All of TedW's Comments + Replies

Mechanisms -- good point. I have another way of putting it.

In TV police shows, detectives try to establish a suspect's means, motive, and opportunity for committing a crime.Sloppy detectives (and jurors!) tend to focus just on motive and its lurid details. In evolutionary bio/psych, we try to establish genetic variation, selective advantage, and heritability. Sloppy evolutionary hypotheses tend to focus just on the selective advantage and ignore the other two.

People are drawn to stories. We give evidence extra weight if it comes in the form of a good narrative. (Is there a name for that bias?)

Seems to me that all that would do is reinforce someone's opinion that probability theory is irrelevant to the real world.

I personally would start with confirmation bias, partly because there are lots of clear examples in pop culture. Like: last night I was watching a rerun of "Glee." Will Schuester, a teacher and the glee-club advisor, is trying to quash a student's crush. He sings her (Rachel) a medley of songs in which the singer is trying to deflect a much younger woman's advances. (Actually, both songs -- "Don't Stand So Close to Me&quo... (read more)

I thank the Ravenclaw Harry Potter for bringing me here. I've been lurking for a couple of weeks. My first clue that I'd feel at home here was learning that Eliezer taught himself physics by reading the Feynman lectures.

I'm an evolutionary ecologist by training, and a self-taught Python programmer and GIS analyst. I currently work at a community college, where I do a lot of one-on-one biology-teaching. I spend a lot of time thinking about where students go wrong when they're thinking about science, and how to help them think more about their own thinking. ... (read more)

I'd meant A to be right in both cases. And of course -- against my own remonstration -- I did none of the math myself. I was unfamiliar with the Templeton data. I looked it up, and it's interesting. I'd note that while Templeton agrees that transit (by the system, not by the fully utilized vehicle) is less efficient than fuel-efficient personal transportation, he still thinks people should make use of existing transit systems.

I ride a bike.

Here's something that comes up in many, many discussions of climate change and anything else where a lot of arguments come from models or simulations: sometimes you have to do the math to make a valid (counter-)argument.

Example:

A: ...And so you, see, as CO2 increases, the mean global temperature will also increase.

B: That's bullshit, and here's why: as CO2 increases, there will be more photosynthesis -- and the increased plant growth will consume all that extra CO2.

Another example (the one that motivated this comment):

A: And so, as long as the bus is carry... (read more)