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Charles van der Haegen

Skeptic » About Us » A Brief Introduction - 1 views

www.skeptic.com/about_us

science education critical thinking controversial ideas unconmfortable knowledge claims investigating fringe

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 27 Jul 11 - Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 27 Jul 11
     
    "A Brief Introduction All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike - and yet it is the most precious thing we have. -Albert Einstein The Skeptics Society is a scientific and educational organization of scholars, scientists, historians, magicians, professors and teachers, and anyone curious about controversial ideas, extraordinary claims, revolutionary ideas, and the promotion of science. Our mission is to serve as an educational tool for those seeking clarification and viewpoints on those controversial ideas and claims. Under the direction of Dr. Michael Shermer, the Society engages in discussions with leading experts and investigates fringe science and paranormal claims. It is our hope that our efforts go a long way in promoting critical thinking and lifelong inquisitiveness in all individuals. I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them. -Baruch Spinoza Some people believe that skepticism is the rejection of new ideas, or worse, they confuse "skeptic" with "cynic" and think that skeptics are a bunch of grumpy curmudgeons unwilling to accept any claim that challenges the status quo. This is wrong. Skepticism is a provisional approach to claims. It is the application of reason to any and all ideas - no sacred cows allowed. In other words, skepticism is a method, not a position. Ideally, skeptics do not go into an investigation closed to the possibility that a phenomenon might be real or that a claim might be true. When we say we are "skeptical," we mean that we must see compelling evidence before we believe. Skepticism has a long historical tradition dating back to ancient Greece, when Socrates observed: "All I know is that I know nothing." But this pure position is sterile and unproductive and held by virtually no one. If you were skeptical about everything, you would have to be skeptical of your own skepticism. Like the dec
  • Charles van der Haegen on 27 Jul 11
     
    a nice source of curated uncomfortable knowledge
David McGavock

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Nicholas Carr - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...306868

Nicholas Carr Scientific Management Information distracted

shared by David McGavock on 13 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy.
  • I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
  • The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.
  • For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.
  • As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.
  • The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.
  • “I can’t read War and Peace  anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      Unlikely. He hasn't lost the ability but the desire.
  • new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.
  • recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.
  • we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s
  • “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.
  • the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains.
  • The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      So the net has ethics?? This anthropomorphism takes away our responsibility
  • Lewis Mumford  described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.”
  • In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
  • The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
  • The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations.
  • even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
  • The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.”
  • In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
  • their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.
  • there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
  • The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      I find this the most compelling argument. "Business" has an interest in selling things. Moving us faster, increasing our "seeking" instinct is one of the keys to this consumption frenzy. The individual needs to understand and manage these forces.
  • The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.
  • we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.
  • As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      I like this metaphor. Pancake people
Charles van der Haegen

Meary Douglas retraces the origins of the Theory od Socio-cultural Viability - 1 views

projects.chass.utoronto.ca/...douglas1.pdf

cultural theory socio-cultural viability rationalities social science mary douglas history origin

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 22 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 22 Jul 11
     
    IThis article, written at the end of her life, presents the Historical Origins of The theory of Socio-cultural Viability by Mary Douglas, who is to be seen as the inspirator of the theory, and to have established the foundational ideas who have been further developped by her students, and later further developped and applied by many scholars across a wide range of disciplines. The first paragraph will hopefully provide some incentive to dig further: Introduction: What is Grid and Group Cultural Theory? How Useful can it be in the Modern World? It is a pleasure for me to reflect on the history of Grid-Group. I first described the idea in Natural Symbols ( Douglas 1970), a kind of necessary sequel to Purity and Danger (1966). I now realise that it was a simple idea presented in a complicated way. After a late start it has been radically redesigned by creative collaborators whose work I will describe. Back in the 1960's social anthropologists still felt it was necessary to vindicate the intelligence of colonial peoples, then known as "natives" or "primitives." A major objective of teaching and writing in anthropology was to attack something described by Levy Bruhl as "primitive mentality," which seemed to mean "primitive irrationality." Malinowski had started in the 1920's showing that the Trobrianders had rational customs and laws. In the 1930's Raymond Firth was original in focusing on the "primitive economics" of the Polynesians and found that the basic laws of supply, demand, and price applied in the rustic economies he studied. Evans-Pritchard made a frontal defence of Azande rationality. After World War II, Nadel and Gluckman followed up with the complexities of Nubian and Barotse legal systems. The very idea that the concept of "jurisprudence" could apply to "the natives" was innovative. In the 1950's and 60's we continued to dismantle intellectual barriers assumed to distinguish "Them" from "Us." The following ex
  • Charles van der Haegen on 22 Jul 11
     
    I believe this to be a helpfull introduction to the study od the Theory od Socio-cultural viability, which, it seems to me, is a usefull framework to look from a new angle to cooperation theory, institutional decision making, democracy and many other fields of social sciences
David McGavock

HOW CULTURE DROVE HUMAN EVOLUTION | Edge.org - 0 views

edge.org/...-culture-drove-human-evolution

anthropology evolution culture tools cooperation religion neuroscience

shared by David McGavock on 07 May 14 - No Cached
  • how culture drove human evolution
  • cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.
  • but tools and artifacts (the kinds of things that one finds useful to throw or finds useful to manipulate) are themselves products of cultural evolution.
  • ...116 more annotations...
  • or a long time was that status in humans was just a kind of human version of this dominant status
  • Chimps, other primates, have dominant status.
  • social status
  • second kind of status. We call this status prestige.
  • from being particularly knowledgeable or skilled in an area,
  • From this we've argued that humans have two separate kinds of status, dominance and prestige
  • give them deference in exchange for knowledge that you get back
  • you want to isolate the members of your group who are most likely to have a lot of this resources, meaning a lot of the knowledge or information that could be useful to you in the future
  • some of the big questions are, exactly when did this body of cumulative cultural evolution get started?
  • may have started early
  • another possibility is that it emerged about 800,000 years ago.
  • here's theoretical models that show that culture, our ability to learn from others, is an adaptation to fluctuating environments.
  • Another signature of cultural learning is regional differentiation and material culture, and you see that by about 400,000 years ago
  • 400,000 years ago
  • there's another possibility that it was a different kind of ape that we don't have in the modern world: a communal breeding ape that lives in family units rather than the kind of fission fusion you might see in chimpanzees
  • In the Pliocene, we see lots of different kinds of apes in terms of different species of Australopithecus.
  • we now have evidence to suggest that humans were communal breeders, so that we lived in family groups maybe somewhat similar to the way gorillas live in family groups, and that this is a much better environment for the evolution of capacities for culture than typical in the chimpanzee model
  • for cultural learning to really take off, you need more than one model.
  • trying out different technique
  • take advantage of the variation
  • the question is, how did we become such long distance runners?
  • only humans have it
  • humans who don't know how to track animals, can't run them down
  • idea being that the religions of modern societies are quite different than the religions we see in hunter gatherers and small scale societies
  • Most recently I've been also thinking about the evolution of societal complexity.
  • when societies begin to get big and complex
  • large-scale cooperation
  • What are the causal processes that bring these things about?
  • There's an interaction between genes and culture. First you have to get the culturally transmitted knowledge about animal behavior and tracking and spore knowledge and the ability to identify individuals, which is something you need to practice, and only after that can you begin to take advantage of long distance running techniques
  • I've worked in a couple of different areas on this, and one is religion.
  • there was an intense period that continues today of intergroup competition, which favors groups who have social norms and institutions that can more effectively expand the group while maintaining internal harmony
  • they've been shaped in ways that galvanize cooperation in larger groups
  • In small-scale hunter-gatherer religions, the gods are typically whimsical. They're amoral.
  • but as we begin to move to the religions in more complex societies, we find that the gods are increasingly moralizing.
  • if you remind believers of their god, believers cheat less, and they're more pro social or fair in exchange tasks,
  • more pro social in are the ones with anonymous others, or strangers. These are the kinds of things you need to make a market run to have a successful division of labor
  • ritual plays a role in this
  • rituals seem to be sets of practices engineered by cultural evolution to be effective at transmitting belief and transmitting faith
  • elevate the degree of belief in the high-moralizing gods
  • high-moralizing gods will often require rituals of this kind
  • Speaking in unison, large congregations saying the same thing, this all taps our capacity for conformist transmission;
  • People also engage in what we call credibility-enhancing displays [during rituals]. These are costly things. It might be an animal sacrifice or the giving of a large sum of money or some kind of painful initiation rite
  • We think religions are just one element, one way in which culture has figured out ways to expand the sphere of cooperation and allow markets to form and people to exchange and to maintain the substantial division of labor.
  • There's a lot of risk in developing specialization because you have to be confident that there's a market there that you can engage with. Whereas if you're a generalist and you do a little bit of farming, a little bit of manufacturing, then you're much less reliant on the market. Markets require a great deal of trust
  • In the intellectual tradition that I'm building on, culture is information stored in people's heads that gets there by some kind of social learning
  • We tend to think of cultural transmission, or at least many people think of cultural transmission as relying on language
  • , it's quite clear that there is a ton of cultural transmission that is just strictly by observational learning.
  • what we don't see amongst other animals is cumulative cultural evolution.
  • you can learn one thing from one generation, and that begins to accumulate in subsequent generations.
  • One possible exception to that is bird song.
  • One of the interesting lines of research that's come out of this recognition is the importance of population size and the interconnectedness for technology.
  • looking at a case study in Tasmania.
  • You start out with two genetically well-intermixed peoples. Tasmania's actually connected to mainland Australia so it's just a peninsula. Then about 10,000 years ago, the environment changes, it gets warmer and the Bass Strait floods, so this cuts off Tasmania from the rest of Australia, and it's at that point that they begin to have this technological downturn
  • You can show that this is the kind of thing you'd expect if societies are like brains in the sense that they store information as a group and that when someone learns, they're learning from the most successful member
  • study by Rob Boyd and Michelle Kline
  • larger islands had much bigger and more complex fishing technologies, and you can even show an effective contact. Some of the islands were in more or less contact with each other,
  • more in contact, you have fancier tools, and that seems to hold up.
  • rates of innovation should continue to increase, especially with the emergence of communication technologies
  • As an individual inventor or company, you're best off if everybody else shares their ideas but you don't share your ideas because then you get to keep your good ideas, and nobody else gets exposed to them, and you get to use their good ideas, so you get to do more recombination.
  • An important thing to remember is that there's always an incentive to hide your information.
  • Embedded in this whole information-sharing thing is a constant cooperative dilemma in which individuals have to be willing to share for the good of the group.
  • a norm of information sharing is a really good norm to have
  • I've done a lot of work on marriage systems with the evolution of monogamy.
  • Eighty-five percent of human societies have allowed men to have more than one wife
  • pushes us towards polygyny
  • But in the modern world, of course, monogamy is normative, and people who have too many wives are thought poorly of by the larger society. The question is, how did this ever get in place?
  • European Marriage Pattern,
  • Athens legislates the first rules about monogamous marriage
  • people are ready to moralize it,
  • it does seem to have societal level benefits. It reduces male-male competition. We think there's evidence to say it reduces crime, reduces substance abuse, and it also engages males in ways that cause them to discount the future less and engage in productive activities rather than taking a lot of risks
  • If I talk about normative monogamy as being successful, I mean that it spread,
  • especially if you have a society with widely varying amounts of wealth, especially among males. Then you're going to have a situation that would normally promote high levels of polygyny
  • to get into the mating and marriage market you would have to have a high level of wealth if we were to let nature take it's course
  • Part of my program of research is to convince people that they should stop distinguishing cultural and biological evolution as separate in that way. We want to think of it all as biological evolution. 
  • Culture is part of our biology.
  • We now have the neuroscience to say that culture's in our brain, so if you compare people from different societies, they have different brains.
  • Cognition and our ability to think are all interwoven,
  • A good example of this is the placebos. Placebos are something that depend on your cultural beliefs. If you believe that something will work, then when you take it, like you take an aspirin or you take a placebo for an aspirin, it initiates the same pathways as the chemically active substance. Placebos are chemically inert but biologically active, and it's completely dependent on your cultural beliefs.
  • One of the large research projects that I run in an effort to understand human sociality is called The Root of Human Sociality Project.
  • at the time to something called the Ultimatum Game, and the Ultimatum Game seemed to provide evidence that humans were innately inclined to punish unfairness.
  • behavioral economists find that students give about half, sometimes a little bit less than half, and people are inclined to reject offers below about 30 percent
  • The older you get, even if you have more wealth and more income, you're especially inclined to only offer half, and you'll reject offers below 40 percent.
  • I was thinking that the Machiguenga would be a good test of this
  • I did it in 1995 and 1996 there, and what I found amongst the Machiguenga was that they were completely unwilling to reject, and they thought it was silly. Why would anyone ever reject?
  • they made low offers, the modal offer was 15 percent instead of 50, and the mean comes out to be about 25 percent.
  • over the next two summers these field anthropologists went to the field and conducted the ultimatum game as well as a few other games
  • we found is that societies vary dramatically, from societies that would never reject, to societies that would even reject offers above 50 percent, and we found that mean offers ranged across societies from about 25 percent to even over 50 percent. We had some of what we called hyper fair societies. The highest was 57 percent in Lamalera, Indonesia.
  • able to explain a lot of the variation in these offers with two variables. One was the degree of market integration.
  • there seemed to be other institutions, institutions of cooperative hunting seemed to influence offers.
  • measured market integration much more carefully
  • subsequent project
  • large number of other variables, including wealth, income, education, community size, and also religion.
  • did the Ultimatum Game along with two other experiments. The two other experiments were the Dictator Game (the Dictator Game is like the Ultimatum Game except the second player doesn't have the option to reject) and the Third Party Punishment Game.
  • Third Party Punishment Game, there are three players and the first two players play a Dictator Game.
  • This gives us two different measures of willingness to punish strangers
  • one is rejection in the Ultimatum Game
  • three measures of fairness
  • size of the community predicts willingness to punish
  • suggesting that if you have small communities, you don't need punishment.
  • It could be some kind of reputational mechanism
  • There's a number of different ways to create norm systems that operate like that.
  • In a big society punishment can be most effective because reputational mechanisms can be weak. If you're in a big society and you encounter somebody, you probably don't have friends in common through which you could pass reputational information for which punishment could be generated. You might want to punish them right on the spot or someone who observes the interaction might want to punish them right on the spot or call the authorities or whatever, which is also costly.
  • This creates a puzzle because typically people think of small-scale kinds of societies, where you study hunter-gatherers and horticultural scattered across the globe (ranging from New Guinea to Siberia to Africa) as being very pro social and cooperative.
  • but the thing is those are based on local norms for cooperation with kin and local interactions in certain kinds of circumstances
  • these norms don't extend beyond food sharing. They certainly don't extend to ephemeral or strangers
  • large-scale society run you have to shift from investing in your local kin groups and your enduring relationships to being willing to pay to be fair to a stranger.
  • if you're going to be fair to a stranger, then you're taking money away from your family.
  • A commitment to something like anti-nepotism norms is something that runs against our evolutionary inclinations and our inclinations to help kin
  • In this sense, the norms of modern societies that make modern societies run now are at odds with at least some of our evolved instincts.
  • Lately we've been focused on the effects of religion
  • adherence to a world religion matters
  • People from world religions were willing to give more to the other person in the experiment, the anonymous stranger
  • Part of this is your willingness to acquire a norm of impartial roles; that we have a set of rules that governs this system.
  • political scientists call it the rule of law
  • those rules apply independently of the identities
  • If you want the rule of law to spread or to be maintained, you need conditions in which you're managing risk.
  • David McGavock on 07 May 14
     
    [JOSEPH HENRICH:] The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution-and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it.
Charles van der Haegen

‪Yochai Benkler on the eG8‬‏ - YouTube The liberty of Internet - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

freedom internet resistance change technology liberty free speeech open democracy intellectual property creatives

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 05 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 05 Aug 11
     
    Interview of Yochai Benklepresents his conclusions of the eG8 in Paris DANGER for the liberty of the Inyternet
  • Charles van der Haegen on 05 Aug 11
     
    I believe all people should try to understand what's at stake here. Let's feriousosly oppose any move that could lead to the net doesn't get hyacked by particumar interests monopolies and partisan hegemonies. Let's not allow discouragement to take the upper hand, let's not get influenced by the fact that all prior information empires have been.through, if we have to believe Tim Wu in his book the Master Switch, But let's be watchfull, very watchfull indeed. This time the fate of closed hegemonies getting the upper hand should be disavowed. People who still believe in freedom, equity, and humanness, please, let's band together beyond all our differences tp disavow this fate. Democracy and our grandchildren's life are at stake
David McGavock

Making Science by Serendipity. A review of Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Tra... - 1 views

jetpress.org/campa.htm

Barber information_literacy critical skills evaluate serendipity

shared by David McGavock on 09 Jul 11 - No Cached
  •  It is worth now turning our attention to the theoretical aspects of serendipity and examining the sociological and philosophical implications of this idea.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
       
      New theme
  • As Mario Bunge (1998: 232) remarks, “Merton, a sociologist and historian of ideas by training, is the real founding father of the sociology of knowledge as a science and a profession; his predecessors had been isolated scholars or amateurs.”
  •  It is true that the American sociologist studies mainly institutions of science, not laboratory life and the products of science (e.g., theories). But he never said that sociologists cannot or should not study other aspects of science.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • His attention to the concept of serendipity is the best evidence
  • Some scientists seem to have been aware of the fact that the elegance and parsimony prescribed for the presentation of the results of scientific work tend to falsify retrospectively the actual process by which the results were obtained” (Merton and Barber 2004: 159)
  • Indeed if you are clever enough to take advantage of the opportunity, you may capture a fox thanks to accidental circumstances while searching for hares.
  • Colombus’ discovery of America, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Nobel’s discovery of dynamite, and other similar cases, prove that serendipity has always been present in research. Merton (1973: 164)
  • “Intuition, scriptures, chance experiences, dreams, or whatever may be the psychological source of an idea.
  • This descriptive model has many important implications for the politics of science, considering that the administration and organization of scientific research have to deal with the balance between investments and performance. To recognize that a good number of scientific discoveries are made by accident and sagacity may be satisfactory for the historian of science, but it raises further problems for research administrators.
  • If this is true, it is necessary to create the environment, the social conditions for serendipity. These aspects are explored in Chapter 10 of The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
       
      Key to the Mindamp group is finding ways to create this environment
  • The solution appears to be a Golden Mean between total anarchy and authoritarianism. Too much planning in science is harmful.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
       
      balance - a good idea
  • Whitney supervised the evolution of the inquiry everyday but limited himself to asking: “Are you having fun today?” It was a clever way to make his presence felt, without exaggerating with pressure. The moral of the story is that you cannot plan discoveries, but you can plan work that will probably lead to discoveries:
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
       
      Applied Serendipity at GE - "having fun?"
  • If scientists are determined by social factors (language, conceptual frames, interests, etc.) to find certain and not other “answers,” why are they often surprised by their own observations? A rational and parsimonious explanation of this phenomenon is that the facts that we observe are not necessarily contained in the theories we already know. Our faculty of observation is partly independent from our conceptual apparatus. In this independence lies the secret of serendipity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
       
      Perhaps an example of embodied cognition. Our senses know something our brains don't.
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