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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.
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  • 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.
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

On the Face of It: How We Vote : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...-the-psychology-of-voting.html

ToK psychology human sciences voting

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Nov 13 - Cached
  • In 2003, the Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov began to suspect that, except for those people who have hard-core political beliefs, the reasons we vote for particular candidates could have less to do with politics and more to do with basic cognitive processes—in particular, perception. When people are asked about their ideal leader, one of the single most important characteristics that they say they look for is competence—how qualified and capable a candidate is. Todorov wondered whether that judgment was made on the basis of intuitive responses to basic facial features rather than on any deep, rational calculus. It would make sense: in the past, extensive research has shown just how quickly we form impressions of people’s character traits, even before we’ve had a conversation with them. That impression then colors whatever else we learn about them, from their hobbies to, presumably, their political abilities. In other words, when we think that we are making rational political judgments, we could be, in fact, judging someone at least partly based on a fleeting impression of his or her face.
  • Starting that fall, and through the following spring, Todorov showed pairs of portraits to roughly a thousand people, and asked them to rate the competence of each person. Unbeknownst to the test subjects, they were looking at candidates for the House and Senate in 2000, 2002, and 2004. In study after study, participants’ responses to the question of whether someone looked competent predicted actual election outcomes at a rate much higher than chance—from sixty-six to seventy-three per cent of the time. Even looking at the faces for as little as one second, Todorov found, yielded the exact same result: a snap judgment that generally identified the winners and losers.
Lawrence Hrubes

If Your Teacher Likes You, You Might Get A Better Grade : NPR Ed : NPR - 2 views

www.npr.org/...u-you-might-get-a-better-grade

bias education human sciences SocialScience ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 22 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • A newly published paper suggests that personality similarity affects teachers' estimation of student achievement. That is, how much you are like your teacher contributes to his or her feelings about you — and your abilities. "Astonishingly, little is known about the formation of teacher judgments and therefore about the biases in judgments," says Tobias Rausch, an author of the study and a research scientist at the Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg. "However, research tells us that teacher judgments often are not accurate."
  • For example, a recent study from Israel showed that teachers gave girls lower grades on math tests when they knew their gender. And lots of researchers have looked at the importance of having teachers who share the racial and socioeconomic backgrounds of their students.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Your Name Matters : The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...why-your-name-matters.html

TOK language names psychology human sciences

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Dec 13
     
    "We see a name, implicitly associate different characteristics with it, and use that association, however unknowingly, to make unrelated judgments about the competence and suitability of its bearer. The relevant question may not be "What's in a name?" but, rather, "What signals does my name send-and what does it imply?""
markfrankel18

Is stealing from a small shop worse than from a chain? | Clare Carlisle | Comment is fr... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-david-lammy-moral-philosophy

TOK ethics

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • David Lammy has raised interesting questions on how we judge a crime like theft. Moral absolutism and monetary value are more compatible than you think
  • Our justice system, like our personal moral intuitions, combines a commitment to the absolute wrongness of certain actions – theft, murder, and rape, for example – with the recognition that different contexts make some such actions worse than others. The more absolute judgment focuses on the action itself, while the secondary judgment about a crime’s severity takes motivations and consequences into account.
markfrankel18

The Moral Instinct - New York Times - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...13Psychology-t.html

ethics TOK Pinker

shared by markfrankel18 on 31 Mar 13 - Cached
  • It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks. Illusions are a favorite tool of perception scientists for exposing the workings of the five senses, and of philosophers for shaking people out of the naïve belief that our minds give us a transparent window onto the world (since if our eyes can be fooled by an illusion, why should we trust them at other times?). Today, a new field is using illusions to unmask a sixth sense, the moral sense.
  • The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished.
  • Until recently, it was understood that some people didn’t enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as immoral. Smokers are ostracized; images of people smoking are censored; and entities touched by smoke are felt to be contaminated (so hotels have not only nonsmoking rooms but nonsmoking floors). The desire for retribution has been visited on tobacco companies, who have been slapped with staggering “punitive damages.” At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices.
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  • But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.
  • People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.
  • Together, the findings corroborate Greene’s theory that our nonutilitarian intuitions come from the victory of an emotional impulse over a cost-benefit analysis.
  • The psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that the mentality of taboo — a conviction that some thoughts are sinful to think — is not just a superstition of Polynesians but a mind-set that can easily be triggered in college-educated Americans. Just ask them to think about applying the sphere of reciprocity to relationships customarily governed by community or authority. When Tetlock asked subjects for their opinions on whether adoption agencies should place children with the couples willing to pay the most, whether people should have the right to sell their organs and whether they should be able to buy their way out of jury duty, the subjects not only disagreed but felt personally insulted and were outraged that anyone would raise the question.
  • The moral sense, then, may be rooted in the design of the normal human brain. Yet for all the awe that may fill our minds when we reflect on an innate moral law within, the idea is at best incomplete. Consider this moral dilemma: A runaway trolley is about to kill a schoolteacher. You can divert the trolley onto a sidetrack, but the trolley would trip a switch sending a signal to a class of 6-year-olds, giving them permission to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Is it permissible to pull the lever? This is no joke. Last month a British woman teaching in a private school in Sudan allowed her class to name a teddy bear after the most popular boy in the class, who bore the name of the founder of Islam. She was jailed for blasphemy and threatened with a public flogging, while a mob outside the prison demanded her death. To the protesters, the woman’s life clearly had less value than maximizing the dignity of their religion, and their judgment on whether it is right to divert the hypothetical trolley would have differed from ours. Whatever grammar guides people’s moral judgments can’t be all that universal. Anyone who stayed awake through Anthropology 101 can offer many other examples.
  • The impulse to avoid harm, which gives trolley ponderers the willies when they consider throwing a man off a bridge, can also be found in rhesus monkeys, who go hungry rather than pull a chain that delivers food to them and a shock to another monkey. Respect for authority is clearly related to the pecking orders of dominance and appeasement that are widespread in the animal kingdom. The purity-defilement contrast taps the emotion of disgust that is triggered by potential disease vectors like bodily effluvia, decaying flesh and unconventional forms of meat, and by risky sexual practices like incest.
  • All this brings us to a theory of how the moral sense can be universal and variable at the same time. The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture.
  • By analogy, we are born with a universal moral grammar that forces us to analyze human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness. The idea that the moral sense is an innate part of human nature is not far-fetched. A list of human universals collected by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown includes many moral concepts and emotions, including a distinction between right and wrong; empathy; fairness; admiration of generosity; rights and obligations; proscription of murder, rape and other forms of violence; redress of wrongs; sanctions for wrongs against the community; shame; and taboos.
  • Here is the worry. The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?
  • Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?
markfrankel18

Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...truth-philosopher-science.html

TOK science

shared by markfrankel18 on 26 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 26 Oct 18
     
    "Philosophers have traditionally recognized a division between facts and values - between, say, scientific knowledge on one hand and human judgments on the other. Latour believes that this is specious. Many of his books are attempts to illuminate, as he has written, "both the history of humans' involvement in the making of scientific facts and the sciences' involvement in the making of human history." In a formulation that was galling to both sociologists and scientists, he once argued that Louis Pasteur did not just, as is commonly accepted, discover microbes; rather, he collaborated with them."
Lawrence Hrubes

Female Scientists Turn to Data to Fight Lack of Representation on Panels - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...as-scientific-conferences.html

science bias gender

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Among the defenders of the project, however, is Anne Churchland, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who studies how people make decisions. In 2001, she started Anne’s List, a directory of 170 women in computational neuroscience, intended to silence claims that no good female scientists existed in that field.Her research suggests that someone you recently had lunch with or someone from your hometown might spring to mind when selecting a speaker, even though neither has anything to do with science.“It doesn’t feel like irrelevant information influences our judgment, but it does,” Dr. Churchland said.
markfrankel18

How To Make Your Face (Digitally) Unforgettable : All Tech Considered : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...r-face-digitally-unforgettable

perception digital face

shared by markfrankel18 on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Thanks to new research out of MIT, you might one day be able to subtly manipulate your picture to make it more memorable — meaning that people should be more likely to remember your face. According to the research article: "One ubiquitous fact about people is that we cannot avoid evaluating the faces we see in daily life ... In this flash judgment of a face, an underlying decision is happening in the brain — should I remember this face or not? Even after seeing a picture for only half a second we can often remember it." There are subjective factors affecting how a face sticks in your memory — for example, if you know someone else who looks similar, you might find a new face more familiar. But researchers found that there is also a strong universal component to memorability. Some faces are just consistently more easily remembered.
Lawrence Hrubes

Alice Munro wins Nobel Prize for literature | Entertainment & Showbiz from CTV News - 0 views

www.ctvnews.ca/...prize-for-literature-1.1491581

TOK art literature NobelPrize judgment criteria value Munro

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Oct 13
     
    ""I want to tell a story, in the old-fashioned way -- what happens to somebody -- but I want that 'what happens' to be delivered with quite a bit of interruption, turnarounds, and strangeness. I want the reader to feel something is astonishing -- not the 'what happens' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.""
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC Radio 4 - The Reith Lectures, Grayson Perry: Playing to the Gallery: 2013, Democrac... - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/b03969vt

TOK arts judgment

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Oct 13
     
    "In the first of four lectures, recorded in front of an audience at Tate Modern in London, the artist Grayson Perry reflects on the idea of quality and examines who and what defines what we see and value as art. He argues that there is no empirical way to judge quality in art. Instead the validation of quality rests in the hands of a tightknit group of people at the heart of the art world including curators, dealers, collectors and critics who decide in the end what ends up in galleries and museums."
markfrankel18

The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld (Part 4) - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...inty-of-donald-rumsfeld-part-4

TOK Iraq evidence history reason bias

shared by markfrankel18 on 03 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • What do I take from this? To me, progress hinges on our ability to discriminate knowledge from belief, fact from fantasy, on the basis of evidence. It’s not the known unknown from the known known, or the unknown unknown from the known unknown, that is crucial to progress. It’s what evidence do you have for X, Y or Z? What is the justification for your beliefs? When confronted with such a question, Rumsfeld was never, ever able to come up with an answer.
  • The history of the Iraq war is replete with false assumptions, misinterpreted evidence, errors in judgment. Mistakes can be made. We all make them. But Rumsfeld created a climate where mistakes could be made with little or no way to correct them. Basic questions about evidence for W.M.D. were replaced with equivocations and obfuscations. A hall of mirrors. An infinite regress to nowhere. What do I know I know? What do I know I know I know? What do I know I don’t know I don’t know? Ad infinitum. Absence of evidence could be evidence of absence or evidence of presence. Take your pick. An obscurantist’s dream. There’s a quotation I have never liked. It comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up. “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Not really. The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and know they are opposed.
  • Rumsfeld, too, may believe what he is saying. But believing something does not make it true. The question is why he believed what he believed. On the basis of what evidence? Mere belief is not enough.
markfrankel18

On Empire and Anachronism | Imperial & Global Forum - 0 views

imperialglobalexeter.com/...on-empire-and-anachronism

TOK history ethics

shared by markfrankel18 on 10 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • One could take the absolutist position that we can’t pass any moral judgements whatsoever about people in the past. However, I doubt that many people would be willing or able to stick to it. Almost everyone, I think, is happy to condemn slavery even though many of the people who perpetrated it were doing so in line with what were then commonly accepted standards within their own societies. We might also ask: where is the cut-off date? If it’s not right to express moral opinions on what people did 500 or 250 years ago, are we also precluded from expressing them about what people did 50 years, 20 years ago, or even last week?
  • Our responsibility as historians is not to take a position which claims that judgments can be avoided, but rather to engage in an ongoing process of trying to decide what types of judgements are actually possible.
markfrankel18

How Firm Are Our Principles? - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...w-firm-are-our-principles.html

TOK ethics Language

shared by markfrankel18 on 31 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • MORAL quandaries often pit concerns about principles against concerns about practical consequences. Should we ban assault rifles and large sodas, restricting people’s liberties for the sake of physical health and safety? Should we allow drone killings or torture, if violating one person’s rights could save a thousand lives? We like to believe that the principled side of the equation is rooted in deep, reasoned conviction. But a growing wealth of research shows that those values often prove to be finicky, inconsistent intuitions, swayed by ethically irrelevant factors. What you say now you might disagree with in five minutes. And such wavering has implications for both public policy and our personal lives.
  • For a recent paper to be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, subjects were made to think either abstractly or concretely — say, by writing about the distant or near future. Those who were primed to think abstractly were more accepting of a hypothetical surgery that would kill a man so that one of his glands could be used to save thousands of others from a deadly disease. In other words, a very simple manipulation of mind-set that did not change the specifics of the case led to very different responses. Class can also play a role. Another paper, in the March issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, shows that upper-income people tend to have less empathy than those from lower-income strata, and so are more willing to sacrifice individuals for the greater good. Upper-income subjects took more money from another subject to multiply it and give to others, and found it more acceptable to push a fat man in front of a trolley to save five others on the track — both outcome-oriented responses.
  • Even the way a scenario is worded can influence our judgments, as lawyers and politicians well know. In one study, subjects read a number of variations of the classic trolley dilemma: should you turn a runaway trolley away from five people and onto a track with only one? When flipping the switch was described as saving the people on the first track, subjects tended to support it. When it was described as killing someone on the second, they did not. Same situation, different answers.
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  • Objective moral truth doesn’t exist, and these studies show that even if it did, our grasp of it would be tenuous.
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