What else?

“All life is problem solving”

Karl R. Popper

Recently, some misconduct happened in the blogs that I read, with some people writing nasty comments either anonymously or using other peoples’ names. After contacting some of the blog owners and comparing more that 40 IPs (in total) everything became clear. I really do not want to hear anything about this because everyone (except maybe for those who did all of that) is already sick of it. The game is over! So any query about this issue will simply be ignored, sorry! What I want to do instead is just to use this as an example to talk about scientific thinking and reasoning.

In the blog comments example, the evidence that I collected was large enough to give me enough confidence that my conclusion is “unlikely to be wrong”. But why am I using this language? Why do I simply not say that “I am sure that my conclusion is right”? Although we use such words like “sure”, “confident”, and “100%” in our day to day conversations, surprisingly enough, such confidence neither exists in the real world nor it does in the world of science.

Long time ago I mentioned briefly some of the cognitive biases and reasoning flaws that human beings do all the time and I am not going to repeat that here. I just want to give one example that illustrates my point. Here is the puzzle: The individuals are given a simple test; there are 4 cards on the table, and each card has one letter on one side and one number on the other side of it. Obviously everyone can see only one side of the card. Two of the cards have letters and two of them have numbers facing up; A, 3, B, 7. This is the hypothesis: If there is an A on one side of a card, then other side should have 7 on it; and here is the question: Which two cards should be turned back to test this hypothesis? It turns out that more than 90% of the respondents give the wrong answer which is A and 7!

To be continued …