Author: Psybertron

This Feb 2010 post from David McRaney confirms evidence of how much we like explanations that involve causation, particularly causation we are in control of.

Your brain doesn’t like randomness, and so it tries to connect a cause to every effect; when it can’t, you make one up.

Weird,
since posting the XKCD “I’m So Meta” Quinian Hofstadter joke,
I get so many search hits on “I’m So Meta” ?!?

Are there really that many similar minds out there
– and anyway, why would they be searching that phrase ?

This time, the “Backfire Effect”, like confirmation bias, but where more counter evidence deepens the conviction in the original belief. From Dave McRaney via David Gurteen.

The backfire effect push[es] those who [-] put more thought into the matter farther [away] from the gray areas.

As social media [-] progresses, confirmation bias and the backfire effect will become more and more difficult to overcome […].

As information technology progresses, the behaviors you are most likely to engage in when it comes to belief, dogma, politics and ideology seem to remain fixed. In a world blossoming with new knowledge, burgeoning with scientific insights into every element of the human experience, like most people, you still pick and choose what to accept even when it comes out of a lab and is based on 100 years of research.

In a world where everything comes to you on demand, your beliefs may never [actually] be challenged.

And flame wars can only intensify

Most online battles follow a similar pattern, each side launching attacks and pulling evidence from deep inside the web to back up their positions until, out of frustration, one party resorts to an all-out ad hominem nuclear strike. If you are lucky, the comment thread will get derailed in time for you to keep your dignity, or a neighboring commenter will help initiate a text-based dogpile on your opponent.

What should be evident from the studies on the backfire effect is you can never win an argument online. When you start to pull out facts and figures, hyperlinks and quotes, you are actually making the opponent feel as though they are even more sure of their position than before you started the debate.

Also put me in mind of this “false neutrality“.
Similar, but different.

Nice piece from Antonio Damasio

Thanks to Marsha on MD for posting the link. Topical for me right now because of the Iain McGilchrist I am currently reading. The indecision of rationality. In the clip we don’t hear what the specific brain lesion / abnormality is, but this is very much about the left-brain being out of touch with the right-brain and the somatic self – its immediate, emotional, holistic, wiser, more-real gut-feelings, etc. Left-brained rational analysis is a very poor substitute for a decision – it’s autistic.

Not ready to blog a review of McGilchrist yet. A massive and deeply researched tome – hundreds of references per chapter. The first half is excellent – very comprehensive collection of sources illustrating left and right brain behaviours and their interdependencies – particularly the “right > left > right” loop pattern – real-world-experience before abstracted-analysis before value-judgement-and-action. His thesis is that “the western mind” is suffering from the left-brain gaining dominance (the Emissary over its Master to coin the Nietzschean phrase in his title) as a disease – a mental disorder. In the second half of the book, which I’m only part through – he applies this notion to the schools of thought from the pre-Socratics to the post-Modern. Less convincing arguments than the first half, but a clear agenda, consistent with so much other reading.

Like Haidt’s Happiness, the ultimate message appears to be wisdom in balance.

[Post Note : Should make it clear here, Damasio is talking about rational vs emotional impairment, not specifically about left-right brain differences – as I noted, the particular lesion is not explained in the short clip. Similarly although McGilchrist IS talking about left-right brain interactions, he does not characterise their difference as simply rational vs emotional, more narrow / closed vs broad / potential. Need to listen to and/or read the wholes.]

I can see I am going to have to find another theme / template for the blog. Still like the power and flexibility of WordPress so I think I’ll stick with it, but it is a bit geeky to maintain all the features of themes and widgets, despite the integrated UI’s in the Dashboard. A fair degree of lottery in finding a theme that 100% supports the actual features you use, and being 99% open source also a lottery in whether bugs get noticed / addressed, even if you offer to pay. Everything ends up lowest common denominator.

The update will be an excuse for a clear-out / clean-up, but the primary motivation is that the comment feature of the current Blaze New Media / Moonlight theme has a bug in forcing the subscribe and submit buttons right to the foot of the page, where the reader is unlikely to find them – as defined by the length of the side-bar, even if the post itself  is only a few lines long. I have experimented at various times with having a different side-bar or no side-bar for the single post & comment forms, but it just adds to the admin overload, whenever you need to add or change things.

Most themes work fine for simple blogs – but I have ten years worth of posts, pages categories and links, linked every which way. Some of the simplistic previous posts & comments widgets just don’t hack it.

Also disappointing that the Google search widget, which can do more than the in-built WordPress search function, even within the blog content, is now disabled by Google, disapproving of automated searches launched from third-party pages. Pity.

Grrrr. I suspect bog-standard Google Blogger has caught up on most available features these days ? Tempting to switch back, again.

Coincidence seeing this news story today about pollinators in urban gardens vs rural farming and wild environments.

In our current rented town garden situation we have just a few pots of flowers, and after a minor infestation of aphids a couple of weeks ago, I noticed the flowers were teeming the last few days with hover flies. Many different varieties and sizes, some only about 4mm long, some almost pass for honey bees – but all hover flies – 20 or more on each pot. Never been aware of so many before.

I understood hover-flies were carnivores, eating aphids and the like, but most of them are dropping into the flower heads for nectar so far as I can tell, even onto the anthers of the lilies.

(PS got rid of the aphids and green-fly by physically picking off and washing with very dilute household detergent – effective as ever.)

Archival vérité film “Magic Trip – Ken Kesey’s Serach for a Kool Place” just being released, based on over 40 hours of 1964 footage.

Thanks to Dan on MD for the link.

Mentioned seeing Public Image Ltd in Oslo back in June and being blown away with the quality of the band and the gig. Not seen or heard of PiL since their Album (1986) album and had the tracks from that and Metal Box (1979) as MP3’s on and off over the years. Apart from that like most people I’d been treated to the odd glimpse of John Lydon on I’m a Celeb … and on the Country Life Butter ad, and never really occurred to me that Johnny was still seriously in the music biz.

As I blogged at the time my expectations were pretty low, so the contrast between those and the reality was marked. Really impressed with Johnny’s delivery, professional and passionate, and the current PiL band is remarkably good – the best PiL ever Johnny says. New members since 2009: Lu Edmonds on assorted 6-stringed instruments and keyboard / synth – marvellous sounds including great renditions of the older PiL favourites; Bruce Smith on drums – no band ever worked without a strong drummer and most recent member Scott Firth bassist, including electric fretless stand-up bass plus assorted keyboard / synth – more than a rhythm section.

He / they won a MoJo lifetime achievement award in July, presented by Hawkwind’s Dave Brock. Johnny is happy and the band are writing and producing new material. Looking forward to the product and more live gigs.