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Multiple Sources: Much of what appears on Internet is bunkum.
According to my sources, all highly connected and familiar with both news and the Internet, have explained to me that much of the writing that appears on the web is based on inaccurate information or is sheer guesswork or wishful thinking. They advise double checking anything found on blogs or social media against actual reported news stories before accepting it as accurate or true.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
The easiest person to deceive is yourself.
Why?
Because if you come up with an idea, if you do an experiment that supports what you are advancing, what fits what you believe, it must be right. It's hard to decouple your agenda and goals from your interpretation of what's correct and what should be correct. If you're methodologically sloppy, if your statistics are off, if you don't take into account a control properly, you'll overlook it. Problems vanish and all that remains is the truth that you are bringing to the world and which you have identified with. Such research, such a report, always has merit. If the truth is debunked, it's a bitter pill to swallow because it means you were wrong. Your self-image takes damage. (Not to worry, we mostly tend to forget such things.)
As he points out, once you publish your findings there are no end of critics to take you to task. They do the critical thinking you should have done; the system is adversarial. But the important word here is "critics." If there's a school of thought, the first thing that the school of thought needs is to be self-critical, otherwise you have to treat that entire group as a single entity. Critics and dissidents are seldom permitted to stay in a group if they're too dissident or critical.
There's a reason that some wag said it took a generation for a paradigm shift in physics--until the old guard died out.
Feynman took to task some pseudo-scientific enterprises. They were a target, to be sure--but his primary aim was to tell a bunch of grad students at CalTech how to be good scientists. His secondary targets were things like psychology and education, the "soft sciences" in which controls are lacking, rigor is missing, and random ideas get picked up and bandied about with carefree abandon, at least with respect to accuracy and a self-critically valid methodology. So in education, learning styles and phonemic awareness were a big thing--with even psychologists saying the first is pure bunkum and linguists pointing out that nobody actually believes the long-since discounted '70s and '80s view of linguistics that "phonemic awareness" requires. Psychology has a reproducibility problem. I know one guy with his doctoral degree proud that he had a huge data set and did a statistical tour-de-force on it, using more than 40 statistical methods to find a couple of results true at p = 0.05. (Of course, the odds at that point were in favor of finding at least one positive result even with random data the first time through; he also said he had to revise his hypotheses several times, thus increasing the odds that he'd get random false positives with no way to tell if any were "true positives". Note that he was proud of data-dredging with no control, and called this "good research."
Now I run across this "growth mindset" idea: It's a valid idea, as formulated, but not as preached. Deliberate practice, effort, etc., all go to success; IQ is not fixed and can decline or increase. But the way it's gotten to my campus is that practice is all that's needed for anybody to master anything, with "deliberate" being poorly defined; there is simply no such thing as IQ or talent. I keep waiting for them say there's no such thing as neuron pruning. Then there are the literature profs I've run into convinced that Worf/Sapir was long ago proven by linguists and linguists all accept them as canonical truth, but nobody thinks of literature as "science". Again, there's an agenda and a cause, and both are like sarin to truth.
Many of the self-critics on DU are routinely castigated. Bucking the trend has consequences. The real danger is that we sit back and say, "Hey, we're past masters at critical thinking. Hear about that anonymous leak reported on social media and echoed by the Partisan Press? Three sources there, it has to be true." Such systems are begging for disinformation that suits their particular mindset: such a report has no actual source. It's rumor, it's gossip, it's hearsay. It's worth, "Hey, there's this bit of gossip" but no serious consideration past that. As Feynman said, we have no problem arguing and countering things we disagree with--we've vested in the failure of those arguments, they're a threat to our identity (my addition, that last clause). The problem is when we run into things that agree with us and which help our cause: Then we're our own worst enemy.
The easiest person to deceive is yourself.
Why?
Because if you come up with an idea, if you do an experiment that supports what you are advancing, what fits what you believe, it must be right. It's hard to decouple your agenda and goals from your interpretation of what's correct and what should be correct. If you're methodologically sloppy, if your statistics are off, if you don't take into account a control properly, you'll overlook it. Problems vanish and all that remains is the truth that you are bringing to the world and which you have identified with. Such research, such a report, always has merit. If the truth is debunked, it's a bitter pill to swallow because it means you were wrong. Your self-image takes damage. (Not to worry, we mostly tend to forget such things.)
As he points out, once you publish your findings there are no end of critics to take you to task. They do the critical thinking you should have done; the system is adversarial. But the important word here is "critics." If there's a school of thought, the first thing that the school of thought needs is to be self-critical, otherwise you have to treat that entire group as a single entity. Critics and dissidents are seldom permitted to stay in a group if they're too dissident or critical.
There's a reason that some wag said it took a generation for a paradigm shift in physics--until the old guard died out.
Feynman took to task some pseudo-scientific enterprises. They were a target, to be sure--but his primary aim was to tell a bunch of grad students at CalTech how to be good scientists. His secondary targets were things like psychology and education, the "soft sciences" in which controls are lacking, rigor is missing, and random ideas get picked up and bandied about with carefree abandon, at least with respect to accuracy and a self-critically valid methodology. So in education, learning styles and phonemic awareness were a big thing--with even psychologists saying the first is pure bunkum and linguists pointing out that nobody actually believes the long-since discounted '70s and '80s view of linguistics that "phonemic awareness" requires. Psychology has a reproducibility problem. I know one guy with his doctoral degree proud that he had a huge data set and did a statistical tour-de-force on it, using more than 40 statistical methods to find a couple of results true at p = 0.05. (Of course, the odds at that point were in favor of finding at least one positive result even with random data the first time through; he also said he had to revise his hypotheses several times, thus increasing the odds that he'd get random false positives with no way to tell if any were "true positives". Note that he was proud of data-dredging with no control, and called this "good research."
Now I run across this "growth mindset" idea: It's a valid idea, as formulated, but not as preached. Deliberate practice, effort, etc., all go to success; IQ is not fixed and can decline or increase. But the way it's gotten to my campus is that practice is all that's needed for anybody to master anything, with "deliberate" being poorly defined; there is simply no such thing as IQ or talent. I keep waiting for them say there's no such thing as neuron pruning. Then there are the literature profs I've run into convinced that Worf/Sapir was long ago proven by linguists and linguists all accept them as canonical truth, but nobody thinks of literature as "science". Again, there's an agenda and a cause, and both are like sarin to truth.
Many of the self-critics on DU are routinely castigated. Bucking the trend has consequences. The real danger is that we sit back and say, "Hey, we're past masters at critical thinking. Hear about that anonymous leak reported on social media and echoed by the Partisan Press? Three sources there, it has to be true." Such systems are begging for disinformation that suits their particular mindset: such a report has no actual source. It's rumor, it's gossip, it's hearsay. It's worth, "Hey, there's this bit of gossip" but no serious consideration past that. As Feynman said, we have no problem arguing and countering things we disagree with--we've vested in the failure of those arguments, they're a threat to our identity (my addition, that last clause). The problem is when we run into things that agree with us and which help our cause: Then we're our own worst enemy.
