No, Wikipedia’s editors aren’t guilty of bias (this time). It’s the featured article for today! Check it out! Of course if you read talk pages for long enough you will discover that Wikipedia does have a bias towards America, the English language and English-speaking countries, hurricanes (at least one was a tropical storm, though), and antarctic explorers. (Note: tongue planted firmly in cheek.)
I’m right an awful lot of the time. Being right isn’t about being loud, violent, or tenacious. Being right is about being willing to give up when your position becomes less certain. So often times I start out wrong, and only become right when someone points out my error. The challenge of being right that I have the easiest time seeing in myself and others is an unwillingness to give up a position that holds sentimental sway.
When I argued with friends about nuclear power or the population of the planet, I didn’t convince anyone of anything. Not because I was wrong, or because I didn’t have a well constructed argument, but because the people I was arguing with had an emotional investment in the subject. No amount of evidence will satisfy, because the fear of Chernobyl or the guilt of living a consumer-driven developed-world lifestyle makes certain unreasonable choices very appealing emotionally.
Sentimental attachment is a trap anyone can fall into. Sometimes the thought of something being true makes us feel good–whether it’s a supreme being, our immanent salvation by renewable energy, or anything that seems to justify a lifestyle choice we’re just not sure about otherwise. Usually the sign of such an attachment is a very defensive response to any kind of criticism, no matter how level. Instead of arguments structured around evidence, these defenses tend to to betray a feeling that the subject in question must be true no matter what.
I usually walk away. I don’t know if letting the sentimental devotee have the last word just lends them more wood for their fire, but I usually find that I can’t even get a direct response to my critique or a single citation of evidence, so it certainly feels like I’m waisting my time. I do know that when I’ve been the emotionally invested, I usually don’t back down until I get something from somewhere unexpected that makes me reflect on my own position. At least for me, the direct approach never works–so when dealing with others I try to back off when the emotions are running high.
My smug title bar makes it sound simple. How to be right? Don’t get attached to ideas–they can be wrong. It’s a lot easier to say than to do, but I think it might be even harder to know how to handle one’s self when confronted with an intensely emotional defense. For the defender, it’s just a matter of holding their ground against any onslaught. For the critic, it’s about communicating without damaging another person’s well-being and friendship.
This one only just barely slips in on-topic. I think I’ve mentioned before my almost unhealthy obsession with the nuttery of one R. Buckminster Fuller. His ideas are often patently crazy, but simultaneously inspiring, artistic, and utterly fascinating. He invented the geodesic dome and a whole host of other things, now mostly unused. So when my fabulous colleague told me about a book she saw at the store about a kid living with his grandmother who was obsessed with Fuller, I had to find it. Then I read it. And now I want to tell you what I thought about it, The House of Tomorrow by Peter Bognanni.
NPR talks to Dan Myers of Notre Dame University about the shortest possible game of Monopoly he and his son designed. It’s extremely unlikely. One player quickly moves around the board to buy Boarwalk and Park Place, then the other player draws a chance card to go to one of those properties with four houses on it and can’t afford the rent. Two turns per player.
Next project is reported to be finding the shortest possible game of Risk. It kind of makes me want to analyze Settlers of Catan or something.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127575676
May 16th is recognized as the anniversary of the laser. Lasers are pretty cool–I’ve had the opportunity to work on the back-end to some laser systems for studying atmospheric aerosols. Which is a bit like saying I’ve had the chance to live in the same state with John Mellencamp, except I like lasers way more than I like John Mellencamp. Anyway. On with the list of cool laser links:
In almost perfect lockstep harmony with Mark Twain’s saying, “There are three kinds of lies in the world: lies, damn lies, and statistics,” I messed up a little bit. There is a six percent chance of a premature death being caused by a car accident. The number I was comparing this to was the probability of a premature death from a nuclear reactor per year. A better comparison would have been using the next line on the Wolfram Alpha search which gives us a value of 15 deaths per 100000 persons per year or 1.5e-4 which is still a far cry more likely than 1e-8 to 1e-11 from the 1991 nuclear regulatory commission safety report.
Just wanted to clear that up.
I had an interesting chat with an old friend a few days ago. It started with the sunken oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico wreaking havoc with the environment, which was essentially a segue into accusing the oil and power companies of “suppressing” clean energy technology. I’m inclined to give the corporations the benefit of the doubt that they are not cartoonishly evil villains. Thus, I’d assume they would be more likely to actively develop cleaner technology since they will be able to make money just as easily off of it once it’s adopted, which it eventually will be.
However, I am told, that their “suppression” of technology is common knowledge (although no sources have been forthcoming from either my associate or my Google searches) and that they only want technology they can “control.” I’m curious as to what kinds of developments they’re sitting on. Do they need a control collar for a living spaceship a la Farscape? But I digress. Suppression of safe, clean, efficient power is a reality, but it is not the work of corporate technocrats. Rather, it is the environmentalists themselves carrying its banner. Its name: No Nukes. (more…)
Steven Strogatz is proposing that Bayes Theorem is too complicated for people, and we should switch to something more intuitive in this New York Times Opinion piece. I’m not exactly endlessly proficient with Bayes Theorem, but I think his alternative method for approaching problems of conditional probability amounts to a reworking of Bayes theorem. Check out the Wikipedia article. With the information he gives you for the mammogram problem, you should be able to get the correct solution by plugging in numbers to the “simple statement” of the theorem. He even gives you the correct answer, so you can check yourself.
I can’t make any proper claim to participation this year, as life has been something of a whirlwind and I’m just already in too many places at once. I will encourage y’all, though, to head on over to read what others have contributed at Finding Ada, or the Facebook group.
Yes, I’m male. But I’ve gotten more inspiration than I can measure from strong women both in my personal life and in the public sphere. The beautiful thing about feminism is that, in the end, everybody wins. There’s perfectly adequate reason to celebrate the participation of women in science and technology, and usually the essays and the blog-posts composed today demonstrate why.
I have ideas kicking around all the time for things I want to write about, but more often than not they’re derailed because my LaTeX support has again been broken or something else is wrong. So if all goes according to plan, the next line should contain the differential form of Ampere’s Law with Gauss’ correction:
