Calamities of Nature: Coming to a Universe Near You
At least we live in the universe were Glenn Beck is leaving FOX.
Daily Archives: April 8, 2011
Cheaters Defy Logic
Interesting. Many people suck at formal logic, but get much better when the problem is framed in terms of cheating.
Another way of saying this is that they turn over the “benefit received” card to make sure the cost was paid. And they turn over the “cost not paid” card to make sure no benefit was received. They look for cheaters.
The difference is startling. Subjects don’t need formal logic training. They don’t need math or philosophy. When asked to explain their reasoning, they say things like the answer “popped out at them.”
There’s also this:
People are just bad at the Wason selection task. They also tend to only take college logic classes upon requirement.
I took logic in college because it was a way of getting one of my humanities credits (taught by the philosophy department) with a class that was a lot like math.
The Limits of Crowdsourcing
aka “no amount of hot air balloons can save a bad idea”
A few days ago on the forum, after a newly-registered poster inquired how to get ahold of TEPCO so he could give them his idea for fixing the leak, I suggested that it was a bit naive to think that a layperson is going to suggest a viable solution that had not already occurred to the people working the problem. I got some static for that position. No matter — here’s someone who agrees.
Guardian readers ‘fix’ the Fukushima power plant
[T]here’s this odd, growing trend in the world today, fed by endless news vox-pops and the general ‘X-Factorization’ of television, that somehow everyone’s opinions are valuable and worth listening to.
Bollocks.
Crowdsourcing can work, but you have to have expertise from which to draw. That’s the idea behind a discussion forum: you have enough people together and odds are good that someone (if not several people) will know the answer to a question. But it all rests on a subset of the crowd having a level of expertise. You aren’t asking a random person for the answer, you’re asking (ideally, anyway) someone who knows what they are talking about. In other words, it’s not guesswork.