Great Magic

This blog is supposed to be about magic among other things. So I thought I might actually post something that has to do with magic. I know about a few very creative minds in magic. This video is from one of the greatest, Lubor Fiedler. And I mean that he is really worth watching.



If you don't understand exactly how these effects are done don't worry, most professional magicians don't have a clue.

Concerning Dunning

A few days ago I posted a speculation about how the Dunning-Kruger effect could in part explain why Americans that cannot find Ukraine on the map are more likely to support military intervention. And now there is a recent interview with Dunning online. This is about why we tend to think of ourselves to be better than people in general.

An observation

During yesterdays activity on facebook in relation to my birthday I made an interesting observation. I have friends in a few different places, also I know some people better than other, and although this is not statistically significant I did find that people seem to use facebook differently in different countries.
Many of my Czech friends didn't write on my wall they sent me personal messages instead. Of my Swedish friends even close friends wrote on my wall. It seems like Czech people prefer to write directly to people instead of using the built in facebook option of writing on someone's wall when they have a birthday. I don't know if Czech people are more private or what it might be. But about 50% of my Czech friends who congratulated me wrote private messages and less than 2% of other people.
Concerning my next birthday, number 40, I just want to point out that it is a boring number not worthy of celebration. But 41, that is something different:

The expert and the non-experts

This is a good and funny video about the position an expert often find him- or herself in. I must say it has quite a bit of resemblance to my experience of talking with, among others, believers in new age and pseudoscience.

Knowing the map and asking for war

In the Washington Post one could read about a survey where Americans (here used incorrectly as a synonym for U.S. citizen) were asked about what they thought the US should do about the situation in the Ukraine. But they were also asked to show where they thought Ukraine was on a map One interesting correlation that was found in the study of ~2000 people was that the more off you were in placing Ukraine on the map the more likely you were to be for a military intervention. This was significant to 95% according the report.
Any keen critical thinker would at this point consider the question if the correlation reported was the only one that was investigated. Statistical significance is a little bit like the lottery. The odds are poor for one player, and thus a win is significant. But if you are looking for many different correlations in your material this is equal to observing all players in the lottery and find that someone won, not that amazing.
But what is this report telling us? Well one thing it is telling us is that apparently the saying that ”War is God's way of teaching Americans geography” is wrong. Another thing might be that people that are less informed are more sure about their opinion and what action to take. That would be in accordance with the Dunning-Kruger (D-K) effect, although not following from it automatically. The D-K effect tell us that people that don't know something also don't know that they don't know. My guess is that people with fewer doubts are also more likely to support extreme actions. This is as I state a guess, but if their is a research done in this area I would not be surprised if it shows this to be true. Combined with the D-K effect that would imply that less knowledge leads to proposing more risky solutions to problems.

A Quick affair

Once upon a time Sweden had the strange honour of having one of the worlds most peculiar serial killers. His name was Thomas Quick. He killed people and that made him a serial killer. He used different methods, he killed at different places, and his victims could be of any age, sex, and ethnicity. He also forgot a lot of information about his acts and could remember almost nothing about the murders he confessed except some precise details.
Now Sweden instead have one of the worlds strangest miscarries of justice. A person who has taken back his old name of Sture Bergwall instead of Thomas Quick, has been found not guilty to all the murders he was previously sentenced for. And people are wondering how the police, the psychologists, the attorney, and even Thomas Quick's own lawyer, all could believe that he was guilty.
Given the change in what is reported to be the ”truth” it is perhaps not surprising to find that some of the people most involved in the original case are meeting to discuss the case of Thomas Quick. They are: the academic who stated that the way Quick's memory ”worked” was consistent with him being the murderer, the prosecutor who based his career on the case, the policeman responsible for many of the interrogations of Quick, the journalist from a local paper that suddenly was reporting on a case of world wide interest, and finally the chancellor of justice who declared that there was no miscarry of justice right before all the sentences were appealed and revoked one by one.
You can read about the meetings in the local paper Dalademokraten (DD).
If you like to see it from their point of view they are suffering from the media's change of heart, all due to some journalists that got everything wrong. Even if Quick has been acquitted in a court of law from all the murders he was sentenced for that does not imply that he didn't commit them. And if only the media had not changed their angle Quick would still be locked up and justice would have been served. It is now up to them to explain this to the people so that they understand that it is only due to some legal technicality that Sture Bergwall is a free man.
From a different point of view it might look like the people responsible for the unlawful imprisonment of a liar and for the fact that several real murderers walks free are either still suffering from their delusion or are trying their best to save themselves. If there has been a miscarry of justice they are all responsible for it and many might feel that they should face other consequences beside being told about their responsibility in the press.
For those who have not studied all the cases this is an interesting exercise in critical thinking. What is most probable: that one man managed to kill a huge number of people without leaving any technical evidence, confessed to the murders and managed to walk free after a retrial when he changed his plea, or that a number of professionals and the media was duped by a liar on heavy medication to believe in a spectacular lie? The odds are not great for either of the two and yet one is the truth. What a critical thinking individual has to do is to listen to the arguments that are presented and look at the evidence.

An informative lecture

Had a very interesting lecture today, or rather this evening, touching among other things on the fight for Aleppo. The violence is of course unforgivable but just to make everything clear I am discussing the conquest of Aleppo by the Hittites in the 16th century B.C.
It is said that those who are ignorant of their history are doomed to repeat it. There are a lot of ignorant people because it is sad to find out this evening that a city suffering from war today suffered the same situation some 3600 years ago. It is equally sad that the BBC series Sherlock had no problem moving the story to modern times and still have Watson returning from the war in Afghanistan.
Can we hope for a better knowledge of our history in the future?