paulgorman.org

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Wed Dec 26 09:13:50 EST 2018 Slept from midnight to nine, waking briefly around six. High of thirty-eight and cloudy today. Goals: Started watching season nine of Doctor Who. Michelle Gomez is a lot of fun as The Master. Hmm. Looks like Openbox (an extension) can do dynamic named workspaces. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=124528 https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/12/radicals-dont-evaluate-their-mistakes-very-effectively/ > Political radicals don’t evaluate their own errors—about anything > Moderates are much better at figuring out when they're likely to be mistaken. > Of course, metacognition isn't the only mental process going on in people. There are various forms of motivated reasoning and cultural cognition, in which people protect themselves from ideas that run against their beliefs. To avoid complications like these and instead focus on metacognition, the researchers decided to use a simple task with no obvious cultural implications: estimate how many dots were in an area after being only shown a brief glimpse of it and describe how confident they were in their estimate. > The confidence estimate was there to force the participants to do a bit of metacognition by evaluating their feelings about their likely performance. And the effectiveness of their metacognition could be evaluated using the accuracy of their answers. To motivate people to make accurate assessments of their performance, financial rewards were given when their confidence matched their performance. > In a second experiment, the participants were asked to make the same estimate as in the first experiment but were then given some additional information about the dot density of the image. This allowed them the opportunity to update their confidence level based on new information. > The same issue was apparent in the tests in which participants were given additional information and then given a chance to revise their opinions. And, informatively, people with radical beliefs were less likely to update their confidence in response to the additional information, a feature that the authors consider a defect specific to metacognition. > The authors sum up their work by writing that "more radical participants displayed less insight into the correctness of their choices and reduced updating of their confidence when presented with post-decision evidence." That's a bit surprising, given that most research into this area has focused on the ideas themselves and suggested that confidence is simply a mechanism for protecting those ideas. Ten-minute walk in the evening. Servings: grains 6/6, fruit 3/4, vegetables 3/4, dairy 0/2, meat 4/3, nuts 1/0.5 Breakfast: carrots, cucumber, banana, pear, coffee, cinnamon rolls Lunch: turkey, apple, tomato Dinner: pita and hummus 128/81

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