TOK@ISPrague

People often have vicious thoughts. Sometimes they share them on Google. Do these thoughts matter?Yes. Using weekly data from 2004 to 2013, we found a direct correlation between anti-Muslim searches and anti-Muslim hate crimes.

‘“What if?” is a waste of time’ went the headline to the Cambridge historian Richard Evans’ piece in The Guardian last year. Surveying the many instances of public counterfactual discourse in the anniversary commemorations of the First World War, Evans wrote: ‘This kind of fantasising is now all the rage, and threatens to overwhelm our perceptions of what really happened in the past, pushing aside our attempts to explain it in favour of a futile and misguided attempt to decide whether the decisions taken in August 1914 were right or wrong.’

But hold on a minute.

If well-done counterfactuals can help us think them through, shouldn’t we allow what-ifs some space at the history table?

No historian can claim to have insight into the motives of living individuals. But history does show that a heightening of rhetoric against a certain group can incite violence against that group, even when no violence is called for. When a group is labeled hostile and brutal, its members are more likely to be treated with hostility and brutality. Visual images are particularly powerful, spurring actions that may well be unintended by the images’ creators.

That the Islamic State has made violent use of history shouldn’t come as a surprise. Perhaps more surprising is that in all those places where a modern nation has been grafted onto an ancient culture, history has returned with a vengeance. From Confucian China to Buddhist Myanmar to Hindu India, history has become the source of a fierce new conservatism that is being used to curb freedoms of women and stoke hatred of minorities. As the ultimate source of legitimacy, history has become a way for modernizing societies to procure the trappings of modernity while guarding themselves from its values.

Find out how and why the Earth's climate is changing

The Forum @ CERN: A Leap of Faith: Finding Common Ground Between Science and Theology. Promoting a dialogue between science and religion has long been a challenging task- the two communities of thought often seem far apart. The Forum explores the challenge in a discussion recorded at CERN in Switzerland and asks not only why this dialogue is important but how it is working and where it might lead. CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research where physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universeWith Bridget Kendall to discuss common ground between science and religion are:Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer, a German particle physicist and the Director General of the European Organization of Nuclear Research, or CERN, since 2009.Marcelo Gleiser, Professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College who specialises in cosmology, nonlinear physics and astrobiology. Dr. Kusum Jain, a renowned Indian scholar of Jain Philosophy and Director of the Centre of Advanced Study in Philosophy at the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur. She has published extensively on such topics as human rights, the roots of terrorism, and bio-ethics.Monsignor Tomasz Trafny, Head of Science and Faith, Vatican City State.And there is poetry, especially written for the programme, by British poet Murray Lachlan Young.

You might expect 10 ÷ 5 is the same as 10/5 is the same as 10 over a 5 with a vinculum between them, but each has its own eccentricities. We’ve already noted that ÷ can mean “divide the number on the left by the number on the right” or “divide the expression on the left by the expression on the right.” But it gets really tricky when people assume that a slash replaces a vinculum. Does ab/cd = (ab)÷(cd) or ((ab)÷c)÷d? Does a/b/c mean (a)÷(b)÷(c) or a÷(b/c) or (a/b)÷c? (Answer: Use some parentheses!)

The bottom line is that “order of operations” conventions are not universal truths in the same way that the sum of 2 and 2 is always 4. Conventions evolve throughout history in response to cultural and technological shifts.

In the English language, the word "he" is used to refer to males and "she" to refer to females. But some people identify as neither gender, or both - which is why an increasing number of US universities are making it easier for people to choose to be referred to by other pronouns.Kit Wilson's introduction when meeting other people is: "Hi, I'm Kit. I use they/them pronouns." That means that when people refer to Kit in conversation, the first-year student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee would prefer them to use "they" rather than "she" or "he".

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.

How big do the numbers have to be for insensitivity to begin? Not very, it turns out.

Consider the recent death of the Syrian child Aylan Kurdi when his family braved the choppy seas off the coast of Turkey. The image of Aylan lying face down on the beach captivated the world’s attention and even, in short order, resulted in refugee policy changes in countries as far away as the United States. But 14 Syrian children drowned in the Aegean Sea the next day. Did you notice? Did you care?

It’s a consistency machine, really, is what he’s saying, and there’s all these ways that we’re looking for consistency. We need to establish order after experiencing disorder, and yes, it’s driven by the need for closure.And it’s simply because the world is incredibly complex. The psychologist Jordan Peterson calls this the miracle of simplification. There’s just—there’s too much. So we need to constantly be reducing non-identical things to identical things, according to our preconceptions. Also we have to act. “Do I do A or B?”—there has to be some mechanism that makes us want to resolve that. Otherwise we would just deliberate forever, we would never act.

This equivalence might lead to a relativist conclusion—you have your faith; I have mine. You believe weird things on faith (virgin birth, winged horse); I believe weird things on faith (invisible particles, Big Bang), and neither of us fully understands what we’re really talking about. But there is a critical difference. Some sorts of deference are better than others.

Bos­trom writes, “Artificial intelligence already outperforms human intelligence in many domains.” The examples range from chess to Scrabble. One program from 1981, called Eurisko, was designed to teach itself a naval role-playing game. After playing ten thousand matches, it arrived at a morally grotesque strategy: to field thousands of small, immobile ships, the vast majority of which were intended as cannon fodder. In a national tournament, Eurisko demolished its human opponents, who insisted that the game’s rules be changed. The following year, Eurisko won again—by forcing its damaged ships to sink themselves.

One of the few Palestinians who has tried to teach the Holocaust, Muhammad S. Dajani Daoudi, included it in a course at Al Quds University, in Jerusalem, and took twenty-seven Palestinian students to visit Auschwitz last year. He was vilified and hounded into resigning.

Too often in our debates about freedom of speech, we assume that it already exists and that it is campus activists, particularly over questions of race, who threaten it. But what Princeton’s students have shown is that, before they came along, there was in fact precious little speech about figures like Wilson, and what speech there was, was mostly bland PR for tourists and prospective students. Even more important, Princeton’s students have shown us that it is precisely the kinds of actions they have taken — which are uncivil, frequently illegal and always unruly — that produce speech.

While my general approach to history is one of modulation — past imperfect, always — I’m leery of those who would say, against the students, don’t erase the past. I’m leery of these critics’ timing: if there’s any erasing going on here, it’s in the daily practices of Princeton. In those campus tours, those campus addresses, the general celebration of the man. Why haven’t we heard criticism of how the past is being erased by Princeton’s celebration of Wilson?I’m also leery of these critics’ assumptions that removing a name from a building is about erasing the past. As if once the name is gone, all conversation stops, all memory disappears.

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."

And so it’s not entirely surprising that minority students in Yale’s Silliman College were upset that their master, Nicholas Christakis, and his wife, Erika, the associate master, defended the rights of students to wear offensive costumes at a Halloween party, while counselling those bothered by such behavior to “look away.”

some of the tensions of the liberal-arts college’s role: namely, that they are not just heady intellectual spaces but also domestic spaces, where young people live in close contact and negotiate emotionally intricate issues, including racial hostility, sexual violence, and more. The whole point of the residential system—as distinct from Yale’s classrooms—is to be a safe space, or at least this is what Yale itself implies.