TOK@ISPrague

It would seem that in situations like the current Greek crisis, we should be able to rely on economics to tell us which policies are most likely to work. But does the discipline have sufficient predictive power to play an important role in our debates about public policy?

The problems that we want economists to help us solve are more like predicting how leaves will fall on a windy day than predicting how objects will fall in a vacuum. Economic phenomena are affected by a very large number of causal factors of many different kinds.

I’ve always believed that the divisions between high art and low art, between high culture, which really ought to be called “sanctified culture,” and what’s sometimes called popular culture, but really ought to be called “everyday culture” — the culture of anyone’s everyday life, the music I listen to, the movies you see, the advertisements that infuriate us and that sometimes we find so thrilling, so moving — I’ve always believed that these divisions are false.

What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed

Analogously, emotion words like “anger,” “happiness” and “fear” each name a population of diverse biological states that vary depending on the context. When you’re angry with your co-worker, sometimes your heart rate will increase, other times it will decrease and still other times it will stay the same. You might scowl, or you might smile as you plot your revenge. You might shout or be silent. Variation is the norm.

The ease with which we experience emotions, and the effortlessness with which we see emotions in others, doesn’t mean that each emotion has a distinct pattern in the face, body or brain. Instead of asking where emotions are or what bodily patterns define them, we would do better to abandon such essentialism and ask the more revealing question, “How does the brain construct these incredible experiences?”

Not even he believes that the various flaws that bedevil decision-making can be successfully corrected. The most damaging of these is overconfidence: the kind of optimism that leads governments to believe that wars are quickly winnable and capital projects will come in on budget despite statistics predicting exactly the opposite. It is the bias he says he would most like to eliminate if he had a magic wand. But it “is built so deeply into the structure of the mind that you couldn’t change it without changing many other things”.

It is often alleged that acupuncture is an ancient medical practice that has been refined and revered for thousands of years. In reality acupuncture is indeed an ancient medical practice, but it has in fact been in decline for thousands of years. In 1822 it was actually banned from the Imperial Medical Academy by Emperor Dao Guang. It wasn’t until 1966 that it was revived by Chairman Mao Zedong, but even he didn’t actually believe in it.

“Almost all trials of alternative medicines seem to end up with the conclusion that more research is needed. After more than 3,000 trials, that is dubious. ... Since it has proved impossible to find consistent evidence after more than 3,000 trials, it is time to give up.” — David Colquhoun

There’s no Rosetta Stone for scientific translation. It’s quite simple really. The first step is getting rid of the technical language.

This sounds like a straightforward instruction, but many enormously intelligent people fail to follow it. The trick they fail to master is to train their brains to think in two ways. One, like a scientist; and two, like someone with no scientific training whatsoever.

And whenever I see or hear journalists or politicians discussing a particularly important social science – economics – I just don’t see them making the same efforts of jargon removal and technical translation. Whether it’s discussion of debt, or the argument for austerity, it’s hard to find good economics communication, where the language is rinsed free of jargon.

The true size of ...

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.)

Some people seem to be born without the capacity to feel joy, sorrow or love. David Robson discovers the challenges and surprising advantages of “alexithymia”.

Kuşköy is remarkable not for how it looks but for how it sounds: here, the roar of the water and the daily calls to prayer are often accompanied by loud, lilting whistles—the distinctive tones of the local language. Over the past half-century, linguists and reporters curious about what locals call kuş dili, or “bird language,” have occasionally struggled up the footpaths and dirt roads that lead to Kuşköy. So its thousand or so residents were not all that surprised when, a few years ago, a Turkish-born German biopsychologist named Onur Güntürkün showed up and asked them to participate in a study.

Is capital punishment moral? Is it necessary?

Who decides what constitutes “proof”? Can “proof” come only from experiments? If so, we’re in trouble, because we can never do an experiment in humans for any exposure that is suspected to be harmful.

The problem is that as new data come along, what was once proven can become unproven again by new expert panels who now consider this new evidence and come to a different conclusion. This leads to the perhaps uncomfortable definition of “proof” as “a consensus of experts.”

The point of emphasis is that there is no hard formula on how to consider the evidence; it is a group decision by a panel of experts (the scientific jury) in which sometimes the epidemiological evidence is so strong that it doesn’t matter whether mice get cancer or not. And sometimes the epidemiology is insufficient to render a verdict on causation and so the toxicology becomes important in making the decision.

Of all the cultural forms that gay men have created and elaborated since coalescing into a social group around the late 19th century, Polari, a full-fledged gay English dialect with roots among circus folk, sailors, and prostitutes, has to be one of the most fascinating—not least since it has faded along with the need for discretion and secrecy.

Churchill has been labelled as the greatest orator of the 20th Century but he was not a natural public speaker.The prime minister had a slight stutter and a lisp, prompting him to practise his delivery for hours. His wartime speeches are recognised as some of the greatest ever made but many of those famous soundbites were recorded after the event as the House of Commons was not wired for audio recording at the time. In 1951, the BBC persuaded Churchill to record some of his wartime communications for posterity but it was not always a smooth process.

Credit Illustration by Nicole Rifkin Early on March 16, 1968, a company of soldiers in the United States Army’s Americal Division were dropped in by helicopter for an assault against a hamlet known as My Lai 4, in the bitterly contested province of Quang Ngai, on the northeastern coast of South Vietnam.