Some folks think "Objective reality exists" is a good counterargument to "Science is socially constructed". It's not and here's why ...
The more I argue with folks about how "science is socially constructed", the more obvious it is to me that the people disagreeing with me are simply saying "Objective reality exists" (which I agree with but they seem to think I don't.)
Over and over again, they restate that reality is indeed real. Although this requires philosophical arguments to defend, they tend not to make any. Perhaps this is because messing with philosophy is how we get statements like "science is socially constructed" in the first place.
Often people resort to threats. What if you jump off a building? What if your boss fires you? What if your bridge collapses or your plane crashes? They seem to be saying "I'm very scared of this and I'm sure you are too! Why would we be so scared if reality didn't exist?"
This is not a good argument. What if I'm not easily scared? What if I'm overly anxious and inclined to irrational fears? Even if I agree that logically, one ought to fear falling out of an airplane, it doesn't prove anything other than we share subjective beliefs.
Of course, at the end of the day, I do think objective reality exists but my best guess as to the nature of that objective reality differs from yours. For instance, in my reality, science is socially constructed and if you're disagreeing with me then it's not in yours.
If you're not making use of philosophical arguments then your sense of objective reality is more of a strongly held intuition. Perhaps you once experienced a bridge collapse and you were very convinced by the experience. I've had similar experiences and so I share the intuition!
The question for me isn't whether objective reality exists. The question is how do we get at it given that our individual experience is subjective. My answer is in part by comparing our individual sense of reality and triangulating.
Social construction is thus an extremely important part of generating knowledge in science. We use triangulation between our differing perceptions and inferences to create a shared truth.
"Social" because the interaction with and understanding of the contents of the minds of others is critical to the process of knowledge creation.
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One of the things I hate most about the cult of IQ is it leads to lot of magical thinking about how the brain works. There’s absolutely nothing shameful about relearning things you use to know.
Research shows forgetting is a normal part of human cognition.
The way to combat the natural tendency to forget is to relearn or retrieve the memory at regular intervals which is known as “spaced repetition”.
Relearning takes the strength of the memory back to 100% and the rate of forgetting is slower the next time.
Infographics of this dataset have been kicking around on the internet for years. It is an insult to real scientists everywhere. For every 10 likes, I will post a new ridiculous fact about how fake and ridiculous this "data" is.
They report data on 185 countries but *104* of those numbers (more than half!) are based on *zero* data collected from people from that country. ZERO.
Rather than acknowledge this lack of data, they decided to guessimate based on surrounding countries.
The IQ estimate for Equatorial Guinea was based on kids in a home for developmentally disabled kids living in Spain. Not even their home country. Spain.
People are getting thousands of likes for spreading this misinformation about sex differences. Let me explain why this interpretation of the data is wrong. 🧵
If you think 100% accuracy is too good to be true, trust your instincts.
The version of the model shown in the plot was basically fed the sex of the participants. That’s why it’s achieving 100% accuracy.
When the model was tested on a subset of people from the same dataset that it had *not* seen previously, the accuracy fell to 90%.
I keep seeing this Huberman clip all over my timeline so let’s use it as teachable moment to learn some statistics.
The basic mistake is not taking the people who are already pregnant out of the pool of people who could be pregnant the next month. Of the starting 100, fewer and fewer will remain each month.
It’s a little tedious to keep track of what number of people aren’t yet pregnant on each round, and then take 20% of that, and then add up all the pregnant people in each round.