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Lawrence Hrubes

Underhill: Rubber Time - 1 views

www.unc.edu/...underhill3.html

TOK perception time culture

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • We soon realized we were dealing with differing concepts of time. In our culture, time has substance. It is not to be wasted. It is a container to be filled. We maintain calendars and make schedules to manage separate blocks of time. We measure accomplishment by how well the allotted segments are used. We take appointments seriously, and see promptness as a virtue. Our language is full of adages urging us to use time wisely, "to fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run." Our approach to time, which developed after the invention of the mechanical clock, is probably one of the reasons why Europe, a stagnant and peripheral backwater in the year 1000, became the predominant culture by 1500. Our own industrial and scientific preeminence and material wealth is also rooted in efficient use of time. But we have paid a price. We think that with schedules we can control the future, but often find instead that we have become the prisoners of schedules. We are compulsive about filling blocks of time with useful activity and hurry like the Mad Hatter from appointment to appointment. We are frustrated when a task takes longer than the time we had planned. We interrupt work we have almost finished and stop activities we're enjoying because we're "running behind schedule." From this can come stress and alienation. Seeing reality as a series of segmented time compartments can blind us to the wholeness of life.
  • "Wasting time" for the Indonesian is a meaningless concept. time is seen as a gentle river carrying everything along. Little effort is made to "manage" the flow. "Morning," "noon," "afternoon," "evening," divide the day adequately. Indonesians explain to Westerners that they live in "rubber time." Appointments, when made, are vague, provisional indications of intention. Harmonious interaction with other people in a flexible, spontaneous, unstructured context is the norm they seek. Interpersonal skills are valued and highly developed. This approach to time is reflected in their language. Verbs in Indonesian have no tense. A time indicator is used, if necessary, at the beginning of a thought, but the verb remains the same for the past, present, future, and pluperfect subjunctive.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Caesium: A brief history of timekeeping - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-29476893

TOK science time relativity

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The answer is that whenever you have a network operating over distance, accurate timekeeping is essential for synchronisation. And the faster the speed of travel, the more accurate the timekeeping must be. Hence in the modern world, where information travels at almost the speed of light down wires or through the air, accuracy is more important than ever. What caesium has done is to raise the standards for the measurement of time exponentially.
  • As the electron moves out into the wider orbit it absorbs energy, and as it jumps back in it releases it in the form of light, fluorescing very slightly. That means you can tell when you've hit the sweet spot of 9,192,631,770 Hz. It's because this transition frequency is so much higher than the resonant frequency of quartz that a caesium clock is so much more accurate. The caesium fountain at NPL, Szymaniec tells me proudly, is accurate to one second in every 158 million years. That means it would only be a second out if it had started keeping time back in the peak of the Jurassic Period when diplodocus were lumbering around and pterodactyls wheeling in the sky.
  • Now, if such insane levels of accuracy seem pointless, then think again. Without the caesium clock, for example, satellite navigation would be impossible. GPS satellites carry synchronised caesium clocks that enable them collectively to triangulate your position and work out where on earth you are. And the practical applications do not end there. Just ask Leon Lobo - he's in charge of time "dissemination" at NPL. His job is to tell the time to the UK. For a fee. NPL has just begun offering businesses standardised timekeeping accurate to the nearest microsecond - a millionth of a second. Mr Lobo is targeting a wide range of clients that all have one thing in common - they need to synchronise a network that operates at speeds far faster than any trains.
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  • Mr Lobo's biggest target is the financial markets, which these days are dominated by computers programmed to place thousands of trades per second, transmitted down wires at almost the speed of light. In this world, the equivalent of a train crash would be ill-timed bets that rack up millions of dollars in losses, and might even briefly sink the market in the process. Unsurprisingly, financial regulators increasingly require a super-accurate timestamp on every transaction.
  • The switch to atomic time was for good reason. The rotation of the earth, it turned out, was not such a reliable measure of time. No day or year is exactly the same length.
  • Due to the earth's elliptical orbit, the sun can be as much as 16 minutes out of line with mean solar time. Add the distortion of time zones, which average time across huge regions, and the difference is far greater. China, which is almost 5,000km wide, has a single time zone spanning 1h40 of solar time. The decision of some countries to adjust the clocks twice a year as a "daylight saving" measure exaggerates the issue yet further.
Lawrence Hrubes

What to Call a Doubter of Climate Change? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...te-change-whats-in-a-name.html

TOK language science climate skepticism

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • People who reject the findings of climate science are dismissed as “deniers” and “disinformers.” Those who accept the science are attacked as “alarmists” or “warmistas. ” The latter term, evoking the Sandinista revolutionaries of Nicaragua, is perhaps meant to suggest that the science is part of some socialist plot.
  • The petition asks the news media to abandon the most frequently used term for people who question climate science, “skeptic,” and call them “climate deniers” instead. By Degrees A column by Justin Gillis about our changing climate. 3.6 Degrees of Uncertainty DEC 15 A Tricky Transition From Fossil Fuel NOV 10 Shining Star Power on a Crucial Subject SEP 22 In the Ocean, Clues to Change AUG 11 Picking Lesser of Two Climate Evils JUL 7 See More » Climate scientists are among the most vocal critics of using the term “climate skeptic” to describe people who flatly reject their findings. They point out that skepticism is the very foundation of the scientific method. The modern consensus about the risks of climate change, they say, is based on evidence that has piled up over the course of decades and has been subjected to critical scrutiny every step of the way.
  • In other words, the climate scientists see themselves as the true skeptics, having arrived at a durable consensus about emissions simply because the evidence of risk has become overwhelming. And in this view, people who reject the evidence are phony skeptics, arguing their case by cherry-picking studies, manipulating data, and refusing to weigh the evidence as a whole.The petition asking the media to drop the “climate skeptic” label began with Mark B. Boslough, a physicist in New Mexico who grew increasingly annoyed by the term over several years. The phrase is wrong, he said, because “these people do not embrace the scientific method.”
markfrankel18

Why Time Slows Down When We're Afraid, Speeds Up as We Age, and Gets Warped on Vacation | Brain Pickings - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...time-warped-claudia-hammond

TOK time psychology brain

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • As we grow older, we tend to feel like the previous decade elapsed more rapidly, while the earlier decades of our lives seem to have lasted longer. Similarly, we tend to think of events that took place in the past 10 years as having happened more recently than they actually did
  • The most straightforward explanation for it is called the clarity of memory hypothesis, proposed by the psychologist Norman Bradburn in 1987. This is the simple idea that because we know that memories fade over time, we use the clarity of a memory as a guide to its recency. So if a memory seems unclear we assume it happened longer ago.
  • It is clear that however the brain counts time, it has a system that is very flexible. It takes account of [factors like] emotions, absorption, expectations, the demands of a task and even the temperature .The precise sense we are using also makes a difference; an auditory event appears longer than a visual one.
markfrankel18

Where Time Comes From - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...where-time-comes-from

TOK time science

shared by markfrankel18 on 14 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The time that ends up on your smartphone—and that synchronizes GPS, military operations, financial transactions, and internet communications—originates in a set of atomic clocks on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory. Dr. Demetrios Matsakis, Chief Scientist for USNO's time Services, gives a tour.
markfrankel18

Time-shifting man predicts the future › Dr Karl's Great Moments In Science (ABC Science) - 0 views

www.abc.net.au/...3834436.htm

ToK psychology perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 18 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • "Time" is something that both philosophers and physicists have been wondering for about, well, a long Time. And now, the neuroscientists have joined in. They have found a man who, when he looks at you, hears what you are saying to him before your lips move.
  • We don't notice this delay in reality because we have evolved to be able to deal with this. We can anticipate actions or patterns through experience.
  • Now you might not realise this, but in terms of vision you are always living 0.3 second (or 300 milliseconds) behind reality. That's how long it takes between when the incoming light lands on the cells in your retina, and you get that full magnificent wraparound 3D colour sensation that we call vision.
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  • So how come we normally see the lips moving at the same time as we hear the voice? Almost certainly, it's because our brain deliberately inserts a delay of about 200 milliseconds on the audio circuit. Now sure, there would be an advantage in being able to hear dangerous things, such as the killer kangaroo bearing down upon you that extra 200 milliseconds earlier. But all of us are a product of an evolutionary pathway that decided it was more important for us to be able to easily communicate with our fellow humans, than to hear the killer kangaroo that 200 milliseconds sooner. After all, we humans are quite pathetic as a hunting animal. We can't run very quickly, our eyes are not very sharp, and neither is our sense of smell. Our claws are silly little fingernails, and our teeth are not very good at ripping and tearing. But thanks to our amazing brain, we can organise ourselves into groups and so we have become masters of the planet. So, getting back to Mr PH, if the sound of the outside world was deliberately electronically delayed by 200 milliseconds, suddenly audio and vision were in sync for him again. And when the neuroscientists did an MRI scan on his brain, they found damage in areas that were well-placed to disrupt audition and/or timing.
Lawrence Hrubes

Seeing and Hearing for the First Time, on YouTube - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...-for-the-first-time-on-youtube

perception senses sensory perception emotion

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 19 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Truly new sensory experiences are rare. Perhaps for that reason, a whole genre of YouTube videos is dedicated to them. The videos of babies tasting lemons are merely heartwarming. Others—the ones showing deaf people activating their cochlear implants, for example, or blind people, after surgery, seeing for the first time—have a power that’s hard to overstate. (A video of Sarah Churman, a young woman from Texas, hearing her own voice has been viewed more than twenty-five million times.) That power flows from a number of sources. The videos are often filmed by family members who are themselves deeply moved. They involve us in a private, intimate, and life-changing moment. They are unusually frank documents of emotion: one doesn’t often see such extremes of surprise, fear, and joy flow so undisguised across an adult face. And, at the same time, they tell part of a larger, communal story about science and its possibilities. (Perhaps this is why patients and their families are so willing to share these otherwise private moments with the rest of us.)
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Earth - Why does time always run forwards and never backwards? - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...hy-does-time-only-run-forwards

science time physics astronomy cosmology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Mar 15 - No Cached
sleggettisp liked it
  • Newton's laws are astonishingly successful at describing the world. They explain why apples fall from trees and why the Earth orbits the Sun. But they have an odd feature: they work just as well backwards as forwards. If an egg can break, then Newton's laws say it can un-break.This is obviously wrong, but nearly every theory that physicists have discovered since Newton has the same problem. The laws of physics simply don't care whether time runs forwards or backwards, any more than they care about whether you're left-handed or right-handed.But we certainly do. In our experience, time has an arrow, always pointing into the future. "You might mix up east and west, but you would not mix up yesterday and tomorrow," says Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "But the fundamental laws of physics don't distinguish between past and future."
Lawrence Hrubes

Ninth Planet May Exist in Solar System Beyond Pluto, New Evidence Suggests - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...solar-system-beyond-pluto.html

science astronomy models observation planet reason

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • What Dr. Brown and a fellow Caltech professor, Konstantin Batygin, have not done is actually find that planet
  • Rather, in a paper published Wednesday in The Astronomical Journal, Dr. Brown and Dr. Batygin lay out a detailed circumstantial argument for the planet’s existence in what astronomers have observed — a half-dozen small bodies in distant, highly elliptical orbits.
  • This would be the second time that Dr. Brown has upended the map of the solar system. In January 2005, he discovered a Pluto-size object, now known as Eris, in the ring of icy debris beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper belt.A year and a half later, the International Astronomical Union placed Pluto in a new category, “dwarf planet,” because it had not “cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.”In the view of the astronomical union, a full-fledged planet must be, in essence, the gravitational bully of its orbit, and Pluto was not.
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  • “The theorists didn’t really take it seriously,” he said. “They figured it was all some observational effect. The observers didn’t take it seriously, because they figured it was all some theoretical thing they couldn’t understand.”
Lawrence Hrubes

History News Network | When Did "the '60s" Begin? A Cautionary Tale for Historians - 1 views

hnn.us/153290

TOK history

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Feb 14
     
    "That's what historians do: look back and see things that people at the time couldn't see. It's a job well worth doing. But it's equally important that we don't confuse the early seeds of a major political, social, and cultural change with the substance of the change itself. If we make that mistake, we miss the most important lesson... The seeds can be all around us, yet the change itself remains unexpected, invisible, even unimaginable to most people at the time."
Lawrence Hrubes

The 1914 Christmas armistice: a triumph for common humanity - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...47-11e3-a87d-00144feabdc0.html

TOK history war memory WW1

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 30 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 30 Dec 13
     
    "We should be aware that views of the war have changed dramatically over time and that those who experienced it directly often saw it in ways that we would find astounding. Memories and remembrances are more plastic than we like to think, changing over time and under the influence of current preoccupations."
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.
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  • 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.
markfrankel18

The Timekeeper: Behind the Scenes of Humanity's Most Accurate Atomic Clocks, Which Dictate Our Daily Lives | Brain Pickings - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...eeper-video-demetrios-matsakis

TOK time perception technology

shared by markfrankel18 on 24 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • In this fascinating micro-documentary, Dr. Demetrios Matsakis, chief scientist for Time Services at the U.S. Naval Observatory — the same federal agency that hired astronomer Maria Mitchell as the first woman employed by the government — takes us on a tour of the USNO’s 100 atomic clocks, where the Time on your iPhone originates. Dr. Matsakis explains how these atomic clocks — which won’t fall behind or race forward by a single second in 300 million years, rendering them the most accurate measuring devices ever created by humanity — also synchronize GPS, coordinate military operations, dictate financial transactions, and orchestrate internet communication. He then peers into the future to imagine the Time-accuracy that is to come, as well as the dark side of such precision.
tpakeman

The Apostate - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...the-apostate-3

Natural Pseudoscience Fallacy No True Scotsman science

shared by tpakeman on 25 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • “Scientology works 100 percent of the time when it is properly applied to a person who sincerely desires to improve his life.”
    • tpakeman
      tpakeman on 25 Nov 14
       
      "Scientology works 100 percent of the time when it is properly applied to a person who sincerely desires to improve his life." A good example of a claim that fails to meet Popper's requirement of falsifiability and thus is unscientific - who can decide when something is 'properly applied'?  This is also a 'no true scotsman' fallacy.
  • tpakeman on 25 Nov 14
     
    "Scientology works 100 percent of the time when it is properly applied to a person who sincerely desires to improve his life." A good example of a claim that fails to meet Popper's requirement of falsifiability and thus is unscientific - who can decide when something is 'properly applied'?  This is also a 'no true scotsman' fallacy.
Lawrence Hrubes

Walter Mischel, The Marshallow Test, and Self-Control - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...hologist-studying-self-control

TOK psychology psychiatry self-control gratification delay social studies human sciences

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 14 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Mischel’s story isn’t surprising—nicotine is addictive, and quitting is difficult—except for one thing: Mischel is the creator of the marshmallow test, one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology, which is often cited as evidence of the importance of self-control. In the original test, which was administered at the Bing Nursery School, at Stanford, in the nineteen-sixties, Mischel’s team would present a child with a treat (marshmallows were just one option) and tell her that she could either eat the one treat immediately or wait alone in the room for several minutes until the researcher returned, at which point she could have two treats. The promised treats were always visible and the child knew that all she had to do to stop the agonizing wait was ring a bell to call the experimenter back—although in that case, she wouldn’t get the second treat. The longer a child delayed gratification, Mischel found—that is, the longer she was able to wait—the better she would fare later in life at numerous measures of what we now call executive function. She would perform better academically, earn more money, and be healthier and happier. She would also be more likely to avoid a number of negative outcomes, including jail time, obesity, and drug use.
  • It was not until one day in the late nineteen-sixties, when he saw a man with metastasized lung cancer in the halls of Stanford’s medical school—chest exposed, head shaved, little green “x” marks all over his body, marking the points where radiation would go—that Mischel realized he was fooling himself. Finally, something clicked. From then on, each time he wanted a cigarette (approximately every three minutes, by his count) he would create a picture in his mind of the man in the hallway. As he described it to me, “I changed the objective value of the cigarette. It went from something I craved to something disgusting.” He hasn’t had a smoke since.
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 14 Feb 15
     
    "Mischel, who is now eighty-four years old, has just published his first popular book, "The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control." It is part memoir, part scientific analysis, and part self-help guide. In the book, he describes the original impetus for the marshmallow study. At the time, his daughters, Judith, Rebecca, and Linda, were three, four, and five years old, respectively. "I began to see this fascinating phenomenon where they morphed from being highly impulsive, immediate creatures who couldn't delay anything," he told me. "There were these amazingly rapid changes-everything around them was the same, but something inside them had changed. I realized I didn't have a clue what was going on in their heads." He wondered what was it that had enabled them to go from deciding that they wanted to wait to actually being able to do so. He found the answer among their classmates at the Bing preschool."
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?
Lawrence Hrubes

RSA Animate - The Secret Powers of Time - YouTube - 1 views

www.youtube.com/watch

TOK perception time culture religion technology paradigm

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 30 Sep 13 - Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 30 Sep 13
     
    "Renowned psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo explains how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being."
markfrankel18

Malcolm Gladwell got us wrong: Our research was key to the 10,000-hour rule, but here's what got oversimplified - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/..._heres_what_got_oversimplified

TOK science research Gladwell

shared by markfrankel18 on 11 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • First, there is nothing special or magical about ten thousand hours. Gladwell could just as easily have mentioned the average amount of time the best violin students had practiced by the time they were eighteen — approximately seventy-four hundred hours — but he chose to refer to the total practice time they had accumulated by the time they were twenty, because it was a nice round number.
  • And the number varies from field to field.
  • Third, Gladwell didn’t distinguish between the type of practice that the musicians in our study did — a very specific sort of practice referred to as “deliberate practice” which involves constantly pushing oneself beyond one’s comfort zone, following training activities designed by an expert to develop specific abilities, and using feedback to identify weaknesses and work on them — and any sort of activity that might be labeled “practice.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The final problem with the ten-thousand-hour rule is that, although Gladwell himself didn’t say this, many people have interpreted it as a promise that almost anyone can become an expert in a given field by putting in ten thousand hours of practice. But nothing in the study of the Berlin violinists implied this. To show a result like this, it would have been necessary to put a collection of randomly chosen people through ten thousand hours of deliberate practice on the violin and then see how they turned out. All that the Berlin study had shown was that among the students who had become good enough to be admitted to the Berlin music academy, the best students had put in, on average, significantly more hours of solitary practice than the better students, and the better and best students had put in more solitary practice than the music-education students.
markfrankel18

Why I Changed My Mind About Confederate Monuments - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...537396

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shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 19 Aug 17
     
    "That summer, I traveled for the first time to Prague, in the former Soviet-bloc country of Czechoslovakia. I noticed almost immediately the concrete foundations and empty pedestals where monuments to communist leaders once stood. Some statues had been relocated to museums, while others were destroyed; skate boarders and sunbathers had since claimed their spot. The experience forced me to reconsider my position on the markers back home. I imagined stepping back in time to convince the residents of Prague that the monuments helped them face their past, or gave teachers an important tool with which to engage their students. This proved to be a futile exercise. "
yelpreviews57

Which Is The Best Place For Buying Verified Paypal Accounts? - 0 views

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shared by yelpreviews57 on 07 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • yelpreviews57 on 07 Jul 23
     
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