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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

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science | Mother Jones - 3 views

www.motherjones.com/...denial-science-chris-mooney

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 01 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion
    • Lawrence Hrubes
      Lawrence Hrubes on 03 Oct 13
       
      2 Ways of Knowing here, acting in combo
markfrankel18

Policy: Twenty tips for interpreting scientific claims : Nature News & Comment - 0 views

www.nature.com/...ting-scientific-claims-1.14183

TOK science

shared by markfrankel18 on 07 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • To this end, we suggest 20 concepts that should be part of the education of civil servants, politicians, policy advisers and journalists — and anyone else who may have to interact with science or scientists. Politicians with a healthy scepticism of scientific advocates might simply prefer to arm themselves with this critical set of knowledge. We are not so naive as to believe that improved policy decisions will automatically follow. We are fully aware that scientific judgement itself is value-laden, and that bias and context are integral to how data are collected and interpreted. What we offer is a simple list of ideas that could help decision-makers to parse how evidence can contribute to a decision, and potentially to avoid undue influence by those with vested interests. The harder part — the social acceptability of different policies — remains in the hands of politicians and the broader political process. Of course, others will have slightly different lists. Our point is that a wider understanding of these 20 concepts by society would be a marked step forward.
markfrankel18

Why Abraham Lincoln Loved Infographics : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...incoln-loved-infographics.html

TOK infographics models

shared by markfrankel18 on 18 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Oct 13
     
    "Unlike traditional cartography, the map was designed to portray political terrain and, in Lincoln's mind, moral terrain. The President called it his "slave map." Today we would call it an infographic."
markfrankel18

What 'The Simpsons' Says About Ukraine's Language Divide : Parallels : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...about-ukraines-language-divide

TOK language ukraine history simpsons

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • And though Kostin and most of the people in eastern Ukraine are native Russian speakers, he prefers to download episodes dubbed not in Russian but in his second language, Ukrainian. All his friends in the city of Donetsk prefer the version dubbed in Ukrainian. "They talk in Russian, they think in Russian," and even their parents speak only Russian, he says of his friends. "But Simpsons? They like in Ukrainian."
  • But Lykov says language in Ukraine has always been more a political tool of division than an actual divide. People in eastern Ukraine — especially those under 35, who came of age after the Soviet Union collapsed — like being bilingual, he says. "Unfortunately," he says, "the media likes to show that only Russians live here and only Ukrainians live in western Ukraine. Actually people here have no trouble understanding both languages. And Ukrainian is even funnier for Russian-speakers [because] it's got cleverer slang."
Lawrence Hrubes

English Timeline - 1 views

www.bl.uk/...index.html

language English history linguistics TOK

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 07 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • This interactive timeline allows you to explore the evolution of English language and literature, from the 11th century to the present day. Scroll through decade by decade to investigate the richness and diversity of our poetry and prose, as well as the many social, cultural and political strands from which our language has been woven.
Lawrence Hrubes

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

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

arts TOK China politics sculpture

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

The Problem With History Classes - Atlantic Mobile - 1 views

m.theatlantic.com/...387823

TOK history

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

The Berlin Wall's great human experiment - Ideas - The Boston Globe - 5 views

www.bostonglobe.com/...story.html

TOK history psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • But before it fell, the wall did something that most people never think of: It created a massive laboratory for studying human society.Imagine this: If you were a researcher trying to determine how a political system affects people’s values, beliefs, and behavior, you would ideally want to take two identical populations, separate them for a generation or two, and subject them each to two totally different kinds of government. Then you’d want to measure the results, the same way a medical researcher might give two sets of patients two different pills and then track their progress.Ethically, such a study would be unthinkable even to propose. But when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, it created what London School of Economics associate professor Daniel Sturm calls a “perfect experiment.”
Lawrence Hrubes

Corrupting the Chinese Language - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ting-the-chinese-language.html

language ethics propaganda politics communism

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 27 May 15 - No Cached
  • The default lingo of high party officials, even on the most solemn occasions, includes banal aphorisms like, “to be turned into iron, the metal must be strong.” Official proclamations and the nightly newscasts speak of “social harmony” and the “Chinese spirit.” In addition to promoting the “China Dream” and a strong work ethic, President Xi Jinping is known for uttering lines like, “Never allow eating the Communist Party’s food and then smashing the Communist Party’s cooking pots.”The government’s propaganda and education machinery moved past the revolutionary bloodthirsty bitterness. Our textbooks are litanies of brutal heroic deeds: “Stop a gun with your chest, hold a bomb in your hands, lie on a fire without moving, until you burn to death.” Nearly every Chinese child still wears a red scarf, “dyed with martyr's blood,” and many grow up singing the young pioneers’ songs: “Always prepared, to perform noble feats, to wipe out our enemy.”
  • Two years ago, in a small town in central Shanxi Province, I overheard two old farmers debating whether a bowl of rice or a steamed bun was more satisfying. As the argument became more heated, one farmer accused the other, without irony, of being a “metaphysicist.”Mao was skeptical of metaphysics and thus, over the years, it became a dubious concept, used in Chinese propaganda as a pejorative term. It’s fair to assume these two farmers didn’t know much about metaphysics, yet they were using the term as an insult, straight out of the party lexicon. Other phrases like “idealist” and “petit bourgeois sentimentalist” have become everyday terms of abuse, even when those who use them clearly have no real idea what they mean.
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?
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.
markfrankel18

Rich countries and the minorities they discriminate against, mapped - Quartz - 1 views

qz.com/...ey-discriminate-against-mapped

TOK bias economics minorities psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 03 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • So what do these findings really mean? Well there are a few different ways of thinking about the economics of discrimination in the workplace. One, known as taste-based discrimination, simply suggests that some employers have a preference against hiring minorities, even if they’re just as productive as other workers. Another, implicit discrimination, is thought to reflect attitudes that the people making discriminatory decisions they are themselves unaware of. Finally, there’s the notion of statistical discrimination, in which the person making the decision is relying not on the characteristics—for example the job skills—of the person in question, but rather some other notion of the “the average characteristics of the group” to which that person belongs. But really those are only elaborate ways of dressing up the obvious: discrimination is discrimination.
Lawrence Hrubes

Can Torture Ever Be Moral? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...can-torture-ever-be-moral

TOK ethics morality torture law politics reason

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 26 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • I think that torture is almost always morally wrong and that, for moral reasons, it ought to be prohibited absolutely in law. Torture has been used to extract confessions, to terrorize people associated with the victims, to punish presumed wrongdoers, and even to gratify and amuse sadists and bullies. These uses are always morally wrong. The only use of torture that has any chance of being morally justified is to gain important information. But even when torture is used to gain information, the torturers are usually wrongdoers seeking information that will help them to achieve their unjust aims. And even when those seeking information have just aims, their victims are often innocent, or lack the information sought, or are sufficiently strong-willed to mislead their torturers, so that the torture is ineffective or counterproductive. Still, both those pursuing unjust aims and those pursuing just aims will continue to be tempted to engage in torture if they can do so with impunity. Hence, torture has been widely practiced, though its use has almost invariably been wrong. This means that the overriding goal of the law ought to be to deter the wrongful use of torture, even at the cost of forbidding the use of torture in those rare cases in which it might be morally justified. The legal prohibition ought therefore to be absolute; for those who think that torture would be advantageous to them will always be tempted to try to exploit any legal permission to use it.
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." "
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Nimrud: Outcry as IS bulldozers attack ancient Iraq site - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-middle-east-31760656

history memory religious knowledge systems archeology culture

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Archaeologists and officials have expressed outrage about the bulldozing of the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud by Islamic State militants in Iraq.
  • IS says ancient shrines and statues are "false idols" that have to be smashed. "They are erasing our history," said Iraqi archaeologist Lamia al-Gailani.
  • Profile of Nimrud Ancient Assyrian city on the River Tigris Capital of Assyria for about 150 years First excavations in modern times undertaken by Europeans starting in the 1840s Treasures unearthed included sections of royal palaces, individual statues and smaller artefacts Investigations stopped for decades but in 1949 Sir Max Mallowan (husband of writer Agatha Christie) began fresh excavations Extensive photographic record of remaining treasures made in the 1970s
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "There is absolutely no political or religious justification for the destruction of humanity's cultural heritage." Dr Gailani told the BBC:"Nimrud for us in Iraq and for me as an archaeologist is one of the most important [sites]. There are still quite a lot of things that are standing - the reliefs and the statues, the famous winged bulls. "They are erasing our history. I wish it was a nightmare and I could wake up."
Lawrence Hrubes

A Pioneer for Death With Dignity - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...pioneer-for-death-with-dignity

ethics science medicine health law death

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • More than two decades before Brittany Maynard’s public advocacy for death with dignity inspired lawmakers in Washington, D.C., and at least 16 states to introduce legislation authorizing the medical practice of aid in dying for the terminally ill, Senator Frank Roberts of Oregon sponsored one of the nation’s first death-with-dignity bills.
  • Medical aid in dying has always had enormous public support. Recent polls by Gallup and Harris show that 69 to 74 percent of people believe terminally ill adults should have access to medical means to bring about a peaceful death. This belief is strong throughout the nation and across all demographic categories, including age, disability, religion and political party.
  • First, the phenomenon of Brittany Maynard has transformed the movement for end-of-life-choice into an unstoppable force. Ms. Maynard was the 29-year-old woman dying of brain cancer, who moved, with her family, from her home in California to establish residency in Oregon and gain access to aid in dying. As her pain and seizures escalated and as inevitable paralysis, blindness and stupor approached, she drank medication obtained under Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act and died quietly in a circle of her loved ones last fall. Her family vows to fulfill her legacy of legal reform in her native California and beyond. Young and old alike identify with Brittany Maynard. Her experience as a refugee for dignity sparks the “aha!” moment when people understand the grave injustice of government’s withholding from a competent, dying adult the elements of choice and control over suffering.
markfrankel18

PQED: How should people respond to open-carry gun-rights activists? - 0 views

www.pqed.org/...ple-respond-to-open-carry.html

TOK guns psychology ethics perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 29 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The difficulty of knowing other people’s intent is a classic philosophical problem. It is epistemological in that it involves the limits of our knowledge. We can’t really know what anyone else hopes to do, and sometimes, because of the subconscious and self-deception, we don’t ever know what our own true intent is. It is also an example of the problem of other minds. We can never really enter into the perspective of any other person nor can we ever really know what they think (or even if they think). We are discrete individuals and communication is unreliable. My point: the political and economic realities of running from gun activists is, yet again, founded on classic philosophical issues, and when we take positions on issues of the day, we are really taking positions philosophically. The gun-rights activists think that their intent is obvious and that everyone knows what they hope to do. They believe their minds are transparent. But this is because they are all extreme narcissists. It baffles them that we don’t all know exactly what they are thinking. It shocks them that we don’t know that Jim is a good guy, and that Sally would never murder anyone. But they are wrong. We don’t know them and we don’t know how they think. The only thing that makes us notice them at all is that they have guns and truthfully, that’s why they carry them in the first place. They want to be celebrities, heroes, and the centers of attention.
markfrankel18

What's a Metaphor For? - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

chronicle.com/...128079

TOK Language metaphor

shared by markfrankel18 on 30 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • "Metaphorical thinking—our instinct not just for describing but for comprehending one thing in terms of another—shapes our view of the world, and is essential to how we communicate, learn, discover and invent. ... Our understanding of metaphor is in the midst of a metamorphosis. For centuries, metaphor has been seen as a kind of cognitive frill, a pleasant but essentially useless embellishment to 'normal' thought. Now, the frill is gone. New research in the social and cognitive sciences makes it increasingly plain that metaphorical thinking influences our attitudes, beliefs, and actions in surprising, hidden, and often oddball ways." Geary further unpacks metaphor's influence in his foreword: "Metaphor conditions our interpretations of the stock market and, through advertising, it surreptitiously infiltrates our purchasing decisions. In the mouths of politicians, metaphor subtly nudges public opinion; in the minds of businesspeople, it spurs creativity and innovation. In science, metaphor is the preferred nomenclature for new theories and new discoveries; in psychology, it is the natural language of human relationships and emotions."
  • The upshot of the boom in metaphor studies, Geary makes clear, is the overturning of that presumption toward literalism: Nowadays, it's believers in a literalism that goes all the way down (so to speak) who are on the defensive in intellectual life, and explorers of metaphor who are on the ascendant. As a result, Geary hardly feels a need to address literalism, devoting most of his book to how metaphor connects to etymology, money, mind, politics, pleasure, science, children, the brain, the body, and such literary forms as the proverb and aphorism.
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