TOK@ISPrague

I think most philosophers of science would say that all scientific generalizations are probabilistic rather than logically certain, more so for the social sciences because the systems you are studying are more complex than, say, molecules, and because there are fewer opportunities to intervene experimentally and to control every variable. But the exis­tence of the social sciences, including psychology, to the extent that they have discovered anything, shows that, despite the uncontrollability of human behavior, you can make some progress: you can do your best to control the nuisance variables that are not literally in your control; you can have analogues in a laboratory that simulate what you’re interested in and impose an experimental manipulation. You can be clever about squeezing the last drop of causal information out of a correlational data set, and you can use converging evi­dence, the qualitative narratives of traditional history in combination with quantitative data sets and regression analyses that try to find patterns in them. But I also go to traditional historical narratives, partly as a sanity check. If you’re just manipulating numbers, you never know whether you’ve wan­dered into some preposterous conclusion by taking numbers too seriously that couldn’t possibly reflect reality. Also, it’s the narrative history that provides hypotheses that can then be tested. Very often a historian comes up with some plausible causal story, and that gives the social scientists something to do in squeezing a story out of the numbers.

Angela Merkel has called on major internet platforms to divulge the secrets of their algorithms, arguing that their lack of transparency endangers debating culture. The German chancellor said internet users had a right to know how and on what basis the information they received via search engines was channelled to them. Speaking to a media conference in Munich, Merkel said: “I’m of the opinion that algorithms must be made more transparent, so that one can inform oneself as an interested citizen about questions like ‘what influences my behaviour on the internet and that of others?’. “Algorithms, when they are not transparent, can lead to a distortion of our perception, they can shrink our expanse of information.”

Just as the Industrial Revolution spurred the creation of powerful and destructive machines like airplanes and tanks that diminished the role of individual soldiers, artificial intelligence technology is enabling the Pentagon to reorder the places of man and machine on the battlefield the same way it is transforming ordinary life with computers that can see, hear and speak and cars that can drive themselves.

Much of the moral case for bodycams, that they reduce police violence, rests on a single experiment: the 2012 Rialto study

Last May, two research groups announced a breakthrough: they each grew human embryos, in the lab, longer than ever before. In doing so, they witnessed a period of human development no one had ever seen. But in the process, they crashed up against something called the '14-day rule,' a guideline set over 30 years ago that dictates what we do, and possibly how we feel, about human embryos in the lab. On this episode, join producer Molly Webster as she peers down at our very own origins, and wonders: what do we do now?

Neil MacGregor, the former director of the British Museum, has bemoaned Britain’s narrow view of its own history, calling it “dangerous and regrettable” for focusing almost exclusively on the “sunny side”. Speaking before the Berlin opening of his highly popular exhibition Germany – Memories of a Nation, MacGregor expressed his admiration for Germany’s rigorous appraisal of its history which he said could not be more different to that of Britain. “In Britain we use our history in order to comfort us to make us feel stronger, to remind ourselves that we were always, always deep down, good people,” he said. “Maybe we mention a little bit of slave trade here and there, a few wars here and there, but the chapters we insist on are the sunny ones,” he said.

One of the more benign aspects of Chinese medicine is acupuncture, a practice deemed superstitious in China in the 17th century until Mao Zedong reemployed it for political purposes in the fifties. Two decades later it infiltrated the American imagination. A myth was reborn. As Jeneen Interlandi writes, research results have been murky at best—one 2013 report of over 3,000 studies showed acupuncture to be no more effective than placebos.

The malleable nature of facts is a particular preoccupation in one field of philosophy. “Social constructivism” argues that there are simply no objective facts. Instead, every “fact” we believe is a reflection of our socially constructed values, and how we choose to perceive the world. This is not a new theory, and develops many of its ideas from Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, who examined shifting human values from a historical perspective in the 19th century. But the current political debate offers a vivid demonstration of these ideas. Jesse Prinz, a philosophy professor at City University of New York, explains that facts are always subjective. Even something as foundational as the periodic table. “When you look closely, you realize that it could have been organized very differently. It could be ordered by atomic weight, rather than atomic number, it could include isotopes, it could exclude elements that don’t exist in nature, and so on,” he says. “The way we classify things is always a function of both mind and world.”

Homo Economicus is a fundamentally selfish man. But what if he’s been vastly overhyped?

policymakers have over-learned Adam Smith’s lesson that people achieve collective good when they pursue private interest. Smith noted that pursuit of self interest often produces societal benefit. But Smith hedged his bets. Bowles charges that economists, jurists, and policymakers often don’t hedge theirs, and they have come to rely excessively on incentives based on the proposition that people’s behavior is entirely self-interested and amoral.

Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ is not just a radical kind of art. It’s a philosophical dialetheia: a contradiction that is true

WHEN representatives from the United States and other countries gathered in Evian, France, in 1938 to discuss the Jewish refugee crisis caused by the Nazis, they exuded sympathy for Jews — and excuses about why they couldn’t admit them. Unto the breach stepped a 33-year-old woman from Massachusetts named Martha Sharp.

“Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.”

y and large, faces are made up of the same, consistent features – two eyes, a nose, a mouth, some ears, and so on. One way in which our brains could process faces is to analyse them as a collection of these separate, individual features. If that were the case though, we might expect to be easier to pick out any discrepancies in an upside-down face. The fact that we don’t suggests that we process and recognise faces in a more holistic manner – in other words, we don’t just process individual features, but also the positions and relationships between those features.

What attributes make for a successful trader? Is it comprehensive knowledge of an industry? The ability to read the markets? Luck?Or might it be something subtler and seemingly unrelated — namely, an awareness of one’s own heartbeat?

For almost all her life, Verda Byrd has lived as a black women. She was raised by black parents, married a black man, attended black churches, and even frequented black hair salons. But two years ago, she learned from her adoption papers that she was actually white.  Verda was legally born Jeanette Beagle, daughter to a poor white woman named Daisy Beagle, who struggled to raise several kids in the 1940's.  She was put into a children's home after her biological mother was injured in an accident. A few years later, Jeanette was adopted by a black couple  — and she became Verda.  Although her adopted parents told Verda she wasn't biologically theirs, they never told her that she was white. The discovery prompted Verda to reunite with her biological sisters. Through the reconnection, she learned that her perspective of race was far different from theirs.