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Lawrence Hrubes

Joshua Foer: John Quijada and Ithkuil, the Language He Invented : The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...121224fa_fact_foer

TOK language linguistic determinism

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Feb 14
     
    "Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like "knight." No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today. "Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn't mean they're optimal," John Quijada told me. Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be. In his preface, Quijada wrote that his "greater goal" was "to attempt the creation of what human beings, left to their own devices, would never create naturally, but rather only by conscious intellectual effort: an idealized language whose aim is the highest possible degree of logic, efficiency, detail, and accuracy in cognitive expression via spoken human language, while minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language." Ithkuil has two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise, capable of capturing nearly every thought that a human being could have while doing so in as few sounds as possible. "
markfrankel18

Why We Need Answers: The Theory of Cognitive closure : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...why-we-need-answers.html

TOK psychology terrorism closure

shared by markfrankel18 on 01 May 13 - No Cached
  • The human mind is incredibly averse to uncertainty and ambiguity; from an early age, we respond to uncertainty or lack of clarity by spontaneously generating plausible explanations. What’s more, we hold on to these invented explanations as having intrinsic value of their own. Once we have them, we don’t like to let them go.
  • Heightened need for cognitive closure can bias our choices, change our preferences, and influence our mood. In our rush for definition, we tend to produce fewer hypotheses and search less thoroughly for information. We become more likely to form judgments based on early cues (something known as impressional primacy), and as a result become more prone to anchoring and correspondence biases (using first impressions as anchors for our decisions and not accounting enough for situational variables). And, perversely, we may not even realize how much we are biasing our own judgments.
  • In 2010, Kruglanski and colleagues looked specifically at the need for cognitive closure as part of the response to terrorism.
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  • It’s a self-reinforcing loop: we search energetically, but once we’ve seized onto an idea we remain crystallized at that point. And if we’ve externally committed ourselves to our position by tweeting or posting or speaking? We crystallize our judgment all the more, so as not to appear inconsistent. It’s why false rumors start—and why they die such hard deaths. It’s a dynamic that can have consequences far nastier than a minor media snafu.
markfrankel18

How Our Minds Mislead Us: The Marvels and Flaws of Our Intuition | Brain Pickings - 1 views

www.brainpickings.org/...daniel-kahneman-intuition

TOK intuition perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • One of the most fascinating examples of heuristics and biases is what we call intuition — a complex cluster of cognitive processes, sometimes helpful but often misleading. Kahneman notes that thoughts come to mind in one of two ways: Either by “orderly computation,” which involves a series of stages of remembering rules and then applying them, or by perception, an evolutionary function that allows us to predict outcomes based on what we’re perceiving.
  • There is no sharp line between intuition and perception.
  • Coherence means that you’re going to adopt one interpretation in general. Ambiguity tends to be suppressed. This is part of the mechanism that you have here that ideas activate other ideas and the more coherent they are, the more likely they are to activate each other. Other things that don’t fit fall away by the wayside. We’re enforcing coherent interpretations. We see the world as much more coherent than it is.
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  • The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence [but] of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...the-stanford-prison-experiment

science SocialScience human sciences psychology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • On the morning of August 17, 1971, nine young men in the Palo Alto area received visits from local police officers. While their neighbors looked on, the men were arrested for violating Penal Codes 211 and 459 (armed robbery and burglary), searched, handcuffed, and led into the rear of a waiting police car. The cars took them to a Palo Alto police station, where the men were booked, fingerprinted, moved to a holding cell, and blindfolded. Finally, they were transported to the Stanford County Prison—also known as the Stanford University psychology department.
  • And yet the lessons of the Stanford Prison Experiment aren’t so clear-cut. From the beginning, the study has been haunted by ambiguity. Even as it suggests that ordinary people harbor ugly potentialities, it also testifies to the way our circumstances shape our behavior. Was the study about our individual fallibility, or about broken institutions? Were its findings about prisons, specifically, or about life in general? What did the Stanford Prison Experiment really show?
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.
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  • 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

Whole Foods is taking heat for selling rabbit - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...g-heat-for-selling-rabbit-meat

ethics animals pets classification

shared by markfrankel18 on 24 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • But worrying about data is probably just a distraction, because, ultimately, “pet” is a relative term—there are more fish in our home aquariums than there are pet dogs, and any category that lumps the two together feels inadequate.
  • Herzog started thinking about this 20 years ago, when he was sitting in a hotel bar having a beer with the psychologist and animal rights activist, Ken Shapiro. Herzog knew Shapiro was a vegan; Shapiro knew Herzog ate meat. Both men had read all of the same psychology and animal-rights literature, and both spent a lot of time working through the same philosophical questions. But somehow, they came to different conclusions about how to live their lives. + “Hal, I don’t get it: why aren’t you like us?” Shapiro suddenly asked. Herzog didn’t have an answer. He still doesn’t. + “I’ve been struggling with this for a long time,” Herzog says. “I can handle moral ambiguity. I can deal with it. So I don’t have that need for moral consistency that animal activists do.” He laughs a little. “And I know that their logic is better than mine, so I don’t even try arguing with them. They win in these arguments.” +
  • Rabbits, as this passer-by is implying, are widely consumed in other countries. Western Europeans love rabbit sausage, slow-cooked rabbit stews, and braised bunny dishes, while the Chinese—who account for 30% of global rabbit consumption—consider rabbit’s head a delicacy. + Rabbit was even a staple of the American diet at one time. It helped sustain the European transplants who migrated west across the frontier, and during World War II, eating rabbit was promoted as an act of patriotism akin to growing a victory garden. But as small farms gave way to large-scale operations, rabbit meat’s popularity melted away and other meats took over.
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  • Outside of the Union Square store, the activists are talking to a small crowd. “They refuse to test products on the very animals they turn around and sell as meat,” says a man wearing fuzzy bunny ears and holding a big sign. + This inconsistency presents a valid question: If I decide there is something ethically wrong with dripping chemicals into a rabbit’s eye to test its toxicity, is it hypocritical to eat that animal? + Hal Herzog talks about the relative ability of an individual to live with moral inconsistency, but perhaps the rabbit debate is less about morality and instead has to do with the categorical boundaries we use to talk about the debate in the first place.
markfrankel18

The Aftershocks - Matter - Medium - 2 views

medium.com/...the-aftershocks-7966d0cdec66

TOK science language probability

shared by markfrankel18 on 31 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Seven of Italy’s top scientists were convicted of manslaughter following a catastrophic quake. Has the country criminalized science?
  • “I am willing to go to jail for this point,” he thunders. “A scientist can write whatever opinions he wants in a scientific paper and it is off limits to a judge.”Even in the land of Berlusconi and the judicial circus of cases like Amanda Knox’s, convicting a bunch of geoscientists in the wake of a natural disaster marks a new low. What would Galileo say? But what happened in L’Aquila is a window onto how we think about, communicate, and live with risk, and about impediments to clear thinking that afflict us all.
  • Years later, Kent published an article in Studies in Intelligence that used the Yugoslavia report to illustrate the problem of ambiguity, particularly when talking about uncertainty.
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  • Conventional wisdom tells us that people are terrible with numbers. But as Kent realized back in the 1950s, we are even worse with words. In one study that Fischhoff co-authored, people had trouble understanding a 30-percent chance of rain. It wasn’t the probability that tripped them up, but the word: rain. Are we talking drizzle or downpour? All day or just part of the day? And over what area, exactly?
Lawrence Hrubes

International School of Prague: Mission & Strategic Plan - 2 views

www.isp.cz/page.cfm

TOK language ambiguity

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Feb 14
     
    "Purposeful: In developing a deep impulse and capacity for life-long learning, we learn to make considered choices and work towards meaningful goals, which provide direction, focus and purpose to our lives."
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Pluto Is a Planet, and Eris Is Too - 0 views

www.space.com/-a-planet-and-eris-is-too.html

science definitions planet space classification reason astronomy

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The International Astronomical Union (IAU) got it wrong. Our solar system has 10 planets. As NASA's New Horizons spacecraft glides its way to the cold outer reaches of our solar system to take the first-ever up-close look at Pluto, the time is right to revise the International Astronomical Union (IAU)'s 2006 definition of a planet, which resulted in Pluto's "demotion" from planet to ambiguous dwarf-planet status.
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