About USP - Leste (links are in Portuguese)

The links take to two articles in Portuguese. It is about some of the several problems we are facing in our new campus, due, in my opinion, to serious incompetence of a few.

Dois artigos sobre diferentes problemas da EACH (vulgo, USP-Leste). Só li cada um na diagonal, por enquanto. Mas acho que valem a pena. Pode ajudar a explicar os problemas que, na minha opinião, são todos gerados por grave incompetência na criação da escola:

Tensões e contradições do conceito de organização aplicado à universidade: o caso da criação da USP-Leste

Como um campus da USP foi transformado em aterro sanitário

Human Stupidity, part III - A Short Historical Perspective

Individual Thinking

How smart we really are is an old question. In the Western tradition, it is easy to remember the phrase attributed to Socrates “I know that I know nothing”. And yet, despite a few people who recognized how untrustworthy knowledge can be, most people actually think they have correct answers about special issues. When some people say they believe in something, be that a religion, a political ideology or a scientific result, they often mean that they know that to be true and are only using the word believe to acknowledge that not everyone has seen the truth. Of course, that is not the only use of the term and we also often use it in a probabilistic way, like in “I believe it will rain tonight”. This tells us that the speaker considers more likely that rain will happen than not. But there is no certainty. As such, if it doesn't rain, the speaker is not at fault, as long as the reasoning and evidence used to make the prediction were solid enough. This different meanings of believing will be discussed later.



The problem is clearly linked to the question of what it means to know something. After all, if any opinion or statement were equally valid, an assassin vision sadly shared by many people, we wouldn't be able to speak of smart. Anything anyone said would be acceptable, any premise could lead to any conclusion, and we would have no way to measure smartness. What actually happens is that there are conclusions that anyone sane agree are correct. The trivial examples of Aristotelian Classic Logic come to mind. If I accept as true that all texts about Logic are boring and that this one you are reading now is a text about Logic, it is unavoidable to conclude that this text is boring. If you don't think it is boring, you must obviously disagree with at least one of the premises (as I hope you do). On the other hand, if you accept as true that all plants are green, the fact that you have a green car is not reason enough to conclude your car is a plant. These cases are so obvious that you need to training in Logic to agree with basically everyone else on Earth.



Unfortunately, we are not allowed the luxury of dealing only with trivial cases or those our brains are already well adapted for. By adapted, I mean either from an evolutionary point of view, that is, problems our ancestors had to deal with so often some wiring might have happened, or from a learning point of view, that is, problems we have encountered very often in our daily lives we learned to solve them. For everything else, we need good standards to compare with. And the sad part is that if you take just one step further in still trivial Aristotelian Logic problems, all hell breaks loose.



P.C. Watson and P. Johnson-Laird describe in chapter 9 of their book Psychology of Reasoning: Structure and Content the results of experiments performed to test how well people reason on such simple problems. What they observed is quite troubling. The now classical example has four cards on a table, so that you can see just one side of each one. This deck is known to always have one letter at one side of the card and one number at the other. The problem is to test if a simple rule can be proven false: “Whenever there is a vowel in one side, the other side will always have an even number”. The four cards, obviously, show one of each possible cases. Per example, they might show “A”, “M”, “2”, and “5”. The question each subject has to answer is: “If you turn the cards to inspect what is in the side that is not visible, which of these four cards can prove the rule to be false?” Answers are open, so any set, from the empty set (none of them could prove that) to all of them can prove it is false, is an acceptable answer.


Think a little and give your own answer. Don't look ahead, where I will eventually provide the right one. Whenever I am teaching TADI (Treatment and Analysis of Data and Information), I present the card problem (among others) to my students in the second meeting. While of very little value as experimental evidence, I observe an astonishing tendency to errors, typically 1 in 60 get the correct answer fast. That is, if you got it wrong, it just means you are human. The original experiment observed better proportions, making the species look less dumb. Of course, there are important differences, among them, the lack of control and a proper setting in my classes. The original experiments also didn't include things like peer pressure and the fact I don't give the students a lot of time to think. I actually ask them to commit soon to the answer they feel to be correct. My goal in the classroom is to make a clear point about how what we feel to be the right answer is often VERY wrong.



It is curious to see that this result is actually dependent on the problem that is presented to the subjects of the experiment. If, instead of unusual cards, the same logical question is about violations of a non-drinking while underage rule, people tend to perform very well and very easily. This suggests that while competent learners, we need to be trained if we are to have any chance at getting the right answer in some very easy problems. And sometimes even training might not be enough. Extra details on this problem and several others that I will speak about later can be found in two very interesting books. The one from, Scott Plous, The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making, is already 20 years old (1993) but it still has a wide range of experiments on the way people think. Jonathan Baron also discusses the same problem in his newer (2007) book  Thinking and Deciding. Both are very interesting readings.



One of the reasons for this phenomenon seems to be a characteristic of our reasoning called confirmation bias. Basically, when analyzing an idea, we tend to look for cases that confirm it. But this is not a true tests. Cases where the idea seems to work well are interesting examples. But, if you really want to test any idea, you must look for cases where the idea can fail.

And while being prey to confirmation bias (as many people seem to do in the card problem) is a bad strategy, we do even worse than that. We actually choose not to look at arguments and data that contradicts our beliefs, or we actually interpret them erroneously. Recently, Dan Kahan and collaborators have reported results that show that mathematically educated people make serious errors when analyzing data that conflicted with their personal opinions. In a control scenario, if the same data was about a neutral problem, people with better numeracy skills performed better at interpreting the data. However, when the problem was gun control, a very controversial issue in USA, people with better numeracy interpreted the data in ways that agreed with their initial points of view, regardless of the real data. People with improved numeracy would become even more polarized on the subject than people less well trained in Mathematics. This strongly suggests that smarter can mean more ability to, perhaps unconsciously, distort reality description to conform to one's own point of view! A more pedestrian discussion of these results can be found here by Mark Kaplan.

1) This text will probably be expanded later. If and when I do, I will make a new post warning about the fact.
2) The correct answer for the cards problem will only appear here later. Try leaving yours in the Comments section. No cheating.
3) I will strongly welcome suggestions of literature and results to add here. Note that probabilistic biases as well as group and societal effects will come later, in new entries. Therefore, they are not discussed here, just logical problems are.

On Human Stupidity, part II

We, humans, are often proud about our characteristics as a species. While I was growing up, I remember being taught that humans were rational animals, as opposed to all animals, who would be irrational. That is a strong notion, one that seems to be supported by the way we were able to become the dominant species on Earth in a way that no species has done before. Indeed, it seems clear that our brains are better equipped for communicating and abstract thinking than any other life form we know of. Some pride on the fact, therefore, is justified, despite the fact we were just lucky to be born humans. However, this pride seems to come with a completely unjustified confidence. We are actually capable of rational thought. But that does not mean we use that ability all the time. Not even most of the time.


And, the more research is done on animals, the clearer it seems that some species are also capable of some decent reasoning and solving problems. Humans have created ways to preserve knowledge and opinions that are far more efficient than copying the behavior of others. This has opened the possibility that what individuals know about the world is actually a sum of what they observe and whatever knowledge was transmitted from their predecessors. Writing made our species smarter than a single individual; the advances in scientific methodology allowed us to circumvent many of the limitations of our brains. But it is crucial to understand those limitations and recognize fully that they apply to ourselves.


It is very easy to point out how other people are dumb. This is so easy because they are dumb, but so are we. We actually must learn how we are very dumb ourselves. I am human, this makes me quite limited. There is no shame in that, although, I have to admit, it really bothers me to notice how we are bad at reasoning.


And there is more. My knowledge is limited to what I have observed myself and what I have learned from others. Since it depends on unreliable thinkers, it must be subject to far more uncertainty than anyone seems to acknowledge. Our civilization has created tools to deal with our limitations, but we don't always use them when making decisions. We can fly, we can visit space and the depths of the oceans, we can endure any climate conditions on our planet. And we don't do any of those because it is a special power of mankind. We do that because we have created tools and methods for that. It is the same with thinking. However, while there are very clear standards that must be obeyed for aircraft to be allowed to fly, the same is not true on the quality of our supposedly rational analysis. And yet, left alone, each of us is just a little smarter than the other animals. We have a horrible tendency to arrive at wrong conclusions about any subject that is not a problem we experience in our daily lives. Of course, we are completely incompetent, far from that.


This exception, that we are actually reasonably competent with understanding people and other issues we have to deal with at a daily basis, has also bad consequences. While it is better to be good at something, it also helps people to feel confident about how they reason.Our intuition is well adjusted to the things we encounter often. But this does not mean it will work when facing new or difficult problems. And yet, people have a certainty about their choices that is completely unjustified, often with disastrous consequences. People express certainty in political, economical, religious, and, sometimes, even about scientific questions they don't understand but that we actually know the answers. Evolution, Medicine and Quantum Mechanics are the first examples that come to mind and I don't need to argue how damaging it might be to have wrong convictions in a health area. This does not mean that errors in areas not directly linked to health might not be equally damaging as well.


It is crucial, in order to answer any questions as competently as possible, that we recognize our own shortcomings. As we will debate later, we must even learn to always doubt our own opinions. Our current society not only accepts but encourages people to make choices between options. And it is expected that people should act as if that choice meant some kind of truth. This kind of belief is actually very wrong. A rational being should not lie to itself by ignoring other possibilities. And yet we do that all the time.


In order to understand why this is so, we will need to answer a number of questions. We need to understand what knowing something means, if it is actually possible to know something. We also need to be able to reason, reaching conclusions from premises and understand when this kind of analysis is a proof and when it is actually just an inference, where, at best, we can hope to assign probabilities to our conclusions. Comparing how normal, untrained humans perform under different circumstances will show us where we are actually weak at it. And that it is very likely that our brains use many different heuristics in decision-making. This allows the brains to get close to the correct answers in a number of situations. But it has serious consequences on how much we can trust things like intuition when we are out of our comfort zone. Finally, one issue that must be addressed very carefully is when we can trust what other people tell us, whomever they are.


I realize that this text and the ideas I will present here might have a difficult time reaching everyone who should be made aware of them. Many people won't like the idea of admitting they are actually stupid, in an absolute sense. It is certainly easy to find the errors I will talk about here on others. But we must learn to notice them on ourselves and correct them. My Master adviser, Henrique Fleming, used to tell his students a phrase from Niels Bohr: “An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.” While there is some truth to it, Bohr forgot to include a crucial part of it. That is that the expert should have learned from those mistakes and not make them anymore. People quite often don't learn when their objective is to prove that they are right, as opposed to find out what is actually the right answer.

On Human Stupidity, part I

The first real post here should come in a few days, I hope. It will be on human stupidity. Since 2005, I teach a course called "Treatment and Analysis of Data and Information" (or TADI, as the students call it, the first letters are the same in Portuguese). My own hypothesis for the name is that the people who planned the school believed in Jane Austen interdisciplinarity. Something is interdisciplinary as long as you add an "AND" to the name. Luckily, this specific course makes sense and it is actually about basic thinking, some epistemology, scientific method and the VERY basics of data analysis.

My second class in this course (the first is traditionally about the problem of the huge amount of information we have to deal with) is about human stupidity. The aim is to convince the students about the absolute need to learn reasoning techniques, including things like logic, probability, statistics, and the scientific method. They are absolutely necessary simply because we are humans. And humans, despite being the smartest species ever known to mankind, are amazingly dumb. So, I tell all students as the first thing in the class that they should not feel ashamed about making mistakes in that class. They will, for sure, not because they are dumber than others, but because they are humans. And I proceed with a number of traditional experiments, taken from Psychology literature, asking them what they think is the correct answer. The problems are actually trivially easy and simple. And, in classes of 60 students, typically, one person gets it right. Quite often, zero, sometimes two. And different people for each question.

While the classroom observation is not a true controlled well conducted experiment, it serves to make a very clear point. When faced with situations that are not common in our daily lives, our intuitions are basically disastrous. All of us need instruments to deal with this absurd failure. And, of course, it is also interesting to understand possible reasons for this human stupidity (and no, animals are not better in any sense, most of them really have no chance at understanding Quantum Mechanics, you know). This kind of stupidity also has serious consequences in everyday life, in all kind of decisions, including the most important decisions about our health. It is no exaggeration to say that millions die (my personal wild guess would be millions every year) simply because we do not acknowledge the simple fact we must have tools for reasoning. Or we make awful mistakes.

I always wanted to write a book about methods and general epistemological problems and mistakes that are done even today in Science. Some of them are either not recognized as such or recognized by very few. Some of the posts that will follow (but, of course, not all of them) are my first draft of that book. And some basic material for TADI, as, starting February of 2014, I will be teaching it once more. And this time, I plan to make a number of changes and make the students work hard, despite what the initial planners of the subject in my school may or may not think.

Or, on a personal note (and, unlike Sheldon, I know I belong to the "others" set as well, even if my belonging, in a fuzzy theory sense, is smaller than that of the majority):

A new kind of prejudice?

Don't forget to check the manifesto at the right side!

Não se esqueça de checar meu manifesto, aí do lado direito!

About this blog (sobre esse blog)

This blog is my plan to make public I absolutely feel I must say. It will be mostly written in English, with the possible exception of a few local things, of local interest to Brazilian people around me. The reason for this is simple. While I'd rather use my own language, I prefer to be accessible to more people.

There is one main exception to that. The Manifesto put in the side of this page was originally written in Portuguese, as a part of a book of short tales I am currently working on (link to be inserted when it becomes public).  I used Google Translate as base for the English version and made lots of corrections to get the meaning right. While I can write a regular English (for a foreigner, at least), I am not good with translating. But I think that Manifesto was important enough to be there in both versions.

As for post frequency, it will be random. I suffer from clinical depression and I am quite aware that, while I can be reasonably sure I will keep posting in the long run, I can't be sure how able to work I will be in a given week. If anyone is interested in what I have to say, I will also make announcements whenever I post anything by using my Twitter account @Andre_CRMartins.

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Este blog é meu plano de tornar público uma série de coisas eu realmente quero dizer. Ele vai ser escrito predominantemente em inglês, com a possível exceção de algumas entradas, de interesse local para os brasileiros ao meu redor. A razão é simples. Eu preferiria usar minha língua, mas, mais do que isso, prefiro ser acessível a mais gente.

Há uma exceção a essa regra. O Manifesto que coloquei no lado da página foi originalmente escrito em português, como parte de um livro de contos que estou escrevendo (o link vai aqui quando o livro for público). Para a tradução para o inglês, usei o Google Translate como base e corrigi muita coisa que não estava certa.  Eu até que escrevo um inglês regular (para estrangeiros), mas não sou bom em traduções. Mas acho o Manifesto importante o suficiente para ter ambas as versões.

Quanto a frequência dos post, essa vai ser aleatória. Eu sofro de depressão e sei que, enquanto tenho certeza suficiente de que manterei postando no longo prazo, não posso garantir como vou estar em uma dada semana. Se alguém estiver interessado no que tenho a dizer, planejo avisar cada vez que postar algo através da minha conta no Twitter,  @Andre_CRMartins