Patternicity - Weiye Loh on Diigo

Jul

13

2011

Epiphenom: Normal people more likely to recover from depression (probably)

epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/...le-more-likely-to-recover.html

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Religion Data Statistics Patternicity

First of, the cardinal rule of statistics is not to going digging around in the numbers if you don't find what you're looking for first time round. The reason is that the laws of chance means that you're bound to find some kind of pattern eventually - but it will probably be a mirage.

Jun

25

2011

Book Review - Everything Is Obvious, Once You Know the Answer - By Duncan J. Watts - NYTimes.com

We rely on common sense to understand the world, but in fact it is an endless source of just-so stories that can be tailored to any purpose. “We can skip from day to day and observation to observation, perpetually replacing the chaos of reality with the soothing fiction of our explanations,” Watts writes. Common sense is a kind of bespoke make-believe, and we can no more use it to scientifically explain the workings of the social world than we can use a hammer to understand mollusks.

www.nytimes.com/...-answer-by-duncan-j-watts.html

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Common Sense Rationality Rationalization Patternicity Methodology Complex System Organization Weak Ties Network

Common sense is a kind of bespoke make-believe, and we can no more use it to scientifically explain the workings of the social world than we can use a hammer to understand mollusks.
Nowadays, of course, it’s common sense to distrust our common sense. A number of best-selling books have made us painfully aware of the biases that beset our everyday reasoning — we overrate the importance of recent events and overvalue objects because we happen to possess them, and so on.
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- “methodological individualism,” the notion that “until one has succeeded in explaining some social phenomenon — the popularity of the Mona Lisa or the relation between interest rates and economic growth — exclusively in terms of the thoughts, actions and intentions of individual people, one has not fully succeeded in explaining it at all.”
- however well we understand the parts, we do not thereby acquire a complete understanding of the whole. This is one of the big reasons that common sense is unreliable. We are prone to think in terms of individual actors whose doings set predictable chains of events in motion. But social systems can acquire properties that don’t easily jibe with this kind of common sense — through processes like self-reinforcing cascades, in which outcomes feedback upon themselves, or nonlinear dynamics, in which small changes in input can lead to large changes in output.
- Consider the view that those well-connected people the marketing industry labels “influencers” have an outsize effect on other people’s behavior. It’s only natural to assume that certain individuals have a disproportionate impact because of their particular characteristics — charisma, intelligence, popularity. But when Watts used computer simulations to model how new behaviors might spread through social networks, he found that the most highly connected individuals were not the whole story. The spread of an idea or taste depended not only on such individuals, but also on “a critical mass of easily influenced people who influence other easy-to-influence people. When this critical mass existed, even an average individual was capable of triggering a large cascade.” If we drop a match on a forest floor, we cannot predict whether the result will be a conflagration or a campfire just by knowing a lot about matches. The outcome much depends on what is going on nearby: how dry is the terrain, how dense is the forest, how fast is the wind? When the right conditions for a fire exist, any spark will set it off; but when they do not, no spark will suffice.
- If you had asked social scientists even 20 years ago what powers they dreamed of acquiring, they might have cited the capacity to inconspicuously track the behaviors, purchases, movements, interactions and thoughts of whole cities of people, in real time. Of course, this is exactly what is possible now that so many of us — via credit cards, cellphones, online social networks, blogs and so on — leave just such digital breadcrumbs as we move through our lives. Watts provides powerful examples, many taken from his own work in this new field of computational social science. One project tracked patterns of tweets and retweets among 1.6 million Twitter users. Another followed thousands of people as they judged which songs they wanted to download, and found that their individual tastes were easily trumped by small, and random, differences in a song’s perceived popularity among other people.
  In 1969, the sociologist Morris Zelditch asked, rhetorically, “Can you really study an army in a laboratory?” Nearly half a century later, the answer appears to be yes. It’s this sort of study, not common sense, that will shed bright light on human affairs.

Jun

21

2011

Bloggingheads.tv - Free Will: Children and the Scientific Worldview

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)

bloggingheads.tv/16889

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Video Free Will Children Imagination Probability Uncertainty Patternicity Science Possibility Chance

Mar

17

2011

Epiphenom: A basic psychological link between religion and right-wing politics

Religiosity and right-wing ideology can be predicted solely on the basis of an inability to cope with randomness.

epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/...sychological-link-between.html

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Religion Patternicity Chance Determinism

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.
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- David Amodio, a psychologist at New York State University, set up an experiment in which the subjects had to press a key when they saw the letter M, but not when they saw the letter W.
  
  Now, the thing was that almost always it was the letter 'M' that was shown, and this set up the expectation that the next letter would also be an 'M'. So this was a test of whether the subjects could break free of their expectations.
  
  What Amodio found was that liberals were better able to break free of this conditioned response, and to correctly withold their response when a W was shown.
- According to a recent article by Bressan & Bramer, both these experimental results can be explained by the same psychological phenomenon. They speculate that we create 'schema' - fundamental concepts about how the world works. Beliefs, in other words.
  
  These schema can be useful, because they speed up mental processing. By employing grand, simple rules of thumb they save mental effort - but at the expense of accuracy.
- By employing this schema, the brain can move on from chewing over things that may not have any survival benefit. The results may not be accurate, but they may be good enough not to be actively harmful. One consequence, however, could be illusions and conspiracy beliefs.
- both religiosity and right-wing ideology can be predicted solely on the basis of an inability to cope with randomness.

Weiye Loh's Library tagged Patternicity → View Popular, Search in Google

Epiphenom: Normal people more likely to recover from depression (probably)

Book Review - Everything Is Obvious, Once You Know the Answer - By Duncan J. Watts - NYTimes.com

Bloggingheads.tv - Free Will: Children and the Scientific Worldview

Epiphenom: A basic psychological link between religion and right-wing politics

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