Excerpt from "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion" Jonathan Haidt, 2012
"...consider the findings of another eminent
reasoning researcher, David Perkins.21 Perkins brought people of
various ages and education levels into the lab and asked them to
think about social issues, such as whether giving schools more money
would improve the quality of teaching and learning. He first asked
subjects to write down their initial judgment. Then he asked them to
think about the issue and write down all the reasons they could think
of—on either side—that were relevant to reaching a final answer.
After they were done, Perkins scored each reason subjects wrote as
either a “my-side” argument or an “other-side” argument.
Not surprisingly, people came up with many more “my-side”
arguments than “other-side” arguments. Also not surprisingly, the
more education subjects had, the more reasons they came up with.
But when Perkins compared fourth-year students in high school,
college, or graduate school to first-year students in those same
schools, he found barely any improvement within each school.
Rather, the high school students who generate a lot of arguments are
the ones who are more likely to go on to college, and the college
students who generate a lot of arguments are the ones who are more
likely to go on to graduate school. Schools don’t teach people to
reason thoroughly; they select the applicants with higher IQs, and
people with higher IQs are able to generate more reasons.
The findings get more disturbing. Perkins found that IQ was by far
the biggest predictor of how well people argued, but it predicted only
the number of my-side arguments. Smart people make really good
lawyers and press secretaries, but they are no better than others at
finding reasons on the other side. Perkins concluded that “people
invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring
the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly.”22
More info on the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind
Referenced Publication (footnote 21):
Perkins, D. N., M. Farady, and B. Bushey. 1991. “Everyday Reasoning
and the Roots of Intelligence.” In Informal Reasoning and Education,
ed. J. F. Voss, D. N. Perkins, and J. W. Segal, 83–105. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Some more recent research shows more correlation than previous psychometric literature.
https://www.science.org/content/article/what-does-iq-really-measure
However, the conventional view is closer to that stated here:
https://www.snexplores.org/article/what-iq-and-how-much-does-it-matter
A example of more or less losers with high IQs would be the typical membership of Mensa. High IQ is no guarantee of success.
Meanwhile some of us went to school and learned marketable skills. Learning engineering and science requires aptitude, or talent, or just a lot of hard work.
It's telling which camp actually rattles the most. Smart people know you can't learn with your jaw flapping.
It's telling which camp actually rattles the most. Smart people know you can't learn with your jaw flapping.
Isn't there an important distinction to be made between social and scientific endeavors? Your cite is an example of the former, but I don't see an easy leap to the latter. Sometimes there simply aren't two reasonable sides to every story, especially in the physical world of science. Perhaps the smart ones have simply decided not to waste time (and other finite resources) spinning their wheels in the muck?
Seems to me its more like this: Some things are controversial. Even in science there is uncertainty. Especially so if you take in to consideration the philosophy of science, ontology, etc. It only takes one counterexample to falsify a scientific 'fact,' and so forth.
Also, if a science and engineering point were completely uncontroversial I would expect us to agree and not argue about it.
Moreover, the people here know a lot about EE stuff, but mostly are hardly expert about people, how they think, how they hallucinate, etc. But sometimes people act like they think are expert in those things because its easy to feel confident blaming other people if you don't see the engineering explanation for something. That's a very human thing to do, of course, but it can turn out to go against other known science. For example, people tend not to hallucinate randomly. Errors of cognition tend to follow certain patterns, cognitive biases, etc. You can see some of those patterns of thinking in this thread as people repeatedly jump to conclusions and then find somebody to blame, insult, vilify, etc. Unfortunately it may be hopeless to try to get people to be more introspective than they already are.
Anyway, if this thread would stick to good, clean fun and avoid trashing honest people by mistake then I wouldn't feel so much need to interject. The other reason I sometimes say something is simply because EEs sometimes believe things contrary to scientific evidence from other fields. If we consider ourselves to be scientific shouldn't we be interested to know about that?
Also, if a science and engineering point were completely uncontroversial I would expect us to agree and not argue about it.
Moreover, the people here know a lot about EE stuff, but mostly are hardly expert about people, how they think, how they hallucinate, etc. But sometimes people act like they think are expert in those things because its easy to feel confident blaming other people if you don't see the engineering explanation for something. That's a very human thing to do, of course, but it can turn out to go against other known science. For example, people tend not to hallucinate randomly. Errors of cognition tend to follow certain patterns, cognitive biases, etc. You can see some of those patterns of thinking in this thread as people repeatedly jump to conclusions and then find somebody to blame, insult, vilify, etc. Unfortunately it may be hopeless to try to get people to be more introspective than they already are.
Anyway, if this thread would stick to good, clean fun and avoid trashing honest people by mistake then I wouldn't feel so much need to interject. The other reason I sometimes say something is simply because EEs sometimes believe things contrary to scientific evidence from other fields. If we consider ourselves to be scientific shouldn't we be interested to know about that?
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What makes you an expert on other members? And moreover why do you feel you know more about people than other members?
When I became an engineering manager I started researching the literature to find out why so many of our employees were dissatisfied with their jobs. Turned out to be nothing useful in the business literature (e.g. things like Harvard Business Review). All the action turned out to be in cognitive psychology. Ten years later I knew the field pretty well. If Bill ever takes up my offer to visit, maybe he can tell you about the shelves of books on the subject. Each one of them was read cover to cover, footnotes and all. Many of the original research papers were read too. Problem I then had is that most of the other engineering managers were like you guys. They didn't want to know the science, they didn't care about it.
Good example of jumping to conclusions, insults, and vilification. Don't think nobody notices.
Anyway, I have had enough interactions with professional psychologists, executive trainers, etc., to earn their respect.
Anyway, I have had enough interactions with professional psychologists, executive trainers, etc., to earn their respect.
Most (i’ll include myself) certainly need professional not amateur……….i don’t think that’s arguable at all ! 😆
Instead of reading all those books did you ever consider looking in the mirror?
Here is a survey of engineers from 2018.
https://www.eeworldonline.com/ecn-s...-lament-long-hours-and-inadequate-management/
Attachments
We have all seen the surveys and understand how they are conducted. Here's a problem:
https://delighted.com/blog/biased-questions-examples-bad-survey-questions#:~:text=What are biased survey questions,for customers to answer honestly.
It is a known problem in research that the outcome can be biased by the questions the researcher chooses to ask, the questions he chooses to leave out, and the questions nobody thought of.
Anyway, there is another angle on employee satisfaction. It includes things like engagement, meaning, purpose, etc. What does a job offer in those respects? Some people work long hours for low pay because they like the job, it makes them feel good to do it. How do you make a job into that kind of job? Toyota once figured out a way. It later became known as 'Lean.' Its a delicate balance to maintain though. Among other things it requires something called 'management pyramid inversion,' which is especially difficult to get right.
https://delighted.com/blog/biased-questions-examples-bad-survey-questions#:~:text=What are biased survey questions,for customers to answer honestly.
It is a known problem in research that the outcome can be biased by the questions the researcher chooses to ask, the questions he chooses to leave out, and the questions nobody thought of.
Anyway, there is another angle on employee satisfaction. It includes things like engagement, meaning, purpose, etc. What does a job offer in those respects? Some people work long hours for low pay because they like the job, it makes them feel good to do it. How do you make a job into that kind of job? Toyota once figured out a way. It later became known as 'Lean.' Its a delicate balance to maintain though. Among other things it requires something called 'management pyramid inversion,' which is especially difficult to get right.
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You are the main culprit it isn’t so.
Anyway, who are those ‘honest people’ that are trashed? Bybee author for sure isn’t honest.
So what makes the outcome biased for an open question such as "In your current position, what do you consider the major reason for dissatisfaction"?
Since this was a voluntary survey the results are probably much less biased than e.g. from an HR survey where employees may well feel inhibited from expressing their real views.
So, to summarize what you repeatedly claim:
We are all victims of our inadequate education resulting in closed mind set, heavily biased to 'known truth and facts' and unwilling to consider alternate possibilities.
Let me ask you a question.
Would you, with your superior education and intelligence, consider claims of those very intelligent (your words) people defending claims that earth is flat/hollow (pick one), evolution is lie, man was never to the moon ….
OR would you, based on knowledge, dismiss such claims without opening new investigation?
For the rest of us, it is all the same with claims about bybee, network switch affecting sound and other snake oil miraculous products, or one unique forum member hearing distortion artifacts below -100 dB. 🙂
We need explanation that can be accepted from the engineering and scientific standpoint and independently verified, instead of fairy tales. That was never provided.
Look, it doesn't matter how I know this or that. You ask for a link, which I provide, and you can read it for yourself. You then proceed to ignore/deny the science.
Regarding hearing distortion artifacts, PMAs opamp buffer listening test was completely double blind. You ask for double blind, then pretend it never happened.
On the topic of a flat earth, looks to me like the belief has a lot in common with religion (which is one of the topics of Haidt's book). I personally would not suggest to investigate beliefs of a religion to revise otherwise good science.
BTW I have not clamed any particular intelligence, nor have I claimed to be superior. I only pointed out information that is scientific and available to anyone.
Regarding hearing distortion artifacts, PMAs opamp buffer listening test was completely double blind. You ask for double blind, then pretend it never happened.
On the topic of a flat earth, looks to me like the belief has a lot in common with religion (which is one of the topics of Haidt's book). I personally would not suggest to investigate beliefs of a religion to revise otherwise good science.
BTW I have not clamed any particular intelligence, nor have I claimed to be superior. I only pointed out information that is scientific and available to anyone.
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A recent example of these sort of "fairy tales" can be found here:
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/path-to-noiseless-linux-streamer.391202/
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