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markfrankel18

In Science, It's Never 'Just a Theory' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-its-never-just-a-theory.html

TOK science theory language

shared by markfrankel18 on 10 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Peter Godfrey-Smith, the author of “Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science,” has been thinking about how people can avoid the misunderstanding embedded in the phrase, “It’s only a theory.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story It’s helpful, he argues, to think about theories as being like maps.“To say something is a map is not to say it’s a hunch,” said Dr. Godfrey-Smith, a professor at the City University of New York and the University of Sydney. “It’s an attempt to represent some territory.”A theory, likewise, represents a territory of science. Instead of rivers, hills, and towns, the pieces of the territory are facts.“To call something a map is not to say anything about how good it is,” Dr. Godfrey-Smith added. “There are fantastically good maps where there’s not a shred of doubt about their accuracy. And there are maps that are speculative.”To judge a map’s quality, we can see how well it guides us through its territory. In a similar way, scientists test out new theories against evidence. Just as many maps have proven to be unreliable, many theories have been cast aside.But other theories have become the foundation of modern science, such as the theory of evolution, the general theory of relativity, the theory of plate tectonics, the theory that the sun is at the center of the solar system, and the germ theory of disease.“To the best of our ability, we’ve tested them, and they’ve held up,” said Dr. Miller. “And that’s why we’ve held on to these things.”
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC World Service - The Forum, Goethe: The Story of Colour - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/p04q77bx

sensory perception perception colour vision theory emotion

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 31 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 31 Jan 17
     
    "The German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe considered his monumental book known in English as The Theory of Colours to be his greatest achievement. The book is a record of hundreds of Goethe's observations about the way colour affects our mood, as well as a long and heated polemic with Isaac Newton's colour theory. Goethe's understanding of light and colour was scientifically flawed yet his book had a surprisingly strong influence on the fine and applied arts. To find out why, Bridget Kendall talks to art historian Alexandra Loske, colour writer Victoria Finlay and designer Odette Steele."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Missing Malaysia plane: 10 theories examined - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-26609687

TOK reason

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • As the search for Malaysia Airlines missing Boeing 777 moves into its 11th day, a multitude of theories about the plane's fate are circulating on forums and social media. Here, former pilots and aviation experts look at some of those theories.
  • As the search for Malaysia Airlines missing Boeing 777 moves into its 11th day, a multitude of theories about the plane's fate are circulating on forums and social media. Here, former pilots and aviation experts look at some of those theories.
markfrankel18

Are scientific theories really better when they are simpler? | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...y-better-when-they-are-simpler

TOK science

shared by markfrankel18 on 10 May 16 - No Cached
  • If all art should be simple or if all art should be complex, the choice is clear. However, both of these norms seem absurd. Isn’t it obvious that some estimable art is simple and some is complex? True, there might be extremes that are beyond the pale; we are alienated by art that is far too complex and bored by art that is far too simple. However, between these two extremes there is a vast space of possibilities.
  • Science is different, at least according to many scientists. Albert Einstein spoke for many when he said that ‘it can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience’. The search for simple theories, then, is a requirement of the scientific enterprise.
markfrankel18

Evidence Rebuts Chomsky's Theory of Language Learning - Scientific American - 1 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...-s-theory-of-language-learning

TOK language Chomsky

shared by markfrankel18 on 11 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Much of Noam Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics—including its account of the way we learn languages—is being overturned
  • research shows that young children use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all—such as the ability to classify the world into categories (people or objects, for instance) and to understand the relations among things. These capabilities, coupled with a unique hu­­­man ability to grasp what others intend to communicate, allow language to happen. The new findings indicate that if researchers truly want to understand how children, and others, learn languages, they need to look outside of Chomsky’s theory for guidance.
  • All of this leads ineluctably to the view that the notion of universal grammar is plain wrong. Of course, scientists never give up on their favorite theory, even in the face of contradictory evidence, until a reasonable alternative appears. Such an alternative, called usage-based linguistics, has now arrived.
markfrankel18

When Nature Looks Unnatural - NYTimes.com - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...when-nature-looks-unnatural

TOK science

shared by markfrankel18 on 01 May 14 - No Cached
  • Science progresses when a good theory is superseded by an even better theory, and the most direct route to building a better theory is to be confronted by data that simply don’t fit the old one. Nature is not always so kind, however. Fields like particle physics and cosmology sometimes include good theories that fit all the data but nevertheless seem unsatisfying to us.
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

Complexity theory and financial regulation | Science - 0 views

science.sciencemag.org/...818.short

economics human sciences SocialScience prediction

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Traditional economic theory could not explain, much less predict, the near collapse of the financial system and its long-lasting effects on the global economy. Since the 2008 crisis, there has been increasing interest in using ideas from complexity theory to make sense of economic and financial markets.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Brain That Couldn't Remember - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ain-that-couldnt-remember.html

memory science brain neuroscience ethics publication bias

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • In that pantheon of illuminatingly broken men and women, Henry stands apart. It is difficult to exaggerate the impact he has had on our understanding of ourselves. Before Brenda Milner collaborated on that first paper about Henry, the prevailing theory of memory held that its functions could not be localized to a single cortical area, that learning was distributed across the brain as a whole. By that theory — built upon the experimental lesioning of the brains of rats — a person’s memory would be affected only in proportion to the amount of brain tissue removed, regardless of which brain structures the tissue was removed from. Milner’s first paper about Henry, along with her previous work, upended this view.
  • Five years after Milner’s first paper about Henry, she published a second that was almost as revelatory. That paper documented Henry’s gradual improvement over a three-day period on a difficult hand-eye coordination task. His improvement came despite his inability to ever remember his previous attempts at the task, indicating that there are at least two different memory systems in the brain — one responsible for our conscious, episodic memories, the second responsible for task-or-skill related “procedural” memories — and that these two systems seem to rely on entirely distinct parts of the brain. This was another fundamental step forward in our understanding of how memory works. Together, Milner’s two Henry-­related revelations can be viewed as the cornerstones of modern memory science.
  • Corkin: Yeah, but it’s not peer-­reviewed, for one thing. That’s important. The stuff that’s published is good stuff. Peer-­reviewed. You can believe it. Things that, you know, experiments that might not have been good experiments, there might have been inadequate control groups. ... There are all sorts of things that can go wrong with experiments. Not every experiment is publishable.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Me: But they can still be interpreted by other people. ... Maybe as we continue to understand how the brain works, and how memory works, some of this existing data of H.M.’s could be reilluminated by new theories, by new ideas, by new — it just seems a shame to destroy it. And it also seems — and this would be the darker interpretation of it — it locks in stone your own telling of H.M.’s story.
markfrankel18

In Defense of Psychology : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-conceptually-messy-psychology

ToK psychology Human Sciences

shared by markfrankel18 on 27 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 27 Aug 13
     
    "There's a natural back and forth: we think about things a particular way, which motivates experiments, which in turn provide data, which leads us to refine and revise the way we conceptualize phenomena and theoretical entities. This dance between theory and experimentation is common to all science. In the case of psychology, it is a particularly young field. It's early days for the empirical study of many core psychological phenomena, including happiness."
markfrankel18

Theory of mind and the belief in God. - Slate Magazine - 0 views

www.slate.com/...e_god_its_me_brain.single.html

TOK mind god belief science

shared by markfrankel18 on 16 Sep 13 - Cached
  • As a direct consequence of the evolution of the human social brain, and owing to the importance of our theory-of-mind skills in that process, we sometimes can't help but see intentions, desires, and beliefs in things that haven't even a smidgeon of a neural system. In particular, when inanimate objects do unexpected things, we sometimes reason about them just as we do for oddly behaving—or misbehaving—people. More than a few of us have kicked our broken-down vehicles in the sides and verbally abused our incompetent computers. Most of us stop short of actually believing these objects possess mental states—indeed, we would likely be hauled away to an asylum if we genuinely believed that they held malicious intent—but our emotions and behaviors toward such objects seem to betray our primitive, unconscious thinking: we act as though they're morally culpable for their actions.
Lawrence Hrubes

Most People Can’t Multitask, But a Few Are Exceptional. : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...multitask-masters.html

TOK psychology neuroscience cognition exceptions assumptions

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 May 14 - No Cached
  • In 2012, David Strayer found himself in a research lab, on the outskirts of London, observing something he hadn’t thought possible: extraordinary multitasking. For his entire career, Strayer, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah, had been studying attention—how it works and how it doesn’t. Methods had come and gone, theories had replaced theories, but one constant remained: humans couldn’t multitask. Each time someone tried to focus on more than one thing at a time, performance suffered. Most recently, Strayer had been focussing on people who drive while on the phone. Over the course of a decade, he and his colleagues had demonstrated that drivers using cell phones—even hands-free devices—were at just as high a risk of accidents as intoxicated ones. Reaction time slowed, attention decreased to the point where they’d miss more than half the things they’d otherwise see—a billboard or a child by the road, it mattered not.
  • What, then, was going on here in the London lab? The woman he was looking at—let’s call her Cassie—was an exception to what twenty-five years of research had taught him. As she took on more and more tasks, she didn’t get worse. She got better. There she was, driving, doing complex math, responding to barking prompts through a cell phone, and she wasn’t breaking a sweat. She was, in other words, what Strayer would ultimately decide to call a supertasker.
  • Cassie in particular was the best multitasker he had ever seen. “It’s a really, really hard test,” Strayer recalls. “Some people come out woozy—I have a headache, that really kind of hurts, that sort of thing. But she solved everything.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Their task was simple: keep your eyes on the road; keep a safe difference; brake as required. If they failed to do so, they’d eventually collide with their pace car. Then came the multitasking additions. They would have to not only drive the car but follow audio instructions from a cell phone. Specifically, they would hear a series of words, ranging from two to five at a time, and be asked to recall them in the right order. And there was a twist. Interspersed with the words were math problems. If they heard one of those, the drivers had to answer “true,” if the problem was solved correctly, or “false,” if it wasn’t. They would, for instance, hear “cat” and immediately after, “is three divided by one, minus one, equal to two?” followed by “box,” another problem, and so on. Intermittently, they would hear a prompt to “recall,” at which point, they’d have to repeat back all the words they’d heard since the last prompt. The agony lasted about an hour and a half.
Lawrence Hrubes

There Is No Theory of Everything - The New York Times - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ere-is-no-theory-of-everything

philosophy science humanities SocialScience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 14 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Despite the astonishing breadth of his interests, Frank’s core obsession in teaching turned on the relation between science and the humanities. More particularly, his concern was with the relation between the causal explanations offered by science and the kinds of humanistic description we find, say, in the novels of Dickens or Dostoevsky, or in the sociological writings of Erving Goffman and David Riesman. His quest was to try and clarify the occasions when a scientific explanation was appropriate and when it was not, and we need instead a humanistic remark. His conviction was that our confusions about science and the humanities had wide-ranging and malign societal consequences.
markfrankel18

A Crisis at the Edge of Physics - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...is-at-the-edge-of-physics.html

TOK physics science

shared by markfrankel18 on 07 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • DO physicists need empirical evidence to confirm their theories?You may think that the answer is an obvious yes, experimental confirmation being the very heart of science. But a growing controversy at the frontiers of physics and cosmology suggests that the situation is not so simple.
  • How are we to determine whether a theory is true if it cannot be validated experimentally? Should we abandon it just because, at a given level of technological capacity, empirical support might be impossible? If not, how long should we wait for such experimental machinery before moving on: ten years? Fifty years? Centuries?
markfrankel18

No Higgs Boson of Hitler: Ron Rosenbaum Explains 'Explaining Hitler' | VICE United States - 0 views

www.vice.com/...explains-explaining-hitler-456

TOK history

shared by markfrankel18 on 26 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • In 1998 the journalist Ron Rosenbaum published Explaining Hitler. Contrary to what the title might suggest, it is not an explanation of Hitler, per se, but rather a 500-page meta-analysis of different theories intended to explain Hitler. Ron Rosenbaum traveled from the ruins of Hitler's Austrian birthplace to meet the historians, psychologists, and Nazi-hunters who have promoted different explanations for Hitler's evil. Whether the basis of the theories are plausible (Hitler's Jewish ancestry) or extremely unlikely (Hitler's penis was bitten off while he attempted to pee into the mouth of a billy goat) they are all presented with a relentless skepticism that makes reading Explaining Hitler a unique and destabilizing experience.
Lawrence Hrubes

To Pi and Beyond - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...pi-prime-numbers-cybersecurity

math mathematics beauty technology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 15 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Entertaining the idea of a peculiar long number such as pi puts me in mind of its cousins twice removed, prime numbers, which have so many strange properties. Prime numbers are those numbers, such as 3, 5, 7, 11, and so on, that can be cleanly divided only by one and themselves. Primes and pi suggest a benign infinity, a pleasing order—pi because of its endlessness and its relation to the circle, and primes because no matter how far you travel on the number line you will always encounter a prime, as Euclid proved in 300 B.C. Recently, Yitang Zhang solved a problem involving prime numbers called bounded gaps that had been open for more than a hundred years. Zhang proved that no matter how far you go on the number line, even to the range where the numbers would fill many books, there will, on an infinite number of occasions, be two prime numbers within seventy million places of each other. (Other mathematicians have reduced this gap to two hundred and forty six.) Before, it had not been known whether any such range applied to prime numbers, which seem to behave, especially as they get larger, as if they appear at random.
  • Number theory is a discipline done for no purpose. It is practiced by people who believe that numbers have properties that exemplify an orderliness and beauty in the universe. The story of numbers is a story of creation not directly contained in the Scriptures, but if a divinity didn’t create numbers and their properties, what accounts for them? The necessity of counting doesn’t entirely explain pi or primes. A breakthrough in number theory is called a discovery, not an invention. There isn’t yet any explanation for the properties of pi or for primes. There is only the sense of wonder that the world contains such extravagant mysteries so close at hand.
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.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • 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

Can Scientific Belief Go Too Far? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR - 3 views

www.npr.org/...n-scientific-belief-go-too-far

TOK science religious knowledge systems

shared by markfrankel18 on 29 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Do some scientists hold on to a belief longer than they should? Or, more provocatively phrased, when does a scientific belief become an article of faith?
  • This kind of posture, when there is a persistent holding on to a belief that is continually contradicted by facts, can only be called faith. In the quantum case, it's faith in an ordered, rational nature, even if it reveals itself through random behavior. "God doesn't play dice," wrote Einstein to his colleague Max Born. His conviction led him and others to look for theories that could explain the quantum probabilities as manifestations of a deeper order. And they failed. (And we now know that this randomness will not go away, being the very essence of quantum phenomena.) There is, however, an essential difference between religious faith and scientific faith: dogma. In science, dogma is untenable. Sooner or later, even the deepest ingrained ideas — if proven wrong — must collapse under the weight of evidence. A scientist who holds on to an incorrect theory or hypothesis makes for a sad figure. In religion, given that evidence is either elusive or irrelevant, faith is always viable.
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