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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

To Understand Religion, Think Football - Issue 17: Big Bangs - Nautilus - 5 views

m.nautil.us/...rstand-religion-think-football

TOK religious knowledge systems

shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The invention of religion is a big bang in human history. Gods and spirits helped explain the unexplainable, and religious belief gave meaning and purpose to people struggling to survive. But what if everything we thought we knew about religion was wrong? What if belief in the supernatural is window dressing on what really matters—elaborate rituals that foster group cohesion, creating personal bonds that people are willing to die for. Anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse thinks too much talk about religion is based on loose conjecture and simplistic explanations. Whitehouse directs the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University. For years he’s been collaborating with scholars around the world to build a massive body of data that grounds the study of religion in science. Whitehouse draws on an array of disciplines—archeology, ethnography, history, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science—to construct a profile of religious practices.
  • I suppose people do try to fill in the gaps in their knowledge by invoking supernatural explanations. But many other situations prompt supernatural explanations. Perhaps the most common one is thinking there’s a ritual that can help us when we’re doing something with a high risk of failure. Lots of people go to football matches wearing their lucky pants or lucky shirt. And you get players doing all sorts of rituals when there’s a high-risk situation like taking a penalty kick.
  • We tend to take a few bits and pieces of the most familiar religions and see them as emblematic of what’s ancient and pan-human. But those things that are ancient and pan-human are actually ubiquitous and not really part of world religions. Again, it really depends on what we mean by “religion.” I think the best way to answer that question is to try and figure out which cognitive capacities came first.
Lawrence Hrubes

Problems Too Disgusting to Solve - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ater-problems-disgusting-solve

science psychology emotion human sciences perception reason

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 22 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • last month, Bill Gates released a video of one of the latest ventures funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: the Omniprocessor, a Seattle-based processing plant that burns sewage to make clean drinking water. In the video, Gates raises a glass of water to his lips. Just five minutes ago, the caption explains, that water was human waste. Gates takes a sip. “It’s water,” he says. “Having studied the engineering behind it,” he writes, on the foundation’s blog, “I would happily drink it every day. It’s that safe.”
  • In the first series of studies, the group asked adults in five cities about their backgrounds, their political and personal views, and, most important, their view on the concept of “recycled water.” On average, everyone was uncomfortable with the idea—even when they were told that treated, recycled water is actually safer to drink than unfiltered tap water. That discomfort, Rozin found, was all about disgust. Twenty-six per cent of participants were so disgusted by the idea of toilet-to-tap that they even agreed with the statement, “It is impossible for recycled water to be treated to a high enough quality that I would want to use it.” They didn’t care what the safety data said. Their guts told them that the water would never be drinkable. It’s a phenomenon known as contagion, or, as Rozin describes it, “once in contact, always in contact.” By touching something we find disgusting, a previously neutral or even well-liked item can acquire—permanently—its properties of grossness.
  • eelings of disgust are often immune to rationality. And with good reason: evolutionarily, disgust is an incredibly adaptive, life-saving reaction. We find certain things instinctively gross because they really can harm us. Human secretions pass on disease. Noxious odors signal that your surroundings may be unsafe. If something feels slimy and sludgy, it’s likely a moisture-rich environment where pathogens may proliferate. Disgust is powerful, in short, because it often signals something important. It’s easy, though, to be disgusted by things that aren’t actually dangerous. In a prior study, Rozin found that people were unwilling to drink a favorite beverage into which a “fully sterilized” cockroach had been dipped. Intellectually, they knew that the drink was safe, but they couldn’t get over the hump of disgust. In another experiment, students wouldn’t eat chocolate that had been molded to look like poop: they knew that it was safe—tasty, even—but its appearance was too much to handle. Their response makes no logical sense. When it comes to recycled water, for instance, Rozin points out that, on some level, all water comes from sewage: “Rain is water that used to be in someone’s toilet, and nobody seems to mind.” The problem, he says, has to do with making the hidden visible. “If it’s obvious—take shit water, put it through a filter—then people are upset.”
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  • Disgust has deep psychological roots, emerging early in a child’s development. Infants and young toddlers don’t feel grossed out by anything—diapers, Rozin observes, are there in part to stop a baby “from eating her shit.” In the young mind, curiosity and exploration often overpower any competing instincts. But, at around four years old, there seems to be a profound shift. Suddenly, children won’t touch things that they find appalling. Some substances, especially human excretions of any sort, are seen as gross and untouchable all over the world; others are culturally determined. But, whether universal or culturally-specific, the disgust reactions that we acquire as children stay with us throughout our lives. If anything, they grow stronger—and more consequential—with age.
markfrankel18

Let's do some math on Ebola before we start quarantining people - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...e-we-start-quarantining-people

TOK math science

shared by markfrankel18 on 17 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The magnitude of false positives for medical tests—a positive test for a condition that a patient does not actually have—is something that is not well understood, even by members of the medical community. We should remember this, as the United States prepares to lock away potential scores of individuals who test positive for Ebola. Many observers do not realize just how many people may spend some time in quarantine when they do not have the dreaded disease.
  • The cognitive psychologist Max Gigerenzer once asked 24 physicians the following hypothetical question, and only two got it right: A test for breast cancer is 90% accurate in identifying patients who actually have breast cancer, and 93% accurate in producing negative results for patients without breast cancer. The incidence of breast cancer in the population is 0.8%. What is the probability that a person who tests positive for breast cancer actually has the disease? Think you know the answer? Many of the physicians in Gigerenzer’s study said there was a 90% probability that a now-terrified patient flagged for breast cancer is an actual victim of the disease. However, the correct probability is less than 10%.
markfrankel18

What Are You So Afraid Of? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...what-are-you-so-afraid-of.html

TOK fear emotion evolution psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 28 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Fear, arriving in layers in which genetic legacy converges with personal experience, is vital to our survival. When we freeze, stop in our tracks or take flight, it is a biological response to what we sense as near and present danger. All the same, it observes its own absurd hierarchy, in which we often harbor an abiding anxiety for the wrong things.
  • Except that we do choose, and what we choose are generally the ordinary fears such as heights, public speaking, insects, reptiles
  • The biologist E. O. Wilson has observed that while we fear snakes, spiders, darkness, open spaces and closed spaces, we do not fear the more likely instruments of danger — knives, guns, cars, electrical sockets — because, he says, “our species has not been exposed to these lethal agents long enough in evolutionary time to have acquired the predisposing genes that ensure automatic avoidance.” Which is to say, fear, real fear, deep fear, the kind that changes our habits and actions, is not something on which we are likely to follow sensible instruction.
Lawrence Hrubes

An Artist with Amnesia - The New Yorker - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...an-artist-with-amnesia

memory arts psychology cognition neuroscience

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Lately, Johnson draws for pleasure, but for three decades she had a happily hectic career as an illustrator, sometimes presenting clients with dozens of sketches a day. Her playful watercolors once adorned packages of Lotus software; for a program called Magellan, she created a ship whose masts were tethered to billowing diskettes. She made a popular postcard of two red parachutes tied together, forming a heart; several other cards were sold for years at MOMA’s gift shop. Johnson produced half a dozen covers for this magazine, including one, from 1985, that presented a sunny vision of an artist’s life: a loft cluttered with pastel canvases, each of them depicting a fragment of the skyline that is framed by a picture window. It’s as if the paintings were jigsaw pieces, and the city a puzzle being solved. Now Johnson is obsessed with making puzzles. Many times a day, she uses her grids as foundations for elaborate arrangements of letters on a page—word searches by way of Mondrian. For all the dedication that goes into her puzzles, however, they are confounding creations: very few are complete. She is assembling one of the world’s largest bodies of unfinished art.
  • Nicholas Turk-Browne, a cognitive neuroscientist at Princeton, entered the lab and greeted Johnson in the insistently zippy manner of a kindergarten teacher: “Lonni Sue! We’re going to put you in a kind of space machine and take pictures of your brain!” A Canadian with droopy dark-brown hair, he typically speaks with mellow precision. Though they had met some thirty times before, Johnson continued to regard him as an amiable stranger. Turk-Browne is one of a dozen scientists, at Princeton and at Johns Hopkins, who have been studying her, with Aline and Maggi’s consent. Aline told me, “When we realized the magnitude of Lonni Sue’s illness, my mother and I promised each other to turn what could be a tragedy into something which could help others.” Cognitive science has often gained crucial insights by studying people with singular brains, and Johnson is the first person with profound amnesia to be examined extensively with an fMRI. Several papers have been published about Johnson, and the researchers say that she could fuel at least a dozen more.
Lawrence Hrubes

Richard Serra in the Qatari Desert : The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...erra-in-the-qatari-desert.html

arts TOK sculpture culture

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 22 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Richard Serra’s new sculpture, “East-West/West-East,” is a set of four standing steel plates rolled in Germany, shipped via Antwerp, and offloaded, trucked, and craned into place in the middle of the western Qatari desert. It’s his second public commission in Qatar—the first, a towering sculpture titled “7,” is his tallest ever—and it is being unveiled, together with a new work, at the Al Riwaq exhibition space, in Doha. “East-West/West-East,” which spans the greatest area of any of Serra’s creations, is yet another grand piece of public art purchased by the Gulf nation. The Qatar Museums Authority is estimated to spend about a billion dollars per year on art. At its head is the young Sheikha al-Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, a sister of the Emir of Qatar and a Duke University graduate, who was recently named the most powerful person in the art world by ArtReview.
markfrankel18

"Just Babies": Is morality hard-wired? - Salon.com - 1 views

www.salon.com/..._babies_is_morality_hard_wired

ToK ethics psychology babies

shared by markfrankel18 on 18 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • “Just Babies” surveys the subjects of empathy and compassion (not the same thing: The first is displeasure felt at witnessing someone else’s suffering, while the second is the urge to alleviate it), concepts of fairness and justice and a basic sense of right and wrong. These are universal moral concerns: Lying, breaking promises, murder and other assaults are regarded everywhere as bad. But what about actions that can be viewed as victimless, most especially sexual transgressions, such as consensual incest between adult siblings?
  • He’s particularly insightful on “trolley problems” a currently much-discussed form of thought experiment in which the subject is asked to make a choice between letting a runaway train kill five individuals strapped to the tracks or flipping a switch that will divert it to a track on which only one person is strapped. Most people say they’d flip the switch, a utilitarian position in which it’s permissible to cause one death in the course of saving five. But most people will also stop short of physically pushing a very fat man onto the tracks in order to stop the train, even when the tradeoff in lives remains the same.
  • What such problems overlook, Bloom argues, is the fact that human morality is not grounded in abstract experiments involving strangers, but rather evolved in a context of kinship and tribal bonds.
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  • “We are not natural-born racists,” he writes, and sexual disgust is, he believes, a subset of our general distaste for the body and its messy functions. Many religions, for example, also place great emphasis on ritual bodily purity, from prohibitions on certain foods to particular forms of washing to the handling of the dead. But the forms themselves are unstable, as illustrated by an old Greek story about two different tribes, each equally appalled by the way the other treats the corpses of their fathers.
  • Bloom, therefore, is a skeptic of what he calls “the current trend in psychology and neuroscience to downplay rational deliberation in favor of gut feelings and unconscious motivations.”
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - Selma and American Sniper: Is accuracy important? - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...6-do-films-need-to-be-accurate

TOK arts ethics history film narrative truth memory

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • One of the problems is that no narrative feature is going to be able to convey the absolute truth. Characters inevitably get conflated and information omitted.“I think if you have two hours to tell a story, you have to contract things, you have to make your point in ways that a documentary would make them differently,” says David Oyelowo, the British actor who portrays Martin Luther King Jr.
  • “We’re in the service of truth. Sometimes that obliges you to take shortcuts of poetic license. You’re obliged to do it. You can take too many liberties, you have to find a line between it all,” he says.
  • The other film caught up in all the mudslinging this year has been American Sniper, the story of US Navy Seal Chris Kyle, directed by Clint Eastwood. With this picture criticism has largely broken down along political lines, with liberals arguing that the movie glorifies killing, demeans Arabs and omits some less than flattering aspects of Kyle’s life. There has also been an effort by the film’s critics to point out that the Academy shouldn’t be celebrating a film about a soldier who reportedly described killing Iraqis as “fun”.The picture, which has been a huge box office success, has been strongly embraced by many conservatives who view it as a well-crafted and very moving portrait of a troubled but patriotic US soldier.
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  • “I think it’s really a bit much to ask a film to 100% reproduce reality on screen when I think the average person in their own lives has a hard time remembering exactly how things happened even [about] lunch with someone a week ago,” says Foundas.
Vicki Close

Does reading fiction make you a more empathic, better person? - 2 views

www.slate.com/...re_empathic_better_person.html

TOK arts emotion language

shared by Vicki Close on 02 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Vicki Close on 02 Dec 14
     
    Response to Science journal research paper by Castano and Corner Kidd reporting increased levels of empathy in readers of fiction. (http://mic.com/articles/104702/science-shows-something-surprising-about-people-who-love-reading-fiction)
markfrankel18

We are more rational than those who nudge us - Steven Poole - Aeon - 3 views

aeon.co/...tional-than-those-who-nudge-us

TOK economics bias rational reason Kahneman

shared by markfrankel18 on 29 Sep 14 - Cached
  • We are told that we are an irrational tangle of biases, to be nudged any which way. Does this claim stand to reason?
  • A culture that believes its citizens are not reliably competent thinkers will treat those citizens differently to one that respects their reflective autonomy. Which kind of culture do we want to be? And we do have a choice. Because it turns out that the modern vision of compromised rationality is more open to challenge than many of its followers accept.
  • Modern skepticism about rationality is largely motivated by years of experiments on cognitive bias.
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  • The thorny question is whether these widespread departures from the economic definition of ‘rationality’ should be taken to show that we are irrational, or whether they merely show that the economic definition of rationality is defective.
  • During the development of game theory and decision theory in the mid-20th century, a ‘rational’ person in economic terms became defined as a lone individual whose decisions were calculated to maximise self-interest, and whose preferences were (logically or mathematically) consistent in combination and over time. It turns out that people are not in fact ‘rational’ in this homo economicus way,
  • There has been some controversy over the correct statistical interpretations of some studies, and several experiments that ostensibly demonstrate ‘priming’ effects, in particular, have notoriously proven difficult to replicate. But more fundamentally, the extent to which such findings can show that we are acting irrationally often depends on what we agree should count as ‘rational’ in the first place.
  • if we want to understand others, we can always ask what is making their behaviour ‘rational’ from their point of view. If, on the other hand, we just assume they are irrational, no further conversation can take place.
  • And so there is less reason than many think to doubt humans’ ability to be reasonable. The dissenting critiques of the cognitive-bias literature argue that people are not, in fact, as individually irrational as the present cultural climate assumes. And proponents of debiasing argue that we can each become more rational with practice. But even if we each acted as irrationally as often as the most pessimistic picture implies, that would be no cause to flatten democratic deliberation into the weighted engineering of consumer choices, as nudge politics seeks to do. On the contrary, public reason is our best hope for survival.
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

Most teachers are overlooking huge numbers of gifted black students - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...gifted-black-students

education human sciences bias culture assessment testing

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • "In all of my publications I have said that giftedness looks different across cultures," she said. "That means that what these predominantly white teachers are looking for may look different than [for] a person from another culture." She calls this a "cultural mismatch," which can cause teachers to have lower expectations for minority students or misinterpret their behavior. As an example, Ford said a common indicator of giftedness —independence — might not manifest in black students, who tend to have tight-knit and interdependent family structures.
markfrankel18

Let's call everyone "they": Gender-neutral language should be the norm, not the exception - Salon.com - 1 views

www.salon.com/..._be_the_norm_not_the_exception

TOK language gender

shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • When someone refers to a Hispanic person or a lesbian or someone with blue eyes or curly hair or double-jointed thumbs, it’s not unreasonable to question whether the detail is merely a rhetorical flourish of sorts or is, in the speaker’s mind, substantively relevant. Such superfluous details can often be offered as a way of reinforcing a stereotype without outright stating it. It is no surprise that we often respond to statements like “My black coworker is always late” or “That blonde student is actually quite smart” or “My gay friend is so dramatic” by asking what, exactly, the speaker is “trying to say.” We are entitled to our indignation because the language presented a very clear alternative; these traits needn’t have been mentioned at all.
  • When it comes to gender, on the other hand, the language has traditionally presented no elegant alternative. We are forced to clumsily dance around the matter, or to give in and refer to our coworkers, students and friends as “he” or “she.”
  • Instead, we ought to revert to the gender neutral “they” whenever gender is not explicitly relevant. Least of all because, if the goal is greater inclusion, limiting the use of the singular they to these cases doesn’t even have the desired effect.
Lawrence Hrubes

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...to-build-the-perfect-team.html

human sciences psychology communication

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Five years ago, Google — one of the most public proselytizers of how studying workers can transform productivity — became focused on building the perfect team. In the last decade, the tech giant has spent untold millions of dollars measuring nearly every aspect of its employees’ lives. Google’s People Operations department has scrutinized everything from how frequently particular people eat together (the most productive employees tend to build larger networks by rotating dining companions) to which traits the best managers share (unsurprisingly, good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many Google managers).The company’s top executives long believed that building the best teams meant combining the best people. They embraced other bits of conventional wisdom as well, like ‘‘It’s better to put introverts together,’’ said Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People Analytics division, or ‘‘Teams are more effective when everyone is friends away from work.’’ But, Dubey went on, ‘‘it turned out no one had really studied which of those were true.’’In 2012, the company embarked on an initiative — code-named Project Aristotle — to study hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared.
  • As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Rozovsky and her colleagues kept coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as ‘‘group norms.’’
  • As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.
Lawrence Hrubes

When Philosophy Lost Its Way - The New York Times - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...when-philosophy-lost-its-way

philosophy ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Having adopted the same structural form as the sciences, it’s no wonder philosophy fell prey to physics envy and feelings of inadequacy. Philosophy adopted the scientific modus operandi of knowledge production, but failed to match the sciences in terms of making progress in describing the world. Much has been made of this inability of philosophy to match the cognitive success of the sciences. But what has passed unnoticed is philosophy’s all-too-successful aping of the institutional form of the sciences. We, too, produce research articles. We, too, are judged by the same coin of the realm: peer-reviewed products. We, too, develop sub-specializations far from the comprehension of the person on the street. In all of these ways we are so very “scientific.”
Lawrence Hrubes

Doctors in Denmark want to stop circumcision for under-18s | The Independent - 1 views

www.independent.co.uk/...ildren-under-18s-a7459291.html

ethics culture religious knowledge systems medicine doctors circumcision

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 09 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • The Danish Medical Association said it had considered suggesting a legal ban on the procedure for children under the age of 18, because it believed circumcision should be “an informed, personal choice” that young men make for themselves.ADVERTISINGinRead invented by Teads When parents have their sons circumcised, it robs boys of the ability to make decisions about their own bodies, and choose their cultural and religious beliefs for themselves, the organisation said.
markfrankel18

Why People Mistake Good Deals for Rip-Offs : The New Yorker - 5 views

www.newyorker.com/...e-good-deals-for-rip-offs.html

TOK arts psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Last Saturday, an elderly man set up a stall near Central Park and sold eight spray-painted canvases for less than one five-hundredth of their true value. The art works were worth more than two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, but the man walked away with just four hundred and twenty dollars. Each canvas was an original by the enigmatic British artist Banksy, who was approaching the midpoint of a monthlong residency in New York City. Banksy had asked the man to sell the works on his behalf. For several hours, hundreds of oblivious locals and tourists ignored the quiet salesman, along with the treasure he was hiding in plain sight. The day ended with thirty paintings left unsold. One Banksy aficionado, certain she could distinguish a fake from the real thing, quietly scolded the man for knocking off the artist’s work.
  • What makes Banksy’s subversive stunt so compelling is that it forces us to acknowledge how incoherently humans derive value. How can a person be willing to pay five hundred times more than another for the same art work born in the same artist’s studio?
  • Some concepts are easy to evaluate without a reference standard. You don’t need a yardstick, for example, when deciding whether you’re well-rested or exhausted, or hot or cold, because those states are “inherently evaluable”—they’re easy to measure in absolute terms because we have sensitive biological mechanisms that respond when our bodies demand rest, or when the temperature rises far above or falls far below seventy-two degrees. Everyone agrees that three days is too long a period without sleep, but art works satisfy far too abstract a need to attract a universal valuation. When you learn that your favorite abstract art work was actually painted by a child, its value declines precipitously (unless the child happens to be your prodigious four-year-old).
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • We’re swayed by all the wrong cues, and our valuation estimates are correspondingly incoherent. Banksy knew this when he asked an elderly man to sell his works in Central Park. It’s comforting to believe that we get what we pay for, but discerning true value is as difficult as spotting a genuine Banksy canvas in a city brimming with imitations.
markfrankel18

Why are shoppers being asked to buy ethically or not in the first place? - Quartz - 3 views

qz.com/...ally-or-not-in-the-first-place

TOK ethics psychology economics

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • A series of studies suggests that, while a product’s ethics may influence purchasing decisions, many shoppers choose simply not to know whether something was ethically made. That includes shoppers who care about social responsibility. And shoppers who ignore ethical matters can even develop a negative opinion about people who do express ethical concerns—which makes them even less likely to pay attention to ethical issues in the future.
  • “You feel badly that you were not ethical when someone else was,” Rebecca Reczek, a professor of marketing at Ohio State University and one of the study’s authors, told NPR about the results. “It’s a threat to your sense of self, to your identity. So to recover from that, you put the other person down.”
  • International supply chains, she points out, are notoriously opaque, and the free market doesn’t have any good way to deal with the way this system stifles information. It might be best, she says, if these matters were regulated before the products even reached consumers, taking ethical dilemmas out of the shopping equation. Of the unethical choice, like a polluting car or a shirt made with exploited labor, she suggests: “Maybe we just shouldn’t have it available.”
Lawrence Hrubes

Viewpoint: Britain must pay reparations to India - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-india-33618621

history nationalism bias ethics justice

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • At the end of May, the Oxford Union held a debate on the motion "This house believes Britain owes reparations to her former colonies". Speakers included former Conservative MP Sir Richard Ottaway, Indian politician and writer Shashi Tharoor and British historian John Mackenzie. Shashi Tharoor's argument in support of the motion, went viral in India after he tweeted it out from his personal account. The argument has found favour among Indians, where the subject of colonial exploitation remains a sore topic. Here he gives a summary of his views:
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