BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
PRODID:UW-Madison-Physics-Events
BEGIN:VEVENT
SEQUENCE:0
UID:UW-Physics-Event-3005
DTSTART:20130409T170500Z
DURATION:PT1H0M0S
DTSTAMP:20260314T195144Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20130405T160958Z
LOCATION:4274 Chamberlin (refreshments will be served)
SUMMARY:Why do people believe crazy things?\, Chaos & Complex Systems 
 Seminar\, Tim Rogers\, UW Department of Psychology
DESCRIPTION:Theories of human knowledge acquisition (ie learning) vary
  in many of their particulars but typically embrace the common assumpt
 ion that learning is rational: through learning\, people acquire reaso
 nably accurate statistical models of the environment that allow them\,
  given some new information\, to make approximately optimal probabilis
 tic inferences about unobserved states of the world. My own work on kn
 owledge acquisition resides firmly in this tradition\, but I have alwa
 ys found it difficult to reconcile this view with the everyday observa
 tion that many people appear to pretty firmly believe some pretty craz
 y things. We can see that this is true even without having to agree wh
 at the crazy beliefs are. For instance\, the President either was or w
 as not born in Hawaii. These are the only two logical possibilities\, 
 and there is a fact of the matter. Of the two groups prepared to vocif
 erously argue each side of the proposition\, one must be wrong. The in
 correct belief persists in this group despite the fact that we all liv
 e to some extent in the same world and are presumably applying largely
  similar reasoning mechanisms to bear on largely the same evidence. Th
 e same point can be made with reference to controversies about global 
 warming\, evolution\, whether vaccines cause autism\, the efficacy of 
 trickle-down economics or gun control policy\, the relative payscales 
 of public and private sector workers\, and any number of other importa
 nt issues facing public life. If we are all such optimal learners\, wh
 y do people arrive at such starkly opposing sets of beliefs?
\n
\nTher
 e is a long tradition of research addressing aspects of this problem. 
 One idea is that human reasoning is "motivated"--there are emotional c
 osts associated with different beliefs\, and in deciding which beliefs
  to endorse\, people jointly minimize an error cost (ie\, fit of the b
 eliefs to evidence) and the emotional cost associated with the belief.
  But this approach fails to address the central question of where the 
 emotional cost comes from\, or why people should be "motivated" to ent
 ertain incorrect beliefs in the first place. A second hypothesis is th
 at the cognitive mechanisms that support human learning and inference 
 were only optimal in an evolutionary context\, and are not suited to t
 he modern environment in which we now find ourselves. But such account
 s seem similarly underconstrained without some specific accounting of 
 what the learning mechanisms are and how and why specifically they are
  unsuited to our current environment.
URL:https://www.physics.wisc.edu/events/?id=3005
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR