Scientific Concepts That Will Help You Understand The World

rogue49 · Aug 21, 2013

I've always been interested in what makes us think.
Those thought ideas that we leverage as tools

Below are a nice summary of some, that will put you into deep consideration.
I've come to notice of few of these as I've experienced various situations.
Cognitive load, cycles...or externalities (as I say, everything counts...)

Hell I just had fun with cumulative error today...as I saw in my mgmt meeting.
Now I just have to figure out how to surpass it and turn it around. (not an easy thing to do with the CEO... )

BTW...here the link to the article. LINK
It has links to the book and essays embedded within.

What have you noted in your time??

35 Scientific Concepts That Will Help You Understand The World
Aimee Groth May 27, 2013, 5:06 PM 362,631 9

In order to sharpen our reasoning skills, we must have a good grasp of our own cognitive biases, as well as the basic laws of the universe.
But in a dynamic world, new laws are constantly emerging.
The editors over at Edge.org asked some of the most influential thinkers in the world — including neuroscientists, physicists and mathematicians — what they believe are the most important scientific concepts of the modern era.
The result is "This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts To Improve Your Thinking," a compilation of nearly 200 essays exploring concepts such as the "shifting baseline syndrome" and a scientific view of "randomness."

We've highlighted 35 of the concepts here, crediting the author whose essay highlights the theory.

Cognitive humility
Decades of cognitive research shows that "our minds are finite and far from noble. Knowing their limits can help us become better reasoners. ... Perhaps the most dire consequence is that human beings tend to be better at remembering evidence consistent with their beliefs."

Gary Marcus, director, New York University, Center for Child Language. Author, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind

Cognitive load
Our brains can only hold so much information at once. When there's too much "information overload," we tend to get distracted easily and not retain what we're learning.
"Working memory is what brain scientists call the short-term store of information where we hold the contents of our consciousness at any given moment — all the impressions and thoughts that flow into our mind as we go through the day."

Nicholas Carr, author, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains,

Constraint satisfaction
When presented with too many choices — no matter how beautiful or beneficial — it can be overwhelming, and we are paralyzed by indecision.
That's why having constraints, or any sort of limits, is beneficial and leads to solutions.
In fact, "much creativity emerges from constraint satisfaction. ... Einstein had one of his major breakthroughs when he realized that time need not pass at a constant rate."

Stephen M. Kosslyn, director, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University,

Contingent superorganisms
"Biologists have joined with social scientists to form an altruism debunkery society" — pushing the belief that every altruistic act is done in self-interest.
But a new concept, "contingent superorganisms," says that we live life on a few different hierarchies. The idea is that when you reach a higher level, you are willing to put the success of the group or a higher cause above one's own. This is what drives militaries, fire departments, and rock bands.

Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist, University of Virginia

Copernican principle
The Copernican Principal is the idea that we are not special — that the universe is much larger, and we have a rather insignificant role.
"The paradox of the Copernican Principle is that by properly understanding our place, even if it be humbling, we can only then truly understand our particular circumstances. And when we do, we don't seem so insignificant after all."

Samuel Arbesman, research fellow, Harvard Medical School Department of Health Care Policy

Cultural attractor
We are attracted to ideas and concepts that are easy to accept or digest.
For example, round numbers are cultural attractors — they're "easier to remember and provide better symbols for magnitudes." Efficiency is another powerful cultural attractor.
But just because we are drawn to specific concepts, does not mean that they are the best ones to apply to any given situation.

Dan Sperber, professor of cognitive science, Central European University, Budapest

Cumulative error
When information travels through multiple channels, it's easy for some elements of the message to get distorted — by biases, or simple human error.
The effect of the spread of misinformation is "cumulative error." Living in an age where information can travel across the world in nanoseconds, this concept has never been more real or dangerous.

Jaron Lanier, author, You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto,

Cycles
Cycles explain everything — especially, at the basic level: evolution and biology. Cycles can be disrupted. Also watch out to see which cycles are doing all the work.
"All the 'magic' of cognition depends, just as life itself does, on cycles within cycles of re-current, reflexive information-transformation processes, from the biochemical scale within the neuron to the whole brain sleep cycle, waves of cerebral activity and recovery revealed by EEGs."

Daniel Dennett, director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University,

Deep time
The belief that there is much more time before us than has already elapsed. This creates a more expansive view of the world and the potential of the universe.
"Our sun is less than halfway through its life. It formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it's got 6 billion more years before the fuel runs out."

Martin Rees, professor of cosmology & astrophysics, Trinity College and the University of Cambridge. Author of Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity's Survival,

Double-blind control experiment
It's a tool that researchers use to prevent against subconscious bias when performing experiments.
Understanding the need for double-blind experiments would help the rest of the population understand their inherent subjective, everyday biases, and guard against generalization and impress upon people the need for critical thinking.

Richard Dawkins, evolutionary zoologist, University of Oxford,

Effective theory
"'Effective theory is one of the more important notions within science — and outside it. The idea is to determine what you can actually measure and decide, given the precision and accuracy of your measuring tools, and to find a theory appropriate to those measurable quantities."

Lisa Randall, physicist, Harvard University,

Expanding in-group
As technology makes us more interconnected, there are more cross-overs between groups and populations. For example, there are more intermarriages.
"These effects are potentially beneficial for the improvement of cognitive skills, from two perspectives. We call these the 'expanding in-group' and the 'hybrid vigor' effects."

Marcel Kinsbourne, neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist, The New School,

Externalities
We all affect each other incidentally, especially in an interconnected world. Externalities are the unintended positive and negative side effects these interactions have.
"Externalities are increasingly important in the present era, when actions in one place potentially affect others half a world away."

Rob Kurzban, director, Pennsylvania Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology,

Failure liberates success
"Failure is not something to be avoided but something to be cultivated. ... It is a sign of weakness and often a stigma that prohibits second chances. ... Yet the rise in the West is in many respects due to the rise in tolerating failure. Indeed, many immigrants trained in a failure-intolerant culture may blossom out of stagnancy once moved into a failure-tolerant culture. Failure liberates success."

Kevin Kelly, editor-at-large, Wired magazine; author, What Technology Wants,

Fear of the unknown
Our attachment to the familiar keeps us from taking risks and making real strides and breakthroughs. We often don't accurately assess the risk/benefit ratio; our irrational fears get in the way of real progress.
"If the public could be brought to a greater understanding of how to evaluate the risks inherent in exploring future technology, and the merits of accepting some short-term risk in the interests of overwhelming greater expected long-term benefit, progress in all areas of technology — especially biomedical technology — would be greatly appreciated."

Aubrey De Grey, gerontologist, chief science officer, SENS Foundation,

Fixed-action patterns
Some behaviors we exhibit we blame on instinct. But what we believe to be instinct may, in fact, be learned behavior over time — or a "fixed-action pattern."
This has many implications, including the fact that, as rational creatures, we can change what we believe to be instinctive.
"Given an understanding of our fixed-action pattern, and those of the individuals with whom we interact we — as humans with cognitive processing powers — could begin to rethink our behavior patterns."

Irene Pepperberg, research associate, Harvard University,

Focusing illusion
We often believe that a certain, different set of circumstances would dramatically change our lives. But the truth is, factors like income and health are less indicative of overall happiness.
"The mismatch in the allocation of attention between thinking about a life condition and actually living it is the cause of the focusing illusion."

Daniel Kahneman, professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs, Princeton University. 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences,

Hidden layers
These are the layers of understanding that exist between the external reality and our own perception of the world.
These systems of layers become more interconnected as we develop habits. Learning to ride a bike was hard; but after a while it's like second nature.
"The general concept of hidden layers captures deep aspects of the way minds — whether human, animal, or alien; past, present, or future — do their work."

Frank Wilczek, recipient, 2004 Nobel Prize in physics,

Holism
"Holism is colloquially described as 'The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.' ... Perhaps the most impressive is that carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, iron, and a few other elements, mixed in just the right way, yield life. ... There is a kind of awesome synergy between the parts."
Just look at DNA, and other much broader systems, like cities, that operate only if each individual element does its part.
"Holism does not come naturally. It is an appreciation not of the simple but of the complex."

Nicholas Christakis, physician and social scientist, Harvard University,

Inference to the best explanation
When any single event occurs, there are many possibilities as to the cause of the event. But the truth often lies in what is the single most reasonable, best explanation for the event.
"Many of our most rancorous scientific debates — say over string theory or the foundations of quantum mechanics — have been ... which competing criteria for judging explanations [of] best ought to prevail."

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work Of Fiction,

Kaleidoscopic discovery engine
The greatest insights and inventions are the product of multiple people. It's never just a single person; everyone's standing on someone's shoulders.
"In hindsight we often find that if one scientist did not make a particular discovery, some other individual would have done so within a few months or years of the discovery. ... We are reluctant to believe that great discoveries are part of a discovery kaleidoscope and are mirrored in numerous individuals at once."

Clifford Pickover, associate editor, Computers and Graphics; author, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension,

Name game
We give names to everything in order to understand the world. But in doing this, we sometimes undermine, or simplify, the true nature of an organism or process. "Naming" keeps us from asking further, deeper questions about the nature of something.
It's also important not to over-associate words, which leads to misunderstanding — for example, "theory [is] a strong idea in science while vague in common discourse."

Stuart Firestein, neuroscientist, chair of the Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University,

Pessimism meta-induction
"Because so many scientific theories from bygone eras have turned out to be wrong, we must assume that most of today's theories will eventually prove incorrect as well."
Accepting the belief that many of our theories are "fundamentally provisional and quite possibly wrong," we can better listen to and empathize with others' ideas.

Kathryn Schultz, journalist and author, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error,

Positive-sum games
In zero-sum games, there's a clear winner and a clear loser. In positive-sum games, "everyone wins."
"In a positive-sum game, a rational, self-interested actor may benefit the other actor with the same choice that benefits himself or herself."
Some competition will always be zero-sum — such as the competition for mates.

Steven Pinker, psychology professor, Harvard University; author, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature,

Powers of 10
Much of the world operates in powers of 10. Understanding scaling laws, like Richter scales that measure earthquakes or of "that between the volume of the brain's cortical white matter" — where computing takes place — would give us more perspective on the depth of events, matter, and ourselves.
"The spatial scales are also immense. Our space-time trajectory is a very tiny part of the universe, but we can at least attach powers of 10 to it and put it into perspective."

Terrence Sejnowski, computational neuroscientist, the Salk Institute,

Predictive coding
Our expectations — and if they are met or not — greatly influence how we perceive the world, and ultimately, our quality of life.
Predictive coding "concerns the way the brain exploits prediction and anticipation in making sense of incoming signals and using them to guide perception, thought and action."

Andy Clark, philosophy professor, University of Edinburgh,

Randomness
"Randomness is a fundamental limit to our intuition; it says that there are processes we can't predict fully. It's a concept that we have a hard time accepting, even though it's an essential part of the way the cosmos works."
But some random events — like random collections of atoms — are so absolute, that we can predict the outcome of that "randomness" with pure certainty.

Charles Seife, journalism professor, New York University; author, Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception,

Rational unconsciousness
Freud inspired the idea of the irrational subconscious, but many of today's scientists dispute that idea.
Instead they are bridging the conscious and unconscious — and insisting that we operate on both levels, and have an awareness of this connection, more than we think. "Our conscious understanding of probability, for example, is truly awful, in spite of the fact that we unconsciously make subtle probabilistic judgments all the time."

Alison Gopnik, psychologist, University of California — Berkeley,

Self-serving bias
The idea that we perceive ourselves to be better than we are; to claim responsibility for success and blame others for failure.
"In everyday life, more than nine in ten drivers are above-average drivers, or so they presume. In surveys of college faculty, 90 percent or more have rated themselves as superior to their average colleague."

David Myers, social psychologist, Hope College; author, A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists,

Shifting baseline syndrome
The belief that what we perceive is what's normal, not taking into account the full extend of the past nor potential for future events.
The syndrome is named after scientist Daniel Pauly, who said that each generation accepts "as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as the new baseline."
Therefore what is "normal" is constantly changing.

Paul Kedrosky, Senior fellow, Kauffman Foundation; editor, Infectious Greed,

Skeptical empiricism
"Skeptical empiricism, the kind exemplified by the carefully thought-out and tested research in science at its best. It differs from plain empiricism" — which is simply the observation of results of the world around us.
Put more simply, it is important for us to be skeptical about the world around us and not blindly accept what we believe to be "truths."

Gerald Holton, professor of physics and the history of science, Harvard University; coeditor, Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art and Modern Culture,

Structured serendipity
We overly-attribute breakthroughs to luck. But successful people regularly put themselves in positions — by studying, relentlessly working, pursuing the truth — where they encounter luck.
"We should each invest a few hours a week in reading research that ostensibly has nothing to do with our day jobs, in a setting that has nothing to do with our day jobs, in a setting that has nothing in common with our regular workspaces."

Jason Zweig, personal finance columnist, Wall Street Journal; author, Your Money and Your Brain,

Subselves and the modular mind
The belief that we have a single self is false. In fact, we have multiple identities, or "subselves."
"Each of us has a set of functional subselves — one dedicated to getting along with our friends, one dedicated to self-protection, one dedicated to winning status, another to finding mates ..."

Douglas T. Kenrick, social psychology professor, Arizona State University,

Finish the rest...
Read more: Scientific concepts that will make you smarter - Business Insider
Click to expand...

If you even more interested in what affects our view of the world and decision making
Check out the link at the bottom about Behavioral Biases

rogue49 · Aug 22, 2013

Oh well, on some you get hits...some you don't.
Must be too out there.

I've got the weirdest interests.

ThomW · Aug 23, 2013

Well, if you're weird, I'm lost: I subscribe to the Edge.org newsletters. I loved This Will Change Everything. I sit in a café before grocery shopping and mull a few of the short chapters. Now, I'm doing that with last year's Edge book: This Will Make You Smarter, and next is the current one: This Explains Everything.

But no one will explain how space-time as such emerges from quantum foam.

rogue49 · Aug 26, 2013

ThomW said: ↑

Well, if you're weird, I'm lost: I subscribe to the Edge.org newsletters. I loved This Will Change Everything. I sit in a café before grocery shopping and mull a few of the short chapters. Now, I'm doing that with last year's Edge book: This Will Make You Smarter, and next is the current one: This Explains Everything.

But no one will explain how space-time as such emerges from quantum foam.
Click to expand...

Actually I think it would be the quantum foam if it exists works within the dimensions.
While we are still figuring out what everything in the universe may be taken up by...it is still defined by what it plays within.

However, there may be a redefinition of this...or there may be more dimensions that we work within.
It's just that no-one has defined them as of yet. (or in my case, hasn't had the time or space )

It needs to be this way, because dimensions are what everything works within & throughout.
And anything you define as such, needs to be able to work here & now...and for all scales. (at least within this universe...)

Space is the measurement of occupancy...and the distance between.
Time is the measurement of action.
The quantum foam would still be within these two aspects.
One can interact with the other.
But one is not the other.

However, the concepts are fascinating to ponder...I love it.
Thanks for the new media site, I was unaware of it until now.

rogue49 · Jan 26, 2014

If you want to think about the dimensional structure...it's easier to think of it as one continuous thing.

Back and forth, every which way in space and direction (there is no "up")
Back and forth, every which when in time (with Time's direction given by Entropy, not itself)
Not smooth though...and not flat.

Not flat, because it is warped by Mass, giving the affect of Gravity.
And in turn, not smooth, because the same thing giving Mass, is likely how it occurs. (perhaps, the Higgs Boson)

There are likely more dimensions than just Space & Time...not parallel universes, or those outside,
but in truth others a part of Here & Now, just not defined as of yet.
Many scientists are unaware that there may be something different...it is not in their mindset.

But leads us back to topic...much the reason that they haven't figured this out yet...are even the smartest of humans
are affected by those concepts above...they are difficult and subtle to surpass and isolated out of your way of thinking.

Or it could be just damn laziness...dealing with the bills and other distractions.
Woe to those who ask, "why?"

Street Pattern · Jan 26, 2014

"Our sun is less than halfway through its life. It formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it's got 6 billion more years before the fuel runs out."
Click to expand...

That is technically true, yes, but the sun is gradually getting hotter. As a result, the Earth will be waterless and lifeless in as little as 100 million years, which is to say, about 1/60 of the Sun's remaining time.

idevourcows · Feb 2, 2014

Hey, nice post. Mainstream reporting and casual conversation are chock full of the intellectual shortcuts that are enumerated here. I hadn't ever heard of edge.org, but it is a great find. Added to my RSS feed, and I'm currently enjoying the contributions regarding which scientific principles should be retired.

Kaleidoscope Discovery Engine: I struggle with this one a bit. Obviously there is some truth here — innovators are informed by context, and innovators of concurrent times share that context. But I am still not convinced that the principle is universal. That's a gut feeling by the way, not the result of any deep study (so maybe I am displaying my own fallacy here). Anyway, the implications here seem strange. Taken at face value, does this mean that human progress is inevitable? And that the. Rate of progress depends mostly on what, the population size of investigators? Something to think about.

Somehow, the juxtaposition of cultural attractors and powers of 10 tickles me.

Fremen · Feb 2, 2014

Street Pattern said: ↑

That is technically true, yes, but the sun is gradually getting hotter. As a result, the Earth will be waterless and lifeless in as little as 100 million years, which is to say, about 1/60 of the Sun's remaining time.
Click to expand...

That's why most of my linens and miscellaneous stuff are still in boxes 7 years after moving in here. (also see; laziness)
You never know when we'll need to move off planet.
We only got a hundred million years left, give or take, right?

@rogue49, I was surprised to find that I've thought of, and thought about some of those "concepts" before, myself. Just didn't know the new lingo.
It seems a few of those would be common sense.

rogue49 · Feb 2, 2014

idevourcows said: ↑

Hey, nice post. Mainstream reporting and casual conversation are chock full of the intellectual shortcuts that are enumerated here. I hadn't ever heard of edge.org, but it is a great find. Added to my RSS feed, and I'm currently enjoying the contributions regarding which scientific principles should be retired.

Kaleidoscope Discovery Engine: I struggle with this one a bit. Obviously there is some truth here — innovators are informed by context, and innovators of concurrent times share that context. But I am still not convinced that the principle is universal. That's a gut feeling by the way, not the result of any deep study (so maybe I am displaying my own fallacy here). Anyway, the implications here seem strange. Taken at face value, does this mean that human progress is inevitable? And that the. Rate of progress depends mostly on what, the population size of investigators? Something to think about.

Somehow, the juxtaposition of cultural attractors and powers of 10 tickles me.
Click to expand...

Well, it likely can be summed up under the classic cliche, "Nothing new under the sun..."
Which people often take to mean is nothing is original...but I've more often taken it as everything is based on everything else.
Ideas, while they may be grand...often aren't used...so that means will they actually be applied somewhere else?
Isn't imitation the sincerest form of flattery??
It is only the knowledge of how you would leverage the idea to your own advantage over others that stops sharing. (financial, military, etc...)

Second, I would think that human progression would be inevitable sooner or later, if we don't destroy ourselves.
People are wired to progress...try for the next rung, think of alternatives...our luck has been we've developed a form of communication
and retention of ideas too...so people use other people's ideas, methods, techniques...they're not "stealing", they're adopting.
So the real evolution is not just adapting...but adopting. This grows your civilization exponentially.

Gutenburg's press was considered the best invention of last millennia, for good reason, it allowed more non-isolated sharing of knowledge.
Computers and the Internet is the next wave...while there is TONS of waste of space...there is TONS of sharing.
It encourages transfer of ideas...and then the leveraging of them.

You think we grew fast last millennia...this is just the start of the next.
The only thing that will hold us back will be not killing ourselves...and the ability to retained or not overwhelmed by the multitude of info & options.
The latter, futurist Alvin Toffler described as Future Shock. (a great book of the same name, I recommend it) Many of his predictions have come true.

See??? I used his idea...put out in 1970...Nothing new under the sun.

rogue49 · Mar 20, 2014

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write,
but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

~ Alvin Toffler (?)

Toffler is also frequently cited as stating: "Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn." The words came from Herbert Gerjuoy, whom Toffler cites in full as follows: "The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction — how to teach himself." (from wikipedia)

Either way...it's a profound idea...and one that I agree with.
You cannot grasp whole hardily onto an mindset for years if not decades anymore.
Information and concepts are expounded on rapidly, new tools emerge often.
The world is a more dynamic place.
You've got to learn to interpret and evaluate...learn, leverage, learn, leverage.

Even now the newer generations have accepted that you only need to reference trivia and details, looking it up quickly.
It's the experience and ideas that you remember...where to best apply it,
but there is not a value to being anal retentive about tedium...but only the results to move forward and prevent mistakes.

It's learning...to apply creativity...to understand the details to the overview and the moving target.
The one who wins is the person who analyzes and absorbs concepts faster.

But I don't know about throwing away ideas...I like more the idea of "archiving" them.
Filtering them out once you've evaluated whether they are needed for that situation.
Because you'll never know when you may need them again...or can leverage them too.

rogue49 · Jun 27, 2014

Yep, I'm kickin' this back up...because I found a good article.

Secrets of the Creative Brain

A leading neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity shares her research on where genius comes from, whether it is dependent on high IQ—and why it is so often accompanied by mental illness.

Copy of my post on Fark...

Only problem with genius...most people don't understand what they're trying to relay to them,
including "smart" people with nice degrees...
They'll usually figure it out...sometime down the line, when the genius has moved on.
(because genius does not equate to the ability to convince...or sell)

I'd say that most "mental illness" occurs the same reason a complicated dynamic program or machine
may have more bugs or "holes"...can you really handle being at that level all the time??
Even the best of the best athletes breakdown...and have long-term impact during and after the fact.
Especially trying to push themselves, or get that rush...or even worse, meet expectations.

I do know this...it is not like the myths people expect or what media portrays.
Genius is often spontaneous and inconsistent...and subtle.
They cannot always have the answer ad-hoc at hand and perfect,
it often just "happens"...something clicks.

But the same can occur in the negative...they are trying to connect all the dots, overwhelms them.
Or even intuitively, their brain absorbing much and relating much...goes haywire. Sometimes chronically.

A wise genius knows how to pace themselves.
How to "let go"...how to purge.
How to "do their thing" during their best moments...not when everyone else "expects" them to.

The brain is not a car...something to turn on & off, gun or brake, drive where you want.
But even a car breaksdown...or needs a simple tune-up.

Personally, I think most "illness" a genius gets...is because of stress and anxiety,
not only trying to deal with normal chaos of life and people...but perhaps even working at another level.

Just because they're smart...doesn't mean they're psychic.
They may estimate, but they cannot tell everything that's coming at them...or the twists people throw at them.
Ignorance is not bliss.
Click to expand...

**My real question is how I can think of this shit when I'm plastered on Cap & Coke...

rogue49 · Jul 14, 2014

This is big...the mass marketing and ability to self-produce/manufacture...potentially most anything.

Not only can you do "random objects" but you could make a part that you cannot get immediately or is out of stock or production.
Or you could potentially "tweak" a design, so it fits your own unique project.

Sure, it's not quite there yet for metal and other complicated things, but it's another step forward.
And the ideas and applications as they experiment and broaden the base/usage will expand rapidly.

I know they're doing it now on the space station, so they don't have to wait to get it rocketed up.

Do It Yourself, has taken on a whole new level.

Home Depot Starts Selling 3-D Printers in Stores for First Time
By Selina Wang - Jul 14, 2014

Home Depot Inc. (HD), the world’s largest home-improvement chain, will start selling 3-D printers today in stores for the first time, pushing deeper into a market that was once the domain of engineers and hobbyists.

Home Depot is selling devices from MakerBot, a 3-D printer maker acquired by Stratasys Ltd. (SSYS) last year, in 12 locations as part of a pilot project, the companies said. The effort will include stores in California, Illinois and New York.

“It’s a pilot for us to test a potential disruptive technology, and to make sure we are on the forefront of a new innovative product,” Joe Downey, an online merchant at Atlanta-based Home Depot, said in an interview.

The move builds on Home Depot’s decision to offer the MakerBot printers on its website three months ago. Though the devices aren’t likely to create a major new source of revenue, the chain is betting that they’ll appeal to forward-thinking contractors and do-it-yourselfers. Customers can use the printers to create parts and supplies that might be handy for repairs, such as cup holders, U-clips and pipe-stakes.

MakerBot’s partnership with Home Depot is a “step into the mainstream,” said Bre Pettis, chief executive officer of Brooklyn, New York-based MakerBot. “Mom, dad, contractors, interior designers -- we’re looking forward to blowing their minds and making them MakerBot lovers.”

As the home-improvement field faces increased competition from specialist retailers and e-commerce, new technology will become a more important way for stores to differentiate themselves, said Jocelyn Phillips, an IBISWorld analyst.

Aging Population

The industry is contending with slowing growth in coming years, according to IBISWorld projections. Sales will increase 1.7 percent annually through 2019, compared with a 2.6 percent gain in the past five years, the research firm said.

The U.S. population also is aging, which will decrease the number of homeowners in the next 10 years, said Seth Basham, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities in New York.

Home Depot is the home-repair market leader -- with $78.8 billion in revenue last year -- followed by Lowe’s Cos. (LOW), which had $53.4 billion. Given the size of the total market, the MakerBot partnership will not “move the needle financially for Home Depot,” said Joseph Feldman, an analyst at Telsey Advisory Group in New York.

Instead, the move is part of the company’s efforts to stay ahead of the curve, he said.

“If they can capture some of the market share first, then they will,” Feldman said.

Learning Process

The 3-D printing industry is still in its early stages and will need people to become educated on how to use software to design objects, said Tim Shepherd, an analyst at research firm Canalys in the U.K.

“Ten years from now, it will be quite common for people to have 3-D printers in their homes,” he said.

The consumer market for 3-D printing will reach $600 million in 2017, up from $70 million to $80 million last year, according to Kenneth Wong, an analyst at Citigroup Inc. in San Francisco.

For retailers, the emerging market presents a double-edged sword. If customers create their own supplies and components at home, there’s less need to order something from a store.

Home Depot and MakerBot say they’re not worried about that.

“You can’t use it as a hammer,” Pettis said. Only certain materials can be printed in the MakerBot machine -- metal cannot -- and customers will still have to go to the store to buy the materials for the printer.

The 3-D printing technology also isn’t as far along as consumers may think, Canalys’s Shepherd said. It takes about an hour to print one chess piece, he said.

“There’s a perception in the public mindset that 3-D printing is like what they see in ‘Star Trek,’” Shepherd said. “If that’s the idea they have, they’ll be disappointed.”

®2014 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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snowy · Jul 14, 2014

Related to the general concept: don't be the "modern jackass." A Little Bit of Knowledge | This American Life Essentially, the idea is that people with a little bit of knowledge on something then try to build on it, sometimes weaving misinformation into what they're talking about. I see this all the time with people who think they know something about Common Core, and my husband sees it a lot with microwaves and chemistry.

In regard to 3D printing, my husband would probably lose it if he could get one that's reasonably high quality for home. As it is, he knows ways to get access to one, but his DIY/maker hobbies haven't needed to go down that route yet. We've had friends use them consistently for creating custom parts for engineering projects or for prototyping, and they seem to be very useful for that.

Related to 3D printing: Stranger Visions
Making Art From the DNA You Leave Behind

Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s “Stranger Visions” project started with a question: What could she learn about a person by collecting one of their stray hairs? In an age of ever-cheaper DNA sequencing, the answer turned out to be “a lot.” Dewey-Hagborg’s portraits of strangers, made with DNA samples found in public places, called attention to the feasibility of DNA snooping. Now with her latest project, “Invisible,” she wants to put the tools to protect genetic privacy in consumers’ hands. But is total genetic privacy really possible?
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rogue49 · Jul 18, 2014

Nice article on a long-time myth...

My humble opinion below.

Humans Already Use Way, Way More Than 10 Percent of Their Brains
Sam McDougle - Jul 16 2014

It’s a complex, constantly multi-tasking network of tissue—but the myth persists.

By now, perhaps you’ve seen the trailer for the new sci-fi thriller Lucy. It starts with a flurry of stylized special effects and Scarlett Johansson serving up a barrage of bad-guy beatings. Then comes Morgan Freeman, playing a professorial neuroscientist with the obligatory brown blazer, to deliver the film’s familiar premise to a full lecture hall: “It is estimated most human beings only use 10 percent of the brain’s capacity. Imagine if we could access 100 percent. Interesting things begin to happen.”

Johansson as Lucy, who has been kidnapped and implanted with mysterious drugs, becomes a test case for those interesting things, which seem to include even more impressive beatings and apparently some kind of Matrix-esque time-warping skills.

Of course, the idea that “you only use 10 percent of your brain” is, indeed, 100 hundred percent bogus. Why has this myth persisted for so long, and when is it finally going to die?

Unfortunately, not any time soon. A survey last year by The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research found that 65 percent of Americans believe the myth is true, 5 percent more than those who believe in evolution. Even Mythbusters, which declared the statistic a myth a few years ago, further muddied the waters: The show merely increased the erroneous 10 percent figure and implied, incorrectly, that people use 35 percent of their brains.
The idea that swaths of the brain are stagnant pudding while one section does all the work is silly.

Like most legends, the origin of this fiction is unclear, though there are some clues. According to Sam Wang, a neuroscientist at Princeton and the author of Welcome to Your Brain, the catalyst may have been the self-help industry. In the early 1900s, William James, one of the most influential thinkers in modern psychology, famously said that humans have unused mental potential. This completely reasonable assertion was later revived, in mangled form, by the writer Lowell Thomas in his foreword to the 1936 self-help bible How To Win Friends And Influence People. “Professor William James of Harvard used to say that the average person develops only 10 percent of his latent mental ability,” Thomas wrote. It appears that he, or perhaps someone else in his day, simply plucked the golden number out of the sky.

The 10 percent claim is demonstrably false on a number of levels. First, the entire brain is active all the time. The brain is an organ. Its living neurons, and the cells that support them, are always doing something. (Where’s the “you only use 10 percent of your spleen” myth?) Joe LeDoux, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at NYU, thinks that people today may be thrown off by the “blobs”—the dispersed markers of high brain activity—seen in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the human brain. These blobs are often what people are talking about when they refer to the brain “lighting up.”

Say you’re watching a movie in an fMRI scanner. Certain areas of your brain—the auditory and visual cortices, for instance—will be significantly more active than others; and that activity will show up as colored splotches when the fMRI images are later analyzed. These blobs of significant activity usually cover small portions of the brain image, often less than 10 percent, which could make it seem, to the casual observer, that the rest of the brain is idling. But, as LeDoux put it to me in an email, “the brain could be one hundred percent active during a task with only a small percentage of brain activity unique to the task.” This kind of imaging highlights big differences in regional brain activity, not everything the brain is doing.
And that’s why the 10-percent myth, compared with other fantasies, is especially pernicious.

In fact, the entire premise of only “using” a certain proportion of your brain is misguided. When your brain works on a problem—turning light that hits your retina into an image, or preparing to reach for a pint of beer, or solving an algebra problem—its effectiveness is as much a question of “where” and “when” as it is of “how much.” Certain regions of the brain are more specialized than others to deal with certain tasks, and most behavior depends on tight temporal coordination between those regions. Your visual system helps you locate that pint of beer, and your motor system gets your hand around it. The idea that swaths of the brain are stagnant pudding while one section does all the work is silly. The brain is a complex, constantly multi-tasking network of tissue.

Still, the appeal of the myth is clear. If we only use 10 percent of our brains, imagine how totally great life would be if we could use more. You could dazzle Grandma and her nursing-home crew during Jeopardy. Or, like Lucy, you could learn Chinese calligraphy in an hour. The 10-percent myth presses the same buttons as any self-help scheme that promises to make us better, faster. As Wang told me, it’s “like the 4-hour workweek guy.”

And that’s why the 10-percent myth, compared with other fantasies, is especially pernicious. It has a distinct air of scientific plausibility—it’s a zippy one-liner with a nice round number, a virus with obvious vectors in pop-psychology books, easy to repeat at cocktail parties. The myth is also part of a larger way of thinking about the brain that is characterized by misleading simplifications—like the notion that the right side of the brain is creative and the left side rational. “Those kinds of ideas self-perpetuate,” LeDoux told me. “It's like saying dopamine is responsible for pleasure and the amygdala makes fear. Both are wrong.”

Neuroscience is still in its adolescence, but it is all too often served to the public as a more mature field. As psychologist Gary Marcus recently argued, biology—including neuroscience—is not like physics, where scientists build on a bedrock of established formal laws. As of yet, neuroscience has no such foundation, which may increase the likelihood that sweeping myths about the brain endure. Neuroscience and psychology are the rare scientific fields that, for many, have tangible personal value—there is no self-help industry based on the therapeutic effects of the Higgs boson—which means slow, careful progress in research often gets juiced up by opportunist, or at least over-eager, non-scientists.

I’m still going to see Lucy, if only because it’s directed by Luc Besson and The Fifth Element blew my 10-year-old mind when it came out. But here’s to hoping for Hollywood sci-fi movies that lean more on the weird and imaginative and less on the widely believed and dead wrong.
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Intelligence IS relative.
And even science and the vaunted IQ tests get it wrong.
What is to make a difference between a scientist and a world-class musician...or a top of field businessperson??
Or even a simple janitor...who choose not to use their ability...or is aware...or is not trained.

Perhaps some just take that test better...perhaps they don't like some questions...and don't attempt them.

It's also not inconsistent...it's how it's applied, when it's applied...IF it is applied.
Sometimes it's controlled, sometimes it just "comes"...and it's if the person actually has interest.

Intelligence is not like movies, TV or media portrays...that is fiction...or even sci-fi or fantasy.
Like the way they show computers, cops, medicine, law, politics and so on...
Intelligent people are NOT like computers...the answer coming out consistently, instant and always pure.

It's subtle at times, ambiguous, sometimes it just "happens"....sometimes over a length of time.

They see things others can't see...patterns...they do things others can't do...creating. Not magic...just not obvious to most.

Even a potential "power" perhaps may not be obvious and blatant. (like telekinesis or a visible detectable task)
It could be underlying, interpretive...non-quantifiable. (like an empathy, foresight...things that are scientifically possible)

Like an incredible detective...slowly putting all the parts together.
And even then, there may be no proof...the person just "knows".
And how do you communicate this and convince others then??? (that's a talent in itself...and many intelligent people cannot do this)

I'd love a real good intelligence documentary,
one that actual considers ALL these aspects...not just the classic mindset.

rogue49 · Jul 20, 2014

As a followup on the previous post on intelligence...

Basically, what I was saying...intelligence and genius is relative.
No person is an island and everything is based on something else.
Creativity is not magic...brilliance is not magic...as the media portrays.
Sure, it makes a good story...it's easier to give credit to one...but typically the magic is of the moment & the environ.

Remember that people have to be ready to accept the idea, the person at the time.
Otherwise it will be ignored or suppressed.

Genius is wonderful...and even more fascinating is how it happens and gets known...then enjoyed.

The End of ‘Genius’
By JOSHUA WOLF SHENKJULY 19, 2014

WHERE does creativity come from? For centuries, we’ve had a clear answer: the lone genius. The idea of the solitary creator is such a common feature of our cultural landscape (as with Newton and the falling apple) that we easily forget it’s an idea in the first place.

But the lone genius is a myth that has outlived its usefulness. Fortunately, a more truthful model is emerging: the creative network, as with the crowd-sourced Wikipedia or the writer’s room at “The Daily Show” or — the real heart of creativity — the intimate exchange of the creative pair, such as John Lennon and Paul McCartney and myriad other examples with which we’ve yet to fully reckon.

Historically speaking, locating genius within individuals is a recent enterprise. Before the 16th century, one did not speak of people being geniuses but having geniuses. “Genius,” explains the Harvard scholar Marjorie Garber, meant “a tutelary god or spirit given to every person at birth.” Any value that emerged from within a person depended on a potent, unseen force coming from beyond that person.

As late as the Renaissance, people we’d now consider quasi-divine creators were more likely to be seen as deft imitators, making compelling work from familiar materials. Shakespeare, for example, did not typically dream up new ideas for plays but rewrote, adapted and borrowed from the plots, characters and language of previous works. “Romeo and Juliet,” as Mark Rose, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, notes, is an episode-by-episode dramatization of a poem by Arthur Brooke.

Of course, theater is inherently collaborative. But the Elizabethan stage was more like the modern film industry, where the writer is generally less an auteur than a piece of a machine. Surviving records show three or four or even five playwrights receiving pay for a single production, according to the Columbia professor James Shapiro. The irony is that Shakespeare, whose world serves so well to illustrate a collaborative (or networked) idea about how good work is made, would become the icon of the solo creator.

The big change began with Enlightenment thinkers, who sought to give man a dignified, central place in the world. They made man’s thinking the center of their universe and created a profoundly asocial self.

Meanwhile, as the feudal and agrarian gave way to the capitalist and industrial, artists needed to be more than entertaining; they needed to be original, to profit from the sale of their work. In 1710, Britain enacted its first copyright law, establishing authors as the legal owners of their work and giving new cultural currency to the idea of authors as originators.

This is when we start to see the modern use of “genius.” In an essay published in 1711, Joseph Addison cited Shakespeare as a “remarkable instance” of “these great natural geniuses” — those lit up by an inner light and freed from dependence on previous models.

But it was during the Romantic era that “the true cult of the natural genius emerged,” Ms. Garber writes — with Shakespeare as its signal example. He was a convenient case; so little biographical material existed that his story could be made up.
Continue reading the main story

Paradoxically, the most potent illustration of Shakespeare-as-genius manifested itself as an apparent challenge to it. How could the son of a glover with a provincial education have written so knowingly of kings and queens and faraway lands? It must have been another, dissenters said, with the Earl of Oxford emerging as a favorite candidate. What’s remarkable here is the underlying assumption that Shakespeare’s plays emerged entirely outside the give-and-take of the theater. Shakespeare doubters, the Cleveland State University scholar James Marino says, “are taking the lone genius idea and doubling down.”

Today, the Romantic genius can be seen everywhere. Consider some typical dorm room posters — Freud with his cigar, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the pulpit, Picasso looking wide-eyed at the camera, Einstein sticking out his tongue. These posters often carry a poignant epigraph — “Imagination is more important than knowledge” — but the real message lies in the solitary pose.

In fact, none of these men were alone in the garrets of their minds. Freud developed psychoanalysis in a heated exchange with the physician Wilhelm Fliess, whom Freud called the “godfather” of “The Interpretation of Dreams”; King co-led the civil rights movement with Ralph Abernathy (“My dearest friend and cellmate,” King said). Picasso had an overt collaboration with Georges Braque — they made Cubism together — and a rivalry with Henri Matisse so influential that we can fairly call it an adversarial collaboration. Even Einstein, for all his solitude, worked out the theory of relativity in conversation with the engineer Michele Besso, whom he praised as “the best sounding board in Europe.”

Now, from disparate directions, a new view of the self has been gathering steam that allows us to begin seeing these old stories as though for the first time. Many factors are at play, not least the rise of the Internet, both for its actual mechanisms that bring people together and for its potency as a metaphor. And the social science of relationships is flourishing, starting with the relational foundations of human development.

Consider what happens when 4-month-olds interact with their mothers: They mimic one another’s facial expressions and amplify them. A baby’s grin elicits a mother’s smile, which leads the baby to a full-on expression of joy — round mouth, big eyes. “Both parties,” writes the psychiatrist Susan C. Vaughan, “are processing an ongoing stream of stimuli and responding while the stimulation is still occurring.” The implication, Ms. Vaughan argues, is that emotions are “peopled” from the start, centered in an interpersonal exchange rather than in an atomized self.

This is just one piece of an impressive body of research in social psychology and the new field of social neuroscience, which contends that individual agency often pales next to the imperatives of a collective.

The elemental collective, of course, is the pair. Two people are the root of social experience — and of creative work. When the sociologist Michael Farrell looked at movements from French Impressionism to that of the American suffragists, he found that groups created a sense of community, purpose and audience, but that the truly important work ended up happening in pairs, as with Monet and Renoir, and Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In my own study of pairs, I found the same thing — most strikingly with Paul McCartney and John Lennon.

WHY is this? For one thing, given that our psyches take shape through one-on-one exchanges, we’re likely set up to interact with a single person more openly and deeply than with any group. The pair is also inherently fluid and flexible. Two people can make their own society. When even one more person is added, roles and power positions harden. This may be good for stability but problematic for creativity. Three legs make a table stand in place. Two legs are made for moving.

Pairs also naturally engage each of the two people involved. In a larger group, an individual may lie low, phone it in. But nobody can hide in a pair.

It’s going to take some time to truly accept the significance of pairs in creative life, in part because so many partners, if they do their job well, remain hidden to the outside world. Most Vera Nabokovs never get acknowledged. Partnership is also obscured when the two people have distinct public identities. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t “collaborate” in the traditional sense, but, as a scholar of their work, Diana Pavlac Glyer, has shown, the influence of each on the other was critical to the work of both.

The pair is the primary creative unit — not just because pairs produce such a staggering amount of work but also because they help us to grasp the concept of dialectical exchange. At its heart, the creative process itself is about a push and pull between two entities, two cultures or traditions, or two people, or even a single person and the voice inside her head. Indeed, thinking itself is a kind of download of dialogue between ourselves and others. And when we listen to creative people describe breakthrough moments that occur when they are alone, they often mention the sensation of having a conversation in their own minds.

This phenomenon is so uncanny that the writer Elizabeth Gilbert has proposed that we return to the myth of the muses to help characterize it. That doesn’t mean there literally are “fairies who follow people around rubbing fairy juice on their projects and stuff,” Ms. Gilbert has said. But the core experience described by the muse-creator interaction — that of one entity helping to inspire another — is almost always true.

This raises vital questions. What is the optimal balance between social immersion and creative solitude? Why does interpersonal conflict so often coincide with innovation? Looking at pairs allows us to grapple with these questions, which are as basic to the human experience as the push and pull of love itself. As a culture, we’ve long been preoccupied with romance. But we should also take seriously something just as important, but long overlooked — creative intimacy.

The author of the forthcoming book “Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs.”
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rogue49 · Jul 30, 2014

How facial features drive our first impressions

LOL - Ok, that last pic is NOT "approachable"...

rogue49 · Sep 8, 2014

Nice summary...So what's the Golden Rule here??
Now these...I can follow.

The Ten Commandments of Science
David J. Eicher

A religious credo is a guideline for life, a suggestion of purpose, and an imperative goal for humanity. Ten is a popular number. Commandments are those principles that humans must heed and follow. Commandments should be positive and compelling rather than negative and prohibiting. They are prescriptions of natural law as applied to religious humanism.

Why, though, should science not also have its ten commandments?

Here is the current set of commandments through the eyes of science, in the form of objective, natural theories that should be believed:

1. Conservation theory: Energy and mass may be neither created nor destroyed but may be interconverted. Thus, creation and final destruction are not relevant.
Conversion: E = MC2
Annihilation: e- + e+ → E

2. Entropy theory: Entropy increases spontaneously. Nature is being dissipated. Improvements, syntheses, organization, and growth require energy at the expense of the environment.

3. Quantum theory: Activity is the product of energy and time.
h = Et

4. Radiation theory: Disintegration of mass is a first-order reaction. Fission applies mostly to large atoms, while fusion applies mostly to small atoms.

5. Particle theory: Particles with mass (such as electrons, protons, and neutrons) give rise to atoms (such as hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon), which give rise to molecules (such as water, quartz, and DNA), which give rise to chemical systems (such as minerals, plants, and animals), which give rise to the universe of objects (such as planets, stars, and galaxies).

6. Evolution theory: Combinations of the kinetic molecular theory, the chirality principle, and the laws of genetics lead to life and the development of species with both inheritance and variation, due to heredity and mutation.

7. Relativity theory: The notion of space-time (simultaneous, consecutive, and complementary events) is defined from the perspective of the observer.

8. Psychological theory: Respect for nature, especially for life, is mandated.

9. Behavior theory: There is satisfaction to be had in helping others toward happiness, which is usually reciprocal in bringing happiness in return. Personal immortality is achieved by the views of others.

10. Ethical theory: For a worthwhile existence, we must strive to maximize freedom with responsibility and find fulfillment with peace and love.
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rogue49 · Sep 12, 2014

Ok, we're REALLY going to twist your noodle here.

Is Anything Certain in Science?
Posted by Alex B. Berezow September 8, 2014

Last week, I was at a coffee shop working when a lady approached me and invited me to attend a science discussion group. The topic was the "limits of science." Intrigued, I put away my laptop and joined the group, which consisted mainly of elderly people who were thoughtful, well-spoken, and seemingly intelligent. I had no idea what to expect in terms of the tone of the conversation, so I listened eagerly as the discussion leader (who has a master's degree in geology) started the meeting.

"Science is subjective, though we like to think of it as objective," he began. "When I speak of 'facts,' I put them in quotation marks." He elaborated that things we once thought to be true were later overturned by further study.

Right away, I knew I was going to be in for a ride. While the geologist didn't clarify exactly what he meant, we can deduce one of two things: Either (1) he does not believe facts are real or (2) he believes facts are not accessible to scientific investigation.

Both of these beliefs are problematic from a scientific viewpoint. The first implies that there is no such a thing as a fact, and hence, no such thing as truth. My favorite philosophy professor, former mentor, and (I'm honored to say) friend, Robert Hahn of Southern Illinois University, once quipped, "If the ultimate truth about the universe is that there is no truth, what sort of truth is that?" I would add that if there is no such thing as truth, then science is merely chasing after the wind. Science would be pointless. As fictitious Tottenham Hotspur coach Ted Lasso would say, "Why do you even do this?"

The second belief poses a much bigger challenge to science because there is no convincing response to it. Philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote of the noumenon (actual reality) and the phenomenon (our experience of reality). Because we experience reality through our imperfect senses, we do not have direct access to it. For instance, we perceive plants as green, but that is simply the result of our eyes and brains processing photons and interpreting them as the color green. How do we know that perception is reliable? Isn't it possible that plants are actually some other color? Given that we are limited by our sensory capabilities, we can never know the answer to that question. Our experience of the greenness of a plant (phenomenon) is separate from the underlying reality of a plant's color (noumenon).

Humans in general, and scientists specifically, ignore this philosophical challenge. We assume that our perception of reality matches actual reality. Do we have any other option? How could we live daily life or accept the findings of scientific research if we believed otherwise?

The point of that lengthy aside is that the geologist's comment was at odds with a practical scientific worldview. But, things got even weirder after that.

When our conversation turned to the reliability of the scientific method, I commented, "Scientific laws are generalized in such a way that if you perform an experiment like a chemical reaction on Earth or on Mars, you should get the same result."

One of the ladies asked, "But how do we know? We've never been to Mars."

I answered, "We have a basic understanding of how chemical reactions work. To our knowledge, they aren't affected by gravity.* So, we should get the same reaction on Mars."

"In theory."

Well, yes, in theory. But this sort of extreme skepticism is difficult to address. Chemistry is a mature science whose basic principles are well understood. Until we have sufficient reason to believe otherwise, we should expect chemical reactions to be identical whether they are performed on Earth or on Mars.

Strangely, a bit later on, the same skeptical lady asked me, "How do you explain telepathy?" She added that there have been times when, as she was speaking to another person, that she knew what the other person was going to say before she said it.

"Scientists don't believe telepathy is real. That's how I explain telepathy," I responded.

"Some scientists do believe in it," retorted the geologist.

True. But, some scientists believe that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. That doesn't mean we should take them seriously. I decided to elaborate: "Think of all the times that you thought of words, but nobody said them. Or all the times you thought of somebody, but they didn't call. You forget all of those, but you remember the few times where a coincidence occurred. That's called confirmation bias."

Unsurprisingly, I didn't win her over. The conversation then took one final turn.

The skeptical lady believed the future would be run entirely by robots and machines. This is referred to as the "singularity" and has been popularized by Ray Kurzweil. It is also probably bunk. Not only are we unable to model a worm's brain accurately, but the scientific knowledge and sheer computing power necessary to properly replicate a human brain -- with its 86 billion neurons and some 100 trillion synapses -- are massive. Besides, there is no compelling reason to believe that computing power will grow exponentially forever. Eventually, some mundane physical factor will limit our technological progress. If (and that's a big if) the "singularity" is even possible, it is likely centuries away.

Our evening ended there. Over the next 24 hours, I pondered what could make otherwise intelligent people embrace pseudoscience and science fiction? Moreover, what could make a person doubtful of chemistry, but accepting of telepathy?

I'm still not sure, but I have a clue. Conspiracy theorists are known to believe contradictory ideas. For instance, as Live Science reported, "people who believed [Osama] bin Laden was already dead before the raid were more likely to believe he is still alive." Similarly, the lady who believed that science wasn't advanced enough to fully understand chemistry yet also somehow so advanced that it could build Earth-conquering robots may be engaging in conspiracy-like thinking. She had no awareness that her skepticism of chemistry and credulity toward telepathy were, in many ways, fundamentally incompatible.

Extreme skepticism and extreme credulity are anathema to the scientific mindset. Successful scientists accept the reliability of the scientific method but question extraordinary claims that are not founded upon extraordinary evidence. That is healthy skepticism, and it was curiously absent from the science discussion group.

*Note: The kinetics of chemical reactions could possibly vary under different gravitational conditions.
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What inspired me to post this is first @Jetee 's quote from my guy Einstein...
The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science. Since, however, sense perception only gives information of this external world or of "physical reality" indirectly, we can only grasp the latter by speculative means. It follows from this that our notions of physical reality can never be final. We must always be ready to change these notions - that is to say, the axiomatic basis of physics - in order to do justice to perceived facts in the most perfect way logically.
And a interview I saw with Cosmos host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who said at the end...and I'm paraphrasing,
It's not just finding out new things...it's figuring out something that you didn't know to ask in the first place.

What do you know??
What do you don't know?
What is everything based on?
How are you observing?

Even Math...it is a tool that is based on human definitions.
Sure, you can say...It is what it is. But as our previous President said, "It depends on what the meaning of the word "IS" is. (although he said it for "legal" purposes...and CYA)

Scientists and others techs fall into this trap all the time...saying this is a FACT.
Their bias is on what they "know", what others taught them.
It may even become a sort of "religion"...which disturbs them if it's deviated from... (even Einstein fell for some time into this, "God does not play with dice", speaking of Quantum Physics)
Or even attack those who may suggest differently.

There are people who believe in black & white, it is their world...they may even kill for it.
There are people who believe in shades of grey
And then colors of the rainbow
And then the spectrum beyond what is visible normally to the eye
And then the other senses
And then add movement and time
And now have them interact
And now factor in everything that happens over that time
And now add in flucuations in those factors
And now add in scope...from Micro to Universal and beyond perhaps...
Can you even grasp it?

Now think...everything you just thought of is just one definition and one perspective.
Now think...what do I NOT know??

But even if you don't know it...or are aware of it. It still affects you and your surroundings.
Whether you want to believe it or not.
That is reality.

And if you want to be a good science person...you'll still want to try to know it all.
But if you're wise, you'll know that you haven't got it all. Nor does anyone else.
And that will make you smile and be in awe.

redravin · Sep 13, 2014

It was interesting until I got to this part

The skeptical lady believed the future would be run entirely by robots and machines. This is referred to as the "singularity" and has been popularized by Ray Kurzweil. It is also probably bunk. Not only are we unable to model a worm's brain accurately, but the scientific knowledge and sheer computing power necessary to properly replicate a human brain -- with its 86 billion neurons and some 100 trillion synapses -- are massive. Besides, there is no compelling reason to believe that computing power will grow exponentially forever. Eventually, some mundane physical factor will limit our technological progress. If (and that's a big if) the "singularity" is even possible, it is likely centuries away.
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Seems to me that there are all kinds of aspects of computer science that he doesn't understand there and isn't very familiar with much of the stuff written about the the singularity.
Do I think it's going to happen tomorrow, no.
Do I think it's going to happen the way the lady he was talking to thinks it will, probably not.
But there is going to be a major shift in the way computer brains work within the next fifty years.
We will just have to accept it.

rogue49 · Sep 13, 2014

redravin said: ↑

Seems to me that there are all kinds of aspects of computer science that he doesn't understand there and isn't very familiar with much of the stuff written about the the singularity.
Do I think it's going to happen tomorrow, no.
Do I think it's going to happen the way the lady he was talking to thinks it will, probably not.
But there is going to be a major shift in the way computer brains work within the next fifty years.
We will just have to accept it.
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Well, I actually agree with both of you to a certain extent.
As a person who delves into computers deep...and keeps on the cutting edge to push the envelope of capabilities in his job...I also know their limitations.
They are very good at one thing at a time, even when it seems they are doing multiple, it's one task very fast.
Nor are they intuitive...or aware. And there are the physical limits. Literally, physics as we know it and can apply it.

People also don't realize how sophisticated and extensive a brain is...just one second to mimic takes a super-computer hours to compute.
And even then, humans have not even grasped all the factors going on to actually program them.
Mother Nature has created an awesome thing, of course with LOTS of time...and LOTS of trial & error.
Shit, humans don't even know how animals think and correctly assess personality...or how to mathematically prove a golf-swing yet.

But, given LOTS of time...perhaps something will occur.
However, this is an unknown...and won't happen anytime soon.
The future will be "done" by robots and machines...but it won't be run by them...not in many generations.

Don't forget, we'll be different by then too. We're changing...not you yourself, but the race.

We are our own crisis and evolution...the progression is exponential...we just don't realize it while living in it.
We will be having our own "singularities"...

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Fremen Allright, who stole my mustache?

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