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markfrankel18

The Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind - NYTimes.com - 0 views

newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/...mind-may-just-be-a-fuller-mind

TOK mind psychology human sciences

shared by markfrankel18 on 30 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Now comes a new kind of challenge to the evidence of a cognitive decline, from a decidedly digital quarter: data mining, based on theories of information processing. In a paper published in Topics in Cognitive Science, a team of linguistic researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany used advanced learning models to search enormous databases of words and phrases. Since educated older people generally know more words than younger people, simply by virtue of having been around longer, the experiment simulates what an older brain has to do to retrieve a word. And when the researchers incorporated that difference into the models, the aging “deficits” largely disappeared.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Degenerate art: Why Hitler hated modernism - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-24819441

arts TOK history painting abstract

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 27 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • This week it was revealed that a huge stash of modern art had been found in a flat in Munich. Many of the paintings were considered "degenerate" by the Nazis, who staged an exhibition especially to ridicule them. Why did Hitler hate abstract art so much?
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.
markfrankel18

The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ionality-and-intelligence.html

TOK bias reason intuition

shared by markfrankel18 on 17 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • The major finding was that irrationality — or what Professor Stanovich called “dysrationalia” — correlates relatively weakly with I.Q. A person with a high I.Q. is about as likely to suffer from dysrationalia as a person with a low I.Q.
  • Based on this evidence, Professor Stanovich and colleagues have introduced the concept of the rationality quotient, or R.Q. If an I.Q. test measures something like raw intellectual horsepower (abstract reasoning and verbal ability), a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ionality-and-intelligence.html

rationalism reason

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • ARE you intelligent — or rational? The question may sound redundant, but in recent years researchers have demonstrated just how distinct those two cognitive attributes actually are.
  • If an I.Q. test measures something like raw intellectual horsepower (abstract reasoning and verbal ability), a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.
markfrankel18

It's not just climate-change deniers-conservatives and liberals distrust science equall... - 1 views

qz.com/...erals-distrust-science-equally

TOK bias reason science

shared by markfrankel18 on 18 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • we not only discount or dismiss scientific information inconsistent with our ideology; we may also distrust and attack its source(s).
  • Furthermore, and contrary to popular belief, this biased processing is most likely to occur among people who have greater cognitive and reasoning capabilities–not less. Where the two sets of explanations for ideological divides on science differ is on how motivated reasoning leads to bias.
Lawrence Hrubes

James Flynn: Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents' | Video on TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...her_than_our_grandparents.html

TOK IQ intelligence abstraction cognition morality politics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 30 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 30 Sep 13
     
    "It's called the "Flynn effect" -- the fact that each generation scores higher on an IQ test than the generation before it. Are we actually getting smarter, or just thinking differently? In this fast-paced spin through the cognitive history of the 20th century, moral philosopher James Flynn suggests that changes in the way we think have had surprising (and not always positive) consequences. James Flynn challenges our fundamental assumptions about intelligence."
Lawrence Hrubes

▶ UPDATED My Kid Could Paint That trailer - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

TOK art painting abstract modern child money ethics skill

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Oct 13 - Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Oct 13
     
    "In the span of only a few months, 4-year-old Marla Olmstead rocketed from total obscurity into international renown -- and sold over $300,000 dollars worth of paintings. She was compared to Kandinsky and Pollock, and called "a budding Picasso." "
Lawrence Hrubes

my kid could paint that part 1- esp. subs on Vimeo - 0 views

vimeo.com/6515653

TOK art painting child skill ethics money abstract modern

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Oct 13
     
    "A look at the work and surprising success of a four-year-old girl whose paintings have been compared to the likes of Picasso and has raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars"
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

The Knoedler and Company Rothko Fake, and Why We Get Taken in by Forgeries : The New Yo... - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...r-and-company-rothko-fake.html

arts TOK

shared by markfrankel18 on 09 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • “If a fake is good enough to fool experts, then it’s good enough to give the rest of us pleasure, even insight,” the art critic Blake Gopnik wrote in an essay, “In Praise of Art Forgeries,” in the Times last Sunday. It’s a cute argument that I reject, but which gets me thinking.
  • Well, because it’s not a “work” at all but a pastiche whose one and only intention is to deceive. Its maker—reportedly, a guy in a garage on Long Island—wasn’t concerned with emulating the historical Rothko but, instead, with mirroring the taste of present-day Rothko fanciers. Fakes are contemporary portraits of past styles. No great talent is required, just a modicum of handiness and some art-critical acuity. A forger needn’t master the original artist’s skill, only the look of it. Indeed, especially in a freewheeling mode like Abstract Expressionism, a bit of awkwardness, incidental to the branded appearance, may impress a smitten chump as a marker of sincerity—even as something new and endearing about a beloved master. Time destroys fakes by revealing features of the era—the climate of taste—in which they were made.
markfrankel18

Is the Field of Psychology Biased Against Conservatives? - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...-psychology-biased-republicans

TOK psychology bias

shared by markfrankel18 on 01 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Perhaps even more potentially problematic than negative personal experience is the possibility that bias may influence research quality: its design, execution, evaluation, and interpretation. In 1975, Stephen Abramowitz and his colleagues sent a fake manuscript to eight hundred reviewers from the American Psychological Association—four hundred more liberal ones (fellows of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and editors of the Journal of Social Issues) and four hundred less liberal (social and personality psychologists who didn’t fit either of the other criteria). The paper detailed the psychological well-being of student protesters who had occupied a college administration building and compared them to their non-activist classmates. In one version, the study found that the protesters were more psychologically healthy. In another, it was the more passive group that emerged as mentally healthier. The rest of the paper was identical. And yet, the two papers were not evaluated identically. A strong favorable reaction was three times more likely when the paper echoed one’s political beliefs—that is, when the more liberal reviewers read the version that portrayed the protesters as healthier.
  • All these studies and analyses are classic examples of confirmation bias: when it comes to questions of subjective belief, we more easily believe the things that mesh with our general world view. When something clashes with our vision of how things should be, we look immediately for the flaws.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Ants Handle Traffic Better Than You Do : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...dle-traffic-better-than-you-do

TOK science physics animals

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Could studying ants reveal clues to reducing highway traffic jams? Physicist Apoorva Nagar at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology thinks the answer is yes. Nagar says he got interested in the topic when he came across a study by German and Indian researchers showing that ants running along a path were able to maintain a steady speed even when there were a large number of ants on the path. Nagar says there are three main reasons ants don't jam up. Number one, ants don't have egos. They don't show off by zooming past people. "The second thing is, they do not mind a few accidents, or collisions," say Nagar. So unless there's a serious pileup, they just keep going.
  • The third reason, he says, is that ants seem to get more disciplined when paths get crowded, running in straighter lines, and varying their speed less. They're less likely to make unexpected moves in this sort of heavy traffic. It's the kind of steady control you see when a computer is controlling a car rather than a human. There's less variability unless it's absolutely called for. Nagar felt this kind of behavior could be explained by something called the Langevin equation, an equation physicists use when describing the movement of liquids, or how individual atoms behave in a lattice.
Lawrence Hrubes

Is Bilingualism Really an Advantage? - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...ilingual-advantage-aging-brain

TOK language human sciences social studies bias

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 26 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Many modern language researchers agree with that premise. Not only does speaking multiple languages help us to communicate but bilingualism (or multilingualism) may actually confer distinct advantages to the developing brain. Because a bilingual child switches between languages, the theory goes, she develops enhanced executive control, or the ability to effectively manage what are called higher cognitive processes, such as problem-solving, memory, and thought. She becomes better able to inhibit some responses, promote others, and generally emerges with a more flexible and agile mind. It’s a phenomenon that researchers call the bilingual advantage.
  • For the first half of the twentieth century, researchers actually thought that bilingualism put a child at a disadvantage, something that hurt her I.Q. and verbal development. But, in recent years, the notion of a bilingual advantage has emerged from research to the contrary, research that has seemed both far-reaching and compelling, much of it coming from the careful work of the psychologist Ellen Bialystok. For many tasks, including ones that involve working memory, bilingual speakers seem to have an edge. In a 2012 review of the evidence, Bialystok showed that bilinguals did indeed show enhanced executive control, a quality that has been linked, among other things, to better academic performance. And when it comes to qualities like sustained attention and switching between tasks effectively, bilinguals often come out ahead. It seems fairly evident then that, given a choice, you should raise your child to speak more than one language.
  • Systematically, de Bruin combed through conference abstracts from a hundred and sixty-nine conferences, between 1999 and 2012, that had to do with bilingualism and executive control. The rationale was straightforward: conferences are places where people present in-progress research. They report on studies that they are running, initial results, initial thoughts. If there were a systematic bias in the field against reporting negative results—that is, results that show no effects of bilingualism—then there should be many more findings of that sort presented at conferences than actually become published. That’s precisely what de Bruin found. At conferences, about half the presented results provided either complete or partial support for the bilingual advantage on certain tasks, while half provided partial or complete refutation. When it came to the publications that appeared after the preliminary presentation, though, the split was decidedly different. Sixty-eight per cent of the studies that demonstrated a bilingual advantage found a home in a scientific journal, compared to just twenty-nine per cent of those that found either no difference or a monolingual edge. “Our overview,” de Bruin concluded, “shows that there is a distorted image of the actual study outcomes on bilingualism, with researchers (and media) believing that the positive effect of bilingualism on nonlinguistic cognitive processes is strong and unchallenged.”
Lawrence Hrubes

The Power of Touch - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...power-touch

touch sensory perception perception science psychology health brain emotion experiment neuroscience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • At a home in the Romanian city of Iași, Carlson measured cortisol levels in a group of children ranging from two months to three years old. The caregiver-to-child ratio was twenty to one, and most of the children had experienced severe neglect and sensory deprivation. Multiple times a day, Carlson took saliva samples, tracking how cortisol levels fluctuated in response to stressful events. The children, she found, were hormonally off kilter. Under normal conditions, cortisol peaks just before we wake up and then tapers off; in the leagăne infants, it peaked in the afternoon and remained elevated. Those levels, in turn, correlated with faltering performance on numerous cognitive and physical assessments. Then Carlson tried an intervention modelled on the work of Joseph Sparling, a child-development specialist, and the outcomes changed. When half of the orphans received more touching from more caregivers—an increase in hugs, holding, and the making of small adjustments to clothes and hair—their performance markedly improved. They grew bigger, stronger, and more responsive, both cognitively and emotionally, and they reacted better to stress.
  • Touch is the first of the senses to develop in the human infant, and it remains perhaps the most emotionally central throughout our lives. While many researchers have appreciated its power, others have been more circumspect. Writing in 1928, John B. Watson, one of the originators of the behaviorist school of psychology, urged parents to maintain a physical boundary between themselves and their children: “Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job on a difficult task.” Watson acknowledged that children must be bathed, clothed, and cared for, but he believed that excessive touching—that is, caressing—would create “mawkish” adults. An untouched child, he argued, “enters manhood so bulwarked with stable work and emotional habits that no adversity can quite overwhelm him.” Now we know that, to attain that result, he should have suggested the opposite: touch, as frequent and as caring as possible
  • And yet touch is rarely purely physical. Field’s more recent work has shown that the brain is very good at distinguishing an emotional touch from a similar, but non-emotional, one. A massage chair is not a masseuse. Certain touch receptors exist solely to convey emotion to the brain, rather than sensory information about the external environment. A recent study shows that we can identify other people’s basic emotions based on how they touch us, even when they are separated from us by a curtain. And the emotions that are communicated by touch can go on to shape our behavior. One recent review found that, even if we have no conscious memory of a touch—a hand on the shoulder, say—we may be more likely to agree to a request, respond more (or less) positively to a person or product, or form closer bonds with someone.
markfrankel18

Why Are Certain Smells So Hard to Identify? - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...naming-scents-uneducated-nose

TOK perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A recent paper in the journal Cognition, for instance, quipped that if people were as bad at naming sights as they are at naming scents, “they would be diagnosed as aphasic and sent for medical help.” The paper quoted scattershot attempts by participants in a previous study to label the smell of lemon: “air freshener,” “bathroom freshener,” “magic marker,” “candy,” “lemon-fresh Pledge,” “some kind of fruit.” This sort of difficulty seems to have very little to do, however, with the nose’s actual capabilities. Last spring, an article in the journal Science reported that we are capable of discriminating more than a trillion different odors. (A biologist at Caltech subsequently disputed the finding, arguing that it contained mathematical errors, though he acknowledged the “richness of human olfactory experience.”) Whence, then, our bumbling translation of scent into speech?
  • That question was the subject, two weekends ago, of an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium at the San Jose Convention Center (which smelled, pleasantly but nonspecifically, of clean carpet). The preëminence of eye over nose was apparent even in the symposium abstract, which touted data that “shed new light” and opened up “yet new vistas.” (Reading it over during a phone interview, Jonathan Reinarz, a professor at the University of Birmingham, in England, and the author of “Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell,” asked me, “What’s wrong with a little bit of inscent?”) Nevertheless, the people on the panel were decidedly pro-smell. “One thing that everyone at this symposium will agree on is that human olfactory discriminatory power is quite excellent, if you give it a chance,” Jay Gottfried, a Northwestern University neuroscientist, told me. Noam Sobel, of the Weizmann Institute of Science, used a stark hypothetical to drive home the ways in which smell can shape behavior: “If I offer you a beautiful mate, of the gender of your choice, who smells of sewage, versus a less attractive mate who smells of sweet spice, with whom would you mate?”
  • But difficulty with talking about smell is not universal. Asifa Majid, a psycholinguist at Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, and the organizer of the A.A.A.S. symposium, studies a group of around a thousand hunter-gatherers in northern Malaysia and southern Thailand who speak a language called Jahai. In one analysis, Majid and her colleague Niclas Burenhult found that speakers of Jahai were as good at classifying scratch-and-sniff cards as they were at classifying color chips; their English-speaking counterparts, meanwhile, tended to give meandering and disparate descriptions of scents. At the symposium, Majid presented new research involving around thirty Jahai and thirty Dutch people. In that study, the Jahai named smells in an average of two seconds, whereas the Dutch took thirteen—“and this is just to say, ‘Uh, I don’t know,’ ” Majid joked onstage.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Olfaction experts each have their pet theories as to why our scent lexicon is so lacking. Jonathan Reinarz blames the lingering effects of the Enlightenment, which, he says, placed a special emphasis on vision. Jay Gottfried, who is something of a nasal prodigy—he once guessed, on the basis of perfume residue, that one of his grad students had gotten back together with an ex-girlfriend—blames physiology. Whereas visual information is subject to elaborate processing in many areas of the brain, his research suggests, odor information is parsed in a much less intricate way, notably by the limbic system, which is associated with emotion and memory formation. This area, Gottfried said, takes “a more crude and unpolished approach to the process of naming,” and the brain’s language centers can have trouble making use of such unrefined input. Meanwhile, Donald A. Wilson, a neuroscientist at New York University School of Medicine, blames biases acquired in childhood.
markfrankel18

Tuning Out Digital Buzz, for an Intimate Communion With Art - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...timate-communion-with-art.html

TOK arts

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A recent scientific study published in the journal Acta Psychologica suggests that people enjoy art more and remember it longer when they see it “live” in museums, as opposed to online.Continue reading the main story We don’t need science to tell us why this might be. Museums, like churches and libraries, are designed to enhance specific activities — praying, reading, looking — through the manipulation of architecture, lighting, object placement and ritualized behavior. Very different designs — from the processional layout of the Metropolitan Museum to the labyrinthine tangle of the new Fondation Louis Vuitton art center in Paris — can be equally effective. And some don’t work.
  • Cellphone snapshots, the souvenir postcards of the present, are fine, and that they can be widely, even endlessly sent and shared is great. The digital presence of entire museum collections online is a tremendous thing, a gift of pleasure and knowledge to museumgoers, scholars and artists alike.But a snapshot is frozen in time. An archive of reproductions isn’t alive. And the further we distance ourselves from art itself, from being in front of it with all filters gone, life is what we lose — art’s and ours.
markfrankel18

Obama and the Crusaders - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...obama-crusaders

TOK history

shared by markfrankel18 on 14 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The forces in history are always multiple, complex, and contingent, much more so than the fables make it seem. The forces in any particular historical event are always almost infinitely divisible into smaller and often contradictory parts, with a lot of fuzzy cases and leg room.
  • Ideologies are abstract; the acts they inspire are real.
  • The job of the good historian is to balance understanding with indictment; it’s the polemicist who tries to use history only to plead innocent.
Lawrence Hrubes

How Children Learn To Read - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...how-children-learn-read

TOK education language writing science neuroscience brain causation correlation

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 14 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Why is it easy for some people to learn to read, and difficult for others? It’s a tough question with a long history. We know that it’s not just about raw intelligence, nor is it wholly about repetition and dogged persistence. We also know that there are some conditions that, effort aside, can hold a child back. Socioeconomic status, for instance, has been reliably linked to reading achievement. And, regardless of background, children with lower general verbal ability and those who have difficulty with phonetic processing seem to struggle. But what underlies those differences? How do we learn to translate abstract symbols into meaningful sounds in the first place, and why are some children better at it than others?
  • When Hoeft took into account all of the explanatory factors that had been linked to reading difficulty in the past—genetic risk, environmental factors, pre-literate language ability, and over-all cognitive capacity—she found that only one thing consistently predicted how well a child would learn to read. That was the growth of white matter in one specific area of the brain, the left temporoparietal region. The amount of white matter that a child arrived with in kindergarten didn’t make a difference. But the change in volume between kindergarten and third grade did.
  • She likens it to the Dr. Seuss story of Horton and the egg. Horton sits on an egg that isn’t his own, and, because of his dedication, the creature that eventually hatches looks half like his mother, and half like the elephant. In this particular case, Hoeft and her colleagues can’t yet separate cause and effect: Were certain children predisposed to develop strong white-matter pathways that then helped them to learn to read, or was superior instruction and a rich environment prompting the building of those pathways?
markfrankel18

"Just Babies": Is morality hard-wired? - Salon.com - 1 views

www.salon.com/..._babies_is_morality_hard_wired

ToK ethics psychology babies

shared by markfrankel18 on 18 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • “Just Babies” surveys the subjects of empathy and compassion (not the same thing: The first is displeasure felt at witnessing someone else’s suffering, while the second is the urge to alleviate it), concepts of fairness and justice and a basic sense of right and wrong. These are universal moral concerns: Lying, breaking promises, murder and other assaults are regarded everywhere as bad. But what about actions that can be viewed as victimless, most especially sexual transgressions, such as consensual incest between adult siblings?
  • He’s particularly insightful on “trolley problems” a currently much-discussed form of thought experiment in which the subject is asked to make a choice between letting a runaway train kill five individuals strapped to the tracks or flipping a switch that will divert it to a track on which only one person is strapped. Most people say they’d flip the switch, a utilitarian position in which it’s permissible to cause one death in the course of saving five. But most people will also stop short of physically pushing a very fat man onto the tracks in order to stop the train, even when the tradeoff in lives remains the same.
  • What such problems overlook, Bloom argues, is the fact that human morality is not grounded in abstract experiments involving strangers, but rather evolved in a context of kinship and tribal bonds.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “We are not natural-born racists,” he writes, and sexual disgust is, he believes, a subset of our general distaste for the body and its messy functions. Many religions, for example, also place great emphasis on ritual bodily purity, from prohibitions on certain foods to particular forms of washing to the handling of the dead. But the forms themselves are unstable, as illustrated by an old Greek story about two different tribes, each equally appalled by the way the other treats the corpses of their fathers.
  • Bloom, therefore, is a skeptic of what he calls “the current trend in psychology and neuroscience to downplay rational deliberation in favor of gut feelings and unconscious motivations.”
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