Close-minded Experts Get It Wrong

My brother, David, sent me this synopsis on how and why "experts" get it wrong so much of the time. It has to do with certainty in one's beliefs--experts are so certain they're right, they are prone to overlook results that do not uphold their hypotheses. Here's the report:

During a four-year study, a pool of amateur forecasters of future events beat experts with classified information, and the amateur "Super-forecasters" were more accurate than the team of experts by 30%.

Conclusions from research published in Philip Tetlock’s “Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction,” included the following:

• The most careful, curious, open-minded, persistent and self-critical—as measured by a battery of psychological tests—did the best.
• “What you think is much less important than how you think,” says Prof. Tetlock; superforecasters regard their views “as hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded.”
• Most experts—like most people—“are too quick to make up their minds and too slow to change them,” he says. And experts are paid not just to be right, but to sound right: cocksure even when the evidence is sparse or ambiguous.

You can read more about this in the WSJ article "The Trick to Making Better Forecasts."   While the story focuses on monetary predictions, the approach to reasoning and decision making applies to our everyday lives.

				The Trick to Making Better Forecasts The Intelligent Investor: A new book suggests that amateurs might well be less-hapless forecasters than the experts—so long as they go about it the right way.
				View on www.wsj.com	Preview by Yahoo

Here at the Simple Explanation blog, we strive to look at scientific findings with a fresh eye. This is not ignorance on our part--it's the way forward to fresh discoveries.

Dad's 1939 Vacation Pith Helmet

In 1939, when my dad was 20 years old, he took a road trip with his family from Colorado to Tijuana and back, stopping at many sights along the way. As it says on the top of the helmet: "A grand trip through 11 states, 2 national parks, 1 national monument, 1 outside nation, 1 Pacific Island playground, and a movie studio."

Dad recorded his trip on a pith helmet he took along. The pith helmet serves as both a map and an autograph book. I imagine that everyone who signed this helmet has long since passed over to the great beyond. I am very happy to still possess that souvenir.

(You can click on any picture to see it bigger--please do!"

This part of the pith helmet map shows the trip winding through Yellowstone National Park, where he meets up with the Morgans. There's a cartoon of two stick figures = martini glass which reads: "Hi, Morg." "Hi George," (equals) "Hi Ball." That joke has always cracked me up.

Dad's trip began on August 7, 1939 and ended August 31, 1939. The drawings on the hat begin at the START point and wind all over the pith helmet until the END. A caption reads, "Length of trip 5081 miles. Approximately as far as from Home to New York City and back to Los Angeles."

"A week's stay in Los Angeles--Mausoleum, Catalina, Auto Races, Warner Brothers Movie Studio, Santa Monica Beach, Venice--Fun House, Tijuana"

Here's the Oregon coast, where he stopped at Reedsport--"more curves than between Durango and Mancos." In Northern California he visited the "Italian Swiss Colony and Winery," then stopped at the "World's Largest and Oldest Living Things--the Redwoods." There's a cartoon of a giant redwood tree with a tiny stick figure underneath it which reads, "Us. Small, like little white lice." A little farther on there's a drawing of the Golden Gate Bridge and "Treasure Island--Isle of Sore Feet." 

The brim reads: "The Five Forgotten Footworn Followers of Fame and Fortune Who Forged Forward Furiously to Frisco and Back to the Foothills of Home."  There were five signatures, now faded by time, but you can still make out my father's name, "Bill Puett" and "Dill," dad's step-dad--Dillworth Halls. Frances, his mother, would have been on that brim, too.

There are more cartoons, more signatures, more little jokes, more sights described.  I'll post more of them if anyone's interested. Just let me know...

Wolflike Genes in Dogs

This nifty graphic first appeared in National Geographic magazine in 2012. Geneticists analyzed the DNA of 85 breeds of dogs and categorized them into four categories according to how wolf-like they are gentically. The graphic below displays the dogs in order of their genetic similarity to wolves, from the "wolflike" breeds at the top of the chart, through "herders," "hunters," and "mastifflike." The color red represents percentages of wolflike genes.

"WOLFLIKE

With roots in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, these breeds are genetically closest to wolves, suggesting they are the oldest domesticated breeds.

HERDERS

Familiar herding breeds such as the Shetland sheepdog are joined by breeds never known for herding: the greyhound, pug, and borzoi. This suggests those breeds either were used in the creation of classic herding dogs or descended from them.

HUNTERS

Most in this group were developed in recent centuries as hunting dogs. While the pharaoh hound and Ibizan hound are said to descend from dogs seen on ancient Egyptian tombs, their placement here suggests they are re-creations bred to resemble ancient breeds.

MASTIFFLIKE

The German shepherd’s appearance in this cluster, anchored by the mastiff, bulldog, and boxer, likely reflects its breeding as a military and police dog."

{from http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/02/build-a-dog/dog-families-graphic} 

A Poem--When the Old Dog Dies

I wrote this poem a few months ago when my dog, Zoey, died. Her lifetime companion and littermate, Franny, died on Saturday. We are now without dogs or cats for the first time ever. My animal friends have always been my best friends and I look forward to seeing them again someday. 

Here is a poem I wrote when Zoey passed on, which I have now edited to include Franny's passing.

Zoey

 Franny

When the old dog dies

I will no longer have to step carefully over her sleeping form

As I rise from bed and feel my way to the toilet in the dark.

When the old dog dies

I can take the ratty old blanket from off the couch

where we sit for hours watching classic movies and eating popcorn.

When the old dog dies

No one will insist I go for walks twice every day

And no one will pull me out the door into rain, into snow, into blistering August heat.

When the old dog is gone

I can eat my meals in peace and quiet

And not have to share bites off the edges of my toast.

When the old dog dies

I can take the beach towels off the car seats and vacuum out all the fur and return the the van from a rolling dog house

Fit for human passengers again.

When the dog finally dies

I can put fancy cheeses in the refrigerator drawer that now houses two pounds of raw, four-meat canine blend from the butcher shop and and a variety of half-chewed bones.

When the dog is gone

I can go to the mall all afternoon and maybe even take in a movie

Without wondering how she is doing home alone.

When the old dog has gone

I won’t have to search for missing shoes

she has carried from the closet and stashed in odd piles about the house.

After the old dog dies

I can sleep until noon if I want to

And no one will jab me with a cold, wet nose over and over and over again until I give up and get out of bed.

After the old dog is gone

I can get dressed in peace

Without her barking and dancing in happy circles as if my life’s purpose was to take her out for a stroll or a ride in the car.

How much quieter, roomier, cleaner the house will seem without her constantly by my side.

Quantum Spookiness Demonstrated--Karma at a Distance

Back in May of 2011, the Simple Explanation blog posted an article called "Quantum Entanglement and Karma."  At that time, I described quantum entanglement and and suggested it as a reasonable mechanism for karma. 

From that 2011 article:

"Karma is the mechanism through which the consequences of behavior inform future potential. Karma is a force of influence that arises out of the decision-making history of every unit of consciousness in the universe. Each UC generates its own karma. We are all affected by one another’s karma. The more a unit of consciousness has in common with another UC, the more it is affected by the other’s karma. Our aggregate karma affects all of creation."

To this definition we can now add quantum entanglement:  Your actions affect not only you, they affect me to the extent we are "entangled." And, because of entanglement swapping, not only am I affected by you, but so is everyone else who is entangled with me, and everyone else entangled with them. And so on, and so on, and so on." A Simple Explanation of Quantum Entanglement and Karma" 

I am happy to report to you that the claim of action-at-a-distance was scientifically verified last week. There is now no scientific reason that Karma at a distance cannot operate in the same way. Read the article below to see how they proved it.

"This latest experiment involved physicists from the Netherlands, the UK, and Spain, who entangled pairs of electrons separated by a distance of 1.3 km. Led by Delft University of Technology researcher B. Hensen from the Netherlands, the team then measured one of the electrons while a group immediately observed whether its partner was affected.

This is a take on the classic 'Bell experiment' devised in the 1960s by Irish physicist John Bell to test whether there was a more sensible explanation for entanglement. According to the rational view of the world, after a certain distance, the correlation should cease to exist as the particles are too far away to communicate with each other. But according to quantum theory, there will be no distance limit.

Over the past 30 years or so the Bell experiment has been attempted many times, always showing that quantum theory is real. But in all those experiments there have been loopholes - usually the fact that most researchers entangle photons, which are hard to pin down and measure due to their super-fast nature, so as many as 80 percent are lost before being measured, making results inconclusive.

In an attempt to close that loophole, many physicists use entangled ions instead of photons. But this opens up another loophole, because these ions aren't kept far enough apart to rule out that they aren't somehow influencing each other by communicating information normally - in other words, at a rate less than the speed of light.

The new experiment managed to close both those loopholes by combining the benefits of photons with electrons, which are easier to measure. To do this, the team entangled the spin of two electrons with two different photons. Those two electrons were located in labs 1.3 km apart, while the photons were sent off to a third location and then separately entangled with each other.

"As soon as the photons are entangled, BINGO, so too are the two original electron spins, seated in vastly distant labs, reports science writer Zeeya Merali over at FQXi blogs. "The team carried out 245 trials of the experiment, comparing entangled electrons, and report that Bell’s bound is violated."

So that means that there really is some freaky quantum behaviour going on, and the results can't be blamed on some kind of loophole.

"Our experiment realises the first Bell test that simultaneously addresses both the detection loophole and the locality loophole," the authors write over at arXiv, where they've published the early results. They're now refining the experiment for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. 

"It’s a very nice and beautiful experiment, and one can only congratulate the group for that," Anton Zeilinger, the leader of a rival team at the University of Vienna in Austria, who wasn't involved in the research, told Jacob Aron over at New Scientist. "I expect they have improved the experiment, and by the time it is published they’ll have better data ... There is no doubt it will withstand scrutiny."  from an article entitled: Quantum spookiness has been confirmed by first loophole-free experiment.  It's official: reality is freaking weird. by FIONA MACDONALD 31 AUG 2015  Science Alert http://www.sciencealert.com/quantum-spookiness-has-been-confirmed-by-first-loophole-free-experiment