Learn the truth

A short blog-post today about two ways to question, and learn, the ”truth”.

In psychology and neurology one of the most repeated ”facts” is what happened to Phineas Gage in 1848. (He got an iron rod through his head and survived it, making the rest of his life very interesting to everyone who studies the brain.) In Slate there is an article about how one of the most told stories when retold, even to university students, is largely fictional. Or to be kind, even some scientists have used poetic freedom when describing the case of Phineas Gage. Now anecdotes are an important part of describing the world including science, but it is somewhat depressing that one of the great scientific stories are also one of the great examples of how to spin a story. It appears that there is a lack of information about what actually happened to Phineas Gage after the accident and that people have filled in the blanks with what they think should be the truth.

There is a lot of debate about energy, arguments about the environment, safety, and world politics is a huge part of the debate. Yesterday in the book store I came across a book arguing that nuclear energy is something bad, using Fukushima as an example of the dangers of nuclear energy. There is no doubt that nuclear energy is dangerous, but everything in life is associated with some danger. The question we need to ask is how dangerous nuclear energy is and anyone who wants to use Fukushima as an example should read this UN-report.
A small extract from the report:

38.
No radiation-related deaths or acute diseases have been observed among the workers and general public exposed to radiation from the accident.
39.
The doses to the general public, both those incurred during the first year and estimated for their lifetimes, are generally low or very low. No discernible increased incidence of radiation-related health effects are expected among exposed members of the public or their descendants. The most important health effect is on mental and social well-being, related to the enormous impact of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident, and the fear and stigma related to the perceived risk of exposure to ionizing radiation. Effects such as depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms have already been reported. Estimation of the occurrence and severity of such health effects are outside the Committee’s remit.

Page 10 of SOURCES, EFFECTS AND RISKS OF IONIZING RADIATION, UNSCEAR 2013 Report,Volume I, REPORT TO THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY, SCIENTIFIC ANNEX A:
Levels and effects of radiation exposure due to the nuclear accident after the 2011 great east-Japan earthquake and tsunami

I want to emphasise that nuclear energy is dangerous and that the text above is cherry picked to show that it is not as dangerous as some people say it is.

How the ancients slept

No, this is not a blog post about H. P. Lovecraft or his work. It is about how people used to sleep, a story I picked up from the BBC. It is a story that showed me how much I take for granted certain things, like our way of sleeping.
Historian Roger Ekirch from Virginia Tech has shown with sources as far back as Homer that people used to sleep in two periods each night, with a period of activity or contemplation in between. Many sources refer to this as the first and second sleep, and it appear to have been perfectly ordinary to people before the enlightenment.
In a way it makes sense, at a time when artificial light was expensive you went to bed at dusk slept for a while, got up to do some chores, talk to your family, or pray in the middle of the night, after a while you went back to sleep and slept until morning.
There is also empirical research regarding sleeping patterns that cooperate that this divided sleep is natural to people. There are experiments that have been performed by Thomas Wehr and also anthropological studies of populations living without artificial light. It is also stated that this way of sleeping can be found in other mammals.
The artificial light we now take for granted has a rather short history, Paris became the first city with street lights in 1667. (I wonder if that might have anything to do with Paris being know as La Ville-Lumière) It became easier and easier for people to occupy themselves after dusk and the industrial revolution made sure that even sleeping had to be done efficiently without brakes.
This research give ample fodder for speculation. Are people who experiences problems sleeping just trying to sleep the way nature intended for them? Some people have been reported to sleep only a few hours each night, usually you here this about very productive people, might they have slept at other times in addition to their reported nightly sleep? And how screwed up is my sleep pattern if this is the way we are supposed to sleep?
For people who wants to learn more there is a book by Ekirch: At Day's Close: Night in Times Past I am considering getting it, but I already have a few books.
Other sources are:

THOMAS A. WEHR In short photoperiods, human sleep is biphasic, Journal of Sleep Research, 1992 (1) 103-107
Roger A. Ekirch Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isles, American Historical Review, CV, no.2 (April 2001), 343-387

2 + 2 does not equal 3

The human mind is not as rational as we tend to assume from the inside of our own mind. I stumbled across this fascinating example of flawed thinking the other day. Or perhaps it is more fair to label this as a case of flawed estimation than flawed thinking.

A lot of people are concerned with their weight but resent research find that the people most concerned are less skilled at estimating the calorie content of dishes under certain conditions. The different conditions where an unhealthy dish by itself or together with healthy food.
Simple logic would suggest that more food implies more calories but those who estimated the number of calories in the meal rated the options with additional healthy food to have less calories than the unhealthy part of the meal by itself.

More about this research can be read in this paper:
A. Chernev / Journal of Consumer Psychology 21 (2011) 178–183

The people involved in the test where divided into groups and shown different meals and asked to estimate the number of calories. Some rated themselves to be very concerned with their weight and others less concerned. Averaged over the different dishes and groups the people not concerned with their weight estimated the number of calories for the unhealthy dish to be 684 and 658 with the added healthy food item, that is a difference of -26. But the people concerned about their weight estimated the unhealthy option at 711 and the healthy one (more food) at 615, that is a difference of -96.

Even if this research concerns peoples estimation of caloric content of food I would not be surprised if it can be transferred to other areas. How we think should not vary that much with what we are trying to estimate. The explanation that has been put forward for why people make these mistakes is that when you divide something, in this case food, in categorise of good and bad your ability to estimate the combination of them is hampered by to what degree you tend to divide things into good and bad. Many diets are of the kind that they divide foods into categories of good and bad.

It has previously been assumed that concerned people and thus motivated, are less likely to make mistakes. This research has shown that the weight concerned make larger mistakes in estimating caloric content and that is very interesting.

The Bystander effect

In psychology there is phenomenon called the Bystander effect and it concerns the likelihood for people to act in a situation or remain a bystander. (It is called the Bystander Effect because that is unfortunately what usually happens according to the science.)
Psychologist began interesting themselves for the phenomenon after a brutal murder in New York that nobody seemed to want to prevent or get involved with, the story was somewhat exaggerated in its narration but that is a completely different thing. The details of the murder and what the Bystander effect is can be found on Wikipedia.

The reason I bring this up is that today I didn't see the Bystander effect in action. Just entering one of the shopping malls here in Uppsala (more like a Czech pasáž than an American mall) I saw a woman lying on the floor and three people kneeling beside her. Actually as I came in the three people got to the woman so I guess she must have fainted just prior to me entering the mall. Just after I noticed the situation I took out my phone but noticed that a girl coming from the other direction also had her out and was apparently dialling 112. We made eye contact and communicated that she was calling for an ambulance so I put my phone away. The people kneeling by the woman checked her breathing and pulse and laid her on her side. A person passing by stopped and asked if we had everything under control, and if we knew the woman. The passer by turned out to be a doctor and not the useless type that this city is full of. A moment later an other woman stopped by and she was a nurse. A shop assistant from a nearby shop came out with a phone to call 112.

It could not have taken more than a minute, a minute and a half, from the woman fainted for all of this to happen. It was not much like the Bystander effect, rather I got the impression that it was a well oiled machinery. The people closest to the one in need stepped in and did what they could do, not passing her by or waiting for someone else to do something. People around assessed the situation to see if they could be of any assistance. The doctor and the nurse of course doing more since they had the training. If anything like that ever happens to me I hope that I can get help just as quickly.

I left after the nurse had arrived. Since everything seemed to be under control there was no reason for me to stay there.

The Real Hustle

This is not news for people in the UK. Objective productions, the company that has produced Derren Brown’s TV shows and TV specials, have a wonderful series about how to con people. Although I should perhaps say that it is about how to avoid being conned but knowledge is a double edged sword. Dishonest people watch TV as everyone else so it is not impossible that some of them learn some new tricks.

One of the differences between a magician and a cheat is the same as the difference between an educated person and an expert. The magician knows many more moves than the cheat but the cheat has perfected his. The audience tend to be less forgiving to a mediocre cheat than to a mediocre magician.

But even if some scoundrels learn a few more tricks I think the overall effect of the series is positive. First, con artist are specialized so they will only try a few if any of the scams. Second, to do a scam requires effort and practice; to see through the same scam and avoid being fooled you only need knowledge. So I see no reason why they could not show The Real Hustle in Sweden, though I hope they show the original British version.

The series is on its sixth season in Britain and the British version is the better one in my opinion. I do not understand why Americans always need their own version; proper English isn’t that hard to understand.

The three people staring in the show are Alex Conran, Jessica-Jane Clement, and Paul Wilson an excellent magician who's lecture I attended at the world championship of magic in Stockholm 2006.

They are really good at explaining how the different scams work because there are a lot of different layers in working a con. There are the practical details of the scam and the psychology that draws the victim into the fantasy world. Appealing to emotions work quite well, especially greed. It is also great fun to watch the show and the reaction of the people that are conned.

Anyone with an interest in how con artists operate can search youtube for some practical psychology at work (and some physics as well). Unfortunately the very best youtube channel was shut down, I guess that someone did not want these shows available for free. But some places to start looking are here, though they might be shut down soon so hurry:

ScamOnTv
Realhustledotcom
Scamplot’s

I think it is possible to learn a lot more from the series than only the mechanics of the plots and the specific psychological hooks that are used. In essence a good con artist let the mark fool himself. To avoid fooling oneself is perhaps something of the most difficult there is, it requires knowledge about the world and how we think and to apply it to oneself.

I guess that when a show is written (by Paul Wilson and Alex Conran incidentally) this is not what they think about; there is a clear educational angle to the series but focused more on consumer awareness than science and philosophy.

I should say something about the American version as well but I let someone else do it.

Objective Productions/Crook Productions’ new show, The Real Hustle, features a pickpocket/security consultant, a magician, and an actress hustling innocent passersby on television. Apollo Robbins, who made national news when he picked the pockets of Secret Service agents while performing for former president Jimmy Carter, heads up the team. New York City magician Ryan Oakes supplies the sleight-of-hand expertise, while Dani Marco is the actress onboard. Her credits include Law&Order The Sopranos, and most recently the Chris Rock movie, I Think I Love my Wife.

Magic Magazine, No 5, vol 17, January 2008, p.27