Painting Fakes

I spent most of my time at University not studying, and besides it was thirty years ago, so it's not surprising I don't remember much.  However, one thing that has stayed with me is the idea of first and second order change. We were introduced to the idea by Mal McCouat, a long-standing social work lecturer at the University of Queensland, and a 1974 book by Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland, and Richard Fisch which went by the rather unpromising title of Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Resolution.   The idea of first and second order change is simple in the way that so many brilliant ideas are.  Most of the changes we make in our lives, or in our society, are first order changes.  These are changes made within the established order or the normal pattern of relationships.  One of Watzlawick et al's examples was in the field of illicit drug supply.  In response to concerns about drug use, authorities bring in new laws which increase the penalties for supply of

Still ploughing through my rapidly diminishing pile of periodicals.  Right now I'm reading Zadok Perspectives No 112, Spring 2011, and it includes a lovely lucid article by John Dickson , director of the Centre for Public Christianity and one of Australia's foremost Christian apologists, reprinted from the Sydney Morning Herald .  Dickson is talking about the very same thing as Michael Shermer , confirmation bias or as Dickson calls it, the "Backfire Effect".  We readily believe evidence which supports our pre-existing views, while contrary evidence not only fails to convince us, it often "backfires" and strengthens our erroneous opinions. His point is the same as Shermer's - that our beliefs are so rarely dictated by the evidence, and instead we read the evidence with beliefs in hand.  This effect applies equally to Christians and atheists, the those on the left and the right, to those who refuse to see the evidence that there is a real physiologic

Many of you will already have heard of the "Dunning and Kruger Effect", a piece of psychological research which has made its way into the popular consciousness.  In summary it suggests that those who are more incompetent at a particular task are also more likely to overrate their competence, since their ignorance prevents them from realising just how bad they are. Anyway, I finally got around to reading the article , "Unskilled and Unaware of it: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self Assessments", by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 1999, Vol 77, No 6.  Much of it is not scintillating reading, being after all an academic research paper filled with statistical jargon.  However, it is more comprehensible than many similar articles and shot through with flashes of psychologist humour. The paper reports a series of four linked studies.  All were carried out on undergra

So Roo said to me that after reading Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain I should read Jonah Lehrer's The Decisive Moment: How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind.   I always aim to please and I did enjoy Shermer. Lehrer is one of those annoying people who seem good at lots of things.  He has a degree in neuroscience, studied literature and theology at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and writes for a number of different publications.  Where Shermer is a scientist who writes, Lehrer appears to be a writer who does science.  He is less technical than Shermer, more journalistic and accessible. The Decisive Moment  (apparently marketed in some countries as How We Decide ) covers a lot of the same territory as The Believing Brain , including reporting many of the same experiments.  However, Lehrer asks a different question to Shermer and so of course he gets a different answer.  Shermer is interested in belief, and his conclusion is that we should reject the emotional, unconscious part

William James is supposed to have said, "Thinking is what a great many people think they are doing when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."  Courtesy of a tip from Roo and the friendly folk at the Brisbane City Council library service, I've finally got my hands on Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain , which explains this aphorism in a lot more detail. I previously encountered Shermer through his Why People Believe Weird Things , a fun journey through a set of beliefs on the edge of the intellectual world like Holocaust denial, alien abduction, Ayn Rand's Objectivism and the psi quotient.  Shermer revealed himself as an intensely curious, sympathetic but highly skeptical observer, constantly on the hunt for evidence.  The Believing Brain covers some of the same territory but it's a much more technical book dealing with the question from the point of view of Shermer's own specialist field, neuro-psychology.  What it is about our brains, S

I guess this is a kind of addendum to all those posts on biblical inerrancy .  It's also the 100th post on Painting Fakes which is more than any of the Australians managed in the first innings in Adelaide (cricket joke, for the Americans among you).  The more I do it, the more I love it. Among the incredibly wide variety of types of people in the world, there are two that I'd like to mention in this post.  The first are "black and white people".  They like things to be clear.  It's right or it's wrong, it's true or it's false.  The second are "shades of grey" people.  They rarely see the world in absolute terms.  Something may be true in a certain sense and false in another sense.  It depends what you mean by "true". This distinction is a matter of psychology, not belief.  For instance, both Ken Ham and Richard Dawkins are black and white people.  The content of their beliefs differs, but they have a similar approach to belief