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Believing in Overcoming Cognitive Biases | Journal of Ethics | American Medical Associa... - 0 views

journalofethics.ama-assn.org/...2020-09
shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Cognitive biases contribute significantly to diagnostic and treatment errors
  • A 2016 review of their roles in decision making lists 4 domains of concern for physicians: gathering and interpreting evidence, taking action, and evaluating decisions
  • Confirmation bias is the selective gathering and interpretation of evidence consistent with current beliefs and the neglect of evidence that contradicts them.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • It can occur when a physician refuses to consider alternative diagnoses once an initial diagnosis has been established, despite contradicting data, such as lab results. This bias leads physicians to see what they want to see
  • Anchoring bias is closely related to confirmation bias and comes into play when interpreting evidence. It refers to physicians’ practices of prioritizing information and data that support their initial impressions, even when first impressions are wrong
  • When physicians move from deliberation to action, they are sometimes swayed by emotional reactions rather than rational deliberation about risks and benefits. This is called the affect heuristic, and, while heuristics can often serve as efficient approaches to problem solving, they can sometimes lead to bias
  • Further down the treatment pathway, outcomes bias can come into play. This bias refers to the practice of believing that good or bad results are always attributable to prior decisions, even when there is no valid reason to do so
  • The dual-process theory, a cognitive model of reasoning, can be particularly relevant in matters of clinical decision making
  • This theory is based on the argument that we use 2 different cognitive systems, intuitive and analytical, when reasoning. The former is quick and uses information that is readily available; the latter is slower and more deliberate.
  • Consideration should be given to the difficulty physicians face in employing analytical thinking exclusively. Beyond constraints of time, information, and resources, many physicians are also likely to be sleep deprived, work in an environment full of distractions, and be required to respond quickly while managing heavy cognitive loads
  • Simply increasing physicians’ familiarity with the many types of cognitive biases—and how to avoid them—may be one of the best strategies to decrease bias-related errors
  • The same review suggests that cognitive forcing strategies may also have some success in improving diagnostic outcomes
  • Afterwards, the resident physicians were debriefed on both case-specific details and on cognitive forcing strategies, interviewed, and asked to complete a written survey. The results suggested that resident physicians further along in their training (ie, postgraduate year three) gained more awareness of cognitive strategies than resident physicians in earlier years of training, suggesting that this tool could be more useful after a certain level of training has been completed
  • A 2013 study examined the effect of a 3-part, 1-year curriculum on recognition and knowledge of cognitive biases and debiasing strategies in second-year residents
  • Cognitive biases in clinical practice have a significant impact on care, often in negative ways. They sometimes manifest as physicians seeing what they want to see rather than what is actually there. Or they come into play when physicians make snap decisions and then prioritize evidence that supports their conclusions, as opposed to drawing conclusions from evidence
  • Fortunately, cognitive psychology provides insight into how to prevent biases. Guided reflection and cognitive forcing strategies deflect bias through close examination of our own thinking processes.
  • During medical education and consistently thereafter, we must provide physicians with a full appreciation of the cost of biases and the potential benefits of combatting them.
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Uganda's Museveni Defends Violent Crackdown In Bid For 6th Term : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-crackdown-in-bid-for-6th-term Uganda election politics
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • But just days away from an election on Thursday, the mood in the country is far more grave. Museveni is facing a formidable challenge from Robert Kyagulanyi, a singer-turned-politician better known by the stage name Bobi Wine.
  • Bobi Wine has electrified young people across Uganda. And Museveni, who has historically clamped down on anyone who poses a real threat to his power, has unleashed his security forces on him.
  • Uganda has already changed the constitution twice, allowing Museveni to remain in power. In the past week, his government shut down social media and his police chief warned that anyone causing trouble on election day "will regret being born."
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  • According to the police procedures, if people are protesting, there is a way you handle it — but if now they overrun — overrun, for instance, a police station — you will have to stop it by using lethal fire. Rioting and attacking civilians and attacking property, it is something that we cannot accept.
  • [Ugandans] don't have to work hard. Now, that's a big struggle, which these know-it-all from [the] outside don't know, because in other parts of the world, people are pressured to work either by the environment, which is hostile, or by competition between man and man. But here, fools can survive.
  • It actually showed the lack of seriousness of those who [say] that you just go, just [leave power].
  • Yes, we are committed to the freedom of the press, but see, the press, especially the Western press, is arrogant. You don't want to learn; you know it all. Then you come on and impose your ignorance on our society.
  • How can we continue dealing with these arrogant ignoramuses? So if they change their attitude from arrogance to inquisitiveness and investigation, I'm very happy.
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Sensory Perception - An Introduction to the Process of Perception - 0 views

byjus.com/...sensory-perception
shared by katedriscoll on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • An individual or organism capable of processing the stimuli in their environment is called to have a sensory perception.
  • This processing is done through the coordination between sense organs and the brain. Hearing, vision, taste, smell, and touch are the five senses we possess. The sensory perception involves detecting, recognizing, characterizing and responding to stimuli.
  • The process of sensory perception begins when something in the real world stimulates our sense organs. For instance, light reflecting from a surface stimulates our eyes. The warmth emanating from a hot cup of beverage stimulates our touch senses.
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The scientific method can't save us from the coronavirus - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ethod-cant-save-us-coronavirus
shared by caelengrubb on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The scientific method can’t save us — because it doesn’t exist.
  • there is no such thing as “the scientific method,” no single set of steps or one-size-fits-all solution to the problems we face.
  • Ask any scientist: what they do, individually and collectively, is too diverse, too dynamic, too difficult to follow one recipe.
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  • But its nonexistence has never dampened the scientific method’s appeal. And now, in the face of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the question of who is (or is not) adhering to the scientific method feels more urgent than ever.
  • Fictional or not, “the scientific method” seems to offer safety in unsafe times.
  • The novel coronavirus causing the current crisis presents a multidimensional challenge — to personal, public, economic and mental health. There is no single tool with which to confront such a threat; what we need is a vast tool kit.
  • Luckily, scientists know this. Science is about staying flexible, trying out a variety of tools as the questions we try to answer change before our eyes. It is a process, not a product
  • In 1910, the philosopher and psychologist John Dewey published a brief introduction to thinking in general, based on research at the Laboratory School he had founded at the University of Chicago.
  • If you paid attention, Dewey argued, you saw that children were already scientific thinkers — they were creative, they solved problems, they worked together. Science came naturally to them.
  • Dewey emphasized that science was all around us and that was its strength
  • Finally, Dewey contended that science evolves. Constant change is how organisms keep up with their environments; the same is true for science. Facts matter, but not as much as flexibility
  • But Dewey’s list wasn’t meant to be the scientific method. He advocated flexibility, not stasis, and saw science as a continuation of everyday problem-solving
  • Pointing to the scientific method, which so many are doing with the best of intentions, misses the thing that gives science its power: scale. Science is too big for one set of steps — and too big to fail
  • The phrase “the scientific method” implies something special, static and solitary. But the history of the scientific method as it emerged last century reveals something familiar, adaptive and social. Science is human, in other words, just like the scientists who do it every day
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How the brain remembers right place, right time: Studies could lead to new ways to enha... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...201208163021.htm
shared by margogramiak on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • how the brain encodes time and place into memories.
  • how the brain encodes time and place into memories.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      This is something we talked about in class... the brain isn't reliable when it comes to this.
  • new treatments to combat memory loss from conditions such as traumatic brain injury or Alzheimer's disease.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      That would be amazing
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  • hippocampus,
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      Familiar, I think we talked about in class/read about
  • Electrodes implanted in these patients' brains help their surgeons precisely identify the seizure foci and also provide valuable information on the brain's inner workings, Lega says.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      Wow, that's pretty cool.
  • What the team found was exciting: Not only did they identify a robust population of time cells, but the firing of these cells predicted how well individuals were able to link words together in time (a phenomenon called temporal clustering). Finally, these cells appear to exhibit phase precession in humans, as predicted.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      That's super interesting. I can see why this would be helpful research
  • In addition, while rats are actively exploring an environment, place cells are further organized into "mini-sequences" that represent a virtual sweep of locations ahead of the rat. These radar-like sweeps happen roughly 8-10 times per second and are thought to be a brain mechanism for predicting immediately upcoming events or outcomes.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      Wow. I think how this article is putting super complex ideas into words that are easier to understand.
  • it was unclear how the hippocampus was able to produce such sequences.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      I'm sure there will be specific research on this eventually
  • hocolate milk
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      why chocolate milk I wonder...
  • However, taking a closer look at the data, the researchers found something new: As the rats moved through these spaces, their neurons not only exhibited forward, predictive mini-sequences, but also backward, retrospective mini-sequences. The forward and backward sequences alternated with each other, each taking only a few dozen milliseconds to complete.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      How can information like his be applied to treating dementia though?
  • "In the past few decades, there's been an explosion in new findings about memory,"
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 16 Jan 21
       
      That's great
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US cities are losing 36 million trees a year. Here's why it matters and how you can sto... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html trees climate change USA
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Trees can lower summer daytime temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a recent study.
  • A study published last year by the US Forest Service found that we lost 36 million trees annually from urban and rural communities over a five-year period. That’s a 1% drop from 2009 to 2014.
  • “cities will become warmer, more polluted and generally more unhealthy for inhabitants,”
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  • Trees act as water filters, taking in dirty surface water and absorbing nitrogen and phosphorus into the soil.
  • But the one reason for tree loss that humans can control is sensible development.
  • “Every time we put a road down, we put a building and we cut a tree or add a tree, it not only affects that site, it affects the region.”
  • The study placed a value on tree loss based on trees’ role in air pollution removal and energy conservation. The lost value amounted to $96 million a year.
  • Trees provide shade for homes, office buildings, parks and roadways, cooling surface temperatures.
  • Trees absorb carbon and remove pollutants from the atmosphere.
  • Trees reduce energy costs by $4 billion a year, according to Nowak’s study.
  • there are many reasons our tree canopy is declining, including hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, insects and disease.
  • Trees reduce flooding by absorbing water and reducing runoff into streams.
  • Trees can deflect sound
  • Trees absorb 96% of ultraviolet radiation, Nowak says.
  • Many studies have found connections between exposure to nature and better mental and physical health.
  • And studies have associated living near green areas with lower death rates.
  • Worldwide, forests provide for a huge diversity of animal life.
  • there’s a downside to trees too, such as pollen allergies or large falling branches in storms, “and people don’t like raking leaves.”
  • Urban forests especially need our help to replace fallen trees. Unlike rural areas, it is very difficult for trees to repopulate themselves in a city environment with so much pavement and asphalt.
  • Don’t remove old trees if it’s not necessary: Instead, try taking smaller actions like removing branches.
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SLS: Nasa's 'megarocket' engine test ends early - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...science-environment-54583588 space rocket moon
shared by colemorris on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The SLS is part of Nasa's Artemis programme, which aims to put Americans back on the lunar surface in the 2020s.
  • When it makes its maiden flight later this year, the SLS will become the most powerful rocket ever to have flown to space.
  • This will be followed - possibly in 2024 - by the first landing on the Moon by humans since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      why are we trying to go back now though?
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The four RS-25s can generate 1.6 million lbs (7 Meganewtons) of thrust
  • This will make it 15% more powerful than the giant Saturn V rocket that sent astronauts to the Moon in the 1960s and 70s.
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      Thats it? Only 15% stronger in 50 years? Maybe not necesary for more but just surprising
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How Galileo Changed Your Life - Biography - 0 views

www.biography.com/...ories-modern-physics-astronomy
shared by caelengrubb on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Galileo’s contributions to the fields of astronomy, physics, mathematics, and philosophy have led many to call him the father of modern science.
  • But his controversial theories, which impacted how we see and understand the solar system and our place within it, led to serious conflict with the Catholic Church and the long-time suppression of his achievements
  • Galileo developed one of the first telescopesGalileo didn’t invent the telescope — it was invented by Dutch eyeglass makers — but he made significant improvements to it.
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  • His innovations brought him both professional and financial success. He was given a lifetime tenure position at the University of Padua, where he had been teaching for several years, at double his salary.
  • And he received a contract to produce his telescopes for a group of Venetian merchants, eager to use them as a navigational tool.
  • He helped created modern astronomyGalileo turned his new, high-powered telescope to the sky. In early 1610, he made the first in a remarkable series of discoveries.
  • While the scientific doctrine of the day held that space was perfect, unchanging environments created by God, Galileo’s telescope helped change that view
  • His studies and drawings showed the Moon had a rough, uneven surface that was pockmarked in some places, and was actually an imperfect sphere
  • He was also one of the first people to observe the phenomena known as sunspots, thanks to his telescope which allowed him to view the sun for extended periods of time without damaging the eye.
  • Galileo helped prove that the Earth revolved around the sunIn 1610, Galileo published his new findings in the book Sidereus Nuncius, or Starry Messenger, which was an instant success
  • The following year, the Church banned all works that supported Copernicus’ theories and forbade Galileo from publicly discussing his works.
  • Kepler’s experiments had led him to support the idea that the planets, Earth included, revolved around the sun. This heliocentric theory, as well as the idea of Earth’s daily rotational turning, had been developed by Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus half a century earlier
  • Their belief that the Sun, and not the Earth, was the gravitational center of the universe, upended almost 2,000 years of scientific thinking, dating back to theories about the fixed, unchanging universe put forth by the Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle.
  • Galileo had been testing Aristotle’s theories for years, including an experiment in the late 16th century in which he dropped two items of different masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, disproving Aristotle’s belief that objects would fall at differing speeds based on their weight (Newton later improved upon this work).
  • Galileo paid a high price for his contributionsBut challenging the Aristotelian or Ptolemaic theories about the Earth’s role in the universe was dangerous stuff.
  • Geocentrism was, in part, a theoretical underpinning of the Roman Catholic Church. Galileo’s work brought him to the attention of Church authorities, and in 1615, he was called before the Roman Inquisition, accused of heresy for beliefs which contradicted Catholic scripture.
  • He became close with a number of other leading scientists, including Johannes Kepler. A German astronomer and mathematician, Kepler’s work helped lay the foundations for the later discoveries of Isaac Newton and others.
  • In 1632, after the election of a new pope who he considered more liberal, he published another book, Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, which argued both sides of the scientific (and religious) debate but fell squarely on the side of Copernicus’ heliocentrism.
  • Galileo was once again summoned to Rome. In 1633, following a trial, he was found guilty of suspected heresy, forced to recant his views and sentenced to house arrest until his death in 1642.
  • It took nearly 200 years after Galileo’s death for the Catholic Church to drop its opposition to heliocentrism.
  • In 1992, after a decade-long process and 359 years after his heresy conviction, Pope John Paul II formally expressed the Church’s regret over Galileo’s treatment.
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Five Theories on the Origins of Language - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/oes-language-come-from-1691015
shared by caelengrubb on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • It's hard to imagine a cultural phenomenon that's more important than the development of language. And yet no human attribute offers less conclusive evidence regarding its origins.
  • The absence of such evidence certainly hasn't discouraged speculation about the origins of language. Over the centuries, many theories have been put forward—and just about all of them have been challenged, discounted, and often ridiculed. Each theory accounts for only a small part of what we know about language.
  • The Bow-Wow Theory According to this theory, language began when our ancestors started imitating the natural sounds around them. The first speech was onomatopoeic—marked by echoic words such as moo, meow, splash, cuckoo, and bang. 
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  • The La-La Theory The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen suggested that language may have developed from sounds associated with love, play, and (especially) song.
  • many onomatopoeic words are of recent origin, and not all are derived from natural sounds.
  • The Ding-Dong Theory This theory, favored by Plato and Pythagoras, maintains that speech arose in response to the essential qualities of objects in the environment. The original sounds people made were supposedly in harmony with the world around them.
  • there is no persuasive evidence, in any language, of an innate connection between sound and meaning.
  • Relatively few words are onomatopoeic,
  • this theory still fails to account for "... the gap between the emotional and the rational aspects of speech expression... ."
  • The Pooh-Pooh Theory This theory holds that speech began with interjections—spontaneous cries of pain ("Ouch!"), surprise ("Oh!"), and other emotions ("Yabba dabba do!").
  • No language contains very many interjections,
  • The Yo-He-Ho Theory According to this theory, language evolved from the grunts, groans, and snorts evoked by heavy physical labor.
  • it doesn't go very far in explaining where words come from.
  • Over the past 20 years, scholars from such diverse fields as genetics, anthropology, and cognitive science have been engaged, as Kenneally says, in "a cross-discipline, multidimensional treasure hunt" to find out how language began. It is, she says, "the hardest problem in science today."
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How Did Language Begin? | Linguistic Society of America - 0 views

www.linguisticsociety.org/...how-did-language-begin
shared by caelengrubb on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The question is not how languages gradually developed over time into the languages of the world today. Rather, it is how the human species developed over time so that we - and not our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos - became capable of using language.
  • Human language can express thoughts on an unlimited number of topics (the weather, the war, the past, the future, mathematics, gossip, fairy tales, how to fix the sink...). It can be used not just to convey information, but to solicit information (questions) and to give orders.
  • Every human language has a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words, built up from several dozen speech sounds
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  • Animal communication systems, in contrast, typically have at most a few dozen distinct calls, and they are used only to communicate immediate issues such as food, danger, threat, or reconciliation. Many of the sorts of meanings conveyed by chimpanzee communication have counterparts in human 'body language'.
  • The basic difficulty with studying the evolution of language is that the evidence is so sparse. Spoken languages don't leave fossils, and fossil skulls only tell us the overall shape and size of hominid brains, not what the brains could do
  • All present-day languages, including those of hunter-gatherer cultures, have lots of words, can be used to talk about anything under the sun, and can express negation. As far back as we have written records of human language - 5000 years or so - things look basically the same.
  • According to current thinking, the changes crucial for language were not just in the size of the brain, but in its character: the kinds of tasks it is suited to do - as it were, the 'software' it comes furnished with.
  • So the properties of human language are unique in the natural world.
  • About the only definitive evidence we have is the shape of the vocal tract (the mouth, tongue, and throat): Until anatomically modern humans, about 100,000 years ago, the shape of hominid vocal tracts didn't permit the modern range of speech sounds. But that doesn't mean that language necessarily began the
  • Some researchers even propose that language began as sign language, then (gradually or suddenly) switched to the vocal modality, leaving modern gesture as a residue.
  • . In an early stage, sounds would have been used to name a wide range of objects and actions in the environment, and individuals would be able to invent new vocabulary items to talk about new things
  • In order to achieve a large vocabulary, an important advance would have been the ability to 'digitize' signals into sequences of discrete speech sounds - consonants and vowels - rather than unstructured calls.
  • These two changes alone would yield a communication system of single signals - better than the chimpanzee system but far from modern language. A next plausible step would be the ability to string together several such 'words' to create a message built out of the meanings of its parts.
  • This has led some researchers to propose that the system of 'protolanguage' is still present in modern human brains, hidden under the modern system except when the latter is impaired or not yet developed.
  • Again, it's very hard to tell. We do know that something important happened in the human line between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago: This is when we start to find cultural artifacts such as art and ritual objects, evidence of what we would call civilization.
  • One tantalizing source of evidence has emerged recently. A mutation in a gene called FOXP2 has been shown to lead to deficits in language as well as in control of the face and mouth. This gene is a slightly altered version of a gene found in apes, and it seems to have achieved its present form between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago.
  • Nevertheless, if we are ever going to learn more about how the human language ability evolved, the most promising evidence will probably come from the human genome, which preserves so much of our species' history. The challenge for the future will be to decode it.
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New Charges In Flint Water Crisis, Including Former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...ormer-michigan-gov-rick-snyder Michigan Environment water crisis
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder was charged Wednesday for his role in the Flint water crisis
  • Snyder is facing two counts of willful neglect of duty and if convicted he could face up to a year in prison and as much as a $1,000 fine.
  • referred to them as "a politically motivated smear campaign,"
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Last year Nessel announced a $600 million-dollar settlement for Flint families impacted by the water crisis last year.
  • Young people were especially vulnerable, at risk of suffering long-term cognitive challenges and other health issues from being exposed to lead contamination in the water.
  • At least 12 died, more than 80 became sick
  • The "wait-and-see approach was a really bad idea,"
  • "I want to remind the people of Flint that justice delayed is not always justice denied
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Covid Didn't Start the Mental-Health Crisis - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ntal-health-crisis-11623881744 mental health crisis psychology research family resilience parenting education
shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • There’s a consensus that the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns have created a mental-health crisis, as increasing numbers of children and adolescents suffer with depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts. It’s more accurate to say that Covid exacerbated a crisis that was already building.
  • the way to protect children’s mental well-being in the long term is strong parental care from an early age.
  • Many stressors play a role in the current mental health crisis: academic and social pressure, unrealistic parental expectations, political and financial instability, the overpowering presence of social media and other technology, and the loss of community in favor of individualism.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Previous generations faced poverty, unemployment, war and racial injustice. So why is the current adversity causing so much mental distress?
  • A major reason is that we have devalued the work of parents. Mothers and fathers are less present for their children physically and emotionally, starting in early childhood and throughout adolescence, and this diminishes a child’s resilience and emotional fortitude throughout life
  • Children aren’t born resilient but neurologically and emotionally fragile.
  • Neuroscience research over the past 30 years has demonstrated how vulnerable an infant’s developing brain is to stress. Studies suggest that early maternal care has long-term effects on stress regulation and resilience, and that attachment patterns formed in early childhood are enduring and long-lasting.
  • Children acutely need parents more than ever in the first three years, and daycare is usually a bad environment for this age group.
  • Building resilience to stress is a slow process of ensuring that children develop emotional security through the constant presence of their primary attachment figure, usually the mother, to withstand incremental amounts of frustration and loss.
  • As a society we have abandoned the care of children to institutional or group care, we have exposed them to early separation from parents’ physical and emotional presence, and we have prioritized financial success and careers over children
  • The government has promoted and pushed the importance of economic productivity and working outside the home and devalued nurturing.
  • We have put less emphasis on caring for and being present for children while simultaneously expecting more from them academically, socially and in all of their extracurricular interests.
  • That’s why it’s a mistake to blame Covid for the children’s mental-health crisis. Covid merely magnified existing family dynamics. If a family was healthy and emotionally secure, Covid tended to bring it together. If a family was struggling, in conflict or dysfunctional, Covid magnified those difficulties.
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The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices - Derek ... - 4 views

www.theatlantic.com/...267255 rational choice rationality psychology consumer economics
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  • Atlantic.displayRandomElement('#header li.business .sponsored-dropdown-item'); Derek Thompson - Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage for the website. More Derek has also written for Slate, BusinessWeek, and the Daily Beast. He has appeared as a guest on radio and television networks, including NPR, the BBC, CNBC, and MSNBC. All Posts RSS feed Share Share on facebook Share on linkedin Share on twitter « Previous Thompson Email Print Close function plusOneCallback () { $(document).trigger('share'); } $(document).ready(function() { var iframeUrl = "\/ad\/thanks-iframe\/TheAtlanticOnline\/channel_business;src=blog;by=derek-thompson;title=the-irrational-consumer-why-economics-is-dead-wrong-about-how-we-make-choices;pos=sharing;sz=640x480,336x280,300x250"; var toolsClicked = false; $('#toolsTop').click(function() { toolsClicked = 'top'; }); $('#toolsBottom').click(function() { toolsClicked = 'bottom'; }); $('#thanksForSharing a.hide').click(function() { $('#thanksForSharing').hide(); }); var onShareClickHandler = function() { var top = parseInt($(this).css('top').replace(/px/, ''), 10); toolsClicked = (top > 600) ? 'bottom' : 'top'; }; var onIframeReady = function(iframe) { var win = iframe.contentWindow; // Don't show the box if there's no ad in it if (win.$('.ad').children().length == 1) { return; } var visibleAds = win.$('.ad').filter(function() { return !($(this).css('display') == 'none'); }); if (visibleAds.length == 0) { // Ad is hidden, so don't show return; } if (win.$('.ad').hasClass('adNotLoaded')) { // Ad failed to load so don't show return; } $('#thanksForSharing').css('display', 'block'); var top; if(toolsClicked == 'bottom' && $('#toolsBottom').length) { top = $('#toolsBottom')[0].offsetTop + $('#toolsBottom').height() - 310; } else { top = $('#toolsTop')[0].offsetTop + $('#toolsTop').height() + 10; } $('#thanksForSharing').css('left', (-$('#toolsTop').offset().left + 60) + 'px'); $('#thanksForSharing').css('top', top + 'px'); }; var onShare = function() { // Close "Share successful!" AddThis plugin popup if (window._atw && window._atw.clb && $('#at15s:visible').length) { _atw.clb(); } if (iframeUrl == null) { return; } $('#thanksForSharingIframe').attr('src', "\/ad\/thanks-iframe\/TheAtlanticOnline\/channel_business;src=blog;by=derek-thompson;title=the-irrational-consumer-why-economics-is-dead-wrong-about-how-we-make-choices;pos=sharing;sz=640x480,336x280,300x250"); $('#thanksForSharingIframe').load(function() { var iframe = this; var win = iframe.contentWindow; if (win.loaded) { onIframeReady(iframe); } else { win.$(iframe.contentDocument).ready(function() { onIframeReady(iframe); }) } }); }; if (window.addthis) { addthis.addEventListener('addthis.ready', function() { $('.articleTools .share').mouseover(function() { $('#at15s').unbind('click', onShareClickHandler); $('#at15s').bind('click', onShareClickHandler); }); }); addthis.addEventListener('addthis.menu.share', function(evt) { onShare(); }); } // This 'share' event is used for testing, so one can call // $(document).trigger('share') to get the thank you for // sharing box to appear. $(document).bind('share', function(event) { onShare(); }); if (!window.FB || (window.FB && !window.FB._apiKey)) { // Hook into the fbAsyncInit function and register our listener there var oldFbAsyncInit = (window.fbAsyncInit) ? window.fbAsyncInit : (function() { }); window.fbAsyncInit = function() { oldFbAsyncInit(); FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(response) { // to hide the facebook comments box $('#facebookLike span.fb_edge_comment_widget').hide(); onShare(); }); }; } else if (window.FB) { FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(response) { // to hide the facebook comments box $('#facebookLike span.fb_edge_comment_widget').hide(); onShare(); }); } }); The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices By Derek Thompson he
  • First, making a choice is physically exhausting, literally, so that somebody forced to make a number of decisions in a row is likely to get lazy and dumb.
  • Second, having too many choices can make us less likely to come to a conclusion. In a famous study of the so-called "paradox of choice", psychologists Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar found that customers presented with six jam varieties were more likely to buy one than customers offered a choice of 24.
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  • Many of our mistakes stem from a central "availability bias." Our brains are computers, and we like to access recently opened files, even though many decisions require a deep body of information that might require some searching. Cheap example: We remember the first, last, and peak moments of certain experiences.
  • The third check against the theory of the rational consumer is the fact that we're social animals. We let our friends and family and tribes do our thinking for us
  • neurologists are finding that many of the biases behavioral economists perceive in decision-making start in our brains. "Brain studies indicate that organisms seem to be on a hedonic treadmill, quickly habituating to homeostasis," McFadden writes. In other words, perhaps our preference for the status quo isn't just figuratively our heads, but also literally sculpted by the hand of evolution inside of our brains.
  • The popular psychological theory of "hyperbolic discounting" says people don't properly evaluate rewards over time. The theory seeks to explain why many groups -- nappers, procrastinators, Congress -- take rewards now and pain later, over and over again. But neurology suggests that it hardly makes sense to speak of "the brain," in the singular, because it's two very different parts of the brain that process choices for now and later. The choice to delay gratification is mostly processed in the frontal system. But studies show that the choice to do something immediately gratifying is processed in a different system, the limbic system, which is more viscerally connected to our behavior, our "reward pathways," and our feelings of pain and pleasure.
  • the final message is that neither the physiology of pleasure nor the methods we use to make choices are as simple or as single-minded as the classical economists thought. A lot of behavior is consistent with pursuit of self-interest, but in novel or ambiguous decision-making environments there is a good chance that our habits will fail us and inconsistencies in the way we process information will undo us.
  • Our brains seem to operate like committees, assigning some tasks to the limbic system, others to the frontal system. The "switchboard" does not seem to achieve complete, consistent communication between different parts of the brain. Pleasure and pain are experienced in the limbic system, but not on one fixed "utility" or "self-interest" scale. Pleasure and pain have distinct neural pathways, and these pathways adapt quickly to homeostasis, with sensation coming from changes rather than levels
  • Social networks are sources of information, on what products are available, what their features are, and how your friends like them. If the information is accurate, this should help you make better choices. On the other hand, it also makes it easier for you to follow the crowd rather than engaging in the due diligence of collecting and evaluating your own information and playing it against your own preferences
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MacIntyre | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - 0 views

www.iep.utm.edu/mac-over rationality morality relativism perspectivism science community historicism tradition modernity Enlightenment Thomism aristotle
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  • For MacIntyre, “rationality” comprises all the intellectual resources, both formal and substantive, that we use to judge truth and falsity in propositions, and to determine choice-worthiness in courses of action
  • Rationality in this sense is not universal; it differs from community to community and from person to person, and may both develop and regress over the course of a person’s life or a community’s history.
  • So rationality itself, whether theoretical or practical, is a concept with a history: indeed, since there are also a diversity of traditions of enquiry, with histories, there are, so it will turn out, rationalities rather than rationality, just as it will also turn out that there are justices rather than justice
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  • Rationality is the collection of theories, beliefs, principles, and facts that the human subject uses to judge the world, and a person’s rationality is, to a large extent, the product of that person’s education and moral formation.
  • To the extent that a person accepts what is handed down from the moral and intellectual traditions of her or his community in learning to judge truth and falsity, good and evil, that person’s rationality is “tradition-constituted.” Tradition-constituted rationality provides the schemata by which we interpret, understand, and judge the world we live in
  • The apparent problem of relativism in MacIntyre’s theory of rationality is much like the problem of relativism in the philosophy of science. Scientific claims develop within larger theoretical frameworks, so that the apparent truth of a scientific claim depends on one’s judgment of the larger framework. The resolution of the problem of relativism therefore appears to hang on the possibility of judging frameworks or rationalities, or judging between frameworks or rationalities from a position that does not presuppose the truth of the framework or rationality, but no such theoretical standpoint is humanly possible.
  • MacIntyre finds that the world itself provides the criterion for the testing of rationalities, and he finds that there is no criterion except the world itself that can stand as the measure of the truth of any philosophical theory.
  • MacIntyre’s philosophy is indebted to the philosophy of science, which recognizes the historicism of scientific enquiry even as it seeks a truthful understanding of the world. MacIntyre’s philosophy does not offer a priori certainty about any theory or principle; it examines the ways in which reflection upon experience supports, challenges, or falsifies theories that have appeared to be the best theories so far to the people who have accepted them so far. MacIntyre’s ideal enquirers remain Hamlets, not Emmas.
  • history shows us that individuals, communities, and even whole nations may commit themselves militantly over long periods of their histories to doctrines that their ideological adversaries find irrational. This qualified relativism of appearances has troublesome implications for anyone who believes that philosophical enquiry can easily provide certain knowledge of the world
  • According to MacIntyre, theories govern the ways that we interpret the world and no theory is ever more than “the best standards so far” (3RV, p. 65). Our theories always remain open to improvement, and when our theories change, the appearances of our world—the apparent truths of claims judged within those theoretical frameworks—change with them.
  • From the subjective standpoint of the human enquirer, MacIntyre finds that theories, concepts, and facts all have histories, and they are all liable to change—for better or for worse.
  • MacIntyre holds that the rationality of individuals is not only tradition-constituted, it is also tradition constitutive, as individuals make their own contributions to their own rationality, and to the rationalities of their communities. Rationality is not fixed, within either the history of a community or the life of a person
  • The modern account of first principles justifies an approach to philosophy that rejects tradition. The modern liberal individualist approach is anti-traditional. It denies that our understanding is tradition-constituted and it denies that different cultures may differ in their standards of rationality and justice:
  • Modernity does not see tradition as the key that unlocks moral and political understanding, but as a superfluous accumulation of opinions that tend to prejudice moral and political reasoning.
  • Although modernity rejects tradition as a method of moral and political enquiry, MacIntyre finds that it nevertheless bears all the characteristics of a moral and political tradition.
  • If historical narratives are only projections of the interests of historians, then it is difficult to see how this historical narrative can claim to be truthful
  • For these post-modern theorists, “if the Enlightenment conceptions of truth and rationality cannot be sustained,” either relativism or perspectivism “is the only possible alternative” (p. 353). MacIntyre rejects both challenges by developing his theory of tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive rationality on pp. 354-369
  • How, then, is one to settle challenges between two traditions? It depends on whether the adherents of either take the challenges of the other tradition seriously. It depends on whether the adherents of either tradition, on seeing a failure in their own tradition are willing to consider an answer offered by their rival (p. 355)
  • how a person with no traditional affiliation is to deal with the conflicting claims of rival traditions: “The initial answer is: that will depend upon who you are and how you understand yourself. This is not the kind of answer which we have been educated to expect in philosophy”
  • MacIntyre focuses the critique of modernity on the question of rational justification. Modern epistemology stands or falls on the possibility of Cartesian epistemological first principles. MacIntyre’s history exposes that notion of first principle as a fiction, and at the same time demonstrates that rational enquiry advances (or declines) only through tradition
  • MacIntyre cites Foucault’s 1966 book, Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things, 1970) as an example of the self-subverting character of Genealogical enquiry
  • Foucault’s book reduces history to a procession of “incommensurable ordered schemes of classification and representation” none of which has any greater claim to truth than any other, yet this book “is itself organized as a scheme of classification and representation.”
  • From MacIntyre’s perspective, there is no question of deciding whether or not to work within a tradition; everyone who struggles with practical, moral, and political questions simply does. “There is no standing ground, no place for enquiry . . . apart from that which is provided by some particular tradition or other”
  • Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990). The central idea of the Gifford Lectures is that philosophers make progress by addressing the shortcomings of traditional narratives about the world, shortcomings that become visible either through the failure of traditional narratives to make sense of experience, or through the introduction of contradictory narratives that prove impossible to dismiss
  • MacIntyre compares three traditions exemplified by three literary works published near the end of Adam Gifford’s life (1820–1887)
  • The Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1875–1889) represents the modern tradition of trying to understand the world objectively without the influence of tradition.
  • The Genealogy of Morals (1887), by Friedrich Nietzsche embodies the post-modern tradition of interpreting all traditions as arbitrary impositions of power.
  • The encyclical letter Aeterni Patris (1879) of Pope Leo XIII exemplifies the approach of acknowledging one’s predecessors within one’s own tradition of enquiry and working to advance or improve that tradition in the pursuit of objective truth. 
  • Of the three versions of moral enquiry treated in 3RV, only tradition, exemplified in 3RV by the Aristotelian, Thomistic tradition, understands itself as a tradition that looks backward to predecessors in order to understand present questions and move forward
  • Encyclopaedia obscures the role of tradition by presenting the most current conclusions and convictions of a tradition as if they had no history, and as if they represented the final discovery of unalterable truth
  • Encyclopaedists focus on the present and ignore the past.
  • Genealogists, on the other hand, focus on the past in order to undermine the claims of the present.
  • In short, Genealogy denies the teleology of human enquiry by denying (1) that historical enquiry has been fruitful, (2) that the enquiring person has a real identity, and (3) that enquiry has a real goal. MacIntyre finds this mode of enquiry incoherent.
  • Genealogy is self-deceiving insofar as it ignores the traditional and teleological character of its enquiry.
  • Genealogical moral enquiry must make similar exceptions to its treatments of the unity of the enquiring subject and the teleology of moral enquiry; thus “it seems to be the case that the intelligibility of genealogy requires beliefs and allegiances of a kind precluded by the genealogical stance” (3RV, p. 54-55)
  • MacIntyre uses Thomism because it applies the traditional mode of enquiry in a self-conscious manner. Thomistic students learn the work of philosophical enquiry as apprentices in a craft (3RV, p. 61), and maintain the principles of the tradition in their work to extend the understanding of the tradition, even as they remain open to the criticism of those principles.
  • 3RV uses Thomism as its example of tradition, but this use should not suggest that MacIntyre identifies “tradition” with Thomism or Thomism-as-a-name-for-the-Western-tradition. As noted above, WJWR distinguished four traditions of enquiry within the Western European world alone
  • MacIntyre’s emphasis on the temporality of rationality in traditional enquiry makes tradition incompatible with the epistemological projects of modern philosophy
  • Tradition is not merely conservative; it remains open to improvement,
  • Tradition differs from both encyclopaedia and genealogy in the way it understands the place of its theories in the history of human enquiry. The adherent of a tradition must understand that “the rationality of a craft is justified by its history so far,” thus it “is inseparable from the tradition through which it was achieved”
  • MacIntyre uses Thomas Aquinas to illustrate the revolutionary potential of traditional enquiry. Thomas was educated in Augustinian theology and Aristotelian philosophy, and through this education he began to see not only the contradictions between the two traditions, but also the strengths and weaknesses that each tradition revealed in the other. His education also helped him to discover a host of questions and problems that had to be answered and solved. Many of Thomas Aquinas’ responses to these concerns took the form of disputed questions. “Yet to each question the answer produced by Aquinas as a conclusion is no more than and, given Aquinas’s method, cannot but be no more than, the best answer reached so far. And hence derives the essential incompleteness”
  • argue that the virtues are essential to the practice of independent practical reason. The book is relentlessly practical; its arguments appeal only to experience and to purposes, and to the logic of practical reasoning.
  • Like other intelligent animals, human beings enter life vulnerable, weak, untrained, and unknowing, and face the likelihood of infirmity in sickness and in old age. Like other social animals, humans flourish in groups. We learn to regulate our passions, and to act effectively alone and in concert with others through an education provided within a community. MacIntyre’s position allows him to look to the animal world to find analogies to the role of social relationships in the moral formation of human beings
  • The task for the human child is to make “the transition from the infantile exercise of animal intelligence to the exercise of independent practical reasoning” (DRA, p. 87). For a child to make this transition is “to redirect and transform her or his desires, and subsequently to direct them consistently towards the goods of different stages of her or his life” (DRA, p. 87). The development of independent practical reason in the human agent requires the moral virtues in at least three ways.
  • DRA presents moral knowledge as a “knowing how,” rather than as a “knowing that.” Knowledge of moral rules is not sufficient for a moral life; prudence is required to enable the agent to apply the rules well.
  • “Knowing how to act virtuously always involves more than rule-following” (DRA, p. 93). The prudent person can judge what must be done in the absence of a rule and can also judge when general norms cannot be applied to particular cases.
  • Flourishing as an independent practical reasoner requires the virtues in a second way, simply because sometimes we need our friends to tell us who we really are. Independent practical reasoning also requires self-knowledge, but self-knowledge is impossible without the input of others whose judgment provides a reliable touchstone to test our beliefs about ourselves. Self-knowledge therefore requires the virtues that enable an agent to sustain formative relationships and to accept the criticism of trusted friends
  • Human flourishing requires the virtues in a third way, by making it possible to participate in social and political action. They enable us to “protect ourselves and others against neglect, defective sympathies, stupidity, acquisitiveness, and malice” (DRA, p. 98) by enabling us to form and sustain social relationships through which we may care for one another in our infirmities, and pursue common goods with and for the other members of our societies.
  • MacIntyre argues that it is impossible to find an external standpoint, because rational enquiry is an essentially social work (DRA, p. 156-7). Because it is social, shared rational enquiry requires moral commitment to, and practice of, the virtues to prevent the more complacent members of communities from closing off critical reflection upon “shared politically effective beliefs and concepts”
  • MacIntyre finds himself compelled to answer what may be called the question of moral provincialism: If one is to seek the truth about morality and justice, it seems necessary to “find a standpoint that is sufficiently external to the evaluative attitudes and practices that are to be put to the question.” If it is impossible for the agent to take such an external standpoint, if the agent’s commitments preclude radical criticism of the virtues of the community, does that leave the agent “a prisoner of shared prejudices” (DRA, p. 154)?
  • The book moves from MacIntyre’s assessment of human needs for the virtues to the political implications of that assessment. Social and political institutions that form and enable independent practical reasoning must “satisfy three conditions.” (1) They must enable their members to participate in shared deliberations about the communities’ actions. (2) They must establish norms of justice “consistent with exercise of” the virtue of justice. (3) They must enable the strong “to stand proxy” as advocates for the needs of the weak and the disabled.
  • The social and political institutions that MacIntyre recommends cannot be identified with the modern nation state or the modern nuclear family
  • The political structures necessary for human flourishing are essentially local
  • Yet local communities support human flourishing only when they actively support “the virtues of just generosity and shared deliberation”
  • MacIntyre rejects individualism and insists that we view human beings as members of communities who bear specific debts and responsibilities because of our social identities. The responsibilities one may inherit as a member of a community include debts to one’s forbearers that one can only repay to people in the present and future
  • The constructive argument of the second half of the book begins with traditional accounts of the excellences or virtues of practical reasoning and practical rationality rather than virtues of moral reasoning or morality. These traditional accounts define virtue as arête, as excellence
  • Practices are supported by institutions like chess clubs, hospitals, universities, industrial corporations, sports leagues, and political organizations.
  • Practices exist in tension with these institutions, since the institutions tend to be oriented to goods external to practices. Universities, hospitals, and scholarly societies may value prestige, profitability, or relations with political interest groups above excellence in the practices they are said to support.
  • Personal desires and institutional pressures to pursue external goods may threaten to derail practitioners’ pursuits of the goods internal to practices. MacIntyre defines virtue initially as the quality of character that enables an agent to overcome these temptations:
  • “A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices
  • Excellence as a human agent cannot be reduced to excellence in a particular practice (See AV, pp. 204–
  • The virtues therefore are to be understood as those dispositions which will not only sustain practices and enable us to achieve the goods internal to practices, but which will also sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good, by enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations, and distractions which we encounter, and which will furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge of the good (AV, p. 219).
  • The excellent human agent has the moral qualities to seek what is good and best both in practices and in life as a whole.
  • The virtues find their point and purpose not only in sustaining those relationships necessary if the variety of goods internal to practices are to be achieved and not only in sustaining the form of an individual life in which that individual may seek out his or her good as the good of his or her whole life, but also in sustaining those traditions which provide both practices and individual lives with their necessary historical context (AV, p. 223)
  • Since “goods, and with them the only grounds for the authority of laws and virtues, can only be discovered by entering into those relationships which constitute communities whose central bond is a shared vision of and understanding of goods” (AV, p. 258), any hope for the transformation and renewal of society depends on the development and maintenance of such communities.
  • MacIntyre’s Aristotelian approach to ethics as a study of human action distinguishes him from post-Kantian moral philosophers who approach ethics as a means of determining the demands of objective, impersonal, universal morality
  • This modern approach may be described as moral epistemology. Modern moral philosophy pretends to free the individual to determine for her- or himself what she or he must do in a given situation, irrespective of her or his own desires; it pretends to give knowledge of universal moral laws
  • Aristotelian metaphysicians, particularly Thomists who define virtue in terms of the perfection of nature, rejected MacIntyre’s contention that an adequate Aristotelian account of virtue as excellence in practical reasoning and human action need not appeal to Aristotelian metaphysic
  • one group of critics rejects MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism because they hold that any Aristotelian account of the virtues must first account for the truth about virtue in terms of Aristotle’s philosophy of nature, which MacIntyre had dismissed in AV as “metaphysical biology”
  • Many of those who rejected MacIntyre’s turn to Aristotle define “virtue” primarily along moral lines, as obedience to law or adherence to some kind of natural norm. For these critics, “virtuous” appears synonymous with “morally correct;” their resistance to MacIntyre’s appeal to virtue stems from their difficulties either with what they take to be the shortcomings of MacIntyre’s account of moral correctness or with the notion of moral correctness altogether
  • MacIntyre continues to argue from the experience of practical reasoning to the demands of moral education.
  • Descartes and his successors, by contrast, along with certain “notable Thomists of the last hundred years” (p. 175), have proposed that philosophy begins from knowledge of some “set of necessarily true first principles which any truly rational person is able to evaluate as true” (p. 175). Thus for the moderns, philosophy is a technical rather than moral endeavor
  • MacIntyre distinguishes two related challenges to his position, the “relativist challenge” and the “perspectivist challenge.” These two challenges both acknowledge that the goals of the Enlightenment cannot be met and that, “the only available standards of rationality are those made available by and within traditions” (p. 252); they conclude that nothing can be known to be true or false
  • MacIntyre follows the progress of the Western tradition through “three distinct traditions:” from Homer and Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and from Augustine through Calvin to Hume
  • Chapter 17 examines the modern liberal denial of tradition, and the ironic transformation of liberalism into the fourth tradition to be treated in the book.
  • MacIntyre credits John Stuart Mill and Thomas Aquinas as “two philosophers of the kind who by their writing send us beyond philosophy into immediate encounter with the ends of life
  • First, both were engaged by questions about the ends of life as questioning human beings and not just as philosophers. . . .
  • Secondly, both Mill and Aquinas understood their speaking and writing as contributing to an ongoing philosophical conversation. . . .
  • Thirdly, it matters that both the end of the conversation and the good of those who participate in it is truth and that the nature of truth, of good, of rational justification, and of meaning therefore have to be central topics of that conversation (Tasks, pp. 130-1).
  • Without these three characteristics, philosophy is first reduced to “the exercise of a set of analytic and argumentative skills. . . . Secondly, philosophy may thereby become a diversion from asking questions about the ends of life with any seriousness”
  • Neither Rosenzweig nor Lukács made philosophical progress because both failed to relate “their questions about the ends of life to the ends of their philosophical writing”
  • First, any adequate philosophical history or biography must determine whether the authors studied remain engaged with the questions that philosophy studies, or set the questions aside in favor of the answers. Second, any adequate philosophical history or biography must determine whether the authors studied insulated themselves from contact with conflicting worldviews or remained open to learning from every available philosophical approach. Third, any adequate philosophical history or biography must place the authors studied into a broader context that shows what traditions they come from and “whose projects” they are “carrying forward
  • MacIntyre’s recognition of the connection between an author’s pursuit of the ends of life and the same author’s work as a philosophical writer prompts him to finish the essay by demanding three things of philosophical historians and biographers
  • Philosophy is not just a study; it is a practice. Excellence in this practice demands that an author bring her or his struggles with the questions of the ends of philosophy into dialogue with historic and contemporary texts and authors in the hope of making progress in answering those questions
  • MacIntyre defends Thomistic realism as rational enquiry directed to the discovery of truth.
  • The three Thomistic essays in this book challenge those caricatures by presenting Thomism in a way that people outside of contemporary Thomistic scholarship may find surprisingly flexible and open
  • To be a moral agent, (1) one must understand one’s individual identity as transcending all the roles that one fills; (2) one must see oneself as a practically rational individual who can judge and reject unjust social standards; and (3) one must understand oneself as “as accountable to others in respect of the human virtues and not just in respect of [one’s] role-performances
  • J is guilty because he complacently accepted social structures that he should have questioned, structures that undermined his moral agency. This essay shows that MacIntyre’s ethics of human agency is not just a descriptive narrative about the manner of moral education; it is a standard laden account of the demands of moral agency.
  • MacIntyre considers “the case of J” (J, for jemand, the German word for “someone”), a train controller who learned, as a standard for his social role, to take no interest in what his trains carried, even during war time when they carried “munitions and . . . Jews on their way to extermination camps”
  • J had learned to do his work for the railroad according to one set of standards and to live other parts of his life according to other standards, so that this compliant participant in “the final solution” could contend, “You cannot charge me with moral failure” (E&P, p. 187).
  • The epistemological theories of Modern moral philosophy were supposed to provide rational justification for rules, policies, and practical determinations according to abstract universal standards, but MacIntyre has dismissed those theorie
  • Modern metaethics is supposed to enable its practitioners to step away from the conflicting demands of contending moral traditions and to judge those conflicts from a neutral position, but MacIntyre has rejected this project as well
  • In his ethical writings, MacIntyre seeks only to understand how to liberate the human agent from blindness and stupidity, to prepare the human agent to recognize what is good and best to do in the concrete circumstances of that agent’s own life, and to strengthen the agent to follow through on that judgment.
  • In his political writings, MacIntyre investigates the role of communities in the formation of effective rational agents, and the impact of political institutions on the lives of communities. This kind of ethics and politics is appropriately named the ethics of human agency.
  • The purpose of the modern moral philosophy of authors like Kant and Mill was to determine, rationally and universally, what kinds of behavior ought to be performed—not in terms of the agent’s desires or goals, but in terms of universal, rational duties. Those theories purported to let agents know what they ought to do by providing knowledge of duties and obligations, thus they could be described as theories of moral epistemology.
  • Contemporary virtue ethics purports to let agents know what qualities human beings ought to have, and the reasons that we ought to have them, not in terms of our fitness for human agency, but in the same universal, disinterested, non-teleological terms that it inherits from Kant and Mill.
  • For MacIntyre, moral knowledge remains a “knowing how” rather than a “knowing that;” MacIntyre seeks to identify those moral and intellectual excellences that make human beings more effective in our pursuit of the human good.
  • MacIntyre’s purpose in his ethics of human agency is to consider what it means to seek one’s good, what it takes to pursue one’s good, and what kind of a person one must become if one wants to pursue that good effectively as a human agent.
  • As a philosophy of human agency, MacIntyre’s work belongs to the traditions of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.
  • in keeping with the insight of Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach, it maintained the common condition of theorists and people as peers in the pursuit of the good life.
  • He holds that the human good plays a role in our practical reasoning whether we recognize it or not, so that some people may do well without understanding why (E&P, p. 25). He also reads Aristotle as teaching that knowledge of the good can make us better agents
  • AV defines virtue in terms of the practical requirements for excellence in human agency, in an agent’s participation in practices (AV, ch. 14), in an agent’s whole life, and in an agent’s involvement in the life of her or his community
  • MacIntyre’s Aristotelian concept of “human action” opposes the notion of “human behavior” that prevailed among mid-twentieth-century determinist social scientists. Human actions, as MacIntyre understands them, are acts freely chosen by human agents in order to accomplish goals that those agents pursue
  • Human behavior, according to mid-twentieth-century determinist social scientists, is the outward activity of a subject, which is said to be caused entirely by environmental influences beyond the control of the subject.
  • Rejecting crude determinism in social science, and approaches to government and public policy rooted in determinism, MacIntyre sees the renewal of human agency and the liberation of the human agent as central goals for ethics and politics.
  • MacIntyre’s Aristotelian account of “human action” examines the habits that an agent must develop in order to judge and act most effectively in the pursuit of truly choice-worthy ends
  • MacIntyre seeks to understand what it takes for the human person to become the kind of agent who has the practical wisdom to recognize what is good and best to do and the moral freedom to act on her or his best judgment.
  • MacIntyre rejected the determinism of modern social science early in his career (“Determinism,” 1957), yet he recognizes that the ability to judge well and act freely is not simply given; excellence in judgment and action must be developed, and it is the task of moral philosophy to discover how these excellences or virtues of the human agent are established, maintained, and strengthened
  • MacIntyre’s Aristotelian philosophy investigates the conditions that support free and deliberate human action in order to propose a path to the liberation of the human agent through participation in the life of a political community that seeks its common goods through the shared deliberation and action of its members
  • As a classics major at Queen Mary College in the University of London (1945-1949), MacIntyre read the Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle, but his studies were not limited to the grammars of ancient languages. He also examined the ethical theories of Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. He attended the lectures of analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer and of philosopher of science Karl Popper. He read Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Jean-Paul Sartre’s L'existentialisme est un humanisme, and Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte (What happened, pp. 17-18). MacIntyre met the sociologist Franz Steiner, who helped direct him toward approaching moralities substantively
  • Alasdair MacIntyre’s philosophy builds on an unusual foundation. His early life was shaped by two conflicting systems of values. One was “a Gaelic oral culture of farmers and fishermen, poets and storytellers.” The other was modernity, “The modern world was a culture of theories rather than stories” (MacIntyre Reader, p. 255). MacIntyre embraced both value systems
  • From Marxism, MacIntyre learned to see liberalism as a destructive ideology that undermines communities in the name of individual liberty and consequently undermines the moral formation of human agents
  • For MacIntyre, Marx’s way of seeing through the empty justifications of arbitrary choices to consider the real goals and consequences of political actions in economic and social terms would remain the principal insight of Marxism
  • After his retirement from teaching, MacIntyre has continued his work of promoting a renewal of human agency through an examination of the virtues demanded by practices, integrated human lives, and responsible engagement with community life. He is currently affiliated with the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics (CASEP) at London Metropolitan University.
  • The second half of AV proposes a conception of practice and practical reasoning and the notion of excellence as a human agent as an alternative to modern moral philosophy
  • AV rejects the view of “modern liberal individualism” in which autonomous individuals use abstract moral principles to determine what they ought to do. The critique of modern normative ethics in the first half of AV rejects modern moral reasoning for its failure to justify its premises, and criticizes the frequent use of the rhetoric of objective morality and scientific necessity to manipulate people to accept arbitrary decisions
  • MacIntyre uses “modern liberal individualism” to name a much broader category that includes both liberals and conservatives in contemporary American political parlance, as well as some Marxists and anarchists (See ASIA, pp. 280-284). Conservatism, liberalism, Marxism, and anarchism all present the autonomous individual as the unit of civil society
  • The sources of modern liberal individualism—Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau—assert that human life is solitary by nature and social by habituation and convention. MacIntyre’s Aristotelian tradition holds, on the contrary, that human life is social by nature.
  • MacIntyre identifies moral excellence with effective human agency, and seeks a political environment that will help to liberate human agents to recognize and seek their own goods, as components of the common goods of their communities, more effectively. For MacIntyre therefore, ethics and politics are bound together.
  • For MacIntyre ethics is not an application of principles to facts, but a study of moral action. Moral action, free human action, involves decisions to do things in pursuit of goals, and it involves the understanding of the implications of one’s actions for the whole variety of goals that human agents seek
  • In this sense, “To act morally is to know how to act” (SMJ, p. 56). “Morality is not a ‘knowing that’ but a ‘knowing how’”
  • If human action is a ‘knowing how,’ then ethics must also consider how one learns ‘how.’ Like other forms of ‘knowing how,’ MacIntyre finds that one learns how to act morally within a community whose language and shared standards shape our judgment
  • MacIntyre had concluded that ethics is not an abstract exercise in the assessment of facts; it is a study of free human action and of the conditions that enable rational human agency.
  • MacIntyre gives Marx credit for concluding in the third of the Theses on Feuerbach, that the only way to change society is to change ourselves, and that “The coincidence of the changing of human activity or self-changing can only be comprehended and rationally understood as revolutionary practice”
  • MacIntyre distinguishes “religion which is an opiate for the people from religion which is not” (MI, p. 83). He condemns forms of religion that justify social inequities and encourage passivity. He argues that authentic Christian teaching criticizes social structures and encourages action
  • Where “moral philosophy textbooks” discuss the kinds of maxims that should guide “promise-keeping, truth-telling, and the like,” moral maxims do not guide real agents in real life at all. “They do not guide us because we do not need to be guided. We know what to do” (ASIA, p. 106). Sometimes we do this without any maxims at all, or even against all the maxims we know. MacIntyre Illustrates his point with Huckleberry Finn’s decision to help Jim, Miss Watson’s escaped slave, to make his way to freedom
  • MacIntyre develops the ideas that morality emerges from history, and that morality organizes the common life of a community
  • The book concludes that the concepts of morality are neither timeless nor ahistorical, and that understanding the historical development of ethical concepts can liberate us “from any false absolutist claims” (SHE, p. 269). Yet this conclusion need not imply that morality is essentially arbitrary or that one could achieve freedom by liberating oneself from the morality of one’s society.
  • From this “Aristotelian point of view,” “modern morality” begins to go awry when moral norms are separated from the pursuit of human goods and moral behavior is treated as an end in itself. This separation characterizes Christian divine command ethics since the fourteenth century and has remained essential to secularized modern morality since the eighteenth century
  • From MacIntyre’s “Aristotelian point of view,” the autonomy granted to the human agent by modern moral philosophy breaks down natural human communities and isolates the individual from the kinds of formative relationships that are necessary to shape the agent into an independent practical reasoner.
  • the 1977 essay “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science” (Hereafter EC). This essay, MacIntyre reports, “marks a major turning-point in my thought in the 1970s” (The Tasks of Philosophy, p. vii) EC may be described fairly as MacIntyre’s discourse on method
  • First, Philosophy makes progress through the resolution of problems. These problems arise when the theories, histories, doctrines and other narratives that help us to organize our experience of the world fail us, leaving us in “epistemological crises.” Epistemological crises are the aftermath of events that undermine the ways that we interpret our world
  • it presents three general points on the method for philosophy.
  • To live in an epistemological crisis is to be aware that one does not know what one thought one knew about some particular subject and to be anxious to recover certainty about that subject.
  • To resolve an epistemological crisis it is not enough to impose some new way of interpreting our experience, we also need to understand why we were wrong before: “When an epistemological crisis is resolved, it is by the construction of a new narrative which enables the agent to understand both how he or she could intelligibly have held his or her original beliefs and how he or she could have been so drastically misled by them
  • MacIntyre notes, “Philosophers have customarily been Emmas and not Hamlets” (p. 6); that is, philosophers have treated their conclusions as accomplished truths, rather than as “more adequate narratives” (p. 7) that remain open to further improvement.
  • To illustrate his position on the open-endedness of enquiry, MacIntyre compares the title characters of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Jane Austen’s Emma. When Emma finds that she is deeply misled in her beliefs about the other characters in her story, Mr. Knightly helps her to learn the truth and the story comes to a happy ending (p. 6). Hamlet, by contrast, finds no pat answers to his questions; rival interpretations remain throughout the play, so that directors who would stage the play have to impose their own interpretations on the script
  • Another approach to education is the method of Descartes, who begins by rejecting everything that is not clearly and distinctly true as unreliable and false in order to rebuild his understanding of the world on a foundation of undeniable truth.
  • Descartes presents himself as willfully rejecting everything he had believed, and ignores his obvious debts to the Scholastic tradition, even as he argues his case in French and Latin. For MacIntyre, seeking epistemological certainty through universal doubt as a precondition for enquiry is a mistake: “it is an invitation not to philosophy but to mental breakdown, or rather to philosophy as a means of mental breakdown.
  • MacIntyre contrasts Descartes’ descent into mythical isolation with Galileo, who was able to make progress in astronomy and physics by struggling with the apparently insoluble questions of late medieval astronomy and physics, and radically reinterpreting the issues that constituted those questions
  • To make progress in philosophy one must sort through the narratives that inform one’s understanding, struggle with the questions that those narratives raise, and on occasion, reject, replace, or reinterpret portions of those narratives and propose those changes to the rest of one’s community for assessment. Human enquiry is always situated within the history and life of a community.
  • The third point of EC is that we can learn about progress in philosophy from the philosophy of science
  • Kuhn’s “paradigm shifts,” however, are unlike MacIntyre’s resolutions of epistemological crises in two ways.
  • First they are not rational responses to specific problems. Kuhn compares paradigm shifts to religious conversions (pp. 150, 151, 158), stressing that they are not guided by rational norms and he claims that the “mopping up” phase of a paradigm shift is a matter of convention in the training of new scientists and attrition among the holdouts of the previous paradigm
  • Second, the new paradigm is treated as a closed system of belief that regulates a new period of “normal science”; Kuhn’s revolutionary scientists are Emmas, not Hamlets
  • MacIntyre proposes elements of Imre Lakatos’ philosophy of science as correctives to Kuhn’s. While Lakatos has his own shortcomings, his general account of the methodologies of scientific research programs recognizes the role of reason in the transitions between theories and between research programs (Lakatos’ analog to Kuhn’s paradigms or disciplinary matrices). Lakatos presents science as an open ended enquiry, in which every theory may eventually be replaced by more adequate theories. For Lakatos, unlike Kuhn, rational scientific progress occurs when a new theory can account both for the apparent promise and for the actual failure of the theory it replaces.
  • The third conclusion of MacIntyre’s essay is that decisions to support some theories over others may be justified rationally to the extent that those theories allow us to understand our experience and our history, including the history of the failures of inadequate theories
  • For Aristotle, moral philosophy is a study of practical reasoning, and the excellences or virtues that Aristotle recommends in the Nicomachean Ethics are the intellectual and moral excellences that make a moral agent effective as an independent practical reasoner.
  • MacIntyre also finds that the contending parties have little interest in the rational justification of the principles they use. The language of moral philosophy has become a kind of moral rhetoric to be used to manipulate others in defense of the arbitrary choices of its users
  • examining the current condition of secular moral and political discourse. MacIntyre finds contending parties defending their decisions by appealing to abstract moral principles, but he finds their appeals eclectic, inconsistent, and incoherent.
  • The secular moral philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shared strong and extensive agreements about the content of morality (AV, p. 51) and believed that their moral philosophy could justify the demands of their morality rationally, free from religious authority.
  • MacIntyre traces the lineage of the culture of emotivism to the secularized Protestant cultures of northern Europe
  • Modern moral philosophy had thus set for itself an incoherent goal. It was to vindicate both the moral autonomy of the individual and the objectivity, necessity, and categorical character of the rules of morality
  • MacIntyre turns to an apparent alternative, the pragmatic expertise of professional managers. Managers are expected to appeal to the facts to make their decisions on the objective basis of effectiveness, and their authority to do this is based on their knowledge of the social sciences
  • An examination of the social sciences reveals, however, that many of the facts to which managers appeal depend on sociological theories that lack scientific status. Thus, the predictions and demands of bureaucratic managers are no less liable to ideological manipulation than the determinations of modern moral philosophers.
  • Modern moral philosophy separates moral reasoning about duties and obligations from practical reasoning about ends and practical deliberation about the means to one’s ends, and in doing so it separates morality from practice.
  • Many Europeans also lost the practical justifications for their moral norms as they approached modernity; for these Europeans, claiming that certain practices are “immoral,” and invoking Kant’s categorical imperative or Mill’s principle of utility to explain why those practices are immoral, seems no more adequate than the Polynesian appeal to taboo.
  • MacIntyre sifts these definitions and then gives his own definition of virtue, as excellence in human agency, in terms of practices, whole human lives, and traditions in chapters 14 and 15 of AV.
  • In the most often quoted sentence of AV, MacIntyre defines a practice as (1) a complex social activity that (2) enables participants to gain goods internal to the practice. (3) Participants achieve excellence in practices by gaining the internal goods. When participants achieve excellence, (4) the social understandings of excellence in the practice, of the goods of the practice, and of the possibility of achieving excellence in the practice “are systematically extended”
  • Practices, like chess, medicine, architecture, mechanical engineering, football, or politics, offer their practitioners a variety of goods both internal and external to these practices. The goods internal to practices include forms of understanding or physical abilities that can be acquired only by pursuing excellence in the associated practice
  • Goods external to practices include wealth, fame, prestige, and power; there are many ways to gain these external goods. They can be earned or purchased, either honestly or through deception; thus the pursuit of these external goods may conflict with the pursuit of the goods internal to practices.
  • An intelligent child is given the opportunity to win candy by learning to play chess. As long as the child plays chess only to win candy, he has every reason to cheat if by doing so he can win more candy. If the child begins to desire and pursue the goods internal to chess, however, cheating becomes irrational, because it is impossible to gain the goods internal to chess or any other practice except through an honest pursuit of excellence. Goods external to practices may nevertheless remain tempting to the practitioner.
  • Since MacIntyre finds social identity necessary for the individual, MacIntyre’s definition of the excellence or virtue of the human agent needs a social dimension:
  • These responsibilities also include debts incurred by the unjust actions of ones’ predecessors.
  • The enslavement and oppression of black Americans, the subjugation of Ireland, and the genocide of the Jews in Europe remained quite relevant to the responsibilities of citizens of the United States, England, and Germany in 1981, as they still do today.
  • Thus an American who said “I never owned any slaves,” “the Englishman who says ‘I never did any wrong to Ireland,’” or “the young German who believes that being born after 1945 means that what Nazis did to Jews has no moral relevance to his relationship to his Jewish contemporaries” all exhibit a kind of intellectual and moral failure.
  • “I am born with a past, and to cut myself off from that past in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships” (p. 221).  For MacIntyre, there is no moral identity for the abstract individual; “The self has to find its moral identity in and through its membership in communities” (p. 221).
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Want the Good Life? This Philosopher Suggests Learning From Cats. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...meaning-of-life-john-gray.html cats philosopher philosophy human supremacy species
shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • On the face of it, “Feline Philosophy” would seem like a departure for Gray — a playful exploration of what cats might have to teach humans in our never-ending quest to understand ourselves. But the book, in true Gray fashion, suggests that this very quest may itself be doomed. “Consciousness,” he writes, “has been overrated.”
  • We get worried, anxious and miserable. Our vaunted capacity for abstract thought often gets us (or others) into trouble. We may be the only species to pursue scientific inquiry, but we’re also the only species that has consciously perpetrated genocides. Cats, unlike humans, don’t trick themselves into believing they are saviors, wreaking havoc in the process.
  • Humans like to think of themselves as special, in other words, but what makes us special also, not infrequently, makes us worse
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In “The Silence of Animals” (2013), he connected a belief in progress, which he ascribes to both the left and the right, to the hubris that denies our animal nature
  • We are human supremacists whose vanity and moralism and tortured ambivalence make us uniquely unhappy and destructive.
  • Gray, who has been critiquing the follies of humanity and humanism for some time now. “Humans are like any other plague animal,” he wrote in “Straw Dogs” (2002). “They cannot destroy the Earth, but they can easily wreck the environment that sustains them.”
  • A recent profile of Gray in The Guardian remarked on his unusual political journey — from a working-class upbringing in Northern England; to support for Thatcherism in the 1980s; to a dalliance with New Labour in the ’90s before he abandoned that, too, after it became yet another “universal project” he considered in thrall to a distorted view of human possibility
  • He was in favor of Brexit, and has written sympathetically of those who voted Leave, deeming the European Union another grand scheme shot through with arrogant idealism. In its place, Gray wants to see … well, something that’s never fully defined.
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Pandemic-Proof Your Habits - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...emic-habits-routine-brain.html
shared by anonymous on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The good news is that much of what we miss about our routines and customs, and what makes them beneficial to us as a species, has more to do with their comforting regularity than the actual behaviors
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      Our brains have that much power over our emotions, and can change how we feel about the world when they experience a change in routine.
  • The key to coping during this, or any, time of upheaval is to quickly establish new routines so that, even if the world is uncertain, there are still things you can count on.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      I haven't really thought of this, since I'm so set on getting back to old routines.
  • Human beings are prediction machines.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • Our brains are statistical organs that are built simply to predict what will happen next
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      I don't know if we've talked about this specifically, more that we like and tend to make up patterns to "predict" the future and reassure ourselves. However, it's not real.
  • This makes sense because, in prehistoric times, faulty predictions could lead to some very unpleasant surprises — like a tiger eating you or sinking in quicksand.
  • So-called prediction errors (like finding salmon instead of turkey on your plate on Thanksgiving) send us into a tizzy because our brains interpret them as a potential threat.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      We have talked about this- the survival aspect of this reaction to change.
  • Keep doing what you’ve been doing, because you did it before, and you didn’t die.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      A good way of putting it.
  • all essentially subconscious efforts to make your world more predictable, orderly and safe.
  • Routines and rituals also conserve precious brainpower
  • It turns out our brains are incredibly greedy when it comes to energy consumption, sucking up 20 percent of calories while accounting for only 2 percent of overall body weight.
  • Our brains are literally overburdened with all the uncertainty caused by the pandemic.
  • Not only is there the seeming capriciousness of the virus, but we no longer have the routines that served as the familiar scaffolding of our lives
  • “It’s counterintuitive because we think of meaning in life as coming from these grandiose experiences
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      I've definitely felt this way.
  • grandiose
  • grandiose
  • Of course, you can always take routines and rituals too far, such as the extremely controlled and repetitive behaviors indicative of addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder and various eating disorders.
  • it’s mundane routines that give us structure to help us pare things down and better navigate the world, which helps us make sense of things and feel that life has meaning.”
  • In the coronavirus era, people may resort to obsessive cleaning, hoarding toilet paper, stockpiling food or neurotically wearing masks when driving alone in their cars. On the other end of the spectrum are those who stubbornly adhere to their old routines because stopping feels more threatening than the virus.
  • You’re much better off establishing a new routine within the limited environment that we find ourselves in
  • Luckily, there is a vast repertoire of habits you can adopt and routines you can establish to structure your days no matter what crises are unfolding around you
  • The point is to find what works for you. It just needs to be regular and help you achieve your goals, whether intellectually, emotionally, socially or professionally. The best habits not only provide structure and order but also give you a sense of pleasure, accomplishment or confidence upon completion.
  • It could be as simple as making your bed as soon as you get up in the morning or committing to working the same hours in the same spot.
  • Pandemic-proof routines might include weekly phone or video calls with friends, Taco Tuesdays with the family, hiking with your spouse on weekends, regularly filling a bird feeder, set times for prayer or meditation, front yard happy hours with the neighbors or listening to an audiobook every night before bed.
  • The truth is that you cannot control what happens in life. But you can create a routine that gives your life a predictable rhythm and secure mooring.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      It's all about changing your thoughts and not tricking exactly but helping your brain.
  • This frees your brain to develop perspective so you’re better able to take life’s surprises in stride.
  • I attended a Thanksgiving dinner several years ago where the hostess, without warning family and friends, broke with tradition and served salmon instead of turkey, roasted potatoes instead of mashed, raspberry coulis instead of cranberry sauce and … you get the idea.
  • Too many people are still longing for their old routines. Get some new ones instead.
  • It wasn’t that the meal itself was bad. In fact, the meal was outstanding. The problem was that it wasn’t the meal everyone was expecting.
  • When there are discrepancies between expectations and reality, all kinds of distress signals go off in the brain.
  • It doesn’t matter if it’s a holiday ritual or more mundane habit like how you tie your shoes; if you can’t do it the way you normally do it, you’re biologically engineered to get upset.
  • This in part explains people’s grief and longing for the routines that were the background melodies of their lives before the pandemic
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Computers Already Learn From Us. But Can They Teach Themselves? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...g-supervised-unsupervised.html
shared by pier-paolo on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • We teach computers to see patterns, much as we teach children to read. But the future of A.I. depends on computer systems that learn on their own, without supervision, researchers say.
  • When a mother points to a dog and tells her baby, “Look at the doggy,” the child learns what to call the furry four-legged friends. That is supervised learning. But when that baby stands and stumbles, again and again, until she can walk, that is something else.Computers are the same.
  • ven if a supervised learning system read all the books in the world, he noted, it would still lack human-level intelligence because so much of our knowledge is never written down.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • upervised learning depends on annotated data: images, audio or text that is painstakingly labeled by hordes of workers. They circle people or outline bicycles on pictures of street traffic. The labeled data is fed to computer algorithms, teaching the algorithms what to look for. After ingesting millions of labeled images, the algorithms become expert at recognizing what they have been taught to see.
  • There is also reinforcement learning, with very limited supervision that does not rely on training data. Reinforcement learning in computer science,
  • is modeled after reward-driven learning in the brain: Think of a rat learning to push a lever to receive a pellet of food. The strategy has been developed to teach computer systems to take actions.
  • My money is on self-supervised learning,” he said, referring to computer systems that ingest huge amounts of unlabeled data and make sense of it all without supervision or reward. He is working on models that learn by observation, accumulating enough background knowledge that some sort of common sense can emerge.
  • redict outcomes and choose a course of action. “Everybody agrees we need predictive learning, but we disagree about how to get there,”
  • A more inclusive term for the future of A.I., he said, is “predictive learning,” meaning systems that not only recognize patterns but also p
  • A huge fraction of what we do in our day-to-day jobs is constantly refining our mental models of the world and then using those mental models to solve problems,” he said. “That encapsulates an awful lot of what we’d like A.I. to do.”Image
  • Currently, robots can operate only in well-defined environments with little variation.
  • “Our working assumption is that if we build sufficiently general algorithms, then all we really have to do, once that’s done, is to put them in robots that are out there in the real world doing real things,”
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Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Explained - 1 views

www.thoughtco.com/ows-hierarchy-of-needs-4582571 Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs love needs belonging relationships
shared by huffem4 on 22 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • According to Maslow, we have five categories of needs: physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization.
  • Maslow considered physiological needs to be the most essential of our needs. If someone is lacking in more than one need, they’re likely to try to meet these physiological needs first. For example, if someone is extremely hungry, it’s hard to focus on anything else besides food.
  • Our safety needs are apparent even early in childhood, as children have a need for safe and predictable environments and typically react with fear or anxiety when these are not met.
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SCIENCE WATCH; Clouded Perceptions - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...watch-clouded-perceptions.html
shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • experiments showed that fog could make a driver think he had dropped to a safe speed when he was actually hurtling along at, say, 70 miles per hour, thinking he was doing 50.
  • Evidence suggests that when people look at a pattern like moving stripes, they think that the stripes move more slowly when it becomes hard to see where one stops and another begins.
  • To find out if a similar distortion affects drivers in fog, the Cardiff researchers studied nine people who had been taught to drive in a computer-controlled simulated environment.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • with feedback,'' Dr. Snowden said, ''we could teach them to be accurate and drive at a consistent speed.''
  • drivers were often reluctant to drag their eyes from a foggy road and tended to judge their speed by feel.
  • ''We can't change our visual systems,'' Dr. Snowden said, ''so even when visibility is poor, it's worth having a look down to check your speed.'
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