Cafe Leone

If BoMR (Both of My Readers) don’t know me by now, you never will. But everyone should know that I call myself a proud member of the skeptic community. It has already been established that I don’t believe in god so I won’t belabor that point here. I also shun any other paranormal or fringe-science claims.

So imagine what was going through my mind when I was reading the local news online and someone looked over my shoulder and said, “Can you read me my horoscope?” I think it important to tell you that I believe astrology to be junk. Astrology can not be used to determine computability, predict the future, determine personality predispositions or offer daily advice.

So I asked her if she really believed in that stuff and she said the typical “Not really, but sometimes it can be true.” Whatever that means, I have no idea. I then asked her what her sign was and she responded, Aries. Of course, I clicked on the horoscope page and began reading the reading for Gemini, not Aries, which went something like this: “Spend the necessary time making plans before you act but remember to begin with home projects first as they will offer the greatest payoff.”

The first words out of her mouth were “See, I am trying to finish painting the kitchen and I keep getting distracted by interruptions at work.” So despite the fact that she really had no idea why it worked, she did accept the validity of the (wrong) horoscope. Then I told her what I did and she laughed good-naturedly. I read her the correct horoscope that went something like this: “Don’t venture into challenges that are beyond your knowledge because someone will call you on it.”

I was stunned when she then screamed: “See, I knew it! I told my husband that I painted walls before and I never picked up a paintbrush. Now I am screwed!”

Now, I am not so stupid as to believe that the horoscope is some sort of etched in the stars inspiration. You can easily witness this by reading 10 different horoscopes on 10 different websites. But what is the value. For example, if I was searching for guidance through the day, I could randomly pick ANY horoscope for ANY zodiac sign for ANY day of the week and find something to latch on to. Perhaps that is the way it is supposed to be.

I guess I am just being a Virgo.

Tell me about your experiences with astrology.

funny, science | No Comments »

http://kokogiak.com/solarsystembodieslargerthan200miles.html

science | 2 Comments »

Scientific American: 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense
Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism
by tearing down real science, but their arguments don’t hold up.

Though I would like to think that I was born without a right-side to my brain, my scientific-ness has only reached the level of wannabe. Anyone that knows me, knows that I am stunned at the way the creationist movement has infiltrated our daily lives. It seems that in the last few years, creationists have played their mind games and word disassociations with impressive results.

If I am not wrong, the Dover Pennsylvania became the first school system in the country to mandate teaching of creationism or intelligent design in schools. They cited flaws in the theory of evolution and used that as a springboard to promote their own religious agendas. This is the equivalent of suggesting that the Theory of Gravity is “just a theory” and that Theory of atom-sized humans held our feet to the ground and prevented us from being hurled into space.

I know that there are more examples of creationists that learned to play 3-Card Monte and are using this to make a case for teaching Intelligent Design.

Although I have a few books on the subject, I believe this article is an excellent synopsis of just want to say when creationist start spouting off their nonsense and then have the nerve to make you defend yourself because Evolution is “just a theory.”

My opinion until I change it.

atheism, science | 1 Comment »

Another article to add to the “I Wish I Wrote This” file.

I was scouring the internet because I was interested in the subject of bias and what makes us lean in a certain way or take a certain position. This was partially due to events in my life where I am being forced to make changes. There is a bias in my head that essentially states that the alternative to the status quo is automatically a bad thing. At this time, I do not even know what the alternatives are! So part of the bias can be based on the fact that the unknown is always intimidating and the another part is based on the fact that the status quo is usually appealing.

When following the trail of links involving bias, I came across this on wikipedia.org. I won’t pretend to have know that there in fact was a list of biases, but apparently there are.

Decision-making and behavioral biases

Many of these biases are studied for how they affect belief formation and business decisions and scientific research.

* Bandwagon effect - the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink, herd behaviour, and manias. Carl Jung pioneered the idea of the collective unconscious which is considered by Jungian psychologists to be responsible for this cognitive bias.
* Bias blind spot - the tendency not to compensate for one’s own cognitive biases.
* Choice-supportive bias - the tendency to remember one’s choices as better than they actually were.
* Confirmation bias - the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.
* Congruence bias - the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing.
* Contrast effect - the enhancement or diminishment of a weight or other measurement when compared with recently observed contrasting object.
* Déformation professionnelle - the tendency to look at things according to the conventions of one’s own profession, forgetting any broader point of view.
* Disconfirmation bias - the tendency for people to extend critical scrutiny to information which contradicts their prior beliefs and uncritically accept information that is congruent with their prior beliefs.
* Endowment effect - the tendency for people to value something more as soon as they own it.
* Focusing effect - prediction bias occurring when people place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.
* Hyperbolic discounting - the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, the closer to the present both payoffs are.
* Illusion of control - the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes which they clearly cannot.
* Impact bias - the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
* Information bias - the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
* Loss aversion - the tendency for people to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains (see also sunk cost effects)
* Neglect of probability - the tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.
* Mere exposure effect - the tendency for people to express undue liking for things merely because they are familiar with them.
* Omission bias - The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).
* Outcome bias - the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
* Planning fallacy - the tendency to underestimate task-completion times.
* Post-purchase rationalization - the tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was a good value.
* Pseudocertainty effect - the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.
* Selective perception - the tendency for expectations to affect perception.
* Status quo bias - the tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.
* Von Restorff effect - the tendency for an item that “stands out like a sore thumb” to be more likely to be remembered than other items.
* Zero-risk bias - preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.

Biases in probability and belief

Many of these biases are often studied for how they affect business and economic decisions and how they affect experimental research.

* Ambiguity effect - the avoidance of options for which missing information makes the probability seem “unknown”.
* Anchoring - the tendency to rely too heavily, or “anchor,” on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.
* Anthropic bias - the tendency for one’s evidence to be biased by observation selection effects.
* Attentional bias - neglect of relevant data when making judgments of a correlation or association.
* Availability heuristic - a biased prediction, due to the tendency to focus on the most salient and emotionally-charged outcome.
* Belief bias - the tendency to base assessments on personal beliefs (see also belief perseverance and Experimenter’s regress).
* Belief overkill - the tendency to bring beliefs and values together so that they all point to the same conclusion.
* Clustering illusion - the tendency to see patterns where actually none exist.
* Conjunction fallacy - the tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones.
* Gambler’s fallacy - the tendency to assume that individual random events are influenced by previous random events — “the coin has a memory”.
* Hindsight bias - sometimes called the “I-knew-it-all-along” effect, the inclination to see past events as being predictable.
* Illusory correlation - beliefs that inaccurately suppose a relationship between a certain type of action and an effect.
* Ludic fallacy - the analysis of chance related problems with the narrow frame of games. Ignoring the complexity of reality, and the non-gaussian distribution of many things.
* Mind projection fallacy - The notion that probabilities represent intrinsic properties of physics rather than a description of one’s knowledge of the situation.
* Myside bias - the tendency for people to fail to look for or to ignore evidence against what they already favor.
* Neglect of prior base rates effect - the tendency to fail to incorporate prior known probabilities which are pertinent to the decision at hand.
* Observer-expectancy effect - when a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it (see also subject-expectancy effect).
* Optimism bias - the systematic tendency to be over-optimistic about the outcome of planned actions.
* Overconfidence effect - the tendency to overestimate one’s own abilities.
* Polarization effect - increase in strength of belief on both sides of an issue after presentation of neutral or mixed evidence, resulting from biased assimilation of the evidence.
* Positive outcome bias - a tendency in prediction to overestimate the probability of good things happening to them (see also wishful thinking, optimism bias and valence effect).
* Recency effect - the tendency to weigh recent events more than earlier events (see also peak-end rule).
* Reminiscence bump - the effect that people tend to recall more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than from other lifetime periods.
* Rosy retrospection - the tendency to rate past events more positively than they had actually rated them when the event occurred.
* Primacy effect - the tendency to weigh initial events more than subsequent events.
* Subadditivity effect - the tendency to judge probability of the whole to be less than the probabilities of the parts.
* Telescoping effect - the effect that recent events appear to have occured more remotely and remote events appear to have occurred more recently.
* Texas sharpshooter fallacy - the fallacy of selecting or adjusting a hypothesis after the data is collected, making it impossible to test the hypothesis fairly.

Social biases

Most of these biases are labeled as attributional biases.

* Actor-observer bias - the tendency for explanations for other individual’s behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation. This is coupled with the opposite tendency for the self in that one’s explanations for their own behaviors overemphasize my situation and underemphasize the influence of my personality. (see also fundamental attribution error).
* Egocentric bias - occurs when people claim more responsibility for themselves for the results of a joint action than an outside observer would.
* Forer effect (aka Barnum Effect) - the tendency to give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. For example, horoscopes.
* False consensus effect - the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.
* Fundamental attribution error - the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior (see also actor-observer bias, group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect).
* Halo effect - the tendency for a person’s positive or negative traits to “spill over” from one area of their personality to another in others’ perceptions of them (see also physical attractiveness stereotype).
* Illusion of asymmetric insight - people perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers’ knowledge of them.
* Illusion of transparency - people overestimate others’ ability to know them, and they also overestimate their ability to know others.
* Ingroup bias - preferential treatment people give to whom they perceive to be members of their own groups.
* Just-world phenomenon - the tendency for people to believe that the world is “just” and therefore people “get what they deserve.”
* Lake Wobegon effect - the human tendency to report flattering beliefs about oneself and believe that one is above average (see also worse-than-average effect, and overconfidence effect).
* Notational bias - a form of cultural bias in which a notation induces the appearance of a nonexistent natural law.
* Outgroup homogeneity bias - individuals see members of their own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups.
* Projection bias - the tendency to unconsciously assume that others share the same or similar thoughts, beliefs, values, or positions.
* Self-serving bias - the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests (see also group-serving bias).
* Self-fulfilling prophecy - the tendency to engage in behaviors that elicit results which will (consciously or subconsciously) confirm our beliefs.
* Trait ascription bias - the tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior and mood while viewing others as much more predictable.

atheism, science | 1 Comment »

How Hubble Killed God…
Though I do not agree with the conclusion that the stunning image taken by Hubble kills the argument for god, I do love the article. The image and the article does seem to put a hole in the “6000 year old universe” argument but I do not know how many Christians take the bible that literally. I am also not so sure about combining the Christian god and the Muslim god in drawing his conclusion. I have no idea if Muslims claim that the universe is only 6000 years old. Ultimately, I don’t care because god doesn’t exist. The rest is just trivialities.

Good job

atheism, blogging, science | 6 Comments »

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mind. Aoccdrnig to a rseearch taem at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sltil raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Such a cdonition is arppoiaprtely cllaed Typoglycemia.

funny, science | 1 Comment »