What is Practically Scientific?
Welcome to the first issue of the Bias Research Initiative’s online newsletter, Practically Scientific!
The Bias Research Initiative’s purpose is to seek fundamental understanding of bias in science, technology, and society. What are the biases that influence our thoughts and actions? What is their fundamental nature? Can we overcome them to become more rational and effective in pursuing our goals? These topics are central to this newsletter as well, but the scope here is broader.
What is Practically Scientific about? I’m going to be exploring that question with each post. An attempt at an answer is covered in the About page, but stepping back I think it’ll come down to considering science, technology, and society from a cognitive and neuroscience perspective.
This focus reflects my own expertise as a cognitive neuroscientist directing a lab at Rutgers University. More importantly, this focus reflects why I became a cognitive neuroscientist to begin with: Cognition and neuroscience cut to the heart of what it means to be human, revealing myriad novel insights into human nature, such as who we are and how we might live better.
Our target audience includes scientists, clinicians, and anyone interested in science. Most posts will be accessible to non-scientists, with the occasional deep dive with scientists in mind (meant to be challenging but interesting to non-scientists).
Here is a sampling of topics my guest authors and I are considering:
How it is rational to be emotional – Emotions are not only compatible with rationality, they ultimately define it. This post will explain how.
Improving Science: Fully establishing new findings should require within-study replication – Starting a new series, I’ll cover a big “metascience” idea addressing the replication crisis, wherein the standard should be that studies replicate their results if the goal is establishing new knowledge
Advanced Yet Primitive – A “thought game” originally shared on our previous initiative’s blog, which puts our current state of progress (scientific, technological, and social) in perspective. I’m imagining this as a series, with a new mind-bending perspective-taking game each time.
Art that celebrates the wonder of the reality science has revealed – Inspired by physicist Richard Feynman, who opined: “Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers: you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.”
What I’ve learned about myself and my own biases by becoming a neuroscientist – Insights and half-insights into my own mind by better understanding the brain
Explaining why a recent scientific publication matters – A series going beyond the jargon to explain why we think recent findings (including our own) matter outside our subfield of cognitive neuroscience, such as this recent paper of ours I’m especially excited about: Ito et al. (2022) “Constructing neural network models from brain data reveals representational transformation linked to adaptive behavior”
The many cognitive and social biases that seem to automatically emerge in artificial intelligences – The classical view of future AI is that it will be less biased than humans (e.g., Data from Star Trek), but it turns out that many AIs are more biased than most humans (reflecting amplification of biases in their training data)
The problems and opportunities of creating artificial intelligences with their own goals – An excellent definition of intelligence is the ability to effectively accomplish a wide variety of possible goals, but it is unclear how future AIs will have their own goals while keeping those goals fully aligned with humans’
Please let me know in the comments if you want to “vote” for any of these topics to help make sure they get written, or if you have an idea for a topic.