Ape, not monkey » psychology

Over Analysis

Jeffrey Weston — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Revenge

Jeffrey Weston — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Innate Curiosity

Jeffrey Weston — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Inputs And Outputs

Jeffrey Weston — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Take that, homeschooling.

Thinking Of Consciousness

Jeffrey Weston — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Everyone has their own pet theory of consciousness and few want to listen to anyone elses.

But if you do, Daniel Dennett is the man to hear.

Life As A Feedback Loop

Jeffrey Weston — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 08:00:00 +0000

I’m not going to claim that this makes sense, but…

[Well, I'll just leave it at that.]

Gullibility

Jeffrey Weston — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 08:00:48 +0000

One could say that the religious are gullible or easily influenced with regards to their ‘faith’. But we all can be hoodwinked or negatively influenced.

A book that’s on my reading list is the Annals of Gullibility: Why we are duped and how to avoid it. Written by Stephen Greenspan who himself was duped in the Madoff Scandal.

You can listen to Stephen talk about the book on the NPR Science Friday Podcast.

The Mirror Test

Jeffrey Weston — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 08:00:00 +0000

There are only a few species that can recognize their own reflections:

great apes (chimps, bonobos, organutans, gorillas and humans)
dolphins
elephants.

The Mirror test shows that other animals are aware of them selves as individuals separate from others, by seeing if they will recognize their own reflection.

It’s often incorrectly said that humans are the only self-aware animals, (usually to reinforce a religious argument about the uniqueness of man).

Scientific discovery continues to show that humans are not the center of the universe. Further delouting the farcical idea that the universe was designed with us in mind.

Slurp , prulS

Jeffrey Weston — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 08:00:00 +0000

Oh, yeah. They live in a zoo now.

Disconnect the dots

Jeffrey Weston — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:00:36 +0000

One of the central ideas behind intelligent design is that by observing something in nature, we can tell if it was designed by an intelligence or evolved in an undirected process. This is illustrated in the watchmaker analogy.

This highly subjective process can easily lead to false positives. IOW, we think we see a design pattern, when there really isn’t one at all.

Michael Shermer, addresses this in an article on patternicity. As he points out, seeing patterns that don’t really exist is in our human nature and occurs in all aspects of life:

Why do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news?

A proximate cause is the priming effect, in which our brain and senses are prepared to interpret stimuli according to an expected model… Religionists see the Virgin Mary on the side of a building… Conspiracy theorists think 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration.

Is there a deeper ultimate cause for why people believe such weird things? There is. I call it “patternicity,” or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.

And now for the musical number. Here’s Of Montreal with “Disconnect the Dots”.