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The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.
The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. "The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill." Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.
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traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out, they blanked him. "The illusion of skill … is deeply ingrained in their culture."
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In a study published by the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon tested 39 senior managers and chief executives from leading British businesses. They compared the results to the same tests on patients at Broadmoor special hospital, where people who have been convicted of serious crimes are incarcerated. On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses's scores either matched or exceeded those of the patients. In fact, on these criteria, they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders.
The psychopathic traits on which the bosses scored so highly, Board and Fritzon point out, closely resemble the characteristics that companies look for. Those who have these traits often possess great skill in flattering and manipulating powerful people. Egocentricity, a strong sense of entitlement, a readiness to exploit others and a lack of empathy and conscience are also unlikely to damage their prospects in many corporations.
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Deep in the comments on an earlier thread Paul Baer offers the following hypothetical:
In my statistics class, I ask my students "what is the probability that when I flip this coin, it will land heads." (And yes, assume it's a fair coin.)
Of course they answer 50% or some equivalent.
Then I flip it and hold it covered on the back of my hand. Then I ask, "What is the probability that this coin is heads." There's usually some puzzlement. Someone says "50%". And I say, "but either it's heads or it isn't. How can there be a fifty percent chance it's heads?"
Then I ask "what odds would you give me if I bet that it's not heads?" Eventually those who know what betting odds mean understand the point. Even when something has happened (like, the deck has been shuffled and the card that will be dealt could be known under some epistemic conditions DIFFERENT FROM OURS) we have to ACT as if the odds are, well, what we think they are. -
To which I responded:
Consider the following case:
Answers gladly accepted.
You flip a coin in your class and ask for the probability of a head. A savvy student replies:
[S1]: The odds of a head are 50-50
You then reveal to the class that the coin is not fair, in fact there is a 75% chance of a tail. You ask the student, now what are the odds of a head? (All while the flipped coin sits on your hand)
The student now replies:
[S2] The odds of a head are 25%.
Q1. Now would it be fair to say that [S1] was incorrect? - 1 more annotation(s)...
Thousands of older people are being put at increased risk of death or developing dementia by taking combinations of common medicines to treat routine illnesses, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
Many are available over the counter at pharmacies as well as being prescribed by GPs, nurses and chemists.
British scientists behind the study are calling for doctors to recognise how dangerous these drug combinations can be and to prescribe harmless alternatives instead.
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The drugs, including common allergy treatments Piriton and Zantac, as well as Seroxat, an anti-depressant, are thought to be used by half of the 10 million over-65s in Britain. Many of the drugs, when taken in combination, were found to more than treble an elderly patient's chance of dying within two years.
Common bladder medications, heart drugs, eye drops and asthma treatments were also among those found to pose a risk.
All the drugs work by blocking a key chemical in the nervous system called acetylcholine.
The scientists also suggested that in patients showing early signs of mental impairment, high doses could "tip them over" into a more confused state.
From MIT’s Technology Review:
In practice, there are numerous examples of democratic systems that are rife with corruption or paralysed by disagreement. Even in benign parliaments, it is often an open question as to whether the work they do really benefits the majority of people.
Today, Alessandro Pluchino and amici at the Universitá di Catania in Italy say there is a better way. They have modelled the behaviour of a two-party parliament and examined how it changes as randomly selected independent legislators are introduced into the system. Their counterintuitive conclusion is that randomly selected legislators always improves the performance of parliament and that it is possible to determine the optimal number of independents at which a parliament works best.
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The researchers wanted to know from a mathematical perspective, if adding a random distribution of ‘politicians’ would increase the number of acts that got passed — and if those acts were socially beneficial. So, the “measure of performance is the number of acts passed multiplied by their average social benefit.” They expected to see the number of socially-beneficial acts passed increase as more ‘random politicians’ were added to the mix. And sure enough:
“They ran their model for various distributions of power in the two party system and found that in every case, adding random legislators improves the performance of parliament.”
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if it was a civic duty to act as legislator, if you were randomly selected to do so (like a draft for governance) — and left office after a term without having to cater to corporate interests to drum up campaign finances for reelection. It would give us a way to sidestep the tightening grip that corporations and the wealthy have on our politics. Sure, there would be some lazy, incompetent people selected who would act in their own self-interest or against the societal good. But as Pluchino’s work shows, they’re offset by smarter ones, willing to work for the good of society.
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Free Will: Children and the Scientific Worldview
How kids know the monster under the bed isn’t real (06:22)
Experiments probe causal thinking in children (09:05)
Do scientists have more in common with kids than other adults? (06:30)
Are morality and causality intertwined for ordinary people? (14:23)
4-year-olds’ value-laden perspective on others’ intentions (07:40)
Are Pinker and Chomsky dead-wrong about child development? (03:41)
a study by Kathy Fogel, Randall Morck, and Bernard Yeung, found statistical evidence that economies with more churn in the corporate sector also had faster economic growth. The relationship even seems causal: churn today is correlated with fast economic growth tomorrow. The real benefit of this creative destruction, say Fogel and her colleagues, is not the appearance of “rising stars” but the disappearance of old, inefficient companies. Failure is not only common and unpredictable, it’s healthy.
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a study by Kathy Fogel, Randall Morck, and Bernard Yeung, found statistical evidence that economies with more churn in the corporate sector also had faster economic growth. The relationship even seems causal: churn today is correlated with fast economic growth tomorrow. The real benefit of this creative destruction, say Fogel and her colleagues, is not the appearance of “rising stars” but the disappearance of old, inefficient companies. Failure is not only common and unpredictable, it’s healthy.
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But in politics, where are the bad ideas that have been tested, found wanting, and replaced with something better? It’s rare – but not unheard of – for politicians to seriously test out their policies, perhaps because they realize that we voters pay more attention to soundbites. And so there’s rarely a really good evidence base to shut down failing policies and replace them with something else.
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you have probably not run into many humble economists. By its nature, punditry craves attention, which is easier to attract with certainties than with equivocation.
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certitude reflects bravado more often than true knowledge.
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In 1967, Milton Friedman gave an address to the American Economic Association with this simple but profound message: The inflation rate that the economy gets is, in large measure, based on the inflation rate that people expect. When everyone expects high inflation, workers bargain hard for wage increases, and companies push prices higher to keep up with the projected cost increases. When everyone expects inflation to be benign, workers and companies are less aggressive. In short, the perception of inflation — or of the lack of it — creates the reality.
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Your concern is that insurers and rating agencies, regulators and a lot of people may be relying too heavily on these models. Is there something in particular that has occurred that makes you want to sound this warning, or is this an ongoing concern with these?
Clark: Well, the concern has been ongoing. But I think you’ve probably heard about the new RMS hurricane model that has recently come out. That new model release is certainly sending shockwaves throughout the industry and has heightened interest in what we are doing here and our messages…. [T]he new RMS model is leading to loss estimate changes of over 100 and even 200 percent for many companies, even in Florida. So this has had a huge impact on confidence in the model.
So this particular model update is a very vivid reminder of just how much uncertainty there is in the science underlying the model. It clearly illustrates our messages and the problems of model over reliance. -
But don’t the models have to go where the numbers take them? If that is what is indicated, isn’t that what they should be recommending?
Clark: Well, the problem is the models have actually become over-specified. What that means is that we are trying to model things that we can’t even measure. The further problem with that is that these assumptions that we are trying to model, the loss estimates are highly sensitive to small changes in those assumptions. So there is a huge amount of uncertainty. So just even minor changes in these assumptions, can lead to large swings in the loss estimates. We simply don’t know what the right measures are for these assumptions. That’s what I meant… when I talked about unknowledge.
There are a lot of things that scientists don’t know and they can’t even measure them. Yet we are trying to put that in the model. So that’s really what dictates a lot of the volatility in the loss estimates, versus what we actually know, which is very much less than what we don’t know. - 1 more annotation(s)...
VATICAN CITY (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI marked the holiest night of the year for Christians by stressing that humanity isn't a random product of evolution.
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it was wrong to think at some point "in some tiny corner of the cosmos there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it."
"If man were merely a random product of evolution in some place on the margins of the universe, then his life would make no sense or might even be a chance of nature," he said. "But no, reason is there at the beginning: creative, divine reason." -
Church teaching holds that Roman Catholicism and evolutionary theory are not necessarily at odds: A Christian can, for example, accept the theory of evolution to help explain developments, but is taught to believe that God, not random chance, is the origin of the world. The Vatican, however, warns against creationism, or the overly literal interpretation of the Bibilical account of creation.
Critics of technology are often dubbed in policy circles as anti-science. Yet critical thinking is central to any rational decision-making process - it is less scientific to support a technology uncritically. Accidents happen with all technologies, and are regrettable but not disastrous so long as the technology does not have catastrophic potential; this raises significant questions about whether we want to adopt technologies that do have such potential.
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Japan's part-natural, part-human disaster is an extraordinary event. As well as dealing with the consequences of an earthquake and tsunami, rescuers are having to evacuate thousands of people from the danger zone around Fukushima. In addition, the country is blighted by blackouts from the shutting of 10 or more nuclear plants. It is a textbook case of how technology can increase our vulnerability through unintended side-effects.
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Yet there had been early warnings from scientists. In 2006, Professor Katsuhiko Ishibashi resigned from a Japanese nuclear power advisory panel, saying the policy of building in earthquake zones could lead to catastrophe, and that design standards for proofing them against damage were too lax.
Further back, the seminal study of accidents in complex technologies was Professor Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents, published in 1984 - 10 more annotation(s)...
Religiosity and right-wing ideology can be predicted solely on the basis of an inability to cope with randomness.
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Humans are fine tuned to spot coincidences. Take, for example, an experiment done a few years ago by Paola Bressan and Peter Bramer, psychologists at the University of Padova in Italy. They asked their subjects to watch a computer screen, where dots would appear either above or below a pair of words. They had to press one of two keys on the keyboard, depending on where the dots appeared.
After 32 rounds of this, one of the words, unexpectedly, appeared as white on black (Trial 33 in the picture). Now, this was completely irrelevant to the task at hand, but even so it captured people's attention. They took longer to press the button, as they couldn't help pondering the meaning of the unexpected change. -
those who reacted most strongly to this change were those who also reported being religious as a result of personal experience. They found it harder than others to dismiss the coincidence.
Not only was this effect linked solely to religiosity derived from personal experience (and not, for example, linked to family history of church attendance), but this link was entirely explained by belief in the meaningfulness of coincidences. - 4 more annotation(s)...
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Currently, the public views genes primarily as self-contained packets of information that come from parents and are distinct from the environment. “The popular notion of the gene is an attractive idea—it’s so magical,” said Mark Blumberg, a developmental biologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. But it ignores the growing scientific understanding of how genes and local environments interplay, he said.
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With the rise of molecular biology in the 1930s and genomics (the study of entire genomes) in the 1970s, scientists have developed a much more dynamic and complex picture of this interplay. The simplistic notion of the gene has been replaced with gene-environment interactions and developmental influences—nature and nurture as completely intertwined.
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1779 - English founder of Methodism John Wesley wrote in a letter: 'Chance has no share in the government of the world. The Lord reigns, and disposes all things, strongly and sweetly, for the good of them that love him.'
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1779 - English founder of Methodism John Wesley wrote in a letter: 'Chance has no share in the government of the world. The Lord reigns, and disposes all things, strongly and sweetly, for the good of them that love him.'
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Pope Benedict XVI said Thursday that God’s knowledge, love and “inexhaustible creativity” — not chance — lay at the origins of the universe. Scientific concepts suggesting the formation of the universe was accidental, like the Big Bang theory, “only arrive at a certain point,” the pope told worshipers in St. Peter’s Basilica on Thursday. The church no longer says that the process of evolution violates its teachings, but for the church, God remains the ultimate creator.
Evolution and the fear of chance.
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people can't stomach the theory of natural selection is that they hate the idea that everything we see around us is the result of blind chance. Hostility to the notion of chance is certainly a recurrent theme in creationist objections.
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evolution by natural selection is not really evolution by chance, as the creationists claim. But even so chance does play a role. Stephen Gould, in many of his essays, repeatedly drove home the importance of chance (or rather, contingency) in evolution
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