Worksheet 1 Reality and Science
1. Describe 5 ways in which scientific efforts is a good way to accurately understand reality.
2. Describe 3 things about science that makes it untrustworthy regarding accuracy about reality.
3. Define and explain why each of the following often make humans wrong about reality and their predictions. Describe what it is about science described above that minimizes these weaknesses.
a. Overconfidence
b. Belief Bias
c. Confirmation Bias
d. Representative Heuristic
e. Availability Heuristic
f. Belief Perseverance
g. Ecological Fallacy
4. As humans, we use “
inductive reasoning” to turn what we observe in reality into our understanding of reality within our minds; and in doing so, we have no alternative but to turn reality into CONCEPTS (words). Additionally, we have no choice but to use CONCEPTS (words) to describe and convince others of what is REAL. Discuss a challenge or two where having to turn reality into words makes it difficult for scientists to be accurate about understanding and describing reality “
deductive reasoning”.
5. Describe how a “Quantitative” approach to trying to understand reality has different challenges of being accurate about reality than a “qualitative” approach.
Below is depiction of an
aggregate of humans. The
variable “sex” with the
attributes of “male” or “female” and the
frequencies of male and female.
