Hi. Just leaving a few comments about me and what I have been doing in terms of research people here will find interesting. I joined just a couple of days ago so I am not so sure about styles, this seems to be the proper place for a first post and I am guessing the format and contents are free.
While I was once a normal theoretical physicist, I was always interested in the questions of why we believe in some theories, I think that for a while I felt that we were not doing everything right. As I went through my professional life, I had to start interacting with people from different areas and that meant a need to learn Statistics. Oddly, I taught myself Bayesian methods before I even knew there was something called hypothesis tests.
Today, my research involves parts of Opinion Dynamics (I am still a theoretical physicist there, somehow), and I have been starting to make more and more use of results of human cognition experiments to understand a few things as well as a Bayesian framework to generate my models. I have also been doing some small amount of research in evolutionary models. But my real main interest in the moment can easily be seen in a paper that I just put online at the ArXiv preprint site. Indeed, while I already knew the site and found it interesting, time limits meant I never really planed to write anything here. So, the reason I actually joined the site now is because I think you will find the whole discussion in the paper quite interesting. I do think that my main conclusion there about human reasoning and its consequences is so obvious that it always amazes me how deep our instincts must be for it to have remained hidden.
There is a series of biases and effects that happen when we decide to support an idea. And those biases make us basically unable to change our minds or, in other words, to learn. In the paper I inspect the concept of choosing an idea to support from what we know about rationality. I conduct a small simulation experiment with different models that suggest that our desire to have one only idea is behind extremist points of view, and I finally discuss the consequences of it all for scientific practice. There is a book planned, with many more details and aimed at the layperson, the first draft version is complete, but it will still take a while before the book is out. The article is in drier prose, of course.
Anyway, while I am still submitting it for publication, the preprint is available at
The name of the article is "Thou shalt not take sides: Cognition, Logic and the need for changing how we believe", I do think you people here will have a lot of fun with it.
Hi. Just leaving a few comments about me and what I have been doing in terms of research people here will find interesting. I joined just a couple of days ago so I am not so sure about styles, this seems to be the proper place for a first post and I am guessing the format and contents are free.
While I was once a normal theoretical physicist, I was always interested in the questions of why we believe in some theories, I think that for a while I felt that we were not doing everything right. As I went through my professional life, I had to start interacting with people from different areas and that meant a need to learn Statistics. Oddly, I taught myself Bayesian methods before I even knew there was something called hypothesis tests.
Today, my research involves parts of Opinion Dynamics (I am still a theoretical physicist there, somehow), and I have been starting to make more and more use of results of human cognition experiments to understand a few things as well as a Bayesian framework to generate my models. I have also been doing some small amount of research in evolutionary models. But my real main interest in the moment can easily be seen in a paper that I just put online at the ArXiv preprint site. Indeed, while I already knew the site and found it interesting, time limits meant I never really planed to write anything here. So, the reason I actually joined the site now is because I think you will find the whole discussion in the paper quite interesting. I do think that my main conclusion there about human reasoning and its consequences is so obvious that it always amazes me how deep our instincts must be for it to have remained hidden.
There is a series of biases and effects that happen when we decide to support an idea. And those biases make us basically unable to change our minds or, in other words, to learn. In the paper I inspect the concept of choosing an idea to support from what we know about rationality. I conduct a small simulation experiment with different models that suggest that our desire to have one only idea is behind extremist points of view, and I finally discuss the consequences of it all for scientific practice. There is a book planned, with many more details and aimed at the layperson, the first draft version is complete, but it will still take a while before the book is out. The article is in drier prose, of course.
Anyway, while I am still submitting it for publication, the preprint is available at
http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.05169
The name of the article is "Thou shalt not take sides: Cognition, Logic and the need for changing how we believe", I do think you people here will have a lot of fun with it.
Best, André