If 10% of the Population Believes a Stupid Thing, The Majority Will Too
Via ScienceDaily:
Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.
The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion.
The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.”When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above…
NASA Names ‘2012′ As The Most Absurd Science Fiction Film of All Time
I have faith that Hollywood can produce an even more ridiculous film in our new decade. (And remember kids, movies are a great way to learn about science : ) Reports Metro UK:
Roland Emmerich’s disaster movie proved to be a smash hit, taking more than £490 million [~$760 million] at the box office — but it was less popular at the US space agency. A panel of NASA experts concluded 2012 was the most scientifically flawed blockbuster ever made.
The film, which stars John Cusack, Danny Glover, Thandie Newton and Chiwetel Ejiofor, includes scenes in which a physicist claims to have discovered that neutrino particles carried to earth on solar flares had caused a series of catastrophic natural disasters.
Many film fans were so worried about what they saw that NASA was inundated with questions about whether the world could end in the way suggested in the movie, prompting the organisation to put…
Darryl Cunningham Investigates Various So-Called “Moon Hoaxes”
There are many things to question is this world, but that people landed on the Moon forty-one years ago today (July 20th) isn’t one of them. Very informative explanation in comic strip form from Darryl Cunningham:
How Facts Backfire: A Surprising Threat to Democracy — Our Brains
This article reminds me of Stephen Colbert’s character: “I don’t like books, they’re all fact, no heart.” Seems like political scientists are finally paying more attention to “Truthiness“. Joe Keohane writes in the Boston Globe:
It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will…
Snopes’ 25 Hottest Urban Legends Gets Remarkably Political
Philip Bump writes on Mediaite:
If you have older relatives, and they have email accounts, I’d guess that you’re pretty familiar with Snopes.com. It’s likely that, for the first few months of their sending you urgent messages about free Applebee’s dinners or gang members threatening people’s lives, you dutifully found rebuttals from Snopes to pass on, intending to limit occasion for embarrassment when they send such things to others.
Then you realized that embarrassment is an emotion powerless against the potency of sheer terror. That no matter how often you demonstrated the fraud behind these emails and ones exactly like them with different brands and new murder plots, still the emails kept coming. Perhaps you even flagged these relatives as junk mail.
Snopes is the tireless and passive scold of the Internet, calmly assessing any and all madness regardless of provenance, and ensuring that the truth is told. It stands patiently in a corner of the Internet, a stationary Diogenes called into action primarily in moments of spite.
The offspring of a California couple with a penchant for urban folklore, the site originally focused on the sorts of nonsense mentioned above — rumors about people trying to give you free things or trying to rape you. As a result, that’s traditionally what was most common on the 25 Hottest Urban Legends page.
And then came Barack Obama.
