I'm not sure of my No. 2 answer tbh doyle if you wanna give your old tactics another go

Lottery numbers 37 and 38 allocated to ed. Congratulations.


C12 REFERENCE ANSWERS

1.

(i) informational conformity

(ii) normative conformity

[Narrator: Only one of the people in the group is a real subject — the fifth person with the white t-shirt. The others are confederates of the experimenter and have been told to give wrong answers on some of the trials. The experiment begins uneventfully, as subjects give their judgements. But on the third trial, something happens. The subject denies the evidence of his own eyes and yields to group influence.

Asch found subjects went along with the group on 37% of the critical trials. But he found through interviews that they went along with the group for different reasons:

- [Description of first reason] This subject's yielding is based on a distortion of his judgement. He genuinely believes that the group is correct.

- [Description of second reason] In this case, the subject knows he is right, but goes along to avoid the discomfort of disagreeing with the group. Here the distortion is at the level of his response.

_______

In the previous experiment, the naive subject stood alone against the group. In this variation, Asch gave the naive subject a partner, here seated in the third position, who also gives the correct response.

With a partner, yielding drops to only 5% of the critical trials, compared to 37% without a partner. Although subjects report warmth and good feeling toward the partner, they typically deny that he played a role in their own independence. The partnership variation shows that much of the power of the group came not merely from its numbers, but from the unanimity of its opposition. When that unanimity is punctured, the group's power is greatly reduced.

_______

Sometimes we go along with the group because what they say convinces us that they are right. This is called informational conformity. But sometimes we conform because we are apprehensive that the group will disapprove if we are deviant. This is called normative conformity.

The strength of the normative factor is shown in another variation carried out by Asch. In this variation, the subject is told that because he had arrived late, he would have to write his answers. Subjects in this private-response experiment are exposed to the same amount of misleading information as other subjects, but they are immune from any possible criticism by the group. And this enormously reduces the pressure to conform. Conformity drops by two-thirds.

Asch's experiment is a classic. It reveals how people will deny what they see, and submit to group pressure. It allows us not only to observe conformity, but to study the conditions that increase or reduce its occurrence.]


2. Example: The financial risk of succumbing to the "I want what they want!" herd instinct (i.e. buying art with your ears rather than your eyes) — which arguably increases the chances of making expensive purchase mistakes. Artwork acquired under these circumstances can become difficult to offload if it's later perceived as merely a former 'flavour of the month'.

[This article is somewhat related and may be of interest to members:

news.artnet.com/art-world/art-experts-tricked-by-prestige-study-761507 ]


3. (i), (ii) and (iii)

Narrator: If the street were deserted, a passerby would probably go to the rescue. But these strangers have silently formed a temporary group with a rule: Don't help. This woman for instance has clearly spotted Ruth, but she conforms to the rule and does nothing. Watch what happens though when someone else helps. She suddenly finds herself in a different group with a new rule: To help.

[Professor Helen Haste, University of Bath: It's always very distressing to watch situations like this, where people are obviously suffering and no one's actually helping them. But what we have here is two conflicting rules. One is the rule we ought to help. And the other is the rule that we ought to do what everybody else is doing. And here you have effectively a group of strangers who are exerting the pressure not to intervene, not to help, and it's very difficult to rebel.]

C13 QUESTIONS

Each time reference below is to the broad period in the video where the answer to the relevant question can be found.

Keeping in mind point 4 of the Game Format and Rules, please answer the following:


1. [0:00–30:00] While discussing Ben Carson (neurosurgeon, then-presidential candidate in the 2016 Republican primaries, and now member of Donald Trump's Cabinet), Michael Shermer talks about the capacity for people to be "smart in one area and really dumb in other areas". Shermer later describes at length what he calls "the mother of all cognitive biases".

State which cognitive bias Shermer is talking about, and give a brief definition of this bias.


2. [30:00–end] At one point, Shermer paraphrases a line or joke by the multitalented Tim Minchin. What was the joke?


3. [30:00–end] What expression does Shermer use (also mentioning one of his Scientific American columns) to explain how intelligent and educated people such as scientists can genuinely believe in things like the existence of god?



[Competition winner to be confirmed as from 22:00 UK time (GMT+1) (but no later than 23:59 UK time).]

Lottery numbers 39, 40 and 41 allocated to doyle. Congratulations.

Lately, doyle and ed, it seems you two have pretty much had a free run of these competitions. Despite (i) a heads-up in January about the lottery, (ii) two separate references to the peak-end effect, and (iii) a March 2017 month-long marathon, what is the likelihood come April of some whiny buffoon saying, "I wish I had participated"?

As an aside, that must have been a comfortable recap video — with its references to cognitive biases, Daniel Kahneman, James Randi, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, etc. Did the familiarity of some of the subject matter and references create feelings of cognitive ease?


C13 REFERENCE ANSWERS

Light edits have been made to some of the quotes for clarity.

1. Confirmation bias: The tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.

[Michael Shermer: Psychologically speaking, as I say in 'Why People Believe Weird Things', smart people believe weird things because they're better at rationalising beliefs they hold for non-smart reasons. That is, people hold beliefs for emotional reasons, psychological reasons, religious reasons, political, ideological reasons — and then they back into it with evidence after the fact that they filter to fit what they already believe: Confirmation bias. [...]

Seth Andrews (interviewer): Let's talk about confirmation bias, for those who may not know what it is. Can you flesh it out for us?

Shermer: Yep. The confirmation bias is where you look for and find confirming evidence for what you already believe, and you ignore the disconfirming evidence. That is, you remember the hits, you forget the misses. You just filter out information that doesn't confirm what you want to be true, and you allow in the information that fits. Everybody does it, we do it in all walks of life. There's a huge body of literature in cognitive psychology about this bias. It's kind of the mother of all cognitive biases. There's a host of these biases, dozens. But that's the biggest one. [3:11–4:35]

_______

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).

_______

What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.
— Warren Buffett ]


2. Shermer: There's no such thing as alternative medicine. There's just medical claims that are proven and all the rest that are not proven. I think it's Tim Minchin that says, "What do you call alternative medicine with evidence? Medicine." [30:43–30:59]

[Minchin: By definition, alternative medicine has either not been proved to work, or been proved not to work. Do you know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? Medicine. [3:55–4:10 in the first video below.]

Tim Minchin: Storm [10:20]
– uploaded by TheDamnWreckless



Tim Minchin's Storm the Animated Movie (2011) [10:38]
– uploaded by stormmovie



Minchin's wonderful riff on Puck's epilogue from A Midsummer Night's Dream, referencing Storm's earlier mention of Shakespeare:

And if perchance I have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
We'd as well be 10 minutes back in time
For all the chance you'll change your mind.]


3. Logic-tight compartments.

[Shermer: I wrote a column, one of my 'Scientific American' columns — the 'Logic-Tight Compartments', I called it. Like a watertight compartment, it's just a little barrier [in the mind], and you hold that belief. That's our best explanation for why scientists believe in god. Because we don't believe there's evidence for it, and they're holding it in there as a separate thing. It's like 'The New York Times' science writer [...], she had this great analogy of the physicist that goes to church on Sunday [...] [saying he believes] in the resurrection. "That's nice, where's your control group?" — Natalie Angier. It's a great analogy. Why aren't they asking for that kind of evidence on Sunday that they do on Monday at the lab? And the answer is that they're holding [these beliefs] in separate compartments. [33:40–34:36]]

_____________________________


Additional information:

Shermer's 2013 article on "logic-tight compartments" in Scientific American:

www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-minds-compartments-create-conflicting-beliefs/

The Mind’s Compartments Create Conflicting Beliefs: How our modular brains lead us to deny and distort evidence

If you have pondered how intelligent and educated people can, in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence, believe that evolution is a myth, that global warming is a hoax, that vaccines cause autism and asthma, that 9/11 was orchestrated by the Bush administration, conjecture no more. The explanation is in what I call logic-tight compartments—modules in the brain analogous to watertight compartments in a ship. [...]

_______

Article by Natalie Angier, Pulitzer prize winning science writer for The New York Times:

www.edge.org/conversation/my-god-problem

Yes met the last video seemed a lot easier to listen to as I was a bit more familiar with the names they would mention throughout. I have surprised myself as I didn't think I would last this long, but the subject matter is so enjoyable and one I didn't really know about or who the main people were to read up about.

BONUS COMPETITION 15

Three random questions will be posted on Friday, 31 March 2017, immediately after the posting of questions for Competition 14.

The first person to correctly or sufficiently answer all three questions (in accordance with point 4 of the Game Format and Rules) will be allocated the following single lottery number: 45

_______

The bonus competition is video-free and — exceptionally — open to all members. Points 7 and 8 of the Game Format and Rules will be waived.

Players wishing to compete in both Competition 14 (for which points 7 and 8 are not waived) and 15 are free to do so, but must respond to the relevant sets of questions in two separate posts.

_______

In case we have a rogue winner for lottery number 45, they've got 1/45 odds of creating a dramatic upset for others who "paid their dues" and secured lottery numbers 1 to 44 by actually watching the videos and answering related questions.

This will potentially add an unsettling, exhilarating side to the lottery. Chance takes no account whatsoever of deservingness. The most worthy are just as likely as the vile to get diagnosed with brain cancer, or fatally hit by a car on their way home from work tomorrow.


"There is no such thing as fate, providence, karma, spells, curses, augury, divine retribution, or answered prayers — though the discrepancy between the laws of probability and the workings of cognition may explain why people believe there are."
— Steven Pinker

Met, Re: Derren Brown exposing charlatans. I know someone who was on his program. He is a talented hypnotist and most of his shows are based on people he has hypnotised before the show and pre suggested what they are going to do/say. The show my friend was on said it wasn't even that special. On the show, Derren appeared to read the participants minds telling them all about themselves. What we didn't know was that prior to the filming they were all in a corridor, give pen and paper and told to write on the paper interesting things about themselves and then put the paper in their pockets. My friend realised that they were given clipboards to lean on which all had carbon paper in them copying what they had written. nothing genius about that imho.

Out of principle, I never delete a post, but you're right to have challenged me here.

For clarity, it's worth mentioning I wasn't equating all non-participants with buffoons. That description was reserved for future gripers only — to the extent there may be any. Regarding the latter (again, if any), it was also intended as a forestalling measure. A pre-emptive volley.

Nevertheless, the quoted passage does on reflection come across as petulant. And so, a regrettable lapse of judgement on my part.

Separately, I enjoyed your comment in point (ii), since I see the video content as an end in itself. The lottery aspect is mere window-dressing with a view to promoting that content.

C14 QUESTIONS

Keeping in mind point 4 of the Game Format and Rules, please answer the following:


1. First video: Ben Goldacre discusses the dangers of publication bias in medicine — where only a biased sample of all scientific studies conducted can be found in the academic literature. Unflattering data is left unreported, negative results go missing, which has led to very serious consequences, since vital decisions are taken by professionals (e.g. government officials and medical professionals) based on the information available to them.

To highlight the problem, Goldacre cites various examples. In three or more sentences, describe either his personal experience with the antidepressant reboxetine or the publication bias study taking all the trials conducted on antidepressants that were approved over a 15-year period by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).


2. Second video: During his TED Talk, Eli Pariser states, "Think about it for a second. There is no standard Google anymore."

(i) What is he referring to?

(ii) Explain the experiment he did with friends to illustrate this point.


3. Third video: Margaret Heffernan describes the working relationship and model of collaboration between the scientist Alice Stewart and her statistician George Kneale: thinking partners who aren't echo chambers, and conflict as a way of thinking.

Heffernan then asks what that kind of constructive conflict requires. She comes up with two main requirements (describing the first in greater detail than the second). Briefly state both of these main requirements.



[Competition winner to be confirmed as from 22:00 UK time (GMT+1) (but no later than 23:59 GMT).]

1. Ben goldacre researched the anti d and felt he had a good overview. One study - positive three studies - at worst as good as other anti D's. He later discovered more hidden research that challenged this perception of efficacy.

2.1 he is referring to differing search results based on algorithms that looks at over 57 variables and give you their sense of personalised content

2.2 he asked all his Facebook friends to search the same term in Google and screen shot him the results

3. She says we need to find people very different from ourselves, different backgeounss, ways of thinking and experience. As well as requiring patience, energy and love

Fucked that last one right up. That's what you get for having a few drinks and trying to rush.

Well I've racked my brains over this.

1 I can't remember the name of the event, but the pow street party where a nola was given away. I might be completely misremembering.
How this inspired this competition I'm not sure over and above "incentive". That said I'm not sure the prize is the incentive of those playing this game. They seem to be just having fun. Respect to them for that.
2 Kate Moss and Mario Testino
3 Egon Schiele. Fell in love with his work after visiting the RA exhibition "Egon Schiele and his contemporaries" in 1990. Love the sensual drawings which have a raw simplicity. But, I am disturbed by my understanding that he treated his models (I believe many were local prostitutes) in an appalling way. No excuses for that. But his work remains utterly beautiful.

Best I can do. Not a great attempt I fear.
But happy to have taken part.

Haha ed alcohol makes for very entertaining reading 😀

Lottery numbers 42, 43 and 44 allocated to doyle — despite minor inaccuracies and lack of clarity in parts of the answers, along with some incompleteness. Congratulations.

Sorry, ed. Insufficiently accurate, clear or complete. Speed was not your friend on this occasion.


C14 REFERENCE ANSWERS

Light edits have been made to some of the quotes for clarity.

1. Ben Goldacre had read all the available studies about the drug reboxetine. One study showed its effects were better than a placebo. However, Goldacre later found out seven studies had in fact been carried out. Only one was published, the positive one. The six others, with negative results against a placebo, were left unpublished. Separately, in three published studies, reboxetine was just as good as other antidepressants. But unpublished trials for three times as many patients' worth of data showed reboxetine to be worse than those other treatments.

Goldacre had prescribed the drug to a patient on the basis of information publicly available at the time — which turned out to be both incomplete and misleading.

[Goldacre: So this is a drug called reboxetine, and this is a drug that I myself have prescribed — it's an antidepressant. And I'm a very nerdy doctor, so I read all of the studies that I could on this drug. I read the one study that was published that showed reboxetine was better than a placebo. And I read the other three studies that were published that showed reboxetine was just as good as any other antidepressant. And because this patient hadn't done well on those other antidepressants, I thought, "Well, reboxetine is just as good. It's one to try." But it turned out that I was misled. In fact, seven trials were conducted comparing reboxetine against a dummy placebo sugar pill. One of them was positive, and that was published. But six of them were negative, and they were left unpublished. Three trials were published comparing reboxetine against other antidepressants, in which reboxetine was just as good, and they were published. But three times as many patients' worth of data was collected, which showed that reboxetine was worse than those other treatments, and those trials were not published. I felt misled. [...]

But it turns out that this phenomenon of publication bias has actually been very well studied. So here is one example of how you approach it. The classic model is, you get a bunch of studies where you know they've been conducted and completed, and then you go and see if they've been published anywhere in the academic literature.

So this took all of the trials that have ever been conducted on antidepressants that were approved over a 15-year period by the FDA. They took all of the trials which were submitted to the FDA as part of the approval package. So that's not all of the trials that were ever conducted on these drugs, because we can never know if we have those, but it is the ones that were conducted in order to get the marketing authorisation. And then they went to see if these trials had been published in the peer-reviewed academic literature.

And this is what they found: It was pretty much a 50-50 split. Half of these trials were positive (38), half of them were negative (36), in reality.

But when they went to look for these trials in the peer-reviewed academic literature, what they found was a very different picture: Only 3 (out of 36) of the negative trials were published, but all but 1 (37 out of 38) of the positive trials were published. Now if we just flick back and forth between those two, you can see what a staggering difference there was between reality, and what doctors, patients, commissioners of health services, and academics were able to see in the peer-reviewed academic literature. We were misled.

And this is a systematic flaw in the core of medicine. In fact, there have been so many studies conducted on publication bias now — over 100 — that they've been collected in a systematic review, published in 2010, that took every single study on publication bias that they could find. Publication bias affects every field of medicine. About half of all trials on average go missing in action. And we know that positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine. [5:50–8:54]]


2.

(i) The personalisation of Google search results. These are tailored to the individual user. In other words, different people get different search results.

(ii) Eli Pariser asked friends to Google "Egypt" and then send him screenshots of the first page of their search results. The disparity between the results was remarkable. For example, the result for one friend had no references to the 2011 protests in Egypt, which was the big story at the time.

[Pariser: So Facebook isn't the only place that's doing this kind of invisible, algorithmic editing of the web. Google is doing it too. If I search for something and you search for something — even right now, at the very same time — we may get very different search results. Even if you're logged out, one engineer told me there are 57 signals that Google looks at — everything from what kind of computer you're on, to what kind of browser you're using, to where you're located — that it uses to personally tailor your query results. Think about it for a second. There is no standard Google anymore.

And, you know, the funny thing about this is that it's hard to see. You can't see how different your search results are from anyone else's. But a couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of friends to Google "Egypt" and to send me screenshots of what they got. So, here's my friend Scott's screenshot. And here's my friend Daniel's screenshot. When you put them side-by-side, you don't even have to read the links to see how different these two pages are. But when you do read the links, it's really quite remarkable. Daniel didn't get anything about the protests in Egypt at all in his first page of Google results. Scott's results were full of them. And this was the big story of the day at that time. That's how different these results are becoming.

So, it's not just Google and Facebook either. You know, this is something that's sweeping the web. There are a whole host of companies that are doing this kind of personalisation. Yahoo News, the biggest news site on the internet, is now personalised; different people get different things. Huffington Post, The Washington Post, The New York Times — all flirting with personalisation in various ways.

And this moves us very quickly toward a world in which the internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see. As Eric Schmidt (Google) said, "It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them."

So I do think this is a problem. And I think if you take all of these filters together, if you take all of these algorithms, you get what I call a filter bubble. And your filter bubble is kind of your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. And what's in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But the thing is that you don't decide what gets in. And more importantly, you don't actually see what gets edited out. [1:54–4:39]]


3. Requirements for constructive conflict, according to Margaret Heffernan:

(i) that we find people who are very different from ourselves and find ways to engage with them; and

(ii) that we have to be prepared to change our minds.

[Heffernan: How did [Alice Stewart] know she was right? Well she had a fantastic model for thinking. She worked with this statistician named George Kneale. And George was pretty much everything that Alice wasn't. So Alice was very outgoing and sociable, and George was a recluse. Alice was very warm, very empathetic with her patients. George frankly preferred numbers to people. But he said this fantastic thing about their working relationship. He said, "My job is to prove Dr. Stewart wrong."

He actively sought disconfirmation: different ways of looking at her models, at her statistics, different ways of crunching the data — in order to disprove her. He saw his job as creating conflict around her theories. Because it was only by not being able to prove that she was wrong that George could give Alice the confidence she needed to know that she was right.

It's a fantastic model of collaboration: Thinking partners who aren't echo chambers. I wonder how many of us have or dare to have such collaborators.

Alice and George were very good at conflict. They saw it as thinking.

So what does that kind of constructive conflict require?

Well, first of all, it requires that we find people who are very different from ourselves. That means we have to resist the neurobiological drive which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves. And it means we have to seek out people with different backgrounds, different disciplines, different ways of thinking, and different experience. And find ways to engage with them. That requires a lot of patience. And a lot of energy. And the more I've thought about this, the more I think, really, that that's a kind of love. Because you simply won't commit that kind of energy and time if you don't really care.

And it also means that we have to be prepared to change our minds. Alice's daughter told me that every time Alice went head-to-head with a fellow scientist, they made her think, and think, and think again. "My mother", she said, "my mother didn't enjoy a fight, but she was really good at them." [3:54–6:38]]