I bought the book, but it wasn't quite what I was expecting to see from Dawkins. I flipped through it quickly and put it away. I'll have to sit down and read it this summer. I have some Evangelical Christian in-laws coming to visit and don't want them to overstay.
Posts by Scully
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17Book - Richard Dawkins
by LV101 inanyone out there --- please be so kind to recommend the dawkins' children book re evolution.
i've ordered magic of reality but have a feeling it's the wrong book.
didn't see a children's book listed at amazon.
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Jehovahs Witnesses and AML
by Marvin Shilmer injehovahs witnesses and aml.
today i uploaded a new article addressing the dilemma faced by jehovahs witnesses diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (aml), and the doctors who desperately want to provide the best medical outcome.
the situation is not what jehovahs witnesses are led to believe.
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Scully
A conservative estimate of preventable deaths in year 2011 among Jehovah's Witnesses suffering severe anemia is right at 2,000 souls.
I remember posting a long time ago, that if the number of deaths among JWs for lack of blood transfusions occurred all at once, instead of one at a time, in isolated incidents, the body count would be greater than Jonestown, and the outcry against the practice would be deafening.
918 people - men, women and children - died at Jonestown. We have here a conservative estimate of 2000 preventable deaths in 2011 among JWs. That's more than TWO Jonestowns in a single year.
This has to stop. We have to start making a lot more noise.
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17
I am VERY surprised that........
by Iamallcool ini am very surprised that a very pretty lady that is i/o psychology doctorate major, she would like to go out with me on date.
she knows that i do not have any college degree.
to be honest with you, i am pretty much intimidated by her intelligence.
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Scully
Don't be silly, you're her latest psychology experiment.
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The Hypercorrection Effect - Scientific American article
by Scully inpermanent address: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=certainty-principle-people-who-hold-false-convictions-are-better-at-retaining-corrected-information.
certainty principle: people who hold false convictions are better at retaining corrected informationresearchers have used imaging technology to spy on the brain as it corrects strongly held beliefs, shedding light on how we might learn from our mistakes.. by charles q. choi | friday, april 27, 2012. image: flickr/olly newport.
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Scully
james_woods:
OK, I have read it twice and I don't completely understand the JW connection.
"People who hold false convictions are better at retaining corrected information"
Are we trying to say that JWs (who do hold many false convictions) - would be better at retaining information AFTER they let go of the false convictions?
Or, are we just saying that people who join things like the JW religion are highly impressionable, and are easier to retain suggested ideas?
Actually, what I took away from the article was that the person who goes the extra mile with their JW studies - the "true believer", if you will - who knows, for example, the scriptures to support the WTS's blood doctrine, or the scriptures that "prove" 1914 is the year that the Gentile Times™ ended, based on 607 BCE as the year for Jerusalem's destruction, who feels those beliefs in their heart of hearts, when presented with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, will have their beliefs fall apart like a house of cards. These are the ones who feel betrayed by the WTS, people who cannot unsee what they've seen, or unlearn the corrections they've learned.
On the other hand, there's a huge number (the vast majority, I would imagine) of JWs who go through the motions, more or less as social JWs. Doctrine is something the Governing Body sorts out. It's not for the Sheep™ to understand. You just trust what the Organization™ tells you and obey, and that's all you need to do to survive Armageddon™. They're intellectually lazy when it comes to the nitty gritty of the JW belief system, and you could show them stacks of evidence to disprove any number of JW doctrines, and they don't care beyond repeating the WTS's mantra: "That's Apostate™". The evidence doesn't have the same impact because they haven't invested in The Truth™ on an intellectual level - and that's how the WTS likes it. It creates dumbed down, fiercely loyal, poorly informed followers, rather than bold, well-informed and confident individuals.
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32
Watchtower threatens to sue their own
by blond-moment inexamining the scriptures daily.
interesting.
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Scully
I love this part:
Watch Tower has not given you permission to ... distribute its materials.
So the Legal Department has no problem with someone NOT going Door-to-Door™, because that would involve the distribution of Watch Tower materials, without the expressed permission of the copyright holder, Watch Tower.
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The Hypercorrection Effect - Scientific American article
by Scully inpermanent address: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=certainty-principle-people-who-hold-false-convictions-are-better-at-retaining-corrected-information.
certainty principle: people who hold false convictions are better at retaining corrected informationresearchers have used imaging technology to spy on the brain as it corrects strongly held beliefs, shedding light on how we might learn from our mistakes.. by charles q. choi | friday, april 27, 2012. image: flickr/olly newport.
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Scully
It's articles and research of this kind that make me wonder whether the JWs who refuse to change, despite overwhelming evidence that we provide to them that the belief system is rubbish, are not really "true believer" material, like I used to be, and are more likely to be social JWs, who don't dig too deeply into the doctrines or examine their beliefs beyond the superficial.
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21
The Hypercorrection Effect - Scientific American article
by Scully inpermanent address: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=certainty-principle-people-who-hold-false-convictions-are-better-at-retaining-corrected-information.
certainty principle: people who hold false convictions are better at retaining corrected informationresearchers have used imaging technology to spy on the brain as it corrects strongly held beliefs, shedding light on how we might learn from our mistakes.. by charles q. choi | friday, april 27, 2012. image: flickr/olly newport.
advertisement.
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Scully
Permanent Address: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=certainty-principle-people-who-hold-false-convictions-are-better-at-retaining-corrected-information
Certainty Principle: People Who Hold False Convictions Are Better at Retaining Corrected Information
Researchers have used imaging technology to spy on the brain as it corrects strongly held beliefs, shedding light on how we might learn from our mistakes.
By Charles Q. Choi | Friday, April 27, 2012
Image: flickr/Olly Newport
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Firm convictions dominate news headlines these days, but because of a phenomenon called the hypercorrection effect, strongly held ideas that turn out to be factually incorrect are actually easier to amend . Brain imaging is now shedding light on how people change their minds during hypercorrection, potentially revealing the best ways for us to learn from our errors.
To understand hypercorrection, says cognitive psychologist Janet Metcalfe at Columbia University, "suppose I ask you, 'What is the capital of Canada ?' and you say 'Toronto. ' I say, 'How confident are you?' and you say, 'Very highly confident.' When I then tell you that actually the capital is Ottawa, you're very likely to remember it- not just a few minutes later but weeks later, and maybe for much longer, we think."
Scientists reason that in hypercorrection, after people discover that ideas they felt very sure about were not in fact correct, the surprise and embarrassment they feel makes them pay special attention to alternative responses about which they felt less confident . People then go on to take the corrected information to heart, learning from their errors.
"In contrast, if I asked you a question to which you gave a not-very-confident answer, like, perhaps, 'What color does amethyst turn when it is heated?' and you say, 'blue' with low confidence, when I tell you that it's actually yellow, you're not very likely to remember it," Metcalfe says.
Given this model , to learn more about what happens in the brain during hypercorrection, Metcalfe and her colleagues focused on brain regions linked to attention as well as those involved in metacognition (self- awareness of the thought process ) . The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of 14 volunteers while they answered nearly 600 general information questions that had single-word answers. The participants then rated their confidence on their responses.
"My favorite-'What is the last name of the Oscar award -winning actor who thanked his parents for not using birth control?' '[Dustin] Hoffman,'" Metcalfe says.
The scientists found evidence supporting their hypercorrection model. Both wrong answers and right answers lit up the anterior cingulate and medial frontal gyrus, parts of the brain linked with attention and metacognition .
"The anterior cingulate registers our surprise and maybe something that we might, roughly, call embarrassment, and so we gear up all our resources to better encode 'Ottawa,'" Metcalfe says, referring to her previous geography quiz . The region did not, however, activate as strongly for wrong answers about which subjects initially felt low confidence, suggesting that the participants would be less likely to remember corrections to such answers.
The medial frontal gyrus is involved in social processes, suggesting a role in hypercorrection is as well. "This makes a lot of sense-a lot of our knowledge comes from other people and books, and from consensus and encyclopedias, and Scientific American," Metcalfe says. "Even though in our experiments answers were delivered by a computer, those answers were written by people. So it makes total sense that accepting corrections involves your relationship with other people." Medial frontal gyrus activation patterns mirrored those of the anterior cingulate.
In addition, after people were told that an answer in which they were very confident was wrong, the fMRI showed activation in the right temporoparietal junction, an area linked with thinking about what others might know, and the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region linked with the avoidance of thinking about something. The former suggests that subjects recognized that others had different beliefs than them, wh ereas the latter hints they may have been suppressing their wrong answers after learning they were incorrect, Metcalfe says. The scientists detailed their findings online March 27 in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
The findings have implications for educational techniques and theory. "The broadest conclusion we might draw from these findings is that we may have the wrong attitude toward errors," says cognitive psychologist Robert Bjork at University of California, Los Angeles, who did not take part in this work. "Throughout society and our educational system, there tends to be an attitude that you don't want people making errors and mistakes during learning. These findings and related findings suggest that in order to increase the effectiveness of long-term learning and understanding, we should structure instruction and training so that likely errors and misconceptions will come up during the learning process, and use them as opportunities for learning."
He added, "when it comes to, say, job contexts such as nuclear power plants or the military or the police...we don't really want such errors to be deferred until a time and place where they may really matter, and matter greatly."
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What Are The Motivations Of Old Men?
by metatron ina subject i (sadly) may have some expertise in !.
if you are an old dude, what motivates you?
not sex, generally.
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Scully
Abraham Maslow would say that "legacy" is a legitimate motivation, or the desire to leave something meaningful of oneself to future generations.
Let's face it, most of the old guard of the WTS, the stodgy old farts in the ivory towers at Bethel, have no children to whom they can bequeath their "wealth" - whether that's in terms of financial wealth (hey, somebody has the keys to the vault!) or the legacy of being a Big Shot within the Organization™, or just a vast library of WTS Publications™ that date back to the very beginning.
And, yes, even if they have serious doubts that they never dare to breathe aloud, their egos demand that they stifle their doubts, otherwise their entire lives will have been for naught. Their reputation, their status, their following, their groupies who hang on every word they speak from the Platform™ at Conventions™ and Special Talks™ all depend on hanging on to the bitter end, even if they know to the core of their being that it's a crock of crap.
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Breastfeeding your child until they are 8 years old
by usualusername inhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxv6r9fuo74&list=fl868j_zisuing3g1hj8rtjw&index=7&feature=plpp_video.
discuss...
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Scully
It's not every day that you get to experience "crunchy granola" to that degree.
I heard of one patient who almost died of postpartum hemorrhage, insisting that her husband and baby suckle her breasts to induce her uterus to contract.
My personal feeling is that once a kid starts taking solid food, can walk, gets potty trained and starts nursery school, breastfeeding is "for" the mother more than it is for the child. At that point, it's creepy.
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50
Apostasy my ass!
by Glander inlet's call it what it is - disagreeing with the watchtower bible and tract society after baptism into the cult.
in no way is the literal definition of the word "apostasy" applicable to what the cult is using the word for.
it is a buzz word that scares the crap out of the rank and file and keeps them from communicating with those who have become enlightened about the cults lies.. we here on jwn have accepted the wt label, "apostates", with a sense of humor, such as calling our get togethers apostafests, etc.. but we are actually the "enlightened"..
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Scully
people who started off as athiests
FWIW, everyone starts off as atheist. Their parents and their culture influence them to become something else.
