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Lawrence Hrubes

The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture | The New Yorker - 1 views

  • if you were looking at an ancient Greek or Roman sculpture up close, some of the pigment “was easy to see, even with the naked eye.” Westerners had been engaged in an act of collective blindness. “It turns out that vision is heavily subjective,” he told me. “You need to transform your eye into an objective tool in order to overcome this powerful imprint”—a tendency to equate whiteness with beauty, taste, and classical ideals, and to see color as alien, sensual, and garish.
markfrankel18

Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science - The New York Times - 0 views

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    "Philosophers have traditionally recognized a division between facts and values - between, say, scientific knowledge on one hand and human judgments on the other. Latour believes that this is specious. Many of his books are attempts to illuminate, as he has written, "both the history of humans' involvement in the making of scientific facts and the sciences' involvement in the making of human history." In a formulation that was galling to both sociologists and scientists, he once argued that Louis Pasteur did not just, as is commonly accepted, discover microbes; rather, he collaborated with them."
Lawrence Hrubes

Watch Out Workers, Algorithms Are Coming to Replace You - Maybe - The New York Times - 1 views

  • In Israel, for instance, we have one of the largest laboratories for A.I. surveillances in the world — it’s called the Occupied Territories. In fact, one of the reasons Israel is such a leader in A.I. surveillance is because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Explain this a bit further.Part of why the occupation is so successful is because of A.I. surveillance technology and big data algorithms.
Lawrence Hrubes

Stunning dot density map shows London's religious clusters - 5 views

  • London's a shallow Christian sea with islands of other faiths​ Although London is predominantly Christian, this map shows an archipelago of different faiths throughout the city.
Lawrence Hrubes

What Should I Do With Old Racist Memorabilia? - The New York Times - 4 views

  • The album was disintegrating, and we removed the cards. Over the years I forgot about them, but in getting ready to move, I came across them again. One in particular is offensive in its captioning and art to people of African descent. While I presume there is a market for this type of memorabilia, there is no way I would seek to profit from it. I offered it to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. I never heard from them, so it moved with us.My husband thinks I should throw it away, but that feels wrong. I feel it is history that we should acknowledge, however painful and wrong. Your thoughts?
Lawrence Hrubes

Google Employees Protest Secret Work on Censored Search Engine for China - The New York... - 1 views

  • Hundreds of Google employees, upset at the company’s decision to secretly build a censored version of its search engine for China, have signed a letter demanding more transparency to understand the ethical consequences of their work.
markfrankel18

Workplace Wellness Programs Don't Work Well. Why Some Studies Show Otherwise. - The New... - 2 views

  • Perhaps the greatest strength of the randomized controlled trial is in combating what’s known as selection bias. That occurs when groups being studied (intervention and control) are already significantly different after they are “selected” to be in the intervention or not. One of the most elegant examples of why we need such trials came recently in an examination of employer-sponsored wellness programs.
markfrankel18

Why do we use reason to reach nonsensical conclusions? | New Humanist - 1 views

  • We suggest that reason is very much like any other cognitive mechanism—it is itself a form of intuition. Like other intuitions, it is a specialised mechanism. The specificity of reason is to bear... on reasons. Reason delivers intuitions about relationships between reasons and conclusions: some reasons are intuitively better than others. When you want to convince someone, you use reason to construct arguments. When someone wants to convince you of something, you use reason to evaluate their arguments. We are swayed by reasons that are intuitively compelling and indifferent to reasons that are intuitively too weak. Reason, then, does not contrast with intuition as would two quite different systems. Reason, rather, is just a higher order mechanism of intuitive inference.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Lifespan of a Lie - Trust Issues - Medium - 0 views

  • Zimbardo’s standard narrative of the Stanford prison experiment offers the prisoners’ emotional responses as proof of how powerfully affected they were by the guards’ mistreatment. The shock of real imprisonment provides a simpler and far less groundbreaking explanation. It may also have had legal implications, should prisoners have thought to pursue them. Korpi told me that the greatest regret of his life was failing to sue Zimbardo.
  • Much of the meeting was conducted by David Jaffe, the undergraduate student serving as “Warden,” whose foundational contribution to the experiment Zimbardo has long underplayed. Jaffe and a few fellow students had actually cooked up the idea of a simulated prison themselves three months earlier, in response to an open-ended assignment in an undergraduate class taught by Zimbardo.
Lawrence Hrubes

Think You Always Say Thank You? Oh, Please - The New York Times - 1 views

  • But as it turns out, human beings say thank you far less often than we might think.A new study of everyday language use around the world has found that, in informal settings, people almost always complied with requests for an object, service or help. For their efforts, they received expressions of gratitude only rarely — in about one of 20 occasions.
markfrankel18

All the explanations you've heard so far about Laurel vs. Yanny are probably wrong. - 0 views

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    "major celebrities chiming in"
markfrankel18

"Laurel" versus "Yanny" is a timely reminder that all human experience is subjective, m... - 0 views

  • The Dress and Yanny/Laurel blow our collective minds because we’re surprised when other people perceive the world differently than we do. And that suggests we’re still attached to the idea that our version of reality is the correct and only one. Nothing could be further from the truth. “It is a fact of neuroscience that everything we experience is a figment of our imagination,”
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