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End Symbolic Patriotism

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - By Ed Brayton - Jul. 07 (Comment) - Common Dreams publishes an essay by the late Howard Zinn that advocates a genuine, meaningful patriotism over a shallow, emotional patriotism predicated solely on symbolism and tribalism. "On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed," the essay begins. Howard, you had me at hello.

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Orrin Hatch's Convenient Principles : Dispatches from the Culture Wars

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

ScienceBlogs.com - By Ed Brayton - Jan. 03 (Opinion) - Charles Babington of the AP points out how utterly hypocritical the Republicans in Congress are being when it comes to fiscal responsibility and health care reform: Democrats are troubled by the inconsistency of Republican lawmakers who approved a major Medicare expansion six years ago that has added tens of billions of dollars to federal deficits, but oppose current health overhaul plans. All current GOP senators, including the 24 who voted for the 2003 Medicare expansion, oppose the health care bill that's backed by President Barack Obama and most congressional Democrats. And what did the Medicare prescription drug plan do? By contrast, when Republicans controlled the House, Senate and White House in 2003, they overcame Democratic opposition to add a deficit-financed prescription drug benefit to Medicare. The program will cost a half-trillion dollars over 10 years, or more by some estimates. With no new taxes or spending offsets accompanying the Medicare drug program, the cost has been added to the federal debt.

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Temptation

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

ScienceBlogs.com - By Jonah Lehrer - Nov. 09 (Comment) - Why might such a state of temporary moral grace exist? The answer returns us to evolution, and to our history as social primates. One possibility is that we come pre-programmed for certain kinds of ethical behavior, as it might be more important to have an honest reputation within the group than to have a few extra dollars.

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Economics and Groupthink

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

ScienceBlogs.com - By Jonah Lehrer - Jan. 11 (Review) - Uwe Reinhardt, an economist at Princeton, has a thoughtful explanation of why macroeconomists were so blindsided by the economic downtown of 2008: Fewer than a dozen prominent economists saw this economic train wreck coming -- and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, an economist famous for his academic research on the Great Depression, was notably not among them. Alas, for the real world, the few who did warn us about the train wreck got no more respect from the rest of their colleagues or from decision-makers in business and government than prophets usually do.

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Going with the Gut

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - By Jonah Lehrer - Sep. 07 (Review) - So there's been a lot of talk about how John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for VP demonstrates the danger of trusting your instincts and making important decisions with your gut. But I think such a conclusion is unfair - not to McCain, but to our very own brain. After all, one of the major findings of neuroscience in the last decade or so has been the tremendous power of the emotional mind. The unconscious, long derided as a Freudian underworld, is now seen as an adaptive supercomputer. Antonio Damasio, for instance, has demonstrated that when people lose the ability to experience emotion - usually because of damage to the orbitofrontal cortex - they also lose the ability to make "rational" decisions. In other words, our gut instincts are a necessary ingredient of reason.

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Loss Aversion and Real Estate

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - By Jonah Lehrer - Jul. 27 (Opinion) - At first glance, now would seem like an excellent time to buy a home. In most urban areas, home prices are down at least 20 percent from their peak in 2007. Shouldn't lower prices lead to increased demand? After all, interest rates are still low by historical standards. The problem, of course, is that people are afraid that the real estate market will only get worse. No one wants to pay interest on an investment that continues to decrease in value. This is a textbook example of loss aversion, which is the kahnemanandtversky principle that losses hurt more than gains feel good. Kahneman and Tversky stumbled upon loss aversion after giving their students a simple survey, which asked whether or not they would accept a variety of different bets. The psychologists noticed that, when people were offered a gamble on the toss of a coin in which they might lose $20, they demanded an average payoff of at least $40 if they won. The pain of a loss was approximately twice as potent as the pleasure generated by a gain.

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Rumor and Politics

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - By Jonah Lehrer - Jun. 08 (Opinion) - Humans are exquisitely social animals, and yet we're vulnerable to some pretty stunning flaws in social cognition. Unfortunately, most of these flaws are on full display during a presidential campaign. Consider the false rumor, which can influence our beliefs even when it has been debunked. The most powerful example of this phenomenon, of course, is the swift-boating of John Kerry. It didn't matter that every reputable news source found most of the charges to be misleading. The sheer fact that Kerry was being accused of lying was enough to impugn his honesty. Even when we're found innocent, a little guilt remains. And now it's another campaign and the libelous lies are once again clotting up the airwaves. Consider the recent rumor that there's a videotape of Michelle Obama saying "whitey". Dave Weigel has thoroughly debunked the rumor - the "facts" of the videotape have mutated from day to day - but it's still worth considering the impact of the rumor, even though it's not true. I think one of the most troubling aspects of the way rumors work is that mere repetition is often confused with truth. When the brain hears a claim repeated endlessly - and that's all cable news ever does - it can't help but take that claim into account, even if the evidence is, at best, ambiguous. Basically, we're the worst Bayesians ever.

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Body position affects memory for events

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - By Dave Munger - Jun. 08 (Review) - A new study adds an unexpected method to the list of ways to spur memories about our past: body position. That's right: just holding your body in the right position means you'll have faster, more accurate access to certain memories. If you stand as if holding a golf club, you're quicker to remember an event that happened while you were golfing than if you position your body in a non-golfing pose.

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The persistence of racism even among the well-intentioned

Sun, 25 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - By Dave Munger - May. 25 (Opinion) - Negative stereotypes about Blacks in the U.S. have declined dramatically since the 1930s -- practically no white person to will say that Blacks are lazy, or superstitious, or many other stereotypes, when these views were common 80 years ago. Yet huge racial disparities still exist infant mortality, unemployment, and poverty are found more than twice as often among Blacks than whites, and these numbers haven't changed since the 1960s. In John Dovidio's talk, "Racism Among the Well-Intentioned, he argued that most whites who say they're not biased, believe they are not biased. Yet at the same time, they do develop negative feelings towards blacks and other people of color.

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Neural Buddhism?

Sun, 18 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - By Jonah Lehrer - May. 18 (Opinion) - I admire David Brooks for trying to expand the list of topics written about by Times columnists. (To be honest, I'm a little tired of reading about presidential politics.) His latest column, on "The Neural Buddhists," tries to interject modern neuroscience into the current debate over New Atheists and religion. Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it.

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Does the Foundation of Prejudice Lie in Native Language?

Sun, 11 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - May. 11 (Opinion) - Who says religion and science can't go together well? I just read an interesting paper by Kinzler et al.(1), published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with apparent Biblical inspiration (OK, maybe not), as it begins with Judges 12:5-6 as an epigraph. In that passage, group membership is determined by having individuals pronounce a word, and if they can't pronounce it properly, they're killed. Kinzler et al. then provide a host of examples of what we might call linguistic discrimination in their opening paragraph:

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A little game for Monday morning

Mon, 05 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - By James Hrynyshyn - May. 05 (Opinion) - Got the Monday blues? Then find five minutes to brighten your day by playing what I call spot-the-slander on the Heartland Institute's list of "500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming."

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With a little training, we can recognize other races as well as our own

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - By Greta Munger, Dave Munger - Apr. 30 (Review) - ResearchBlogging.orgHumans are exceptionally good at recognizing faces they've seen before. It doesn't take much study to accurately recall whether or not you've seen a particular face. However, this pattern breaks down when faces come from unfamiliar races. A white person who lives primarily among other whites will have more difficulty recognizing Asian faces, and vice versa. But how engrained is this difference? How much experience with other-race faces do we need to have before we can recognize them as well as same-race faces? Is learning to recognize other races as difficult as recognizing any new category of objects -- cars, say, or birds? When we do learn to recognize other-race faces, do we really know them as well as more familiar races?

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This Is Your Brain On Free Choice

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - Apr. 18 (Review) - Last month, a paper was published in Nature, in which Kay et al(1) were able to guess which of their stimuli a person was seeing by looking at their fMRI scans. The model looked something like this (from Kay et al's Figure 1, p. 352):

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When we see a brain "light up," [most of] our brains shut off

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - By Greta Munger, Dave Munger - Mar. 14 (Opinion) - Psychologists often complain that neuroscientists get a disproportionate share of the glory when the mainstream media reports on their studies. It seems to some that an important new psychology study is often neglected or ignored entirely, while neuroscience studies of similar importance are hailed as "groundbreaking." What is it about pictures of brains that are so appealing? A while back, were excited to hear of a study which promised to show that people are more impressed by neuroscience explanations of research results than nonneural psychology explanations. Paul Bloom's article about the then-unpublished research suggested that even experts were more impressed with explanations of psychological phenomena that included irrelevant references to brain activity.

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The Amazing Shrinking Room : Childrens' use of Symbols

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

ScienceBlogs.com - By Steve Higgins - Mar. 04 (Opinion) - If you have kids you might have seen them make some very funny errors early in their lives. They do things like try to sit on miniature chairs, try to climb into small houses, or drive toy cars. Why in the world do children make these scale errors?! Can't they see that the small versions only represent the real larger versions? Research by Judy DeLoache and colleagues has given us some great insights into this problem as well as one of the most entertaining methods for a psychology study ever.

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The fall of Ben Stein

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:01:55 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - Aug. 23 (Opinion) - You know, even though I know he's been a Republican talker for a long time, that he worked for the Nixon administration as a speechwriter and lawyer, I've always kind of liked Ben Stein. My wife and I used to like to watch Win Ben Stein's Money, and he was quite amusing as the principal in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. He's always come across as a pleasant doofus, even though I know that image appears to be carefully calculated one. Now I learn that he's the narrator and a driving force behind a pro-"intelligent design" movie called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which is due to be released in February. It looks really, really bad.

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A better way for bloggers to identify peer-reviewed research

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 08:22:04 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - Aug. 08 (Opinion) - Most CogDaily readers are familiar with the little icon we developed to indicate when we were reporting on peer reviewed research. We created it when we began to offer links to news and blog posts, as a way of distinguishing those less "serious" posts from when we were talking about peer-reviewed journal articles. But Sister Edith Bogue of Monastic Musings recently pointed out that other academic bloggers could also make use of the icon, to distinguish when they're blogging about news, family, books, etc., from serious scholarship. But our icon isn't ideal for this purpose since its design is specifically linked to our site. I also think a public icon should come with some guidelines for use.

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Dividing With God

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 19:30:01 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - By Mike Dunford - Aug. 07 (Opinion) - Citizens of the great state of Texas, where I now live, are very proud of their state. Proud enough, in fact, that they've got their very own state pledge of allegiance. We found out about this a few months back while we were researching schools, because every morning all public schoolchildren in Texas pledge allegiance to the United States Flag, then pledge allegiance to the Texas flag, then sit for a moment of silence. We looked up the Texas pledge, and decided that it seemed to be innocuous enough: Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one and indivisible...Then the Texas State Legislature got in the game and everything changed. They decided that the old version wasn't good enough, but that it could be fixed by just adding a few small words. Now, the children are expected to say this every morning: Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under God, one and indivisible. It's just four little words, but they're words that create problems for me where there were none before. All because a lawmaker in Texas decided that the state wasn't honoring God enough. Now I've got a problem that has no good solution.

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Deep Sea News : Canadians Should Root For Global Warming

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 06:41:02 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - By CR McClain - Jul. 12 (Opinion) - All this global warming and reduced ice pack means a commercially viable, Northwest Passage is becoming more feasible and who actually owns it more disputed. Canada claims the waters of the Northwest Passage are within their territorial waters. The U.S. refuses such and in 1985 sailed the Polar Sea without obtaining permission from Canada provoking the response of a official declaration in 1986 reaffirming Canada's claim. In 1988 the Arctic Co-operation Agreement between the two countries was established based on the previous quarrel stating the United States will not send any more icebreakers through the passage without Canada's consent, and Canada will always give that consent Stephen Harper, serving as the Prime Minister of Canada, campaigned with the agenda of increasing Canada's presence and strengthening their claim in the Northwest Passage. Currently, this includes the construction eight Polar Class 5 Arctic Offshore Patrol Ships, at cost of 3 billion dollars (US), and the establishment of a deep water port in the far North in Nunavut (map below).

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Exclusive: Interview with Senator John Edwards on Science-Related Topics

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 07:41:30 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - Jul. 09 (Interview) - Welcome to my blog, Senator. It is great privilege for me to be able to ask you a few questions on topics of interest to the scientific community in particular and the 'reality-based' community in general. 1. Let's start with the fun part of the interview - your personal thoughts on science: past, present and future. Were you a science geek as a kid, where do you get your science information today and how do you see the world transformed by science in the future? First, let me say I was not a science geek growing up. Nothing against science geeks. But that wasn't me. However, I do believe that science is the key to innovation in the American economy, the key to improving our standard of living. We see the impact of science everyday--from biotechnology to smart bombs, from satellite Global Positioning Systems to the Internet.

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Michael Moore's Sicko (or why Orac should relent and go see this movie)

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 11:18:25 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - By Mark Hoofnagle - Jun. 30 (Opinion) - went to see Michael Moore's Sicko last night and it is truly worthy of being seen by every American. I say that knowing how many feel about Michael Moore and his tendency towards spectacle. I hope that people can set aside whatever prejudice they have towards Moore and see this movie. This is a movie that contains more truth than any he has made so far. I went in with a skeptical mind, knowing the issues that face the practice of medicine in the United States in this new millennium, how easy they can be discussed inaccurately or flippantly and how medicine was once practiced in this country. Medicine is something deeply personal to me as I am a the son of two doctors - my mother a private-practice family physician who has been practicing for more than 30 years, and my father a research MD at the NIH. This movie struck many chords, as someone who has insurance, who studies medicine, who cares about fixing our current medical care system, who has known doctors, and who has received medical care. There is something for everyone in this movie, doctors, nurses, patient, and policy-makers alike, and I sincerely wish that everyone gives it a chance and an open mind. I doubt anyone will see it and be disappointed or unaffected.

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Want to hear a dirty little secret?

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 06:22:29 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - By Mark Hoofnagle - Jun. 27 (Opinion) - The New York Times writes an editorial about hospital rankings based on mortality of medicare patients from cardiac disease, and not surprisingly, misses the point on metrics of patient survival comparisons between hospitals. Famed medical institutions like Johns Hopkins, the Cleveland Clinic and Massachusetts General Hospital are lumped into the broad national average category when perhaps they deserve better (we can't tell), and no doubt many other hospitals deserve a lesser ranking. In the next round of evaluations, the Medicare program ought to make public every institution's mortality rates along with any caveats needed to help patients understand them. I'll tell you a dirty little secret if you like. It explains why all this data is essentially going to be bunk.

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Some Suggestions for Improving Biology Textbooks

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 13:13:44 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - By Mike the Mad Biologist - Jun. 26 (Opinion) - Well, they're not my suggestions, they're David Hillis' But they are still pretty good.... In the June 2007 issue of Evolution, Hillis writes about how to make general biology textbooks discuss evolution better. He has a list of ten suggestions, and I thought it would be interesting to go through them (italics original; boldface mine; I cut a great deal of text*): 1) Demonstrate that evolutionary research is current and ongoing.... Post-Darwinian findings also present an excellent opportunity to teach about the process of science, and to show that the methods of evolutionary biology are the same approaches used in other areas of science. 2) Clarify that evolution is not a synonym for natural selection.... Creationists like to build a straw man by equating "evolution" with "natural selection," and then pointing out that natural selection is not the only mechanism of change. This error of falsely equating "evolution" with "natural selection" should be theirs, not the textbook's. This is my favorite item: 3) Use fresh examples.... I thought if I read one more description of peppered moth evolution I would scream. Creationists attack these examples as "icons" of our field, and although their criticisms are often absurd, they are right to criticize the books for always using the same examples. If students are presented with the peppered moth example in every biology course they take (and most are), they begin to think that this must be one of a few examples of evolution by natural selection observed by humans. There are a myriad of other examples published in the scientific literature, and many of them are much more relevant to the students' lives than is the color of moth wings. It helps for students to read different examples to illustrate principles such as natural selection each time they take a new biology course.

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Understanding the political timing of stem cell studies

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 10:15:19 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - By Matthew C. Nisbet - Jun. 11 (Opinion) - Consider the following events, their political timing, and their impact on the framing of the stem cell debate: 1) Last week, as the House was preparing to vote on legislation that would overturn Bush's limits on funding for embryonic stem cell research, studies published at the journals Nature and Cell Stem Cell reported that mouse skin stem cells could be turned into a pluripotent stem cell with all the characteristics of an embryonic stem cell. Coverage of the studies appeared on the front page of the Washington Post and other newspapers across the country. Though the research teams connected to the two studies urged Congress to pass the legislation, Catholic and pro-life groups were quick to frame the event as offering a "middle way compromise," adding that moving ahead with embryonic stem cell research was no longer necessary. Others argued, as in this op-ed appearing at the Chicago Tribune, that a conspiracy was afoot to censor the promise of adult stem cell research: Significant numbers of scientists believe that the less controversial route to creating stem cells is possible, but their voices have been drowned out by politicians who would have it that if you're opposed to embryonic stem cell research, you're a "right-wing nut" who opposes all stem cell research.

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