CGSC 1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Wishful Thinking, Confirmation Bias, Falsifiability
Document Summary
Self-reinforcing cycle that explains the development of certain kinds of collective beliefs. People like to believe in the paranormal. People can lose whole hemispheres and still function relatively normal. If (cid:449)e re(cid:373)o(cid:448)ed 70% of your (cid:374)euro(cid:374)s ra(cid:374)do(cid:373)ly, (cid:449)e"re (cid:374)ot sure ho(cid:449) (cid:271)adly off you"d (cid:271)e. Psychic powers exist: not true, se(cid:448)eral (cid:272)og(cid:374)iti(cid:448)e (cid:271)iases that (cid:373)ake us (cid:271)elie(cid:448)e it"s real. Happiness: mo(cid:374)ey (cid:272)orrelates (cid:449)ith happi(cid:374)ess u(cid:374)til you"re (cid:373)aki(cid:374)g a(cid:271)out k a year, the(cid:374) it levels off, life e(cid:448)e(cid:374)ts do(cid:374)"t affe(cid:272)t happi(cid:374)ess (cid:373)u(cid:272)h. Winners of lotteries and people who become paraplegic have happiness changes that only last months. Things that do affect us: divorce, getting fired: much of your happiness is genetic, two kinds of happiness. How science works: generation of a theory. A theory is an explanation that typically suggests the existence of theoretical entities that cannot be measured directly: theories make predictions about the real world, these predictions become hypotheses that can be tested with experiments and quasi-experiments.
