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Jul 20 2020

Mistaking Intention for Behavior

Published by under Neuroscience

Here’s another brain glitch that I know I do on a regular basis – confusing the intention to do a task with having actually completed the task. This is a type of false memory created by the intention itself. Albarracin et al have published a series of five experiments where they explore this phenomenon, which they claim is new to the published literature.

In there experiments people reported having completed a task that they only thought about doing but never actually did. If the task is routine this is more likely to happen. For example, if you take medication every day, you might remember taking the medication when you didn’t partly because you already have so many memories of actually taking the medication. Just having the thought – I need to take my medication – may be enough to trigger a false memory of taking it when you later think back about whether or not you took the medication. The experiments show that forming the intention to do the task increases the likelihood of forming such false memories.

The situation is also a factor. The closer the intention is to the actual task, the more likely it is you will form such a false memory of task completion. In other words, if you are sitting at your desk and you make a mental note that you have to do some task at your desk (such as sending an e-mail or signing a form), you may later remember having completed the task. This is more likely to occur than if the task involved traveling to a new location. They report:

Participants chose job candidates and either acted on the decision to hire them, generated an intention to hire them later or made a judgment that was irrelevant to the behavior.

Following a delay, participants were asked to report whether they had acted on the decision or simply intended to do so for each person they had seen.

“The methodology was carefully crafted to produce the necessary high level of errors we were studying, to keep irrelevant characteristics constant across conditions, and to systematically manipulate enactment versus intention,” said Albarracin, also a professor of business administration at Illinois. “If intentions play a causal role in producing misreports of behavior, misreports should be more common in the intention than the control condition.”

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Aug 09 2019

Some Climate Change Cherry Picking

Published by under General Science

There is an industry of misinformation fueling climate change denial. It is often fairly sophisticated, and because it is dealing with a highly complex technical area, it’s easy to create an argument that sounds compelling. This results (as if often evidenced right here in the comments) in people who are confident that they are good skeptics and climate fearmongering is all nonsense. Of course they have to simultaneously believe in a rather absurd conspiracy theory regarding the scientific community, but they make that work somehow too.

Here are a couple of recent examples, both of which involve some subtle cherry picking. The first has to do with electric cars, which are frequently opposed by the denialists, in that they oppose subsidies to help bootstrap the market. This involves the “solution aversion” aspect of climate change denial – deniers are really motivated by the proposed solutions to climate change, which goes against either their politics or other interests. The claim that is often made is that producing electric cars has a higher carbon footprint than gasoline cars, and that if you are charging your car off the grid you are probably getting that electricity from fossil fuels. Therefore – electric cars are worse for the environment.

At the very least, I see climate change deniers delight in how stupid this makes the climate change believers appear.  This is a great example of cherry picking, because the two basic facts are correct but they are not the whole picture. Here, for example, is an article posted by Breitbart claiming that batteries are not green, concluding:

One of the authors, Mats-Ola Larsson at IVL, has made a calculation of how long you have to drive a petrol or diesel before it has released as much carbon dioxide as battery manufacturing has caused.

“The result was 2.7 years for a battery of the same size as the Nissan Leaf and 8.2 years for a battery of the Tesla-size.”

Truly the enduring mystery of why Tesla is now more highly valued than such non-Potemkin U.S. car manufacturers as Ford and General Motors grows more mysterious by the hour.

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Nov 14 2014

The Seduction of Cancer Quackery

Here’s another instance of the narrative clashing with reality.

I wrote recently about an 11-year-old girl, a member of Canada’s Six Nations community, who has leukemia. Her parents, concerned about the side effects of chemotherapy, would rather treat her with traditional and alternative medicine. They are fighting for their right to do so, and the court seems sympathetic to the rights of the parents to express their cultural identity.

Meanwhile, it seems clear to me that the parents, and more importantly the girl, are simply being victimized by a charlatan, who has nothing to do with their cultural identity.

The seduction, really a con, is fairly straight forward. A seriously ill child is every parent’s worst nightmare, putting them into an extremely vulnerable position. Cancer is especially frightening, and chemotherapy, while it can be effective, is harsh. Leukemia is very treatable, and the girl’s doctors give her a 90-95% chance of being completely cured with a standard course of chemotherapy. However, she will have serious side effects from the chemo, and that is hard for any parent to watch. It can be an emotional dilemma (I think intellectually it’s a no-brainer, but emotionally tough).

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31 responses so far

May 19 2014

Drinkable Sunscreen

Recently the Daily Mail (some like to call it the “Daily Fail”) ran an article reporting, without any critical analysis, that a company is now offering drinkable sunscreen.

At first the claim seems extraordinary, but it is not impossible. It is theoretically possible to drink a substance that becomes deposited in the skin and absorbs or reflects UV radiation providing protection. However, upon reading the details it becomes immediately apparent that the product in question is pure snake oil.

The product is Harmonized Water by Osmosis Skin Care. In fact, UV protection is just one claim among many for the harmonized water line of products. The website claims:

  • Remarkable technology that imprints frequencies (as standing waves) onto water molecules.
  • Advances in the ability to “stack” thousands of frequencies onto one molecule.
  • Revolutionary formula allows us to reverse engineer the frequencies of substances found in nature and/or the human body.
  • Newly identified frequencies that have beneficial effects on the body.

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10 responses so far

Jan 08 2013

Saved by Psychic Powers

Published by under Pseudoscience

In just about every disaster or event in which there are many deaths, such as a plane crash, there is likely to be, by random chance alone, individuals who survived due to an unlikely sequence of events. Passengers missing their flight by a few minutes can look back at all the small delays that added up to them seeing the doors close as they a jog up to their gate. If that plane were then to crash, killing everyone on board, those small delays might seem like destiny. The passenger who canceled their flight because of flying anxiety might feel as if they had a premonition.

This is nothing but the lottery fallacy – judging the odds of an event occurring after the fact. What are the odds of one specific person winning the lottery? Hundreds of millions to one against. What are the odds of someone winning the lottery? Very good.

Likewise, what are the chances that someone will miss or choose not to take any particular flight? Very high – therefore this is likely to be true about any flight that happens to crash. If you are that one person, however, it may be difficult to shake the sense that your improbable survival was more than just a lucky coincidence.

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15 responses so far

Sep 20 2012

The GM Corn Rat Study

By all accounts this study looks like the perfect storm of ideologically motivated pseudoscience. French researchers Gilles-Eric Séralini at the University of Caen, who have a history of opposition to GM food, have published a highly dubious study allegedly linking consuming the GM corn or exposure to the roundup pesticide with increased risk of tumors and death. However:

In an unusual move, the research group did not allow reporters to seek outside comment on their paper before its publication in the peer-reviewed journal Food and Chemical Toxicology and presentation at a news conference in London.

So – they presented their controversial findings, which they consider “alarming,” but prohibited journalists from doing their job before presenting the results. That’s more than suspicious – I think it’s unethical. Transparency in science is critical, especially when that research has immediate implications for public safety and can have a profound effect on public opinion.

It is much easier to provoke fear than to reassure with careful analysis. It’s almost as if the researchers wanted an undiluted initial shock reaction to their research before the careful analysis could even take place.

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51 responses so far

Feb 21 2011

Body Snatchers, Phantom Limbs, and Alien Hands

One of the critical bits of wisdom central to a skeptical outlook is the realization that our brains are not objective perceivers of reality. Not even close. What we perceive as reality is constructed in an active process that is rife with assumptions and flaws. Everything you take for granted about what you experience as yourself and the outside world is actively constructed by specific brain processes.

There are some assumptions that are so fundamental to your construct of reality that you take them for granted – you are not even aware they are happening. We only know about them from cases where these mechanisms break down. For example, there is specific brain processing that makes you feel as if you are separate from the rest of the universe. If this processing breaks down, you will have the sense of feeling merged or one with the universe. Most people who experience this, usually as a consequence of psychoactive chemicals, feel that they have had a profound experience. In a way they have – they have had a “for the world is hollow and I have touched the sky” moment. They have peeked behind the curtain of their brain’s function and have experienced what it is like to have their brains construct reality in a different manner from what they are used to.

In essence they have had a profound internal experience. Many people however will interpret this as an external experience – that in some meaningful way they have touched the universe or experienced God or something similar. It is no surprise that many cultures have traditions that involve the use of psychoactive drugs in order to induce profound spiritual experiences.

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63 responses so far

Dec 06 2010

Alternate Biochemistry

Published by under General Science

NASA has announced the discovery of a strain of bacteria that is not only able to live in an extreme environment loaded with the toxin arsenic, but is able to incorporate arsenic into its basic structure. The research is part of NASA astrobiology project – exploring the limits of life in order to infer the possible environments beyond earth in which life might exist.

Researchers were investigating bacteria in the harsh environment of Mono Lake – which has been without a supply of fresh water for 50 years and is loaded with arsenic. The discovery of so-called extremophiles – bacteria that have adapted to extreme environments – is nothing new. Bacteria are amazingly adaptable forms of life and have been found in very hot as well as cold environments, and in environments under high pressure and with high salinity. The ability to tolerate the presence of a toxin is interesting, but also not surprising given what has already been discovered about extremophiles.

What is entirely new with this discovery, however, is the fact that these bacteria, a strain (GFAJ-1) of a common type of bacteria called Gammaproteobacteria, appear to incorporate arsenic into their own biochemistry. In normal living cells phosphorous is used as part of the DNA and RNA backbone, in addition to being the energy transporting molecule (adenosine triphosphate), and being part of structural phospholipids. Arsenic is chemically similar to phosphate, and in fact that is partly the reason for its toxicity – it is very disruptive to normal biochemistry. These bacteria seem to have replaced phosphate with arsenic in some of these structures and molecules.

This is an important proof of concept – an alternate biochemistry in which arsenic replaces phosphate is possible.

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22 responses so far

Sep 15 2010

More Evidence Our Memory Stinks

One of the major themes of scientific skepticism is  – know thyself, specifically the many frailties and foibles of human cognition. Skeptics generally hold that the many anecdotes of strange experiences, sightings, abductions, encounters, and healings are not evidence of a paranormal world lurking beneath the physical world, but rather evidence of our flawed thinking, memory, and perception. The scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports the latter, rather than the former, hypothesis.

Memory by itself is a sufficient explanation for many apparent anomalies. Our memories are not an accurate recording of the past. They are constructed from imperfect perception filtered through our beliefs and biases, and then over time they morph and merge. Our memories serve more to support our beliefs rather than inform them.

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17 responses so far

May 31 2010

Our Coming Robot Overlords

Published by under Technology

The recent oil spill in the Gulf has prompted a great deal of wringing of hands – how do such disasters happen? David Brooks discusses in the New York Times that the cause is primarily due to the fact that our modern technological civilization is becoming too complex for us to manage adequately. The Deepwater Horizon oil rig is just one example of a piece of technology that is beyond the mastery of any single person. But there are also nuclear power plants, computer operating systems, jet airliners, financial systems, operating rooms, and numerous other examples.

Brooks concludes:

So it seems important, in the months ahead, to not only focus on mechanical ways to make drilling safer, but also more broadly on helping people deal with potentially catastrophic complexity. There must be ways to improve the choice architecture — to help people guard against risk creep, false security, groupthink, the good-news bias and all the rest.

This seems reasonable. Certainly we  need to get better at managing such complexity, by having clear lines of authority and responsibility, proper risk assessment, and a thorough understanding of group dynamics.

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42 responses so far

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