10 days left...

Mazille wrote:10 days left...

I've just finished writing mine. I need to proof read it and check that it all makes sense, then I'll post it - either tonight or tomorrow. I know DB is working on his and Hackenslash too. Everyone is just procrastinating

C'mon guys ! Where is everybody ?

I know that Aussies have a tradition of winning gold when everyone else fails to finish, but this is silly.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mmrmHiFVAw[/youtube]

Get writing !

Mazille wrote:10 days left...

Well? Ten days is ten days. I'm following my time-honoured tradition of handing in stuff at the last possible moment before the deadline.

In fact, this time I'll try to finish a bit sooner so I can get some unhappy victim to read my contribution before I post it. I'd be happy to proofread others' essays as well (one more excuse for procrastinating with mine! ).

Yes, we still have 10 days... And I don't have time to write mine during the week, I'll probably do it next weekend, and polish it afterwards.

I have got a topic ! I found a way of framing a very nasty cognitive illusion that appears at least one bit original to me. Now a small problem will be to wrap words around it since they don't seem to exist, and a bigger problem is that I have got a list of things to do before Christmas, that I am sick, that my wife is sick and that my son is sick as well.

If I manage to make it, it will probably be hours before the deadline.

palindnilap wrote:I have got a topic ! I found a way of framing a very nasty cognitive illusion that appears at least one bit original to me.

Sounds good! Bring on the nasty cognitive illusions!

Now a small problem will be to wrap words around it since they don't seem to exist, and a bigger problem is that I have got a list of things to do before Christmas, that I am sick, that my wife is sick and that my son is sick as well.

Get well soon!

I may have written a few words...but as the astute posters above have pointed out, there's still 10 days til the deadline. That means I've still got 9 3/4 days to ignore it.

Entry added..

Mr.Samsa wrote:

Mazille wrote:10 days left...

I've just finished writing mine. I need to proof read it and check that it all makes sense, then I'll post it - either tonight or tomorrow. I know DB is working on his and Hackenslash too. Everyone is just procrastinating

Ahhhgrrr! I keep getting sidetracked! I think, do I really understand this bit? And...end up reading another paper or book chapter. Another thing is my bad memory.....where the fuck did I read that? So I have to go look it up, because I know my friend Ms Samsa might politely hint that I pulled the idea out of my ass!
And in my case, there might be some merit to the Smsa theory of procrastination.

Great article, Samsa. You have a gift for simplifying psychology for the layman.

I have a couple of queries, however. The first is to do with this statement:

Whilst it is necessarily true that an evolutionary behavior would be universal across cultures...

I'm wondering whether this is necessarily true? Is the assumption here that any evolved behaviours would have evolved so long ago that they would now be present in all cultures? Or is there a possibility that some very isolated cultures have evolved behaviours which remain specific to their culture?

The second query is to do with the experiments to test cheating. I'm not sure I fully understood what they were getting at here. In the experiment with the numbers and the coloured cards, what would constitute cheating behaviour? Is the word 'cheat' being used in a different context? Or did I simply not read it carefully enough? There's a high probability of that occurring, mind.

Crocodile Gandhi wrote:Great article, Samsa. You have a gift for simplifying psychology for the layman.

Thanks , it was a little rushed so that's probably why my points below weren't too clear..

Crocodile Gandhi wrote:I have a couple of queries, however. The first is to do with this statement:

Whilst it is necessarily true that an evolutionary behavior would be universal across cultures...

I'm wondering whether this is necessarily true? Is the assumption here that any evolved behaviours would have evolved so long ago that they would now be present in all cultures? Or is there a possibility that some very isolated cultures have evolved behaviours which remain specific to their culture?

You are quite right for calling me out on that. It's an assumption made by evo psychs as behaviors don't fossilise, so the only selection pressures for humans that they believe they can be relatively sure of are those surrounding the beginning of humans, and since the first humans emerged around the Pleistocene era, they base their theories on this "environment of evolutionary adaptedness". There is a lot of criticism over this assumption; some for the reasons you outline above (that evolution can occur in relatively short time frames), and some highlight the fact that we don't know a whole lot about what situations or behaviors were relevant at that time. This is where the claims of cartoon Darwinism come from, since a lot of their arguments rely on anthropological data seemingly gathered from the Flintstones.

Perhaps my statement, to be more accurate, should have read: "It is necessarily true that a testable evolutionary behavior would be universal across cultures".

The second query is to do with the experiments to test cheating. I'm not sure I fully understood what they were getting at here. In the experiment with the numbers and the coloured cards, what would constitute cheating behaviour? Is the word 'cheat' being used in a different context? Or did I simply not read it carefully enough? There's a high probability of that occurring, mind.

The cards with colours and numbers on them are part of the logical test, the one that most people fail. Cosmides (and others) argue that since adding a "cheater" element to the logical problem increases accuracy, then we must have some evolved mechanism for detecting cheaters - the "cheater" in these situations is when somebody benefits by breaking some rule. In the alcohol example, we seek out the cheaters: we check that the 17 year old isn't drinking beer (by flipping the "17" card), and we check that the people drinking beer are over 18 (by flipping the "beer" card). The "benefit" here is obvious, people want to drink beer, it's a privilege and people enjoy it (and in the second example, the cassava root is a powerful aphrodisiac that only certain tribes members can have).

To test whether this is a true demonstration of cheater detection, Liberman and Klar changed the conditions so that there was still someone "benefiting" from breaking the rules, but they were no longer the salient feature of the task. If cheater detection were true, then we should still look for the cheater in this condition but we don't - instead our "cheater detection mechanism" is essentially just a specific instance of "one of these things is not like the other". When the cheater isn't the odd one out, we no longer care about them. In other words, we no longer care about the 17 year olds drinking beer, and instead we are more concerned about detecting 18+ people drinking coke.

Does that make more sense?

That makes a lot more sense. I had assumed that 'cheating' referred to a behaviour displayed by the person flipping the cards - that they could somehow cheat by flipping certain cards and not others.

Cheers

Crocodile Gandhi wrote:That makes a lot more sense. I had assumed that 'cheating' referred to a behaviour displayed by the person flipping the cards - that they could somehow cheat by flipping certain cards and not others.

Cheers

Sorry! I guess I didn't explain that bit too well. It's quite a big and detailed area, and the limited word count forced me to gloss over some basic explanations apparently

Mr.Samsa wrote:

Crocodile Gandhi wrote:That makes a lot more sense. I had assumed that 'cheating' referred to a behaviour displayed by the person flipping the cards - that they could somehow cheat by flipping certain cards and not others.

Cheers

Sorry! I guess I didn't explain that bit too well. It's quite a big and detailed area, and the limited word count forced me to gloss over some basic explanations apparently

I'm sure that the others here who read your article will make better sense of it. I have very little experience with reading scientific papers, so I don't have a good grasp of methodology.

Darwinsbulldog wrote: my friend Ms Samsa

Darwinsbulldog, how shall I phrase this politely ... you do know that his avatar is ... well, his avatar? It's not, er, um, you get my drift ...

Mr.Samsa wrote:Entry added..

You're making the rest of us look bad!


... That's my lunchtime reading material sorted out, then.

Mr.Samsa wrote:Entry added..

Sterling work, old chap.