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Lawrence Hrubes

Most teachers are overlooking huge numbers of gifted black students - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...gifted-black-students

education human sciences bias culture assessment testing

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • "In all of my publications I have said that giftedness looks different across cultures," she said. "That means that what these predominantly white teachers are looking for may look different than [for] a person from another culture." She calls this a "cultural mismatch," which can cause teachers to have lower expectations for minority students or misinterpret their behavior. As an example, Ford said a common indicator of giftedness —independence — might not manifest in black students, who tend to have tight-knit and interdependent family structures.
markfrankel18

The Price of Denialism - NYTimes.com - 1 views

mobile.nytimes.com/...the-rules-of-denialism

TOK science reason bias

shared by markfrankel18 on 09 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • In other words, we need to be able to tell when we believe or disbelieve in something based on high standards of evidence and when we are just engaging in a bit of motivated reasoning and letting our opinions take over. When we withhold belief because the evidence does not live up to the standards of science, we are skeptical. When we refuse to believe something, even in the face of what most others would take to be compelling evidence, we are engaging in denial. In most cases, we do this because at some level it upsets us to think that the theory is true.
  • So how to tell a fact from an opinion? By the time we sit down to evaluate the evidence for a scientific theory, it is probably too late. If we take the easy path in our thinking, it eventually becomes a habit. If we lie to others, sooner or later we may believe the lie ourselves. The real battle comes in training ourselves to embrace the right attitudes about belief formation in the first place, and for this we need to do a little philosophy.
markfrankel18

Our Biased Brains - NYTimes.com - 4 views

mobile.nytimes.com/...kristof-our-biased-brains.html

TOK bias perception psychology race

shared by markfrankel18 on 11 May 15 - No Cached
  • The human brain seems to be wired so that it categorizes people by race in the first one-fifth of a second after seeing a face. Brain scans show that even when people are told to sort people by gender, the brain still groups people by race.
  • White American kids disproportionately judged that the people who were smiling were white and that those who were frowning were Asian. When the experiment was conducted in Taiwan with exactly the same photos, Taiwanese children thought that the faces when smiling were Asian, when frowning were white.
xinniguo

The Clothes Make the Doctor - The Atlantic - 3 views

www.theatlantic.com/...382866

science psychology ethics perception bias TOK placebo

shared by xinniguo on 01 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • stilettos and a tailored expensive-looking suit. This wasn’t a case of a low-cut blouse or a thigh-revealing skirt
    • xinniguo
      xinniguo on 01 Dec 14
       
      Prejudice - caused by induction. women who wear stilettos and expensive suits tend to be not as professional as male doctors in uniforms
    • xinniguo
      xinniguo on 01 Dec 14
       
      uniforms - fulfilment of a schema in our head -> all great doctors are in long white coats with formal suits underneath.. -> stereotype
  • uniform
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But forcing all clothing-description categories into one or the other of those two somewhat vague terms is misleading.
    • xinniguo
      xinniguo on 01 Dec 14
       
      our perception or ideas are very different. conservative x modern
markfrankel18

Parable of the Polygons - a playable post on the shape of society - 0 views

ncase.me/polygons

TOK bias technology

shared by markfrankel18 on 31 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • This is a story of how harmless choices can make a harmful world.
Lawrence Hrubes

There's a good reason Americans are horrible at science - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...ricans-are-horrible-at-science

science bias facts assumptions

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • There are a number of problems with teaching science as a collection of facts. First, facts change. Before oxygen was discovered, the theoretical existence of phlogiston made sense. For a brief, heady moment in 1989, it looked like cold fusion (paywall) was going to change the world. In the field of medical science, “facts” are even more wobbly. For example, it has been estimated that fewer than 10% of published high profile cancer studies are reproducible (the word “reproducible” here is a euphemism for “not total poppycock”).
  • It’s not possible for everyone—or anyone—to be sufficiently well trained in science to analyze data from multiple fields and come up with sound, independent interpretations. I spent decades in medical research, but I will never understand particle physics, and I’ve forgotten almost everything I ever learned about inorganic chemistry. It is possible, however, to learn enough about the powers and limitations of the scientific method to intelligently determine which claims made by scientists are likely to be true and which deserve skepticism. As a starting point, we could teach our children that the theories and technologies that have been tested the most times, by the largest number of independent observers, over the greatest number of years, are the most likely to be reliable.
markfrankel18

A Cambridge professor on how to stop being so easily manipulated by misleading statisti... - 0 views

qz.com/...lated-by-misleading-statistics

TOK math bias statistics data

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Graphs can be as manipulative as words. Using tricks such as cutting axes, rescaling things, changing data from positive to negative, etc. Sometimes putting zero on the y-axis is wrong. So to be sure that you are communicating the right things, you need to evaluate the message that people are taking away. There are no absolute rules. It all depends on what you want to communicate.
  • The bottom line is that humans are very bad at understanding probability. Everyone finds it difficult, even I do. We just have to get better at it. We need to learn to spot when we are being manipulated.
markfrankel18

Fake news and gut instincts: Why millions of Americans believe things that aren't true ... - 2 views

qz.com/...believe-things-that-arent-true

TOK bias intuition science

shared by markfrankel18 on 10 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 10 Nov 17
     
    "There are many individual qualities that seem like they should promote accuracy, but don't. Valuing evidence, however, appears to be an exception. The bigger the role evidence plays in shaping a person's beliefs, the more accurate that person tends to be. We aren't the only ones who have observed a pattern like this. Another recent study shows that people who exhibit higher scientific curiosity also tend to adopt more accurate beliefs about politically charged science topics, such as fracking and global warming."
Lawrence Hrubes

When behavioral economics meets a $700M Powerball jackpot - 2 views

kottke.org/...meets-a-700m-powerball-jackpot

economics behavioral economics psychology science bias reason fallacy money probability

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 25 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Business Insider went out onto the streets of NYC and tried to buy people’s just-purchased Powerball tickets ahead of the $700 million drawing. They did not get many takers, even when offering twice the price they paid (which meant they could just go and buy double the number of tickets and slash their odds of winning). The video says this is an example of regret avoidance.
markfrankel18

Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational | Wired Science | Wired.com - 5 views

www.wired.com/...language-and-bias

TOK Language psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 30 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language. A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.
  • it’s plausible that the cognitive demands of thinking in a non-native, non-automatic language would leave people with little leftover mental horsepower, ultimately increasing their reliance on quick-and-dirty cogitation. Equally plausible, however, is that communicating in a learned language forces people to be deliberate, reducing the role of potentially unreliable instinct. Research also shows that immediate emotional reactions to emotively charged words are muted in non-native languages, further hinting at deliberation.
  • The researchers believe a second language provides a useful cognitive distance from automatic processes, promoting analytical thought and reducing unthinking, emotional reaction.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Brain That Couldn't Remember - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ain-that-couldnt-remember.html

memory science brain neuroscience ethics publication bias

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • In that pantheon of illuminatingly broken men and women, Henry stands apart. It is difficult to exaggerate the impact he has had on our understanding of ourselves. Before Brenda Milner collaborated on that first paper about Henry, the prevailing theory of memory held that its functions could not be localized to a single cortical area, that learning was distributed across the brain as a whole. By that theory — built upon the experimental lesioning of the brains of rats — a person’s memory would be affected only in proportion to the amount of brain tissue removed, regardless of which brain structures the tissue was removed from. Milner’s first paper about Henry, along with her previous work, upended this view.
  • Five years after Milner’s first paper about Henry, she published a second that was almost as revelatory. That paper documented Henry’s gradual improvement over a three-day period on a difficult hand-eye coordination task. His improvement came despite his inability to ever remember his previous attempts at the task, indicating that there are at least two different memory systems in the brain — one responsible for our conscious, episodic memories, the second responsible for task-or-skill related “procedural” memories — and that these two systems seem to rely on entirely distinct parts of the brain. This was another fundamental step forward in our understanding of how memory works. Together, Milner’s two Henry-­related revelations can be viewed as the cornerstones of modern memory science.
  • Corkin: Yeah, but it’s not peer-­reviewed, for one thing. That’s important. The stuff that’s published is good stuff. Peer-­reviewed. You can believe it. Things that, you know, experiments that might not have been good experiments, there might have been inadequate control groups. ... There are all sorts of things that can go wrong with experiments. Not every experiment is publishable.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Me: But they can still be interpreted by other people. ... Maybe as we continue to understand how the brain works, and how memory works, some of this existing data of H.M.’s could be reilluminated by new theories, by new ideas, by new — it just seems a shame to destroy it. And it also seems — and this would be the darker interpretation of it — it locks in stone your own telling of H.M.’s story.
Lawrence Hrubes

Viewpoint: Britain must pay reparations to India - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-india-33618621

history nationalism bias ethics justice

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • At the end of May, the Oxford Union held a debate on the motion "This house believes Britain owes reparations to her former colonies". Speakers included former Conservative MP Sir Richard Ottaway, Indian politician and writer Shashi Tharoor and British historian John Mackenzie. Shashi Tharoor's argument in support of the motion, went viral in India after he tweeted it out from his personal account. The argument has found favour among Indians, where the subject of colonial exploitation remains a sore topic. Here he gives a summary of his views:
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