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Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - Science & Environment - Why science needs imagination and beauty - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...cret-to-thinking-like-a-genius

TOK science physics imagination beauty

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Nov 13
     
    "Albert Einstein famously said: "Imagination is more important than knowledge." They're both important, says physicist and Nobel Prize recipient Frank Wilczek, but knowledge without imagination is barren. Take his subject of theoretical physics. As Wilczek says a lot of what you do is to try to understand Mother Nature's mind and her sense of beauty to see how the laws of physics could be more beautiful."
markfrankel18

Creativity Creep - The New Yorker - 3 views

www.newyorker.com/...creativity-creep

creativity TOK arts language

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 Sep 14 - Cached
  • How did we come to care so much about creativity? The language surrounding it, of unleashing, unlocking, awakening, developing, flowing, and so on, makes it sound like an organic and primordial part of ourselves which we must set free—something with which it’s natural to be preoccupied. But it wasn’t always so; people didn’t always care so much about, or even think in terms of, creativity.
  • It was Romanticism, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which took the imagination and elevated it, giving us the “creative imagination.”
  • How did creativity transform from a way of being to a way of doing? The answer, essentially, is that it became a scientific subject, rather than a philosophical one.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • All of this measuring and sorting has changed the way we think about creativity. For the Romantics, creativity’s center of gravity was in the mind. But for us, it’s in whatever the mind decides to share—that is, in the product. It’s not enough for a person to be “imaginative” or “creative” in her own consciousness. We want to know that the product she produces is, in some sense, “actually” creative; that the creative process has come to a workable conclusion. To today’s creativity researchers, the “self-styled creative person,” with his inner, unverifiable, possibly unproductive creativity, is a kind of bogeyman; a great deal of time is spent trampling on the scarf of the lone, Romantic genius. Instead, attention is paid to the systems of influence, partnership, power, funding, and reception that surround creativity—the social structures, in other words, that enable managers to reap the fruits of creative labor. Often, this is imagined to be some sort of victory over Romanticism and its fusty, pretentious, élitist ideas about creativity.
  • But this kind of thinking misses the point of the Romantic creative imagination. The Romantics weren’t obsessed with who created what, because they thought you could be creative without “creating” anything other than the liveliness in your own head.
  • It sounds bizarre, in some ways, to talk about creativity apart from the creation of a product. But that remoteness and strangeness is actually a measure of how much our sense of creativity has taken on the cast of our market-driven age
  • Thus the rush, in my pile of creativity books, to reconceive every kind of life style as essentially creative—to argue that you can “unleash your creativity” as an investor, a writer, a chemist, a teacher, an athlete, or a coach.
  • Among the many things we lost when we abandoned the Romantic idea of creativity, the most valuable may have been the idea of creativity’s stillness. If you’re really creative, really imaginative, you don’t have to make things. You just have to live, observe, think, and feel.
Lawrence Hrubes

Reading With Imagination - NYTimes.com - 2 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...reading-with-imagination

arts literature imagination

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Fiction, which I believe suffers most from modern readership, is by definition not factual. It may be about the real world and it may try to illuminate some facts about the real world or how real people behave in it or, as is so often the case in modern literature, it may also be about the impossibility of portraying any such reality since the very nature of art is artifice. Primarily, however, fiction (and biography, essay, history, memoir only perhaps to a lesser degree) is a creative act, an act of the author’s imagination and likewise, ideally, it should be read with imagination.
Lawrence Hrubes

Imagining the Lives of Others - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...imagining-the-lives-of-others

imagination psychology politics literature

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 09 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • What could be more exhilarating than experiencing the world through the perspective of another person? In “Remembrance of Things Past,” Marcel Proust’s narrator says that the only true voyage of discovery is not to visit other lands but “to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds.” This is one of the central projects of the humanities; it’s certainly part of the pleasure we get from art and literature.
  • People are often highly confident in their ability to see things as others do, but their attempts are typically barely better than chance. Other studies find that people who are instructed to take the perspectives of others tend to do worse, not better, at judging their thoughts and emotions.
  • There are certain limits, however, to how far we can go. The philosopher Laurie Paul, in her book “Transformative Experience,” argues that it’s impossible to actually imagine what it would be like to have certain deeply significant experiences, such as becoming a parent, changing your religion or fighting a war. The same lack of access applies to our understanding of others. If I can’t know what it would be like for me to fight in a war, how can I expect to understand what it was like for someone else to have fought in a war? If I can’t understand what it would be like to become poor, how can I know what it’s like for someone else to be poor?
Lawrence Hrubes

Karen Thompson Walker: What fear can teach us | Video on TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...er_what_fear_can_teach_us.html

TOK emotion fear imagination

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 26 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 26 Nov 13
     
    "Imagine you're a shipwrecked sailor adrift in the enormous Pacific. You can choose one of three directions and save yourself and your shipmates -- but each choice comes with a fearful consequence too. How do you choose?"
Andrea Barlien

What happens in your brain when you make a memory? | Education | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-brain-when-you-make-a-memory

memory WOK

shared by Andrea Barlien on 17 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Andrea Barlien on 17 Sep 15
     
    You might imagine memory is a Santa's sack of life events and the first half of jokes. You would be wrong. Neuroscientist Dean Burnett explains all in our new series, Use your head
  • Andrea Barlien on 17 Sep 15
     
    You might imagine memory is a Santa's sack of life events and the first half of jokes. You would be wrong. Neuroscientist Dean Burnett explains all in our new series, Use your head
Lawrence Hrubes

If Animals Have Rights, Should Robots? - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...mals-have-rights-should-robots

ethics animals robots technology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 01 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • People projected thoughts into Harambe’s mind. “Our tendency is to see our actions through human lenses,” a neuroscientist named Kurt Gray told the network as the frenzy peaked. “We can’t imagine what it’s like to actually be a gorilla. We can only imagine what it’s like to be us being a gorilla.” This simple fact is responsible for centuries of ethical dispute. One Harambe activist might believe that killing a gorilla as a safeguard against losing human life is unjust due to our cognitive similarity: the way gorillas think is a lot like the way we think, so they merit a similar moral standing. Another might believe that gorillas get their standing from a cognitive dissimilarity: because of our advanced powers of reason, we are called to rise above the cat-eat-mouse game, to be special protectors of animals, from chickens to chimpanzees. (Both views also support untroubled omnivorism: we kill animals because we are but animals, or because our exceptionalism means that human interests win.) These beliefs, obviously opposed, mark our uncertainty about whether we’re rightful peers or masters among other entities with brains.
  • The big difference, they argue, is “sentience.” Many animals have it; zygotes and embryos don’t. Colb and Dorf define sentience as “the ability to have subjective experiences,” which is a little tricky, because animal subjectivity is what’s hard for us to pin down. A famous paper called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, points out that even if humans were to start flying, eating bugs, and getting around by sonar they would not have a bat’s full experience, or the batty subjectivity that the creature had developed from birth.
  • If animals suffer, the philosopher Peter Singer noted in “Animal Liberation” (1975), shouldn’t we include them in the calculus of minimizing pain? Such an approach to peership has advantages: it establishes the moral claims of animals without projecting human motivations onto them. But it introduces other problems. Bludgeoning your neighbor is clearly worse than poisoning a rat.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Face blindness: Seeing but not seeing - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...health-24385650

TOK perception vision brain neuroscience blindness

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Oct 13
     
    "Imagine that suddenly you cannot recognise your mother, your partner, your child. You can see them but your brain cannot process the information - you don't know whether they are smiling, or understand their emotions."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC World Service - The Why Factor, Swearing - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/p01j2vps

TOK language swearing

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 11 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 11 Oct 13
     
    "#*?@! %$&@*! Why do a few, select words have such power to shock and offend? With help from swearing historian Melissa Mohr, Mike Williams traces the history of taboo language from Roman times to the present day and hears how cultural taboos have shaped offensive language down the centuries. He talks to American psychologist Professor Tim Jay about why we swear and discovers that children start using profane language at a much earlier age than you might imagine. And he meets psychologist Dr Richard Stephens who persuades him to take part in two swearing experiments, one of them rather painful, with some surprising results. "
Lawrence Hrubes

How Green Could New York Be? - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...how-green-could-new-york-be

imagination environment architecture

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 20 May 15 - No Cached
  • Michael Sorkin, a globe-trotting sixty-six-year-old architect, urban planner, and critic, has published fourteen books and has designed buildings and public spaces from the Rockaways to Abu Dhabi. Currently, one of his biggest projects is a large urban complex in Xi’an, China. Meanwhile, in New York, where Sorkin lives, he runs Terreform, a non-profit devoted to architecture that is both urban and green. Two years ago, Terreform began a project called New York City (Steady) State, which investigates the possibility of “urban self-reliance”; its goal is to figure out what an optimally self-sufficient N.Y.C. might look like. By concretely imagining an ideal city, the thinking goes, you make a better one more likely. How would such a city function? And what would it be like to live on its leafy and fruitful streets?
Lawrence Hrubes

Elizabeth Kolbert: Why Are We So Busy? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...140526crbo_books_kolbert

economics human sciences SocialScience wealth leisure TOK gender

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 24 May 14 - No Cached
  • n the winter of 1928, John Maynard Keynes composed a short essay that took the long view. It was titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” and in it Keynes imagined what the world would look like a century hence. By 2028, he predicted, the “standard of life” in Europe and the United States would be so improved that no one would need to worry about making money. “Our grandchildren,” Keynes reckoned, would work about three hours a day, and even this reduced schedule would represent more labor than was actually necessary.
  • According to Keynes, the nineteenth century had unleashed such a torrent of technological innovation—“electricity, petrol, steel, rubber, cotton, the chemical industries, automatic machinery and the methods of mass production”—that further growth was inevitable. The size of the global economy, he forecast, would increase sevenfold in the following century, and this, in concert with ever greater “technical improvements,” would usher in the fifteen-hour week.
  • Four-fifths of the way through Keynes’s century, half of his vision has been realized. Since “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” was published, the U.S. gross domestic product has grown, in real terms, by a factor of sixteen, and G.D.P. per capita by a factor of six. And what holds for the United States goes for the rest of the world, too: in the past eighty years, the global economy has grown at a similar rate.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But if we have become, in aggregate, as rich as Keynes imagined, this wealth has not translated into leisure. (When was the last time someone you know complained about having too little to do?) In terms of economic theory, this is puzzling. In terms of everyday life, it’s enough to, well, induce a nervous breakdown.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - The greatest mistranslations ever - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...-greatest-mistranslations-ever

TOK language translation history culture politics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 03 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 03 Feb 15
     
    "Life on Mars When Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli began mapping Mars in 1877, he inadvertently sparked an entire science-fiction oeuvre. The director of Milan's Brera Observatory dubbed dark and light areas on the planet's surface 'seas' and 'continents' - labelling what he thought were channels with the Italian word 'canali'. Unfortunately, his peers translated that as 'canals', launching a theory that they had been created by intelligent lifeforms on Mars. Convinced that the canals were real, US astronomer Percival Lowell mapped hundreds of them between 1894 and 1895. Over the following two decades he published three books on Mars with illustrations showing what he thought were artificial structures built to carry water by a brilliant race of engineers. One writer influenced by Lowell's theories published his own book about intelligent Martians. In The War of the Worlds, which first appeared in serialised form in 1897, H G Wells described an invasion of Earth by deadly Martians and spawned a sci-fi subgenre. A Princess of Mars, a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs published in 1911, also features a dying Martian civilisation, using Schiaparelli's names for features on the planet. While the water-carrying artificial trenches were a product of language and a feverish imagination, astronomers now agree that there aren't any channels on the surface of Mars. According to Nasa, "The network of crisscrossing lines covering the surface of Mars was only a product of the human tendency to see patterns, even when patterns do not exist. When looking at a faint group of dark smudges, the eye tends to connect them with straight lines." "
markfrankel18

The cold, hard truth about the ice bucket challenge - Quartz - 2 views

qz.com/...about-the-ice-bucket-challenge

TOK ethics charity

shared by markfrankel18 on 15 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • People who had previously purchased a green product were significantly more likely to both lie and steal than those who had purchased the conventional product. Their demonstration of ethical behavior subconsciously gave them license to act unethically when the chance arose. + Amazingly, even just saying that you’d do something good can cause the moral self-licensing effect. In another study, half the participants were asked to imagine helping a foreign student who had asked for assistance in understanding a lecture. They subsequently gave significantly less to charity when given the chance to do so than the other half of the participants, who had not been asked to imagine helping another student.
Lawrence Hrubes

Rage Against The Machines | FiveThirtyEight - 0 views

fivethirtyeight.com/...rage-against-the-machines

TOK prediction computers reason technology imagination chess

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 16 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Computers are very, very fast at making calculations. Moreover, they can be counted on to calculate faithfully—without getting tired or emotional or changing their mode of analysis in midstream. But this does not mean that computers produce perfect forecasts, or even necessarily good ones. The acronym GIGO (“garbage in, garbage out”) sums up this problem. If you give a computer bad data, or devise a foolish set of instructions for it to analyze, it won’t spin straw into gold. Meanwhile, computers are not very good at tasks that require creativity and imagination, like devising strategies or developing theories about the way the world works. Computers are most useful to forecasters, therefore, in fields like weather forecasting and chess where the system abides by relatively simple and well-understood laws, but where the equations that govern the system must be solved many times over in order to produce a good forecast. They seem to have helped very little in fields like economic or earthquake forecasting where our understanding of root causes is blurrier and the data is noisier. In each of those fields, there were high hopes for computer-driven forecasting in the 1970s and 1980s when computers became more accessible to everyday academics and scientists, but little progress has been made since then.
markfrankel18

David Byrne: "Do you really think people are going to keep putting time and effort into... - 0 views

www.salon.com/..._if_no_one_is_making_any_money

TOK arts imagination

shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • I’m not saying that the artist doesn’t put their feelings into it, or any part of their biography, but that there’s a lot of constraints and considerations and templates that they work with – unconscious decisions or constraints put upon them that guide what they’re going to do.Otherwise, why didn’t people in the 14th century start writing full-blown operas with giant orchestras and whatever?” These things just weren’t available to them. Our imaginations are constrained by all these other things — which is a good thing. There’s kind of a process of evolution that goes on where the creative part of you adapts to whatever circumstances are available to you. And if you decide you want to make pop songs, or whatever, there’s a format. You can push the boundaries pretty far, but it’s still a recognized thing. And if you’re going to do something at Lincoln Center, there’s a pretty prescribed set of things you are going to do. You can push that form, but kind of from inside the genre. So I guess I’m saying that a lot of creative decisions are kind of made for us, and the trick is then working creatively within those constraints.
markfrankel18

Psychiatry's Mind-Brain Problem - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...iatrys-mind-brain-problem.html

TOK psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Recently, a psychiatric study on first episodes of psychosis made front-page news. People seemed quite surprised by the finding: that lower doses of psychotropic drugs, when combined with individual psychotherapy, family education and a focus on social adaptation, resulted in decreased symptoms and increased wellness.
  • Recently, a psychiatric study on first episodes of psychosis made front-page news. People seemed quite surprised by the finding: that lower doses of psychotropic drugs, when combined with individual psychotherapy, family education and a focus on social adaptation, resulted in decreased symptoms and increased wellness. But the real surprise — and disappointment — was that this was considered so surprising.
  • But the real surprise — and disappointment — was that this was considered so surprising.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Unfortunately, Dr. Kane’s study arrives alongside a troubling new reality. His project was made possible by funding from the National Institute of Mental Health before it implemented a controversial requirement: Since 2014, in order to receive the institute’s support, clinical researchers must explicitly focus on a target such as a biomarker or neural circuit. It is hard to imagine how Dr. Kane’s study (or one like it) would get funding today, since it does not do this. In fact, psychiatry at present has yet to adequately identify any specific biomarkers or circuits for its major illnesses.
  • Unfortunately, Dr. Kane’s study arrives alongside a troubling new reality. His project was made possible by funding from the National Institute of Mental Health before it implemented a controversial requirement: Since 2014, in order to receive the institute’s support, clinical researchers must explicitly focus on a target such as a biomarker or neural circuit. It is hard to imagine how Dr. Kane’s study (or one like it) would get funding today, since it does not do this. In fact, psychiatry at present has yet to adequately identify any specific biomarkers or circuits for its major illnesses.
markfrankel18

Why I Changed My Mind About Confederate Monuments - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...537396

TOK history

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 19 Aug 17
     
    "That summer, I traveled for the first time to Prague, in the former Soviet-bloc country of Czechoslovakia. I noticed almost immediately the concrete foundations and empty pedestals where monuments to communist leaders once stood. Some statues had been relocated to museums, while others were destroyed; skate boarders and sunbathers had since claimed their spot. The experience forced me to reconsider my position on the markers back home. I imagined stepping back in time to convince the residents of Prague that the monuments helped them face their past, or gave teachers an important tool with which to engage their students. This proved to be a futile exercise. "
markfrankel18

The Touch-Screen Generation - Hanna Rosin - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...309250

language consciousness children iPad digital

shared by markfrankel18 on 27 Mar 13 - No Cached
    • markfrankel18
      markfrankel18 on 27 Mar 13
       
      This is important!
  • What, really, would Maria Montessori have made of this scene? The 30 or so children here were not down at the shore poking their fingers in the sand or running them along mossy stones or digging for hermit crabs. Instead they were all inside, alone or in groups of two or three, their faces a few inches from a screen, their hands doing things Montessori surely did not imagine. A couple of 3-year-old girls were leaning against a pair of French doors, reading an interactive story called Ten Giggly Gorillas and fighting over which ape to tickle next. A boy in a nearby corner had turned his fingertip into a red marker to draw an ugly picture of his older brother. On an old oak table at the front of the room, a giant stuffed Angry Bird beckoned the children to come and test out tablets loaded with dozens of new apps. Some of the chairs had pillows strapped to them, since an 18-month-old might not otherwise be able to reach the table, though she’d know how to swipe once she did.
markfrankel18

BBC News - Pareidolia: Why we see faces in hills, the Moon and toasties - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...magazine-22686500

ToK Science psychology consciousness reason

shared by markfrankel18 on 31 May 13 - No Cached
  • People have long seen faces in the Moon, in oddly-shaped vegetables and even burnt toast, but a Berlin-based group is scouring the planet via satellite imagery for human-like features. What's behind our desire to see faces in our surroundings, asks Lauren Everitt. Most people have never heard of pareidolia. But nearly everyone has experienced it. Anyone who has looked at the Moon and spotted two eyes, a nose and a mouth has felt the pull of pareidolia. It's "the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist", according to the World English Dictionary. It's picking a face out of a knotted tree trunk or finding zoo animals in the clouds.
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