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markfrankel18

Rational Disagreement: Arguing Your Way to the Right Decision | Big Think Edge | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...your-way-to-the-right-decision

ToK reason disagreement

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • When you find yourself in a disagreement with someone - whether you are discussing politics or football - you probably tend to view the experience as a waste of time. Humans are stubborn creatures because we need to validate our own egos. That means no one wants to "give in." We all want to "win" the argument. However, as Julia Galef, President of the Center for Applied Rationality, demonstrates in today's lesson, if you are simply out to "win" an argument and validate your ego, you really aren't winning much of anything. You are actually missing out on an opportunity for learning and personal growth.  In the video below, derived from a lesson on Big Think Edge, the only forum on YouTube designed to help you get the skills you need to be successful in a rapidly changing world, Galef shows how one can disagree productively:
markfrankel18

Why we can 'see' the house that looks like Hitler | Science | The Observer - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...why-we-see-hitler-house

ToK psychology perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • had inadvertently rediscovered the remarkable human talent for perceiving meaning where there is none. Known as apophenia or pareidolia, it is something we all experience to some degree. We see faces in the clouds and animals in rock formations. We mishear our name being called in crowds and think our mobile phones are vibrating when it turns out to be nothing but the normal sensations of our own movement.
  • In many ways, this tendency is the basic ingredient of hallucination and it is present to a much stronger degree in people who have frank and striking hallucinations, most notably as part of the range of experiences that can accompany a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
  • Less clinically, the Swiss neuroscientist Peter Brugger has discovered that this tendency is raised in people who have greater numbers of supernatural beliefs and experiences but aren't unwell in any sense of the word. With increased apophenia, perhaps, the world just seems more imbued with meaning.
markfrankel18

On the Face of It: How We Vote : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...-the-psychology-of-voting.html

ToK psychology human sciences voting

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Nov 13 - Cached
  • In 2003, the Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov began to suspect that, except for those people who have hard-core political beliefs, the reasons we vote for particular candidates could have less to do with politics and more to do with basic cognitive processes—in particular, perception. When people are asked about their ideal leader, one of the single most important characteristics that they say they look for is competence—how qualified and capable a candidate is. Todorov wondered whether that judgment was made on the basis of intuitive responses to basic facial features rather than on any deep, rational calculus. It would make sense: in the past, extensive research has shown just how quickly we form impressions of people’s character traits, even before we’ve had a conversation with them. That impression then colors whatever else we learn about them, from their hobbies to, presumably, their political abilities. In other words, when we think that we are making rational political judgments, we could be, in fact, judging someone at least partly based on a fleeting impression of his or her face.
  • Starting that fall, and through the following spring, Todorov showed pairs of portraits to roughly a thousand people, and asked them to rate the competence of each person. Unbeknownst to the test subjects, they were looking at candidates for the House and Senate in 2000, 2002, and 2004. In study after study, participants’ responses to the question of whether someone looked competent predicted actual election outcomes at a rate much higher than chance—from sixty-six to seventy-three per cent of the time. Even looking at the faces for as little as one second, Todorov found, yielded the exact same result: a snap judgment that generally identified the winners and losers.
markfrankel18

As Babies, We Knew Morality - Emily Esfahani Smith - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281567

ToK psychology ethics

shared by markfrankel18 on 18 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • New research supports the understanding that all people are born with a sense of good and bad. What does that say about altruism, community, and the capacity to kill one another?
Lawrence Hrubes

Dan Pink: The puzzle of motivation | Video on TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...dan_pink_on_motivation.html

TOK emotion SocialScience science motivation

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Nov 13 - Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Nov 13
     
    "Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think."
markfrankel18

Time-shifting man predicts the future › Dr Karl's Great Moments In Science (A... - 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • 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.
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.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “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.”
markfrankel18

Tennessee Pastor Disputes Wildlife Possession Charge by State - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ossession-charge-by-state.html

ToK religion ethics

shared by markfrankel18 on 16 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • In a mix of old-time religion, modern media and Tennessee law, a 22-year-old preacher who has become a reality television star because of his experience in handling poisonous snakes pleaded not guilty on Friday to illegally keeping dozens of them that he and his congregants routinely touch during worship services.
  • “This ain’t no longer just a fight for snake handling,” Mr. Hamblin, the father of five, told a group of supporters wearing red — to symbolize the blood of Christ — before his arraignment on a misdemeanor wildlife possession charge. “This is a fight for freedom of religion.”
  • “We don’t allow anybody other than a permitted individual to possess venomous snakes,” said Matthew Cameron, a spokesman for the wildlife agency. “We don’t view him as any different from anyone else in the general public who has a king cobra in his room.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But to Mr. Hamblin and his supporters, the case is little more than state-instigated discrimination against a religious practice that has been present in East Tennessee for more than a century. “When those officers entered the house of God, that cooked it with me,” said James Slusher, who attends Mr. Hamblin’s church but said he does not handle snakes.
markfrankel18

When are you dead? - 2011 SPRING - Stanford Medicine Magazine - Stanford University Sch... - 0 views

stanmed.stanford.edu/...article5.html

ToK psychology Science consciousness death medicine

shared by markfrankel18 on 20 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • A little more than 40 years ago, a partially functioning brain would not have gotten in the way of organ donation; irreversible cardiopulmonary failure was still the only standard for determining death. But during the 1970s, that began to change, and by the early 1980s, the cessation of all brain activity — brain death — had become a widely accepted standard. In the transplant community, brain death was attractive for one particular reason: The bodies of such donors could remain on respirators to keep their organs healthy, even during much of the organ-removal surgery. Today, the medical establishment, facing a huge shortage of organs, needs new sources for transplantation. One solution has been a return to procuring organs from patients who die of heart failure. Before dying, these patients are likely to have been in a coma, sustained by a ventilator, with very minimal brain function — a hopeless distance from what we mean by consciousness. Still, many people, including some physicians, consider this type of organ donation, known as “donation after cardiac death” or DCD, as akin to murder.
Lawrence Hrubes

European Maps Showing Origins Of Common Words - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/rigins-of-common-words-2013-11

TOK language etymology Europe

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Nov 13
     
    "European etymology maps of various commons words"
markfrankel18

The Syllable Everyone Recognizes - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lable-everyone-recognizes.html

language TOK

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Are there words that are universally understood, across all countries and cultures? A team of linguists has proposed one: “huh.”
  • Huh? In a paper published on Friday in the journal PLOS One, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands announced that they had found strikingly similar versions in languages scattered across five continents, suggesting that “Huh?” is a universal word.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC World Service - The Forum, Advantage - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/p01ksh9h

TOK science SocialScience biology disability education success

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Nov 13
     
    "We explore what can confer advantage. Bridget Kendall talks to best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell about whether the power of the underdog has been under-estimated; psychologist Kathryn Asbury on why some kids start school with a biological advantage over their peers, and globalisation professor Ian Goldin on ensuring future generations' advantage now."
markfrankel18

The Knoedler and Company Rothko Fake, and Why We Get Taken in by Forgeries : The New Yo... - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...r-and-company-rothko-fake.html

arts TOK

shared by markfrankel18 on 09 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • “If a fake is good enough to fool experts, then it’s good enough to give the rest of us pleasure, even insight,” the art critic Blake Gopnik wrote in an essay, “In Praise of Art Forgeries,” in the Times last Sunday. It’s a cute argument that I reject, but which gets me thinking.
  • Well, because it’s not a “work” at all but a pastiche whose one and only intention is to deceive. Its maker—reportedly, a guy in a garage on Long Island—wasn’t concerned with emulating the historical Rothko but, instead, with mirroring the taste of present-day Rothko fanciers. Fakes are contemporary portraits of past styles. No great talent is required, just a modicum of handiness and some art-critical acuity. A forger needn’t master the original artist’s skill, only the look of it. Indeed, especially in a freewheeling mode like Abstract Expressionism, a bit of awkwardness, incidental to the branded appearance, may impress a smitten chump as a marker of sincerity—even as something new and endearing about a beloved master. Time destroys fakes by revealing features of the era—the climate of taste—in which they were made.
Lawrence Hrubes

A Dig Through Old Files Reminds Me Why I'm So Critical of Science | Cross-Check, Scient... - 1 views

blogs.scientificamerican.com/...-why-im-so-critical-of-science

TOK science skepticism

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Nov 13
     
    "Arguably the biggest meta-story in science over the last few years-and one that caught me by surprise-is that much of the peer-reviewed scientific literature is rotten. A pioneer in exposing this vast problem is the Stanford statistician John Ioannidis, whose blockbuster 2005 paper in PLOS Medicine presented evidence that "most current published research findings are false." Discussing his findings in Scientific American two years ago, Ioannidis writes: "False positives and exaggerated results in peer-reviewed scientific studies have reached epidemic proportions in recent years. The problem is rampant in economics, the social sciences and even the natural sciences, but it is particularly egregious in biomedicine.""
Lawrence Hrubes

Science and Its Skeptics : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...science-and-its-skeptics.html

TOK science skepticism replicability

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Nov 13
     
    "At the same time, it is facile to dismiss science itself. The most careful scientists, and the best science journalists, realize that all science is provisional. There will always be things that we haven't figured out yet, and even some that we get wrong. But science is not just about conclusions, which are occasionally incorrect. It's about a methodology for investigation, which includes, at its core, a relentless drive towards questioning that which came before."
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