Overview: Psychology

An interview with Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind & architect behind AlphaFold.

A YANSS interview with Adam Grant, author of Think Again: The Power of Knowing What you Don’t Know. Generally an "extensive exploration of how to rethink your own thinking", including his WorkLife podcast interview of Margaret Atwood on procrastination.(When annotating a podcast I really like a transcript, but there was none for this epi…

counties that had voted for Donald Trump in 2016 exhibited 14% less physical distancing... higher Covid-19 infection and fatality growth rates ...the hormone oxytocin... promotes bonding... plays a role in trust... When participants trusted and felt trusted, oxytocin levels ... jumped... Trust just feels good... But risky if we give it to the w…

geoengineering technologies are hypothetical... to be used ‘in case of emergency’ ... should radical emissions cuts fail... Running concurrently... ‘chemtrails’ ... interchangeably with the term geoengineering... belief that the persistent contrails left by aeroplanes provide evidence that a secret programme of large‐scale weather and climate modi…

The Cranky Uncle smartphone game is currently being developed... teach you to throw the arguments of even your crankiest climate-misinformed uncle back at him... let’s learn the arguments of denial to defeat them...cartoons and gameplay to interactively explain the denial techniques used to cast doubt on climate science... ‘active inoculation’ — l…

intellectual humility, the crucial characteristic that allows for admission of wrongness... crucial for learning... difficult to foster... a virtue worth striving for... entertaining the possibility that you may be wrong and being open to learning ...actively curious about your blind spots... It’s about asking: What am I missing here? our reali…

Our bodies exploit fractal networks to maximize surface areas ... Blood vessels branch out like root systems; the brain houses folds within folds... means we don’t simply enjoy looking at fractals—we are designed to process them effortlessly, and even have a need to be looking at them....That’s also why you might see a face in a cloud... or a prof…

Each side of the climate debate accuses the other of exaggeration and suffers from its own... sometimes feel like a shouting match in a roomful of children wearing earplugs... We have allowed our political, national, economic, and cultural narratives free play ... where... are the narratives from science itself? Where is the science teacher?... p…

Many famous scientists have something in common—they didn’t work long hours... lives were full and memorable, their work was prodigious, and yet their days are also filled with downtime... great students didn’t just practice more than the average, they practiced more deliberately... engaging with full concentration in a special activity to improv…

science has become as horrifically politicized as any other aspect of American life.... If we truly want to endorse the idea of science, let’s break up into groups and fan out across America:

The objectivity that matters so much in science is not primarily a characteristic of individual scientists but of scientific communities. Scientists rarely refute their own pet hypotheses... Their fellow scientists will be happy to expose these hypotheses to severe testing... Not being afraid of being wrong... is a value we could promote... Intel…

There are always “alternative facts.” What matters is how we decide which of those alternative facts are most likely to be true... Conway’s statement based ... on a much older tradition of deciding what is true: the argument from authority.... the culmination of a long retreat from the scientific perspective on truth... pitted against creationist…

While we would like to believe we can persuade people ... with evidence, studies show the other side is likely to become even more deeply entrenched in its view in the face of more information... “politically motivated reasoning,”... people use their minds to protect the groups to which they belong from grappling with uncomfortable truths. The mot…

the science on how to best communicate science across different issues, social settings and audiences has not led to easy-to-follow, concrete recommendations... becoming increasingly clear that the “deficit model” ... if we just “fill people up” with science knowledge and understanding, they’ll become increasingly rational decision-makers – simpl…

"@NASA is the 104th most popular Twitter account in the world... and 3.5 million on Instagram. The Department of the Interior, whose stunning wildlife and nature pictures make it the only government agency with cool visual content to rival NASA’s, has just 654,000 ... John Yembrick and Jason Townsend are veterans of other government agencies...…

An alternative to Popular Science's approach: "Climate change articles trigger some of the most heated discussions on Ars Technica... a scientific matter with political ramifications, it's also the focus of astroturfers (fake grassroots movements), trolls, and the willfully scientifically illiterate. At Ars, we take trolling very seriously... we…

"But even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests. In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benef…