Cognitive Biases for Scientists (in progress)

We all suffer with Cognitive Biases. What is Cognitive Bias? One typical example is how we stick to and defend an information that we received earlier in life, no matter what it may be. Therefore, we have people born in a religious environment incapable of seeing the illogicality of their faith, and under adequate provocation, also ready to kill or get killed for their faith.

Such cognitive bias can prove fatal for a scientist. A scientist is in search of truth. Cognitive biases will make them fool themselves into believing something that is actually not true. But nature cannot be fooled, and the said scientist would waste all of their exsistence because of cognitive biases. We want to avoid that.

Why is Cognitive Biases a matter for absolute concern for a scientist, more so than a common person. I mean, the opposite can be argued. Science is a deductive discipline, a logical framework with rigour and objectivity? What room for subjectivity and let alone a Cognitive Bias is for a scientist? A scientist should be least worried about cognitive biases than common people!

If only this picture I have painted was true. The argument can be summarized in a single quote.

“It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.”

― Henri Poincaré

And when intuition is at play, congnitive biases follow. Hence the necessity to guard oneself from being fooled by one's own mind. Because, as Feynman said, "you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.".

Before we dive into a list of cognitive biases, it is important to note that there does not exist an exhaustive list of cogitive biases, in the same way as there does not exist an exhaustive list of nutritients required for a human being. Scientists know about a certain number of nutrients, but they might not know about many other ones. Moreover, we as human beings are not static machines. We are evolving. We do not have a strict list of prescriptions of nutrients. The body dynamically reacts to chemicals that it is exposed to, and this reaction also evolves through time.

What I am trying to say that, be watchful for cognitive lapses that perhaps nobody has heard of. How will you do that. Stay intellectually honest. Don't fool your own self.

Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete ?

 The Podolsk's argument

Consider a pair of particles, A and B, having entangled positions and momentum, separated by a distance. We can hence determine either the position or momentum of B by measuring the corresponding quantity of A. But note that in doing so, we could NOT have disturbed B whatsoever, because of special relativity.

Since the value of position or momentum of B can be determined without disturbing it, a concept of reality can be associated with these physical quantities. But quantum mechanics denies to attribute a definite position AND momentum to the particles prior to their measurement, and also claims that both these quantities do not coexist to arbitrary precision. Hence Quantum mechanics must be incomplete.

Bohr's reply to  The Podolsk's argument

Position and momentum are complementary quantities, and determining one destroys anything that can be said about the other. That is, these measurements are NOT non disturbing. Measuring the position of A DOES disturb B. There is a nonlocal influence in a way that no superluminal signaling is still valid.

Einstein's argument

The choice of measuring the position OR momentum of A collapses the wavefunction of B. But locality demands that such influence should not be possible. Hence, wavefunction is not true description of the 'real' state of the system, because it is not possible to influence the 'real' state of a system nonlocally.

My take

By measuring one of the EPR pair, we do end up disturbing the other particle. Nonlocal influences exist in quantum mechanics. These influences are such that a useful superluminal signal cannot be sent. Hence, measuring position of A instantaneously disturbs the state of B (in A's rest frame) in the same manner as measuring the position of B would disturb the state of B. Hence the reality claim based on non disturbance is invalid.

Einstein is wrong because when choice of measurement on particle A steers particle B's state, such superluminal influence does not transfer any information. Hence special relativity is not violated.

Einstein believed that the real state of a particle cannot be influenced by choices made at a distance. Hence wavefunction cannot be in one-to-one correspondence with the real states.

If by real state he meant all the information that can be extracted from the system, then this cannot indeed be influenced by the choices made at a distance. BUT, wavefunction gives a probabilistic description of a system, and hence can be disturbed from a distance without revealing superluminal information.

The superluminal signals are censored, inaccessible.