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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Javier E

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Javier E

Forever Young? For Bob Dylan, In Some Ways, Yes. - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...24hajdu.html

adolescence music taste culture

shared by Javier E on 24 May 11 - No Cached
  • Fourteen is a formative age, especially for people growing up in social contexts framed by pop culture. You’re in the ninth grade, confronting the tyrannies of sex and adulthood, struggling to figure out what kind of adult you’d like to be, and you turn to the cultural products most important in your day as sources of cool — the capital of young life.
  • “Fourteen is a sort of magic age for the development of musical tastes,”
  • “Pubertal growth hormones make everything we’re experiencing, including music, seem very important. We’re just reaching a point in our cognitive development when we’re developing our own tastes. And musical tastes become a badge of identity.”
Javier E

When the Internet Thinks It Knows You - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...23pariser.html

internet personalization filtering relevance facebook google information

shared by Javier E on 24 May 11 - No Cached
  • There is a new group of gatekeepers in town, and this time, they’re not people, they’re code.
  • Today’s Internet giants — Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft — see the remarkable rise of available information as an opportunity. If they can provide services that sift though the data and supply us with the most personally relevant and appealing results, they’ll get the most users and the most ad views. As a result, they’re racing to offer personalized filters that show us the Internet that they think we want to see. These filters, in effect, control and limit the information that reaches our screens.
  • increasingly, and nearly invisibly, our searches for information are being personalized too.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • when personalization affects not just what you buy but how you think, different issues arise. Democracy depends on the citizen’s ability to engage with multiple viewpoints; the Internet limits such engagement when it offers up only information that reflects your already established point of view. While it’s sometimes convenient to see only what you want to see, it’s critical at other times that you see things that you don’t.
  • At Facebook, “relevance” is virtually the sole criterion that determines what users see. Focusing on the most personally relevant news — the squirrel — is a great business strategy. But it leaves us staring at our front yard instead of reading about suffering, genocide and revolution.
  • It is in our collective interest to ensure that the Internet lives up to its potential as a revolutionary connective medium. This won’t happen if we’re all sealed off in our own personalized online worlds.
Javier E

Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan on Faith, Religion, Tolerance, Moderates, Bible, God, Is... - 0 views

www.beliefnet.com/...-Religion-Built-Upon-Lies.aspx

faith reason religion evidence rationality fundamentalism God

shared by Javier E on 24 May 11 - No Cached
  • Best-selling atheist Sam Harris and pro-religion blogger Andrew Sullivan debate God, faith, and fundamentalism.
  • Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?
Javier E

God Is Love - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 0 views

andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/...god_is_love_2.html

faith Catholic reason fundamentalism religion

shared by Javier E on 24 May 11 - No Cached
  • "Faith is not a theory that one can take up or lay aside. It is something very concrete: It is the criterion that decides our lifestyle. In an age in which hostility and greed have become superpowers, an age in which we witness the abuse of religion to the point of culminating in hatred, neutral rationality on its own is unable to protect us."
  • This attack on reason as a neutral way of understanding the world is what makes Benedict an ally of the fundamentalisms we see colliding and resurging around us. As humans, we only have reason to temper the passions and the demands of religion.
Javier E

Quote For the Day - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 0 views

andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/...quote_for_the_d_16.html

religion sacred defeat

shared by Javier E on 24 May 11 - No Cached
  • "Religion is man's way of accepting life as an inevitable defeat.
  • One can accept life, and accept it, at the same time, as a defeat only if one accepts that there is a sense beyond that which is inherent in human history - if, in other words, one accepts the order of the sacred.
  • A hypothetical world from which the sacred had been swept away would admit of only two possibilities: vain fantasy that recognizes itself as such, or immediate satisfaction which exhausts itself.
Javier E

Rationally Speaking: Razoring Ockham's razor - 0 views

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...razoring-ockhams-razor.html

Ockham science logic explanation philosophy parsimony

shared by Javier E on 22 May 11 - No Cached
  • Philosophers often refer to this as the principle of economy, while scientists tend to call it parsimony. Skeptics invoke it every time they wish to dismiss out of hand claims of unusual phenomena
  • The obvious question to ask about Ockham’s razor is: why? On what basis are we justified to think that, as a matter of general practice, the simplest hypothesis is the most likely one to be true? Setting aside the surprisingly difficult task of operationally defining “simpler” in the context of scientific hypotheses (it can be done, but only in certain domains, and it ain’t straightforward), there doesn’t seem to be any particular logical or metaphysical reason to believe that the universe is a simple as it could be.
  • Pierre Duhem suggested in 1908 that, as Sober puts it: “it is wrong to think that hypothesis H makes predictions about observation O; it is the conjunction of H&A [where A is a set of auxiliary hypotheses] that issues in testable consequences.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The history of science is replete with examples of simpler (“more elegant,” if you are aesthetically inclined) hypotheses that had to yield to more clumsy and complicated ones.
  • This is both why there is no such thing as a “crucial” experiment in science (you always need to repeat them under a variety of conditions), and why naive Popperian falsificationism is wrong (you can never falsify a hypothesis directly, only the H&A complex can be falsified).
  • The Duhem thesis explains why Sober is right, I think, in maintaining that the razor works (when it does) given certain background assumptions that are bound to be discipline- and problem-specific.
  • So, Ockham’s razor is a sharp but not universal tool, and needs to be wielded with the proper care due to the specific circumstances.
  • There is no shortcut for a serious investigation of the world, including the spelling out of our auxiliary, and often unexplored, hypotheses and assumptions.
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