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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.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • 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.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Why do people cough during concerts? - 2 views

www.bbc.com/...entertainment-arts-21242727

TOK arts science human sciences SocialScience music

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Many concert-goers are often frustrated by the sound of people coughing during classical music performances. These coughers have now become the subject of an academic paper concerning "the economics of concert etiquette", which analyses a stark fact: people appear to cough more in concerts than in they do in normal life. The German economist Andreas Wagener told the Today programme: "The statistics indicate people cough during concerts twice as much as they do in normal life." Concert pianist Susan Tomes said: "i certainly do notice it, but i think it has something to do with the fact that people have gotten so used to hearing music amplified. "Many types of music are so loud, but classical music is not, and when you go to a classical concert, you forget how quiet acoustic instruments are." First broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme on Monday 28 January 2012.
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

The Physicist's View Of Reality : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...the-physicists-view-of-reality

TOK science Physics

shared by markfrankel18 on 14 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 14 Sep 13
     
    "Science is more like the United Nations than it is like a village. Different communities of scientists carry out their work using their own methods, languages and styles. Scientists in different fields need interpreters if they are to communicate with each other. There is no scientific lingua franca, not even mathematics. So, while there is no incompatibility between what physics teaches us about the world and what we learn from biology, no one today would seriously propose eliminating biology by reducing it to physics. You can't carry out the work of biology - you can't identify its problems and investigate their solutions - in the language of physics. And yet, despite this state of affairs, i suspect that many of us, and most scientists, whether they ever take the time to think about this or not, are probably committed to what i'll call the physicist's view of reality."
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.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • 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

Chef Heston Blumenthal's Philosophy: The Fat Duck Restaurant - 1 views

www.thefatduck.co.uk/...Our-Philosophy

TOK sensory perception taste food

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 23 Sep 13
     
    "Of course I want to create food that Is delIcIous, but thIs depends on so much more than sImply what's goIng on In the mouth-context, hIstory, nostalgIa, emotIon, memory and the Interplay of sIght, smell, sound and taste all play an Important part In our apprecIatIon and enjoyment of food"
Lawrence Hrubes

Meet the woman who can't feel fear - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...t-the-woman-who-cant-feel-fear

emotion fear brain neuroscience reason

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • "Tell me what fear is," Tranel began. "Well, that's what i'm trying to -- to be honest, i truly have no clue," SM said, her voice raspy. That's actually a symptom of the condition that stole fear from her. Urbach-Wieth disease
  • Even though she's a talented artist, she always has trouble drawing (or reading) a fearful facial expression. "i wonder what it's like, you know, to actually be afraid of something," she told Tranel.
  • That's actually just one of two times that SM has been held at knife point. She's also been held at gunpoint twice. And after the above incident, she didn't feel like she should call the police. The threat had passed. She didn't have any lasting trauma, because the event had failed to faze her. SM isn't stupid. She understands what can and can't kill her. But she lacks the quick, subconscious, visceral response that the rest of us feel when we're exposed to danger.
Lawrence Hrubes

Tim Cook Opposes Order for Apple to Unlock iPhone, Setting Up Showdown - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-cook-fbi-san-bernardino.html

ethics technology law privacy government terrorism

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 17 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Apple said on Wednesday that it would oppose and challenge a federal court order to help the F.B.i. unlock an iPhone used by one of the two attackers who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in December.
  • “We have made a solemn commitment to the victims and their families that we will leave no stone unturned as we gather as much information and evidence as possible. These victims and families deserve nothing less.”
  • Mr. Cook said the order would amount to creating a “back door” to bypass Apple’s strong encryption standards — “something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “If the government can use the All WrIts Act to make It easIer to unlock your IPhone, It would have the power to reach Into anyone’s devIce to capture theIr data.
Philip Drobis

ImItatIon Is what makes us human and creatIve - Kat McGowan - Aeon - 3 views

aeon.co/...hat-makes-us-human-and-creativ

TOK Imitation WeAreCopycats aeon perception psychology intuition science

shared by Philip Drobis on 02 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Throughout human history, innovation – including the technological progress we cherish – has been fuelled and sustained by imitation. Copying is the mighty force that has allowed the human race to move from stone knives to remote-guided drones, from digging sticks to crops that manufacture their own pesticides.
    • Philip Drobis
      Philip Drobis on 02 Dec 14
       
      ImItatIon Is the source for technologIcal advance --by copyIng others InventIons we can add our own potentIally benefIt to them, thus provIdIng a small contrIbutIon to Its advancement
  • advances happen largely through tinkering, when somebody recreates a good thing with a minor upgrade that makes it slightly better.
  • When Isaac Newton talked about standIng on the shoulders of gIants, he should have saId that we are dwarves, standIng atop a vast heap of dwarves.
    • Philip Drobis
      Philip Drobis on 02 Dec 14
       
      Ties to our ability to observe and remember what we see. That we can then build off of that and improve it
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Lots of copying means that many minds get their chance at the problem; imitation ‘makes the contents of brains available to everyone’, writes the developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello in the Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (1999). Tomasello, who is co-director of the Max Planck institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, calls the combination of imitation and innovation the ‘cultural ratchet’. it is like a mechanical ratchet that permits motion in only one direction – such as winding a watch, or walking through a turnstile. Good ideas push the ratchet forward one notch. Faithful imitation keeps the ratchet from slipping backward, protecting ideas from being forgotten or lost and keeping knowledge alive for the next round of improvement.
    • Philip Drobis
      Philip Drobis on 02 Dec 14
       
      Multiple minds are essentially key as the cumulative opportunities of each individual given a chance at the issue can lead to one finding something prosperous 
  • In the 1930s, a paIr of psychologIsts raIsed an Infant chImp alongsIde theIr own baby In an attempt to understand both specIes better. The chImp raIsed In thIs famIly (and others In other such experIments later In the century) never behaved much lIke a human. The human chIld, on the other hand, soon began knuckle-walkIng, bItIng, gruntIng and hootIng – just lIke hIs new sIblIng.
    • Philip Drobis
      Philip Drobis on 02 Dec 14
       
      We copy to survive. Only we humans actually have the 'push' or are gullible enough to not realize as the Chimp example above proposes. -Ties to a biological and/or physiological connection in terms of behavior 
  • Philip Drobis on 02 Dec 14
     
    How we are imitators from childbirth 
markfrankel18

Internet Makes HypochondrIa Worse - 1 views

www.webmd.com/...ernet-makes-hypochondria-worse

TOK technology psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 16 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Thanks to the Internet, becomIng a hypochondrIac Is much easIer than It used to be. The easy avaIlabIlIty of health InformatIon on the web has certaInly helped countless people make educated decIsIons about theIr health and medIcal treatment, but It can be dIsastrous for people who are lIkely to worry. HypochondrIacs researchIng an Illness used to have to scour books and ask doctors for InformatIon. Now a unIverse of InformatIon Is avaIlable wIth a few mouse clIcks. "For hypochondrIacs, the Internet has absolutely changed thIngs for the worse," says BrIan Fallon, MD, professor of psychIatry at ColumbIa UnIversIty and the co-author of Phantom Illness: RecognIzIng, UnderstandIng and OvercomIng HypochondrIa (1996). So far, no studIes have been conducted on just how hypochondrIacs use the Internet, Fallon says. But the phenomenon Is common enough to have a snappy name -- "cyberchondrIa."
Lawrence Hrubes

Why 'Natural' Doesn't Mean Anything Anymore - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...snt-mean-anything-anymore.html

language ethics science nature

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 03 May 15 - No Cached
  • It seems that gettIng end-of-lIfe patIents and theIr famIlIes to endorse “do not resuscItate” orders has been challengIng. To many ears, “D.N.R.” sounds a lIttle too much lIke throwIng Grandpa under the bus. But accordIng to a paper In The Journal of MedIcal EthIcs, when the orders are reworded to say “allow natural death,” patIents and famIly members and even medIcal professIonals are much more lIkely to gIve theIr consent to what amounts to exactly the same protocols.
  • So does this mean that, when it comes to saying what’s natural, anything goes? i don’t think so. in fact, i think there’s some philosophical wisdom we can harvest from, of all places, the Food and Drug Administration. When the federal judges couldn’t find a definition of “natural” to apply to the class-action suits before them, three of them wrote to the F.D.A., ordering the agency to define the word. But the F.D.A. had considered the question several times before, and refused to attempt a definition. The only advice the F.D.A. was willing to offer the jurists is that a food labeled “natural” should have “nothing artificial or synthetic” in it “that would not normally be expected in the food.” The F.D.A. states on its website that “it is difficult to define a food product as ‘natural’ because the food has probably been processed and is no longer the product of the earth,” suggesting that the industry might not want to press the point too hard, lest it discover that nothing it sells is natural.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why this man wants to take the words 'Allahu akbar' back from terrorists - Home | As it Happens | CBC Radio - 1 views

www.cbc.ca/...back-from-terrorists-1.4386048

language religious knowledge systems terrorism

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Extremists on all sides not only hijack religion and identity and narratives, they also hijack language to rationalize their violent ideology and their violent actions. i want to take it back and say, "No. Allahu akbar means God is great. i use it in prayer."
Lawrence Hrubes

The Great A.I. AwakenIng - The New York TImes - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-great-ai-awakening.html

language translation technology AI brain

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 22 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Translation, however, is an example of a field where this approach fails horribly, because words cannot be reduced to their dictionary definitions, and because languages tend to have as many exceptions as they have rules. More often than not, a system like this is liable to translate “minister of agriculture” as “priest of farming.” Still, for math and chess it worked great, and the proponents of symbolic A.i. took it for granted that no activities signaled “general intelligence” better than math and chess.
  • A rarefied department within the company, Google Brain, was founded five years ago on this very principle: that artificial “neural networks” that acquaint themselves with the world via trial and error, as toddlers do, might in turn develop something like human flexibility. This notion is not new — a version of it dates to the earliest stages of modern computing, in the 1940s — but for much of its history most computer scientists saw it as vaguely disreputable, even mystical. Since 2011, though, Google Brain has demonstrated that this approach to artificial intelligence could solve many problems that confounded decades of conventional efforts. Speech recognition didn’t work very well until Brain undertook an effort to revamp it; the application of machine learning made its performance on Google’s mobile platform, Android, almost as good as human transcription. The same was true of image recognition. Less than a year ago, Brain for the first time commenced with the gut renovation of an entire consumer product, and its momentous results were being celebrated tonight.
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.
Lawrence Hrubes

My Terezín Diary | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...my-terezin-diary

history memory war holocaust ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 16 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • What is most striking to me today about the diary i kept seventy-five years ago is what i left out.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...hy-facts-dont-change-our-minds

reason bias confirmation bias psychology science rationalism emotion human sciences

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 06 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. if your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and i rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When i talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. if we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.
Lawrence Hrubes

'The Art of Dissent' - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-art-of-dissent.html

arts politics technology China government

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 11 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Ai Weiwei and Jacob Appelbaum are artists, journalists, dissidents, polymaths — and targets. Their respective governments, China and the United States, monitor their every move. They have been detained and interrogated. Ai cannot leave China, and Appelbaum is advised not to return to the United States. They are separated from their families. Ai has been imprisoned and beaten by the police. Yet each continues his work and speaks out against government wrongdoing.in April, Ai and Appelbaum met in Beijing to collaborate on an art project commissioned by Rhizome and the New Museum in New York. As a filmmaker, and as a target of state surveillance myself, i am deeply interested in the way being watched and recorded affects how we act, and how watching the watchers, or counter-surveillance, can shift power. i was asked to film their project. During the encounter, Ai and Appelbaum continually filmed and photographed each other. Between their cameras and mine, we created a zone of hyper-surveillance. Almost everything was documented. Just outside Ai’s studio hung surveillance cameras installed by the Chinese government. The art project the pair made, “Panda to Panda,” was not about surveillance. it was about secrets. They stuffed cuddly toy panda bears with public, shredded N.S.A. documents that were originally given to me and Glenn Greenwald two years ago in Hong Kong by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden. inside each panda, Ai and Appelbaum placed a micro SD memory card containing a digital backup of the previously published documents.
markfrankel18

Is EconomIcs More LIke HIstory Than PhysIcs? | Guest Blog, ScIentIfIc AmerIcan Blog Network - 3 views

blogs.scientificamerican.com/...more-like-history-than-physics

ToK economics psychology Science

shared by markfrankel18 on 21 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 21 Aug 13
     
    "Is economIcs lIke physIcs, or more lIke hIstory? Steven PInker says, "No sane thInker would try to explaIn World War I In the language of physIcs." Yet some economIsts aIm close to such crazIness. PInker says the "mIndset of scIence" elImInates errors by "open debate, peer revIew, and double-blInd methods," and especIally, experImentatIon. But experIments requIre repetItIon and control over all relevant varIables. We can experIment on IndIvIdual behavIor, but not wIth hIstory or macroeconomIcs."
Lawrence Hrubes

How 'The Good Place' Goes Beyond 'The Trolley Problem' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...543393

ethics utilitarianism duty

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 22 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • How The Good Place Goes Beyond ‘The Trolley Problem’ In Season 2, the terrIfIc NBC sItcom contInues to explore ethIcs wIthout sacrIfIcIng complexIty or humor.
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