Tag: quotations

“We rarely recognize how…

“We rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can traverse an entire lifetime without making a single really serious mistake — like putting a fork in one’s eye or using a window instead of a door.”

—Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (1988)

“We rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can traverse an entire lifetime without making a single really serious mistake — like putting a fork in one’s eye or using a window instead of a door.”

—Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (1988)

A cup of coffee and a tent

“Can’t they be about… sorry… we… er… eh… no no no no… it’s just so obvious I can’t be bothered…

“You don’t have to want to return to a barter system in the stoneage to complain about the way the financial crisis affected large numbers of people in the world, do you? Even if you’re having a cup of coffee and you’ve got a tent!”

— Ian Hislop responding to Louise Mensch on Have I Got News For You, 23/10/2011

Linking statistics and qualitative methods

You’ll be aware of the gist. Quantitative statistical models are great for generalizing, also data suitable for the stats tends to be quicker to analyze than qualitative data. More qualitative methods, such as interviewing, tend to provide much richer information, but generalization is very tricky and often involves coding up so the data can be fitted using the stats. How else can the two (crudely defined here!) approaches to analysis talk to each other?

I like this a lot:

“In the social sciences we are often criticized by the ethnographers and the anthropologists who say that we do not link in with them sufficiently and that we simply produce a set of statistics which do not represent reality.”

“… by using league tables, we can find examples of places which are perhaps not outliers but where we want to look for the pathways of influence on why they are not outliers. For example, one particular Bangladeshi village would have been expected to have high levels of immunization, whereas it was down in the middle of the table with quite a large confidence interval. This seemed rather strange, but our colleagues were able to attribute this to a fundamentalist imam. […] Another example is a village at the top of the league table, which our colleagues could attribute to a very enthusiastic school-teacher.”

“… by connecting with the qualitative workers, by encouraging the fieldworkers to look further at particular villages and by saying to them that we were surprised that this place was good and that one was bad, we could get people to understand the potential for linking the sophisticated statistical methods with qualitative research.” (Ian Diamond and Fiona Steele, from a comment on a paper by Goldstein and Spiegelhalter, 1996, p. 429)

Also reminds me of a study by Turner and Sobolewska (2009) which split participants on their Systemizing and Empathizing Quotient scores. Participants were asked, “What is inside a mobile phone?” Here’s what someone with high EQ said:

“It flashes the lights, screen flashes, and the buttons lights up, and it vibrates. It comes to life on the inside and it comes to life on the outside, and you talk to the one side and someone is answering on the other side”

And someone with high SQ:

“Many things, circuit boards, chips, transceiver [laughs], battery [pause], a camera in some of them, a media player, buttons, lots of different things. [pause] Well there are lots and lots of different bits and pieces to the phone, there are mainly in … Eh, like inside the chip there are lots of little transistors, which is used, they build up to lots of different types of gates…”

(One possible criticism is that the SQ/EQ just found students of technical versus non-technical subjects… But the general idea is still lovely.)

Would be great to see more quantitative papers with little excerpts of stories. We tried in our paper on spontaneous shifts of interpretation on a probabilistic reasoning task (Fugard, Pfeifer, Mayerhofer & Kleiter, 2011, p. 642), but we only squeezed in a few sentences:

‘Participant 34 (who settled into a conjunction interpretation) said: “I only looked at the shape and the color, and then always out of 6; this was the quickest way.” Participant 37, who shifted from the conjunction to the conditional event, said: “In the beginning [I] always [responded] ‘out of 6,’ but then somewhere in the middle . . . Ah! It clicked and I got it. I was angry with myself that I was so stupid before.” Five participants spontaneously reported when they shifted during the task, for example, saying, “Ah, this is how it works.”’

References

Fugard, A. J. B., Pfeifer, N., Mayerhofer, B., & Kleiter, G. D. (2011).  How people interpret conditionals: Shifts towards the conditional event.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37, 635–648.

Goldstein, H. & Spiegelhalter, D. J. (1996). League tables and their limitations: statistical issues in comparisons of institutional performance. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (Statistics in Society) 159, 385–443.

Turner, P. & Sobolewska, E. (2009). Mental models, magical thinking, and individual differences. Human Technology 5, 90–113.

Authority

“… all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect, by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising. People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people’s thoughts…”

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism, 1891

Moral appeal

“… politics is politics, and Labour’s rhetoric has to offer something to middle class people, if it is going to be elected. But it doesn’t have to offer to them what suits their own unreflective self-interest without qualification: being human beings, they are open to a degree of moral appeal.”
– G. A.  Cohen (Nov, 1997) “Socialism and Equality of Opportunity”, Red Pepper

Dysrationalia — if you disagree with me, off with your head

Some quotations from a critique of (an early version of) Stanovich’s theory by Sternberg (1994). Firstly, theory:

“Why do we need a theory? Because we’ve had too many fly-by-night constructs in the abilities business, and we don’t need more of them. We do need serious new constructs — and the way to present them is via a theory […] — and construct validation of that theory.”

What is an irrational belief?

“In the real world, few problems truly lend themselves to the kind of deductive (rational) reasoning we learn in logic classes. The vast majority of problems are inductive, so that arguments can be stronger or weaker, but not logically valid or invalid. I am afraid that Stanovich has fallen into a trap that of labeling people as “dysrational” who have beliefs that he does not accept. And therein lies frightening potential for misuse. And if you disagree with me, off with your head. Here, it’s a joke. Historically, it’s not.”

Reference

Robert J. Sternberg (1994). What If the Construct of Dysrationalia Were an Example of Itself? Educational Researcher, 23, pp. 22-23+27

Understanding unconscious processes is easy…

“Six decades ago our psychoanalytically oriented predecessors wrestled with the problem of formulating a credible account of the unconscious. Paradoxically, perhaps, having gathered such convincing evidence in recent years to support the existence of extensive and elaborate nonconscious information processing, contemporary psychologists now are faced with precisely the reverse problem. A major challenge confronting modern psychology is the need to develop an adequate account of the nature and function of consciousness”

Williams et al (1997 [Cognitive psychology and emotional disorders, 2nd ed.], p. 260), via an article by Mick Power (2000) in the Psycholologst

… trying to do the right thing …

Republican New York State Senator Roy McDonald changes his mind and decides to support same-sex marriage legislation in New York:

You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything isn’t black and white, good and bad, and you try to do the right thing. You might not like that. You might be very cynical about that. Well, fuck it, I don’t care what you think. I’m trying to do the right thing.

I’m tired of Republican-Democrat politics. They can take the job and shove it. I come from a blue-collar background. I’m trying to do the right thing, and that’s where I’m going with this.

(From the Star Spangled Staggers)

On programs to help disadvantaged children

“… what actually happens in the course of many programs that claim to set out to remedy disadvantage is that target children are forced to spend time doing things they are not good at and deprived of opportunities to practice doing things they are good at. This is bad enough by itself. But the seriousness of the problem is exacerbated by the fact that most of the talents they might have developed cannot … show up on most of the tests developed by psychologists and are thus unable to register in most of the evaluation studies conducted by psychologists. Worse, these evaluations are largely framed and conducted within a reductionist, single-outcome focus rather than a comprehensive or ecological evaluation framework. In the end, this whole network of interlocking activities contributes to the autopoietic process that is heading our species toward extinction.”

Raven, J. (2005). More Problems With Gap Closing Philosophy and Research. American Psychologist 60(9), 1041–1042.