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Philip Drobis

Imitation is what makes us human and creative - Kat McGowan - Aeon - 3 views

aeon.co/...hat-makes-us-human-and-creativ

TOK Imitation WeAreCopycats aeon perception psychology intuition science

shared by Philip Drobis on 02 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Throughout human history, innovation – including the technological progress we cherish – has been fuelled and sustained by imitation. Copying is the mighty force that has allowed the human race to move from stone knives to remote-guided drones, from digging sticks to crops that manufacture their own pesticides.
    • Philip Drobis
      Philip Drobis on 02 Dec 14
       
      Imitation is the source for technological advance --by copying others inventions we can add our own potentially benefit to them, thus providing a small contribution to its advancement
  • advances happen largely through tinkering, when somebody recreates a good thing with a minor upgrade that makes it slightly better.
  • When Isaac Newton talked about standing on the shoulders of giants, he should have said that we are dwarves, standing atop a vast heap of dwarves.
    • Philip Drobis
      Philip Drobis on 02 Dec 14
       
      Ties to our ability to observe and remember what we see. That we can then build off of that and improve it
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Lots of copying means that many minds get their chance at the problem; imitation ‘makes the contents of brains available to everyone’, writes the developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello in the Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (1999). Tomasello, who is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, calls the combination of imitation and innovation the ‘cultural ratchet’. It is like a mechanical ratchet that permits motion in only one direction – such as winding a watch, or walking through a turnstile. Good ideas push the ratchet forward one notch. Faithful imitation keeps the ratchet from slipping backward, protecting ideas from being forgotten or lost and keeping knowledge alive for the next round of improvement.
    • Philip Drobis
      Philip Drobis on 02 Dec 14
       
      Multiple minds are essentially key as the cumulative opportunities of each individual given a chance at the issue can lead to one finding something prosperous 
  • In the 1930s, a pair of psychologists raised an infant chimp alongside their own baby in an attempt to understand both species better. The chimp raised in this family (and others in other such experiments later in the century) never behaved much like a human. The human child, on the other hand, soon began knuckle-walking, biting, grunting and hooting – just like his new sibling.
    • Philip Drobis
      Philip Drobis on 02 Dec 14
       
      We copy to survive. Only we humans actually have the 'push' or are gullible enough to not realize as the Chimp example above proposes. -Ties to a biological and/or physiological connection in terms of behavior 
  • Philip Drobis on 02 Dec 14
     
    How we are imitators from childbirth 
markfrankel18

Why People Mistake Good Deals for Rip-Offs : The New Yorker - 5 views

www.newyorker.com/...e-good-deals-for-rip-offs.html

TOK arts psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Last Saturday, an elderly man set up a stall near Central Park and sold eight spray-painted canvases for less than one five-hundredth of their true value. The art works were worth more than two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, but the man walked away with just four hundred and twenty dollars. Each canvas was an original by the enigmatic British artist Banksy, who was approaching the midpoint of a monthlong residency in New York City. Banksy had asked the man to sell the works on his behalf. For several hours, hundreds of oblivious locals and tourists ignored the quiet salesman, along with the treasure he was hiding in plain sight. The day ended with thirty paintings left unsold. One Banksy aficionado, certain she could distinguish a fake from the real thing, quietly scolded the man for knocking off the artist’s work.
  • What makes Banksy’s subversive stunt so compelling is that it forces us to acknowledge how incoherently humans derive value. How can a person be willing to pay five hundred times more than another for the same art work born in the same artist’s studio?
  • Some concepts are easy to evaluate without a reference standard. You don’t need a yardstick, for example, when deciding whether you’re well-rested or exhausted, or hot or cold, because those states are “inherently evaluable”—they’re easy to measure in absolute terms because we have sensitive biological mechanisms that respond when our bodies demand rest, or when the temperature rises far above or falls far below seventy-two degrees. Everyone agrees that three days is too long a period without sleep, but art works satisfy far too abstract a need to attract a universal valuation. When you learn that your favorite abstract art work was actually painted by a child, its value declines precipitously (unless the child happens to be your prodigious four-year-old).
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • We’re swayed by all the wrong cues, and our valuation estimates are correspondingly incoherent. Banksy knew this when he asked an elderly man to sell his works in Central Park. It’s comforting to believe that we get what we pay for, but discerning true value is as difficult as spotting a genuine Banksy canvas in a city brimming with imitations.
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