Scientific consensus shifts public opinion on climate change. People are more likely to believe that humans cause global warming if they are told that 97% of publishing climate scientists agree that it does, a new study has found. Despite overwhelming evidence showing that human activity is causing the planet to overheat, public concern is on the wane, said the study, titled The pivotal role of perceived scientific consensus in acceptance of science and published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Monday. “One reason for this decline is the ‘manufacture of doubt’ by political and vested interests, which often challenge the existence of the scientific consensus.
The role of perceived consensus in shaping public opinion is therefore of considerable interest,” the study’s authors said. Overall, participants in the study greatly underestimated the level of scientific agreement on the issue, the study said. The second study involved surveying 100 Perth pedestrians – half in a control group and half in a ‘consensus group’. Pus.sagepub.com/content/9/2/85.full.pdf. The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic.
Public representations of scientific uncertainty about global climate change. Es.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.pdf. Is medical science built on shaky foundations? - opinion - 17 September 2012. More than half of biomedical findings cannot be reproduced – we urgently need a way to ensure that discoveries are properly checked REPRODUCIBILITY is the cornerstone of science. What we hold as definitive scientific fact has been tested over and over again. Even when a fact has been tested in this way, it may still be superseded by new knowledge. Newtonian mechanics became a special case of Einstein's general relativity; molecular biology's mantra "one gene, one protein" became a special case of DNA transcription and translation. One goal of scientific publication is to share results in enough detail to allow other research teams to reproduce them and build on them.
However, many recent reports have raised the alarm that a shocking amount of the published literature in fields ranging from cancer biology to psychology is not reproducible. The reasons for this are myriad. There are human factors, too. The cost of this failure is high. Here's how it works. More From New Scientist. Psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/teaching/Tversky_Kahneman_1974.pdf. How Should We Make Hard Decisions? | Wired Science. We live in a world filled with difficult decisions. In fact, we’ve managed to turn even trivial choices – say, picking a toothpaste – into a tortured mental task, as the typical supermarket has more than 200 different dental cleaning options. Should I choose a toothpaste based on fluoride content? Do I need a whitener in my toothpaste? Is Crest different than Colgate? How should we make all these hard choices?
But what if rationality backfires? The most widely cited demonstration of this theory is a 2006 Science paper led by Ap Dijksterhuis. Dijksterhuis then showed a separate group of people the same car ratings. So far, so obvious. But Dijksterhuis was just getting warmed up. Did conscious deliberation still lead to the best decision? The moral of this research is clear…Use your conscious mind to acquire all the information you need for making a decision. While the Dijksterhuis work generated plenty of buzz, it failed several tests of replication. Photo: Kevin McShane on Flickr.
Are complex decisions better left to the unconscious? Further failed replications of the deliberation-without-attention effect. Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 4, no. 6, October 2009, pp. 509-517 The deliberation-without-attention effect occurs when better decisions are made when people experience a period of distraction before a decision than when they make decisions immediately or when they spend time reflecting on the alternatives. This effect has been explained (e.g., Dijksterhuis, 2004) by the claim that people engage in unconscious deliberation when distracted and that unconscious thought is better suited for complex decisions than conscious thought.
Experiments 1, 2A, and 2B in this study included a dominant alternative and failed to find evidence for this effect. Experiment 3 removed the dominant alternative and manipulated mode of thought within-subjects to eliminate alternative explanations for the failed replication. Keywords: decision making, conscious thought, unconscious thought. 1 Introduction Evidence for UTT’s claim comes from a series of studies by Dijksterhuis and colleagues. 2 Experiment 1.
The Marvels And The Flaws Of Intuitive Thinking Edge Master Class 2011. We ended up studying something that we call "heuristics and biases". Those were shortcuts, and each shortcut was identified by the biases with which it came. The biases had two functions in that story. They were interesting in themselves, but they were also the primary evidence for the existence of the heuristics. If you want to characterize how something is done, then one of the most powerful ways of characterizing the way the mind does anything is by looking at the errors that the mind produces while it's doing it because the errors tell you what it is doing. Correct performance tells you much less about the procedure than the errors do. We focused on errors. That was 40 years ago, and a fair amount has happened in the last 40 years. One of the things that was was not entirely clear to us when we started, and that has become a lot clearer now, was that there are two ways that thoughts come to mind.
I wouldn't say it's generally accepted. Click to Enlarge Quite interesting. I'm done. David Spiegelhalter's Personal Home Page. David Spiegelhalter's Personal Home Page The Norm Chronicles The Norm Chronicles (with Michael Blastland) was published by Profile Books in June 2013. It has a promotional website. Reviews (favourable!) Articles and interviews have appeared in Daily Telegraph , The Observer , The BIg Issue , Guardian Colour section , Pacific Standard , and an article by David Ropeik in the Big Think . There is a video from the RSA featuring both the authors, and a Guardian podcast with an extensive interview with both of us. Research Since October 2007 I have been Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk. Teaching I currently teach Applied Bayesian Statistics in the Lent Term to Part III students. Understanding Uncertainty and Risk I work with a small team comprising Mike Pearson (web and animation), and Owen Smith (web).
Talks In over 350 talks since October 2007, audiences total around 50000 (up to December 2013), including around 19000 school students. Recent presentations include: Cambridge Ideas - Professor Risk. Articles appearing in other places. Bacon sandwiches and middle – class drinkers: the risk of communicating risk - Spiegelhalter - 2008 - Significance. The Met Office thinks August will be wet. Buy futures in sun cream now | Simon Jenkins. Tomorrow's weather will be unsettled with bright intervals and showers interspersed with more prolonged periods of rain. The weekend will continue unsettled with a 65% chance of showers and further rain on Saturday. We listen uncomplaining to this drivel from one day to the next. We are British. Weather forecasting is like abstract art, any fool can do it once he has got the job. This week our spirits broke. This is no laughing matter. I once sympathised with the BBC forecaster Michael Fish after he was roasted for telling the nation that the hurricane of 1987 would miss land and veer off in the direction of the Bay of Biscay or somewhere harmless.
When I read Fish's defence of the "barbecue summer" in yesterday's Guardian, my sympathy lapsed. Curiously Fish added that the forecasts were really aimed at "commercial organisations", as if firms could be fobbed off with any rubbish. We hear much talk about those who study English needing to be taught science. Response: Weather forecasts are not pseudo-science | UK news.
Simon Jenkins' tirade against weather forecasters (The Met Office thinks August will be wet. Buy futures in sun cream now, 31 July) shows a misunderstanding of what science can deliver. Jenkins contrasts "scientists who lecture ministers on the exactitude of their calling" with "public predictions so smothered in caveats and qualifiers as to be drained of significance". He seems to expect precise predictions of the future despite deriding such claims in the light of "the probabilistic nature of life".
In fact, there is a middle way between a demand for certainty and fatalistic resignation. I am a member of a rich community – including insurers, statisticians, doctors and bookies – who use probability theory for prediction. This may use unfamiliar language but it is not a "pseudo-science". Jenkins' view that predictions should be left to "astrologers, ball-gazers and seaweed" was, at least in the medieval period, very respectable. Why managing risk is a risky business - opinion - 17 August 2009. THE British players in the unfolding swine-flu drama are providing a riveting case study of different responses to risk. While the government tries to look cool, controlled and consistent, tabloid newspapers hunt sensation and citizens exhibit every emotion from nervous anxiety to stoical acceptance.
In the meantime, mainland Europe revels in portraying the UK as a land gripped by pestilence. Perhaps we all need a crash course in considering the unintended consequences of overreacting to events. Take a couple of memorable overreactions. In the year after the terrorist attacks on the US on 11 September 2001, so many people avoided airline travel in the US by driving that there were about 1500 additional deaths on the roads, or six times the number of air passengers that died on 9/11.
Then there is the trouble that officials can cause when they panic. Understanding Uncertainty.