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):