From the article:

Using an adaptation of the standard 'bat-and-ball' problem, the researchers explored this phenomenon. The typical 'bat-and-ball' problem is as follows: a bat and ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? The intuitive answer that immediately springs to mind is 10 cents. However, the correct response is 5 cents.

The authors developed a control version of this problem, without the relative statement that triggers the substitution of a hard question for an easier one: A magazine and a banana together cost $2.90. The magazine costs $2. How much does the banana cost?

A total of 248 French university students were asked to solve each version of the problem. Once they had written down their answers, they were asked to indicate how confident they were that their answer was correct.

Only 21 percent of the participants managed to solve the standard problem (bat/ball) correctly. In contrast, the control version (magazine/banana) was solved correctly by 98 percent of the participants. In addition, those who gave the wrong answer to the standard problem were much less confident of their answer to the standard problem than they were of their answer to the control version. In other words, they were not completely oblivious to the questionable nature of their wrong answer.

Article in Science Daily: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130219102202.htm

Original abstract (the rest is paywalled): http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-013-0384-5

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, DC Meetup with Special Guest

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, DC Meetup with Special Guest

Discussion article for the meetup : DC Meetup: Games and Conversation

Discussion article for the meetup : DC Meetup: Games and Conversation

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=122523&org=NSF&from=news
From the article:

New research published today in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It's the kind of thing seen in Hollywood's "Matrix" franchise.

Think of a person watching a computer screen and having his or her brain patterns modified to match those of a high-performing athlete or modified to recuperate from an accident or disease. Though preliminary, researchers say such possibilities may exist in the future.

Experiments conducted at Boston University (BU) and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, recently demonstrated that through a person's visual cortex, researchers could use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to induce brain activity patterns to match a previously known target state and thereby improve performance on visual tasks.

EDIT: To clarify, this is almost certainly over-hyped. However, it appears to at least be an instance of very interesting biofeedback.

The results for these have been stable for a while now; I'm posting them a bit late. 95 people took the survey after I modified it to add two questions. For the public version, I removed the pre-change data (10 data points).

One text response included identifying information, which I removed in the public version of the data. If you participated and there is any information you provided that you would like removed from the public version, PLEASE tell me as soon as possible and I will remove it.

P.S. To the person who predicted an 80-90% significant difference between different parts of California: I predict with at least 90% confidence that there will be no significant difference, because of the wide spread of locations and smallish sample size of this survey.

(The original post about the survey.)

EDIT: After some comments that it was unethical for me to post the data (in particular the text), I removed public access from the link provided earlier. Given my precommitment to post the data, I assumed it was clear enough to respondents that it would be public. I'm not convinced that this has hurt anyone, but given that others seem to disagree, it seemed prudent to remove it. Please feel free to continue this discussion; I'm interested in your thoughts.

At Reason Rally a couple of months ago, we noticed that a lot of atheists there seemed to be there for mutual support - because their own communities rejected atheists, because they felt outnumbered and threatened by their peers; the rally was a way for them to feel part of an in-group. Reason Rally is definitely an event that selects for people who feel excluded by their communities most of the time. But there may be a different concentration of people who have had this sort of experience on LessWrong, and we wondered what that concentration was.

Hence, this survey: LessWrong Members and their Local Communities.

If I get a decent sample size, I will post the data for all to enjoy.

EDIT: I added two questions about current and previous religious views to the poll. If you took it before 11:30PM EST 5/2, I'd appreciate it very much if you would take the time to retake it. :)

This experiment, to be published in Science, used priming (cues like hard-to-read fonts, showing participants the sculpture The Thinker) and problem-solving tasks to induce "analytical thinking" in the participants, and found that it seemed to reduce their degree of religious belief. Participants not given such tasks showed no such reduction.

Their methods of quantifying "religious belief" aren't given in detail (a questionnaire, probably), so it may be interesting to see the actual article when it comes out.