Month: March 2019

What Science Can Learn From Religion

March 31, 2019

Hostility toward spiritual traditions may be hampering empirical inquiry.

Just as ancient doesn’t always mean wise, it doesn’t always mean foolish. The only way to determine which is the case is to put an idea — a hypothesis — to an empirical test. In my own work, I have repeatedly done so. I have found that religious ideas about human behavior and how to influence it, though never worthy of blind embrace, are sometimes vindicated by scientific examination.

Debating the legacy of Winston Churchill

March 30, 2019

The first story is what led to a lot of interesting pieces being written about Churchill and offers some interesting insights about the nature of history.

Winston Churchill was a villain, says John McDonnell

There has been renewed debate recently over the legacy of Churchill, who in 2002 was named the greatest Briton ever in a BBC poll. The Good Morning Britain host Piers Morgan rebuked the Green party MSP Ross Greer on live TV last month after the politician called Churchill a “white supremacist mass murderer” in a tweet.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/feb/13/winston-churchill-was-more-villain-than-hero-says-john-mcdonnell

The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

His record in Britain’s former colonies more closely resembles that of a war criminal than a defender of democracy and freedom.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-16/churchill-was-more-villain-than-hero-in-britain-s-colonies

The Churchill row is part of the glib approach to history that gave us Brexit

The idea of history as composed of heroes and villains is infantile. Inside every hero lurks an opposite. The best answer to a stupid question is no answer, as McDonnell said when asked his favourite Tory. Fake history may be a clever way to engage the empathy of the young with otherwise difficult material. But if the purpose of history is to offer lessons for the future, distorting it is fraught with danger.

The current cult of identity politics is to rifle through the past careers of great men and women, not to ascertain accuracy but to sort them into friends or foes. Churchill has been accused of racism. He undoubtedly expressed racist views but they were uttered in very different times, in which such ideas were deemed acceptable by many.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/14/winston-churchill-history-brexit-john-mcdonnell

 

Does mentoring “at risk” youth do more harm than good? The fascinating “Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study”

March 29, 2019

The “Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study” was a fascinating study in constructing knowledge in the human sciences but more importantly, using scientific methods to come to conclusions that seem to be completely counterintuitive: that mentorship programs can do more harm than not intervening in the lives of children considered at risk. The Freakonomics episode linked below gets into great detail about this.

Freakonomics Podcast: When Helping Hurts

Jump ahead to the 6 minute mark to hear about the “Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study”

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/when-helping-hurts/

Charities aren’t doing enough to determine if they’re really making a difference

First do no harm. It’s a basic tenet of medicine. When intervening in peoples lives – even with good intentions – we need to check whether we are doing them any damage. But sadly, this key principle from the medical profession has not been taken to heart by charities.

https://theconversation.com/charities-arent-doing-enough-to-determine-if-theyre-really-making-a-difference-95110

Similar to an older post “How do we measure the effectiveness of charitable giving?”

https://toktopics.com/2015/02/22/how-can-we-measure-the-effectiveness-in-charitable-giving/

 

Motivated Reasoning Is Disfiguring Social Science

March 28, 2019

Worthwhile article that examines the nature of knowledge in the social sciences as well as its limitations caused by human limitations and the structure of our institutions that produce knowledge.

If moral arguments for equality or against corporal discipline are constructed on a foundation of faulty science, then the foundations of that morality collapse as the faults are exposed. It is far safer to ensure that moral arguments remain independent of scientific claims—to argue, for instance, that gender equality is a moral imperative irrespective of whether or not gender differences are biological, or that hitting children is wrong irrespective of whether it leads to negative outcomes for the child.

https://quillette.com/2019/02/23/motivated-reasoning-is-disfiguring-social-science/?fbclid=IwAR2CVIZg98n-3URoBvzgAAdWJGypTl4QMkDMR6WfqlIiIJHQGCCUwk5NmVQ

Interestingly, here is another post from the same publication coming to the opposite conclusion about spanking which also speaks to the nature of the production of knowledge in the human sciences

https://toktopics.com/2018/02/04/the-spanking-debate-is-over-how-can-we-prove-anything-in-the-human-sciences/

Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship

March 25, 2019

“Something has gone wrong in the university — especially in certain fields within the humanities,” the three authors of the fake papers wrote in an article in the online journal Areo explaining what they had done. “Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields.”

Their original post”

https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/

Big data and ethics

March 24, 2019

The perils of Big Data: How crunching numbers can lead to moral blunders

Considering data at a distance makes it perilously easy to overlook the stories the data does not tell. What would a strategic management consultancy have done if they had been handed the data of wealthy slaveholders? Would they have suggested ways to tweak profits? Or perhaps recommended lobbying Congress to prevent abolition? Hopefully not.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/02/18/perils-big-data-how-crunching-numbers-can-lead-moral-blunders/?utm_term=.6acb03d1c218

Machine Bias

If computers could accurately predict which defendants were likely to commit new crimes, the criminal justice system could be fairer and more selective about who is incarcerated and for how long. The trick, of course, is to make sure the computer gets it right. If it’s wrong in one direction, a dangerous criminal could go free. If it’s wrong in another direction, it could result in someone unfairly receiving a harsher sentence or waiting longer for parole than is appropriate.

https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing

 

Who decides what art means?

March 23, 2019

There is a question that has been tossed around by philosophers and art critics for decades: how much should an artist’s intention affect your interpretation of the work? Do the artist’s plans and motivations affect its meaning? Or is it completely up to the judgment of the viewer? Hayley Levitt explores the complex web of artistic interpretation.

Where Proof, Evidence and Imagination Intersect

March 23, 2019

Screen Shot 2019-03-23 at 8.17.54 PM

In mathematics, where proofs are everything, evidence is important too. But evidence is only as good as the model, and modeling can be dangerous business. So how much evidence is enough?

Those mathematicians know to be cautious when working with their models. Because they know that no matter how useful and interesting their model, no matter how compelling the evidence they collect, there might be something out there about elliptic curves that they didn’t quite imagine. And if you can’t imagine it, your model can’t capture it, and that means the evidence won’t reflect it.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/where-proof-evidence-and-imagination-intersect-in-math-20190314/