Astronomer Thomas Dick believed that every planet in the solar system was inhabited. In his 1838 book Celestial Scenery he worked out that they contain 21 trillion inhabitants in all — assuming “280 inhabitants to a square mile, which is the rate of population in England.”
In 1907, Francis Galton famously found that when a crowd were asked to guess the weight of an ox, the average value of their responses was surprisingly accurate — in Galton’s experiment, it fell within 1 percent of the ox’s true weight. This is “the wisdom of crowds”: By canceling errors across individuals, the mean response often proves more accurate than individual estimates.
Interestingly, the same phenomenon can arise when we aggregate multiple estimates made by a single person (the “wisdom of the inner crowd”). And organizational behavior researchers Philippe van de Calseyde and Emir Efendić now find that the accuracy can be refined still further when people are asked to consider a question from the perspective of someone they often disagree with.
“In explaining its accuracy, we find that taking a disagreeing perspective prompts people to consider and adopt second estimates they normally would not consider as viable option, resulting in first and second estimates that are highly diverse (and by extension more accurate when aggregated),” the researchers write. “Our results suggest that disagreement, often highlighted for its negative impact, can be a powerful tool in producing accurate judgments.”
(Philippe van de Calseyde and Emir Efendić, “Taking a Disagreeing Perspective Improves the Accuracy of People’s Quantitative Estimates,” PsyArXiv, Nov. 15, 2019.)
“Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me!” — Pete Conrad, after becoming the third human to set foot on the moon
In 1903 Robert Falcon Scott made an odd discovery in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica:
[W]e have seen no living thing, not even a moss or a lichen; all that we did find, far inland amongst the moraine heaps, was the skeleton of a Weddell seal, and how that came there is beyond guessing. It is certainly a valley of the dead; even the great glacier which once pushed through it has withered away.
It appears that periodically a crabeater, Weddell, or leopard seal finds its way inland from McMurdo Sound and the Ross Sea and perishes in the punishing environment of the dry valleys, an extreme desert. There the dry conditions mummify its corpse, preserving it in some cases for thousands of years.
Some mummies have been found as much as 41 miles inland and as high as 5,900 feet above sea level, reflecting a heroic effort to find the sea. Mercifully the phenomenon is relatively rare, with a seal becoming lost only once every 4 to 8 years.
“I think it is all right to argue sometimes.”
“I disagree!”
(From Raymond Smullyan.)
George Parker Bidder was born with a surprising gift: He could do complex arithmetic in his head. His feats of calculation would earn for him a university education, a distinguished career in engineering, and fame throughout 19th-century England. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast, we’ll describe his remarkable ability and the stunning displays he made with it.
We’ll also try to dodge some foul balls and puzzle over a leaky ship.
Imaginary distinctions are often drawn between beliefs which differ only in their mode of expression;– the wrangling which ensues is real enough, however. To believe that any objects are arranged as in Fig. 1, and to believe that they are arranged as in Fig. 2, are one and the same belief; yet it is conceivable that a man should assert one proposition and deny the other. Such false distinctions do as much harm as the confusion of beliefs really different, and are among the pitfalls of which we ought constantly to beware, especially when we are upon metaphysical ground. One singular deception of this sort, which often occurs, is to mistake the sensation produced by our own unclearness of thought for a character of the object we are thinking. Instead of perceiving that the obscurity is purely subjective, we fancy that we contemplate a quality of the object which is essentially mysterious; and if our conception be afterward presented to us in a clear form we do not recognize it as the same, owing to the absence of the feeling of unintelligibility. So long as this deception lasts, it obviously puts an impassable barrier in the way of perspicuous thinking; so that it equally interests the opponents of rational thought to perpetuate it, and its adherents to guard against it.
— Charles Sanders Peirce, “Illustrations of the Logic of Science: How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Popular Science Monthly, January 1878
In 2014, after receiving dozens of unsolicited emails from the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, scientists David Mazières and Eddie Kohler submitted a paper titled “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List.”
To Mazières’ surprise, “It was accepted for publication. I pretty much fell off my chair.”
The acceptance bolsters the authors’ contention that IJACT is a predatory journal, an indiscriminate but superficially scholarly publication that subsists on editorial fees. Mazières said, “They told me to add some more recent references and do a bit of reformatting. But otherwise they said its suitability for the journal was excellent.”
He didn’t pursue it. And, at least as of 2014, “They still haven’t taken me off their mailing list.”
In 1997, Berkeley psychology student Arthur Aron and his colleagues refined a list of 36 questions for “creating closeness.” “One key pattern associated with the development of a close relationship among peers is sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personal self-disclosure,” Aron wrote. “The core of the method we developed was to structure such self-disclosure between strangers.”
Each pair of subjects took turns asking each other questions from this list, in order:
Most of the pairs of strangers left the session with highly positive feelings for each other: “[I]mmediately after about 45 min of interaction, this relationship is rated as closer than the closest relationship in the lives of 30% of similar students” (though, to be sure, “it seems unlikely that the procedure produces loyalty, dependence, commitment, or other relationship aspects that might take longer to develop”).
(Arthur Aron et al., “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 23:4 [1997], 363-377.)
This is great — Eugene Wigner tells the story of Max Born giving the “two bikes and a fly” puzzle to John von Neumann (it starts at 16:50).
(Via Tamás Görbe, from an old VHS video digitized by Robert Klips.)
