Better to be a moral individual, in whatever sphere, than to refrain from doing good for fear that you may not do enough good.
A Measured Post
Despite how little we think of it, measurement underpins the technological fabric of our modern world, it is fundamental to science and engineering, and it is how we are able to interact with the world.
Revising Memories
His specific claim, “this finding led to the idea that ACSS2 could be involved in unwanted memory formation,” was what set off my internal alarm bells.
Bernoulli’s Fallacy Review
There are so many reasons why you should read Bernoulli’s Fallacy, many of which we will be addressing in this review, and finally understanding why statistics and probability didn’t make sense back in school is just one of them.
Society’s Origins
When I unearth an article that I can make applicable to writing and storytelling, I have no compulsions against sharing it with you. This week, that’s a paper from Science Advances on how societies initially arose: “Disentangling the Evolutionary Drivers of Social Complexity: A Comprehensive Test of Hypotheses.”
The Art of Thinking Clearly Review
This example, The Art of Thinking Clearly, is something that I’ve been meaning to post a review for on the site for quite some time now, mostly because of how often I reference logical fallacies. Whatever else this book might be, and it certainly has its flaws, it is a short, approachable compendium of common logical fallacies.
Communicating Uncertainty
In a few months, when my review for Bernoulli's Fallacy goes live, we'll have a lot more to talk about when it comes to uncertainty, probability, and statistics. In the meantime, I wanted to share an article with you from the journal Science Advances, entitled "Earning the Public's Trust."
Smug Science
I think science as a discipline could benefit from a more practical approach. This doesn’t so much refer to some of the really abstract and intangible research happening in fields like quantum physics as it does to something that I see more and more presented in lieu of actual experiments: computer models. In just the past few weeks, I’ve read everything from government reports, to news articles, to peer-reviewed scientific papers that leverage as their evidence not practical experiments or real datasets, but computer models and statistical simulations. There was even one that proudly proclaimed that it was based on interpolated data – in other words, data that is only inferred to exist between known data points.
Sententia Discussion Series 5: Statistics
We've talked a bit about statistics before. Sometimes, it seems that our modern society has a numbers fetish. Every argument seems to come down exclusively to data, decisions are made based on data, and the world turns on enormous quantities of data (I really should do a post on "Big Data" and its implications). All of that data is presented in the form of statistics, but statistics can be made to say almost anything.
Moral Arguments
These arguments look at the published statistics, showing that the virus is apparently under control in Eastern nations, and isn't in Western nations, and suggest that perhaps the supposedly example-setting Western democracies need to take a lesson from these Eastern countries. I have even seen some essays suggesting that the progress of the pandemic in the East and the West demonstrates that the time for Western-style democracy has passed. What is left unspoken in all of these arguments is that these discussions are assuming the primacy of utilitarian morality.
IGC Publishing 