LINKS - March 8th, 2023
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human. LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Motivated Reasoning Plus Ideology Can Make You Foolish
By Matt Grawitch Ph.D., Psychology Today
“And that brings me to a recent argument made by Gurwinder (2022), who provided an explanation for why smart people believe stupid things[1]. He cited and linked to prior research demonstrating that people who possess greater analytical thinking, basic knowledge of a topic, greater ability to digest statistical information, or education were also more likely to be susceptible to motivated reasoning if they also possessed strongly held beliefs related to the decision at hand. In other words, people who should have been least susceptible to belief-driven bias (educated, analytical thinkers) were more motivated to reason their way into conclusions consistent with their beliefs.”
Seven everyday objects that made the modern world
By Anna Novitzky, Nature
With a clear, lively and engaging style — and many puns — Agrawal encourages a new perspective on the inventions that keep the world rolling. The wheel, she explains, was first used not for transport, but to make pottery. It wasn’t for another 700 years that it was turned on its side and attached to an axle; the earliest surviving wheeled vehicles are from around 3200 bc, in what’s now Russia. A multitude of refinements followed, technological advances ushering in sweeping social change. Spoked wheels supplanted solid ones, their lightness enabling fast travel and improved trade. Wheels with wire spokes led to the bicycle, a source of freedom for many who couldn’t afford carriages or cars.
Scientists create mice with two fathers after making eggs from male cells
By Hannah Devlin, The Guardian
“Hayashi, who presented the development at the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing at the Francis Crick Institute in London on Wednesday, predicts that it will be technically possible to create a viable human egg from a male skin cell within a decade. Others suggested this timeline was optimistic given that scientists are yet to create viable lab-grown human eggs from female cells.”
The Computer Scientist Who Finds Life Lessons in Games
By Ben Brubaker, Quanta Magazine
“In the ancient game Go, when you put down enough stones, you get many separate arenas, so in some sense you are playing a sum of games. You have to worry about this corner and that corner. You want to win the whole thing, but that doesn’t mean you have to win every part.
“It’s philosophically interesting, right? It’s like you have a war, and it has many battles, but your attention is finite. At any moment you can only make a single decision on one of the battlefields, and your opponent can either respond or double down in some other battlefield. I was trying to explain this to my father. When you play a sum of games, it really means: How do you lose strategically?”
Oldest reference to Norse god Odin found in Danish treasure
by James Brooks, Phys.org
“Lisbeth Imer, a runologist with the National Museum in Copenhagen, said the inscription represented the first solid evidence of Odin being worshipped as early as the 5th century—at least 150 years earlier than the previous oldest known reference, which was on a brooch found in southern Germany and dated to the second half of the 6th century.”