Your Scientific Reasoning Is More Flawed Than You Think

<i>Worse than simple ignorance, naïve ideas about science lead people to make bad decisions with confidence.</i><p>This is the reason these articles capture my attention.<p>A related problem not discussed in the article is the tendency to use so-called "scientific" explanations to a non-scientific area of life. A better understanding of the scientific method itself in education is essential. Simply prefacing a statement with phrases like "it has been scientifically proven that..." or "statistics show..." is used to lend a vague scientific credibility various claims. It shows up in a slightly more sophisticated form in political diatribe and in educational settings as well.<p>Although of course there might be a flaw in my scientific reasoning about the article ;).

Given a multiple choice True/False test with the statement “people turn food into energy”, I would have had to spend some time deciding on what to answer, not because I have to question whether or not the statement is true, but because I'd have to wonder in whether or not the test writer understands the nuanced implications of that statement.<p>The way I see it, people don't turn food into energy -- they simply move energy around and transform it by breaking the chemical bonds in the food and forming other chemical bonds using enzymes to keep the activation energies low enough to make a net gain despite losses to heat. So based on the conservation of energy, people don't turn anything into energy. The energy was already there -- they simply transformed it.<p>But then with the conservation of mass-energy, we know that some mass is converted to energy when chemical bonds are broken. So technically the statement is true in a sense. But the amount of energy created from mass is so small it can't even be measured or detected, so for all practical purposes, the statement is false. You have to be breaking nuclear bonds before you see that.<p>The article's author says the statement is true, using it as an example of a statement that's consistent with our preconceived ideas, but instead of explaining it, he simply does some pseudo-scientific hand-waving -- digestion, respiration, metabolism, and all that. This suggests the author somehow considers energy as something that is created and used up on a regular basis.<p>Which makes you wonder, what if the writer of the statement was an expert biologist whose major focus isn't understanding the concept of energy or the chemical underpinnings of microbiology? What if they also saw energy in the same way as the author of the article? What if the answer on the answer key is true, despite being arguably false? In that case, the answer is true in the sense that that's what the writer of the test wanted you to answer.<p>I think a better test would give the option of adding a statement or two to qualify or explain your choice on the test. I know that would allow me to finish such a test sooner, especially if it was computerized and I could type my explanations.

<i>the authors found that participants who had best mastered scientific concepts (determined by their overall accuracy) were especially slow to verify inconsistent statements</i><p>I would expect that it's the other way around ie the people who take longer time to think stuff through will have a higher accuracy. Which doesn't make their results all that surprising

Sounds like a System 1 vs. System 2 conflict: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374275637/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&#38;qid=1345778519&#38;sr=8-1&#38;keywords=thinking+fast+and+slow" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/...</a> And not even a particularly interesting or surprising one, really.

Surely the "inconsistent" questions are the ones that initially seem to be possibly tricky or subtle questions. This is not the same as contradicting the intuitive answer. For example, if you ask whether two masses fall at the same speed in air, that would probably trigger a careful response in the same way that asking whether two objects fall at the same speed in a vacuum would, even though in the first case the correct answer ultimately matches natural intuition. That's my guess as to what's going on.

This seems to me to be as much "you have a hard time replacing what you know works in some (indeed many) cases with something that might be harder to apply in simple cases but is always correct" as it is "you have a hard time learning correct things."<p>That is, the ideas (that this piece mentioned) that people had a hard time leaving behind seemed to be those that work as decent guidelines, even if they are not accurate. Speed of processing is a value in our minds as much as it is in a computer. If you have a rule of thumb that works rather well, why abandon it?

The reason people persist with unscientific conceptions of the world even after learning the scientifically correct explanation is because scientifically correct explanations often have little benefit in our day to day lives.<p>The heliocentric model of the solar system, for example, has no effect on our normal lives, and thus by Pierce's Pragmatic Maxim is of little value.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatic_maxim" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatic_maxim</a>

I'm going to bet they used something like harvards implicit to run this test. If you have never seen it, the results are surprising given how simple the tests are (measure your time of response)<p><a href="https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/" rel="nofollow">https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/</a><p>the warning statement alone should make you interested:<p><pre><code> I am aware of the possibility of encountering interpretations of my IAT test performance with which I may not agree. Knowing this, I wish to proceed</code></pre>

Anyone interested traveling even further down the rabbit hole I recommend Kuhn, Lakatos &#38; Feyrabend.

There's a great deal of examples of this in economics, and this is not just a theoretical problem-- it causes bad electoral outcomes.<p>For instance, the idea that "government spending stimulates the economy" is a naive concept. It sounds good- right, because they are spending money, that means it is creating demand and the goods and services they are buying increases economic activity.<p>The scientific reality is, this naive concept is ignoring the cost of that government spending. All of the money government has comes from two sources- inflation and taxes. Whichever way they raise the money, they do economic damage.<p>Thus government spending, like Obama's so-called "stimulus" plan, actually hurts the economy.<p>This is why, for instance, the unemployment rate ended up being higher than Obama claimed it would be if his plan wasn't passed.. even though his plan was passed.<p>But it is not very hard to find people who believe that some other thing caused unemployment to be higher.<p>In fact, both the Republican and Demcorat parties, and their partisan's ideologies, reject the science of economics and embrace pseudo-science.<p>In my lifetime, I've seen a great increase in embracing pseudo-scientific concepts or even anti-science positions, most recently and alarmingly, by people who insist that they are right because "science" agrees with them.<p>Another example: Glaciers are getting smaller because of global warming. This belief is completely unscientific-- there is no way to know how many glaciers there are on earth, let alone whether they are getting smaller, and nobody has even tried to guess whether more of them are shrinking than growing.<p>Another example: The idea that the TSA protects us against airplane hijackings. Or that somehow the government is protecting us against terrorism. Or that mass shootings would be worse if guns were less regulated (the stats: 9.2 is the average number killed in areas where guns are banned, but only 2.2 people die in areas where the intended victims are allowed to be armed.)<p>Politics' natural enemy is science.