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Lawrence Hrubes

The Surprising Science Behind Why and When We Yawn : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...why-we-yawn.html

science psychology yawning SocialScience biology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 15 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Yawning is one of the first things we learn to do. “Learn” may not even be quite the right word. Johanna de Vries, a professor of obstetrics at Vrije University Amsterdam, has discovered that the human fetus yawns during its first trimester in the womb. And, unless we succumb to neurodegenerative disease, yawning is something we keep doing throughout our lives. “You don’t decide to yawn,” Robert Provine, a neuroscientist and the author of “Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond,” told me. “You just do it. You’re playing out a biological program.” We yawn unconsciously and we yawn spontaneously. We can’t yawn on command—and we sometimes can’t stop ourselves from letting out a big yawn, even at the most inopportune times. (Case in point: Sasha Obama’s infamous yawn during her father’s 2013 Inaugural Address.) But what, precisely, are we accomplishing with all this yawning?
Lawrence Hrubes

Ai Weiwei Survey Lands at the Brooklyn Museum - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ds-at-the-brooklyn-museum.html

arts TOK China politics sculpture

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Mr. Ai is a complex, troublesome figure: an artistic provocateur who works in several mediums, an activist and thorn in the side of the Chinese powers that be and an impresario able to marshal scores of variously adept Chinese artisans to make ambitious pieces that he barely touches. He’s also a designer and part-time architect who collaborated with the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron on the emblematic “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. And he was the darling of the Chinese power structure, until he began jumping in where he wasn’t invited.
markfrankel18

3quarksdaily: Is Wine Tasting Nonsense? - 1 views

www.3quarksdaily.com/...is-winetasting-nonsense.html

TOK wine perception arts taste

shared by markfrankel18 on 17 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • If there is such a thing as real expertise in identifying the properties of a wine, then it must be possible to get it wrong.  If tastes, in general, were entirely subjective there would be no right answer to the question of whether, for instance, chocolate ice cream tastes of chocolate.  No one really thinks that. The fact that expert wine tasters get it wrong so often is evidence that wine tasting is harder than identifying the presence of chocolate in ice cream—not that it is utterly capricious. So tastes are not so entirely subjective that our experiences of them have no relationship to an object.
  • Furthermore, tasters can strive to eliminate environmental factors that have been shown to influence judgments about wine such as conversations, the style of music being played, and changes in the weather, etc. These are all factors that wine tasters can control by adjusting the environment in which they taste. Wine tasters, if they are to maintain credibility, must taste under the appropriate conditions. But that is no different from any other normative judgment we make. Our ability to make ethical judgments, for instance, is similarly influenced by environmental factors. We know (or should know) better than to make ethical judgments when we are excessively angry, fearful, under the influence of powerful desires, etc. Yet, it does not follow from the fact that ethical judgments can be influenced by irrelevant factors that all ethical judgments are subjective.
  • So the taste of wine (or anything else) is partly dependent on objective features of the world and partly dependent on how our view of those features has been shaped by past experience. The crucial question then is how much of a distorting lens is that past experience.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • What is puzzling about this whole debate about the objectivity of wine critics, however, is why people want objective descriptions of wine. We don't expect scientific objectivity from art critics, literary critics, or film reviewers. The disagreements among experts in these fields are as deep as the disagreements about wine. There is no reason to think a film critic would have the same judgment about a film if viewed in a different context, in comparison with a different set of films, or after conversing about the film with other experts. Our judgments are fluid and they should be if we are to make sense of our experience. When listening to music aren't we differently affected by a song depending upon whether we are at home, in a bar, going to the beach, listening with friends or alone? Why would wine be different? The judgment of any critic is simply a snapshot at a particular time and place of an object whose meaning can vary with context. Wine criticism cannot escape this limitation.
  • What we want from critics whether of music, art, or wine is a judgment made in light of their vast experience that can show us something about the object that we might have missed without their commentary. That can be accomplished independently of whether the critic is perfectly consistent or objective. We want the critic to have a certain kind of bias, born of her unique experience, because it is that bias that enables her to taste, see, or hear what she does.
sleggettisp

Are We Approaching the End of Human History? | Perspectives | BillMoyers.com - 0 views

billmoyers.com/...ching-the-end-of-human-history

history TOK

shared by sleggettisp on 13 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • sleggettisp on 13 Sep 14
     
    This post first appeared at In These Times. It is not pleasant to contemplate the thoughts that must be passing through the mind of the Owl of Minerva as the dusk falls and she undertakes the task of interpreting the era of human civilization, which may now be approaching its inglorious end.
markfrankel18

What's Up With That: Why It's So Hard to Catch Your Own Typos | WIRED - 1 views

www.wired.com/wuwt-typos

TOK perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 13 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • The reason typos get through isn’t because we’re stupid or careless, it’s because what we’re doing is actually very smart, explains psychologist Tom Stafford, who studies typos of the University of Sheffield in the UK. “
  • As with all high level tasks, your brain generalizes simple, component parts (like turning letters into words and words into sentences) so it can focus on more complex tasks (like combining sentences into complex ideas). “We don’t catch every detail, we’re not like computers or NSA databases,” said Stafford. “Rather, we take in sensory information and combine it with what we expect, and we extract meaning.”
  • Unfortunately, that kind of instinctual feedback doesn’t exist in the editing process. When you’re proof reading, you are trying to trick your brain into pretending that it’s reading the thing for the first time. Stafford suggests that if you want to catch your own errors, you should try to make your work as unfamiliar as possible. Change the font or background color, or print it out and edit by hand. “Once you’ve learned something in a particular way, it’s hard to see the details without changing the visual form,” he said.
Lawrence Hrubes

This War Of Mine - 0 views

www.11bitstudios.com/...this-war-of-mine

arts ethics war games video film

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 14 May 15 - No Cached
  • This War Of Mine provides an experience of war seen from an entirely new angle. For the very first time you do not play as an elite soldier, rather a group of civilians trying to survive in a besieged city. During the day snipers outside stop you from leaving your refuge, so you need to focus on maintaining your hideout. At night you get a chance to scavenge nearby locations for items that will help you stay alive. Make life-and-death decisions driven by your conscience. Try to protect everybody from your shelter or sacrifice some of them to endure the hardships. During war, there are no good or bad decisions; there is only survival. The sooner you realize that, the better.
markfrankel18

Why We Keep Playing the Lottery - Issue 4: The Unlikely - Nautilus - 1 views

nautil.us/...hy-we-keep-playing-the-lottery

ToK Lottery math psychology emotion

shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Nov 13 - Cached
  • Blind to the mathematical odds, we fall to the marketing gods.
  • “People just aren’t able to grasp 1 in 175 million,” Williams says. “It’s just beyond our experience—we have nothing in our evolutionary history that prepares us or primes us, no intellectual architecture, to try and grasp the remoteness of those odds.” And so we continue to play. And play.
  • It may seem easy to understand why we keep playing. As one trademarked lottery slogan goes, “Hey, you never know.” Somebody has to win. But to really understand why hundreds of millions of people play a game they will never win, a game with serious social consequences, you have to suspend logic and consider it through an alternate set of rules—rules written by neuroscientists, social psychologists, and economists. When the odds are so small that they are difficult to conceptualize, the risk we perceive has less to do with outcomes than with how much fear or hope we are feeling when we make a decision, how we “frame” and organize sets of logical facts, and even how we perceive ourselves in relation to others. Once you know the alternate set of rules, plumb the literature, and speak to the experts, the popularity of the lottery suddenly makes a lot more sense. It’s a game where reason and logic are rendered obsolete, and hope and dreams are on sale.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Selling the lottery dream is possible because, paradoxically, the probabilities of winning are so infinitesimal they become irrelevant. Our brains didn’t evolve to calculate complex odds. In our evolutionary past, the ability to distinguish between a region with a 1 percent or 10 percent chance of being attacked by a predator wouldn’t have offered much of an advantage. An intuitive and coarse method of categorization, such as “doesn’t happen,” “happen sometimes,” “happens most of time,” “always happens,” would have sufficed, explains Jane L. Risen, an associate professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business, who studies decision-making. Despite our advances in reason and mathematics, she says, we still often rely on crude calculations to make decisions, especially quick decisions like buying a lottery ticket.
  • In the conceptual vacuum created by incomprehensible odds, people are likely to experience magical thinking or superstition, play a hunch, or simply throw reason out the window all together, says George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon. “Most of the weird stuff that you see with decision-making and risk happens with small probabilities,” he says.
  • But even fantasy will drop its hold on us if we always lose—a point Hargrove grasped from the start. Research has shown that positive reinforcement is a key in virtually all of the successful lotteries, notes the University of Lethbridge’s Williams. Lotteries that allow players to choose combinations of four or five numbers from a total of 60 numbers are popular, he says, because many players experience “the near miss,” which creates the illusion that they came close to winning the multi-million dollar jackpot. Most players don’t realize, however, that “near-miss” is an illusion. The odds of winning get worse with each successive match.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - The surprising downsides of being clever - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...-the-downsides-of-being-clever

reason intelligence IQ wisdom bias psychology human sciences SocialScience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The first steps to answering these questions were taken almost a century ago, at the height of the American Jazz Age. At the time, the new-fangled IQ test was gaining traction, after proving itself in World War One recruitment centres, and in 1926, psychologist Lewis Terman decided to use it to identify and study a group of gifted children. Combing California’s schools for the creme de la creme, he selected 1,500 pupils with an IQ of 140 or more – 80 of whom had IQs above 170. Together, they became known as the “Termites”, and the highs and lows of their lives are still being studied to this day.
  • The harsh truth, however, is that greater intelligence does not equate to wiser decisions; in fact, in some cases it might make your choices a little more foolish. Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto has spent the last decade building tests for rationality, and he has found that fair, unbiased decision-making is largely independent of IQ. Consider the “my-side bias” – our tendency to be highly selective in the information we collect so that it reinforces our previous attitudes. The more enlightened approach would be to leave your assumptions at the door as you build your argument – but Stanovich found that smarter people are almost no more likely to do so than people with distinctly average IQs.
  • A tendency to rely on gut instincts rather than rational thought might also explain why a surprisingly high number of Mensa members believe in the paranormal; or why someone with an IQ of 140 is about twice as likely to max out their credit card.Indeed, Stanovich sees these biases in every strata of society. “There is plenty of dysrationalia – people doing irrational things despite more than adequate intelligence – in our world today,” he says. “The people pushing the anti-vaccination meme on parents and spreading misinformation on websites are generally of more than average intelligence and education.” Clearly, clever people can be dangerously, and foolishly, misguided.
markfrankel18

N.Y. Judge Grants Legal Rights To 2 Research Chimps : The Two-Way : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...al-rights-to-2-research-chimps

TOK ethics animals science

shared by markfrankel18 on 21 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • A New York judge has granted two research chimps the writ of habeas corpus — a move that allows them to challenge their detention. The decision, says Science magazine, effectively recognizes chimps as legal persons, marking the first time in U.S. history that an animal has been given that right.
markfrankel18

The Problem With History Classes - Atlantic Mobile - 1 views

m.theatlantic.com/...387823

TOK history

shared by markfrankel18 on 17 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Currently, most students learn history as a set narrative—a process that reinforces the mistaken idea that the past can be synthesized into a single, standardized chronicle of several hundred pages. This teaching pretends that there is a uniform collective story, which is akin to saying everyone remembers events the same. Yet, history is anything but agreeable. It is not a collection of facts deemed to be "official" by scholars on high. It is a collection of historians exchanging different, often conflicting analyses. And rather than vainly seeking to transcend the inevitable clash of memories, American students would be better served by descending into the bog of conflict and learning the many "histories" that compose the American national story.
  • History may be an attempt to memorialize and preserve the past, but it is not memory; memories can serve as primary sources, but they do not stand alone as history. A history is essentially a collection of memories, analyzed and reduced into meaningful conclusions—but that collection depends on the memories chosen.
  • Although, as Urist notes, the AP course is "designed to teach students to think like historians," my own experience in that class suggests that it fails to achieve that goal. The course’s framework has always served as an outline of important concepts aiming to allow educators flexibility in how to teach; it makes no reference to historiographical conflicts. Historiography was an epiphany for me because I had never before come face-to-face with how historians think and reason—how they construct an argument, what sources animate that approach, and how their position responds to other historians. When I took AP U.S. History, I jumbled these diverse histories into one indistinct narrative. Although the test involved open-ended essay questions, I was taught that graders were looking for a firm thesis—forcing students to adopt a side. The AP test also, unsurprisingly, rewards students who cite a wealth of supporting details. By the time I took the test in 2009, I was a master at "checking boxes," weighing political factors equally against those involving socioeconomics and ensuring that previously neglected populations like women and ethnic minorities received their due. I did not know that I was pulling ideas from different historiographical traditions. I still subscribed to the idea of a prevailing national narrative and served as an unwitting sponsor of synthesis, oblivious to the academic battles that made such synthesis impossible.  
Lawrence Hrubes

How English Ruined Indian Literature - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-ruined-indian-literature.html

language culture India indigenous knowledge systems English

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • “English is not a language in India,” a friend once told me. “It is a class.” This friend, an aspiring Bollywood actor, knew firsthand what it meant to be from the wrong class. Absurd as it must sound, he was frequently denied work in the Hindi film industry for not knowing English. “They want you to walk in the door speaking English. Then if you switch to Hindi, they like it. Otherwise they say, ‘the look doesn’t fit.’ ” My friend, who comes from a small town in the Hindi-speaking north, knew very well why his look didn’t fit. He knew, too, from the example of dozens of upper-middle class, English-speaking actors, that the industry would rather teach someone with no Hindi the language from scratch than hire someone like him.
  • India has had languages of the elite in the past — Sanskrit was one, Persian another. They were needed to unite an entity more linguistically diverse than Europe. But there was perhaps never one that bore such an uneasy relationship to the languages operating beneath it, a relationship the Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock has described as “a scorched-earth policy,” as English.India, if it is to speak to itself, will always need a lingua franca. But English, which re-enacts the colonial relationship, placing certain Indians in a position the British once occupied, does more than that. It has created a linguistic line as unbreachable as the color line once was in the United States.Continue reading the main story
  • That student, Sheshamuni Shukla, studied classical grammar in the Sanskrit department. He had spent over a decade mastering rules of grammar set down by the ancient Indian grammarians some 2,000 years before. He spoke pure and beautiful Hindi; in another country, a number of careers might have been open to him. But in India, without English, he was powerless. Despite his grand education, he would be lucky to end up as a teacher or a clerk in a government office. He felt himself a prisoner of language. “Without English, there is no self-confidence,” he said.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But around the time of my parents’ generation, a break began to occur. Middle-class parents started sending their children in ever greater numbers to convent and private schools, where they lost the deep bilingualism of their parents, and came away with English alone. The Indian languages never recovered. Growing up in Delhi in the 1980s, I spoke Hindi and Urdu, but had to self-consciously relearn them as an adult. Many of my background didn’t bother.
Andrea Barlien

The Two Faces of Science - 0 views

www.npr.org/...the-two-faces-of-science

science

shared by Andrea Barlien on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Andrea Barlien on 01 Nov 13
     
    "Science is unabashedly radical, willing to toss aside established wisdom and ideas to embrace mind-warping new concepts (if the data backs them up). Science is relentlessly conservative, deeply suspicious of new claims and determined to hold firm to cherished truths that have stood the test of time. As strange as it may seem, both these contradictory statements have held true throughout the 450-year history of "modern" science. In fact, they are what have given science the stability and creativity that root its cultural power."
markfrankel18

Problems with scientific research: How science goes wrong | The Economist - 1 views

www.economist.com/...print

TOK science research

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • But success can breed complacency. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity.
  • A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.
  • Science still commands enormous—if sometimes bemused—respect. But its privileged status is founded on the capacity to be right most of the time and to correct its mistakes when it gets things wrong. And it is not as if the universe is short of genuine mysteries to keep generations of scientists hard at work. The false trails laid down by shoddy research are an unforgivable barrier to understanding.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - iWonder - The Longer View: Great speeches - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/ztpqxsg

history language

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Churchill has been labelled as the greatest orator of the 20th Century but he was not a natural public speaker.The prime minister had a slight stutter and a lisp, prompting him to practise his delivery for hours. His wartime speeches are recognised as some of the greatest ever made but many of those famous soundbites were recorded after the event as the House of Commons was not wired for audio recording at the time. In 1951, the BBC persuaded Churchill to record some of his wartime communications for posterity but it was not always a smooth process.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Startups Love Moleskines - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...why-startups-love-moleskines

technology imagination memory writing

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Digital note-taking apps also leave their users only a finger-swipe away from e-mail or Candy Crush. An article on digital distraction in the June issue of The Harvard Business Review cites an estimate, by the Information Overload Research Group, that the problem is costing the U.S. economy nine hundred and ninety-seven billion dollars a year. “The digital world provides a lot of opportunity to waste a lot of time,” Allen said. A paper notebook, by contrast, is a walled garden, free from detours (except doodling), and requiring no learning curve. A growing body of research supports the idea that taking notes works better on paper than on laptops, in terms of comprehension, memorization, and other cognitive benefits.
markfrankel18

Science Isn't Broken | FiveThirtyEight - 0 views

fivethirtyeight.com/...science-isnt-broken

TOK science bias research statistics p-hacking

shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • If we’re going to rely on science as a means for reaching the truth — and it’s still the best tool we have — it’s important that we understand and respect just how difficult it is to get a rigorous result
  • Scientists’ overreliance on p-values has led at least one journal to decide it has had enough of them. In February, Basic and Applied Social Psychology announced that it will no longer publish p-values.
  • P-hacking and similar types of manipulations often arise from human biases. “You can do it in unconscious ways — I’ve done it in unconscious ways,” Simonsohn said. “You really believe your hypothesis and you get the data and there’s ambiguity about how to analyze it.” When the first analysis you try doesn’t spit out the result you want, you keep trying until you find one that does.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • From 2001 to 2009, the number of retractions issued in the scientific literature rose tenfold. It remains a matter of debate whether that’s because misconduct is increasing or is just easier to root out.
  • Science isn’t broken, nor is it untrustworthy. It’s just more difficult than most of us realize. We can apply more scrutiny to study designs and require more careful statistics and analytic methods, but that’s only a partial solution. To make science more reliable, we need to adjust our expectations of it.
  • Science is not a magic wand that turns everything it touches to truth. Instead, “science operates as a procedure of uncertainty reduction,” said Nosek, of the Center for Open Science. “The goal is to get less wrong over time.”
  • Some of these biases are helpful, at least to a point. Take, for instance, naive realism — the idea that whatever belief you hold, you believe it because it’s true. This mindset is almost essential for doing science, quantum mechanics researcher Seth Lloyd of MIT told me. “You have to believe that whatever you’re working on right now is the solution to give you the energy and passion you need to work.” But hypotheses are usually incorrect, and when results overturn a beloved idea, a researcher must learn from the experience and keep, as Lloyd described it, “the hopeful notion that, ‘OK, maybe that idea wasn’t right, but this next one will be.’”
markfrankel18

The Real Miracle of Acupuncture: That Anyone Still Believes In It | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...at-anyone-still-believes-in-it

acupuncture TOK science pseudoscience

shared by markfrankel18 on 01 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • It is often alleged that acupuncture is an ancient medical practice that has been refined and revered for thousands of years. In reality acupuncture is indeed an ancient medical practice, but it has in fact been in decline for thousands of years. In 1822 it was actually banned from the Imperial Medical Academy by Emperor Dao Guang. It wasn’t until 1966 that it was revived by Chairman Mao Zedong, but even he didn’t actually believe in it.
  • “Almost all trials of alternative medicines seem to end up with the conclusion that more research is needed. After more than 3,000 trials, that is dubious. ... Since it has proved impossible to find consistent evidence after more than 3,000 trials, it is time to give up.” — David Colquhoun
markfrankel18

Can Moral Disputes Be Resolved? - The New York Times - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...can-moral-disputes-be-resolved

TOK ethics

shared by markfrankel18 on 14 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • What makes moral disagreements so intractable? Ethics shouldn’t be as hard as rocket science. Can religion help? It might seem that if morality is a matter of obeying divine commands, we could make short work of moral disagreement, if only we knew which was the true faith. Of course, we don’t. But 2,300 years ago Plato showed that appeals to God’s wisdom, no matter which faith, is irrelevant to what makes for moral rightness.
  • What about reason? Many philosophers have argued that rational beings can reason their way to the right answers in morality. Kant and Mill both tried to do this, but ended up building incompatible moral theories by reasoning from two quite different starting points.
  • In recent years some thinkers have argued that the foundations of morality are given by what science, especially evolutionary biology, shows us about the conditions of human flourishing. These philosophers, social psychologists and evolutionary anthropologists argue that there was strong selection for a core set of moral norms that are so widespread they are absent only in psychopaths.
Lawrence Hrubes

Migration and Morality - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...migration-and-morality.html

ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Eduardo Porter makes a persuasive economic argument for Europe to be more welcoming to immigrants fleeing Africa and the Middle East instead of erecting barriers and fences to those escaping. But there is also the moral argument.
markfrankel18

Effectiveness of Talk Therapy Is Overstated, a Study Says - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...for-depression-overstated.html

TOK psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 02 Oct 15
     
    "Medical literature has overstated the benefits of talk therapy for depression, in part because studies with poor results have rarely made it into journals, researchers reported Wednesday."
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