We often talk as though we are in direct contact with reality - as though our eyes show us the world, and our minds read off the facts. But between whatever reality fundamentally is and the experience you're having right now, there are a surprising number of layers. At each layer, two types of error happen: information gets left out, and bias creeps in. By the time experience reaches you, there's the potential for a great deal of both to have accumulated.
Put another way, rather than p...
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interpretation
How can we look at the same dataset and come to wildly different conclusions?
Recently, a study came out where 73 research teams independently analyzed the same data, all trying to test the same hypothesis. Seventy-one of the teams came up with numerical results across a total of 1,253 models. Across these 1,253 different ways of looking at the data, about 58% showed no effect, 17% showed a positive effect, and 25% showed a negative effect. But that's not even the oddest part.
The oddest part is that despite a heroic attempt to do so, the study authors failed to...
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Seven reasons why you could be defining a concept ineffectively
Note (December 16, 2022): This piece is cross-posted from the Clearer Thinking blog, where it appeared on March 2, 2021.
Can a chosen definition be "wrong"? No. If you choose a definition, then you can define a sound or series of characters to mean whatever you want them to mean. For instance, if you wanted, you could declare that whenever you say "phloop," you mean one of those little paper umbrellas that are sometimes found in Piña coladas. That would be weird, but it wouldn't be ...
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There are at least 8 different ways to interpret the Constitution
Is gun ownership a constitutional right? What about a “right to privacy” that makes it unconstitutional to ban birth control? And can the federal government really use the power to regulate “commerce among the several states” to make laws banning certain plants in cases when they are grown only for private use?
I know of 8 approaches to interpreting the U.S. Constitution (and its amendments). None is obviously correct; some are more popular than others, but all are, in some unsatisfying sens...
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