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Comment by doone on June 18, 2012 at 7:59am

Intelligence Isn't A Buffer Against Bias

Jonah Lehrer digests a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that showed even people with high SAT scores fall prey to simple mental errors. One reason why:

[W]hen assessing our own bad choices, we tend to engage in elaborate introspection. We scrutinize our motivations and search for relevant reasons; we lament our mistakes to therapists and ruminate on the beliefs that led us astray.

The problem with this introspective approach is that the driving forces behind biases—the root causes of our irrationality—are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and impermeable to intelligence. In fact, introspection can actually compound the error, blinding us to those primal processes responsible for many of our everyday failings. We spin eloquent stories, but these stories miss the point. The more we attempt to know ourselves, the less we actually understand.

Comment by doone on June 17, 2012 at 10:36am

More to the point, how did those lazy non ass wipers in 1982 get away with it?   and why would they try to get away with it?

Comment by Michel on June 17, 2012 at 10:20am

8. Diapers…the final frontier: The idea that men have truly become involved in the raising of their children only in the past few decades just isn’t true, says a University of Warwick paper published yesterday. What has changed is that many more fathers now are willing to make the ultimate expression of love–they’re changing diapers. Figures from a 1982 study suggested that 43 percent of fathers had never changed a diaper. By 2000, that figure, according to another study, had fallen to 3 percent. Which makes you wonder: How did the 3 percent pull that off?

I never even asked myself the question of diapers. They needed changing, if I was the one on hand, I changed them. But hey! I was an "old" dad at 34.

Comment by doone on June 17, 2012 at 9:29am

DECONSTRUCTING DAD

From Smithsonian:

Having children changes a man. All of us know examples of that. I’m pretty sure, for instance, that the only time I ever saw my father sing was to his kids. It wasn’t always pretty, but it was pure Dad. But is there something about fatherhood that actually changes the male brain? Studies suggest that it does, including one published a few years ago which found that new sets of neurons formed in brains of mouse dads that stayed around the nest after their pups were born. Still, there’s much yet to be learned about the effects of being a father. And so scientists continue to explore the eternal question: “What’s with this guy?” Here are 10 recent studies deconstructing dad:

1.The upside to an old old man: So what if they’re only good for one throw in a game of catch. Old fathers can do something for their kids that young dads can’t–pass on genes that give them a better shot at a long life. A study published earlier this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says children of older fathers–men who wait until their late 30s to have children–inherit longer telomeres, caps at the end of the chromosomes that protect them from degeneration. And that seems to to promote slower aging and likely a longer lifespan for those kids.

2. See what I do for you?: Most dads know they’re going have to make a few sacrifices for their kids, but lose testosterone? Who knew? A recent study of 600 men in the Philippines found that testosterone levels dropped considerably after they fathered children. Scientists were quick to counter the notion that raising kids makes someone a less manly man and instead concluded that men’s bodies helped them evolve hormonal systems that make it easier to commit to their families. And the men who spent the most time taking care of their kids had the lowest testosterone levels, suggesting that biology helps them shift into parent mode.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 08:58 AM | Permalink |

Comment by doone on June 15, 2012 at 12:23pm

Comment by doone on June 15, 2012 at 7:03am

DID NEANDERTALS PAINT EARLY CAVE ART?

From Science:

The basic questions about early European cave art—who made it and whether they developed artistic talent swiftly or slowly—were thought by many researchers to have been settled long ago: Modern humans made the paintings, crafting brilliant artworks almost as soon as they entered Europe from Africa. Now dating experts working in Spain, using a technique relatively new to archaeology, have pushed dates for the earliest cave art back some 4000 years to at least 41,000 years ago^*, raising the possibility that the artists were Neandertals rather than modern humans. And a few researchers say that the study argues for the slow development of artistic skill over tens of thousands of years.

Figuring out the age of cave art is fraught with difficulties. Radiocarbon dating has long been the method of choice, but it is restricted to organic materials such as bone and charcoal. When such materials are lying on a cave floor near art on the cave wall, archaeologists have to make many assumptions before concluding that they are contemporary. Questions have even arisen in cases like the superb renditions of horses, rhinos, and other animals in France's Grotte Chauvet, the cave where researchers have directly radiocarbon dated artworks executed in charcoal to 37,000 years ago. Other archaeologists have argued that artists could have entered Chauvet much later and picked up charcoal that had been lying around for thousands of years.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 06:30 AM | Permalink 

Comment by Michel on June 14, 2012 at 4:51pm

Oldest confirmed cave art is a single red dot

As cave art goes, it doesn't look like much: a single red dot, hidden among a scatter of handprints and drawings of animals on the wall of El Castillo cave in northern Spain.

But this red dot is at least 40,800 years old, making it the oldest known piece of cave art in Europe. At that time modern humans had only just migrated out of Africa, raising a tantalising possibility: that the dot was drawn by a Neanderthal. If that's the case, our extinct cousins may have had the rudiments of written language.

While cave art is common throughout western Europe, the oldest dated examples are those in Chauvet cave in France, which have controversially been dated to between 35,000 and 30,000 years ago.

But many other pieces of cave art have never been dated. Standard radiocarbon dating only works when paintings were made using organic material like charcoal. Anything drawn with minerals like ochre, or just carved into the wall, can not be carbon dated.

Zoomed-out view of the cave art in El Castillo cave, Spain (Image: Pedro Saura)

A hand stencil in El Castillo cave, Spain, has been dated to earlier than 37,300 years ago and a red dot to earlier than 40,600 years ago, making them the oldest cave paintings in Europe (Image: Pedro Saura)

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Now, Alistair Pike of the University of Bristol, UK, and colleagues have come up with a partial solution that will put a minimum age on some previously un-datable paintings.

As water seeps through rock and dribbles over the cave surface, it leaves behind a thin layer of calcite. This contains radioactive uranium, which slowly decays into thorium at a known rate.

So, by measuring how much uranium has decayed into thorium, Pike figured he could determine the age of the calcite layer.

If the calcite overlays a painting, it will provide a minimum age for that art.

(more)

 

Comment by Adriana on June 13, 2012 at 11:44am

It applies to any age, but i think it's especially relevant in old age, because as we age, more things go wrong :-)

Comment by doone on June 13, 2012 at 11:15am

WHY SMART PEOPLE ARE STUPID

Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker:

Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.)

For more than five decades, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this and analyzing our answers. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way we think about thinking. While philosophers, economists, and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents—reason was our Promethean gift—Kahneman and his scientific partner, the late Amos Tversky, demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.

When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. These shortcuts aren’t a faster way of doing the math; they’re a way of skipping the math altogether. Asked about the bat and the ball, we forget our arithmetic lessons and instead default to the answer that requires the least mental effort.

More here.

Posted by Abbas Raza at 09:41 AM | Permalink 

Comment by Neal on June 13, 2012 at 11:13am

I don't think it applies to getting old, I think it applies to being happy at any age. 

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