One, it’s a story about how democracy itself is always based on uncertain notions of truth, in moral terms and in epistemological terms. The other is a story about a continual conflict between a kind of expert truth and a more populist, everyday, common-sense truth that supposedly stems not from experts but the wisdom of the crowd.

Democracy insists on the idea that truth both matters and that nobody gets to say definitively what it is. That’s a tension that’s built into democracy from the beginning, and it’s not solvable but is, in fact, intrinsic to democracy.

We don’t want to have one definitive source of truth. Part of the reason ideas evolve and culture changes is that we’re constantly debating what is an accurate rendition of reality in some form.

Can we accept evolution as a set truth or not? They have not exploded to the point where they’ve destabilized our political or social life, but they’ve been a controversial question for over a hundred years. That’s a public contest that, actually, democracy’s pretty good for. You know, you contest things in court, you contest things in universities, you contest things in the public sphere.

I think it’s important that there be a contest about what is true and also about, How do you know what’s true? Where does your information come from? I would say, largely, science has won. That is, that the mainstream educational institutions, the National Institutes of Health, et cetera, all accept that evolution is as close as we’re going to get to truth.

One says that experts often make [bad] decisions because there’s been no popular input on them—not just because they don’t know enough but because they haven’t actually taken account of popular knowledge.

The most common example involves things like the World Bank coming up with a plan about water use in some part of the world without studying how people actually think and use water, simply imagining a kind of technocratic solution with no local input, and it turns out to be totally ineffective because it runs contrary to cultural norms and everyday life. There’s every chance that experts alone get things wrong.

Social media and the Internet more broadly have clearly had a rather revolutionary effect on not just what we take to be true but how truths circulate, what we believe, how we know anything.

new technology causes certain kinds of panics about truth. The Internet is particularly important because of its reach and because of the algorithmic way in which it promotes what’s popular rather than what’s true. It creates a culture of untruth, probably, that other forms of publishing can’t easily.

I actually approve of fact-checking, even if I think it’s often not very effective, because it doesn’t persuade people who aren’t already inclined to want to look at fact-checking. And I don’t think it’s much of a substitute for real politics

I don’t think facts are pure in any sense. You know, if I give you something like an unemployment rate, it implies all kinds of interpretative work already about what is work and who should be looking for it and how old you should be when you’re working.

It’s important that that’s part of democracy, too—questioning received wisdom. If somebody says that’s how it is, it’s correct to think, Is that really how it is? Do I have enough information to be sure that’s how it is?

Conspiracy theories, the complex ones that arise from the bottom, tend to involve seeing through official truths and often seeing how the rich and powerful have pulled the wool over people’s eyes, that what looked like this turned out to be that because there was a kind of subterfuge going on from above.

Whereas, the climate-change one, which we know has been sort of promoted by the Koch brothers and others in business interest groups, as you say, didn’t start really organically as much as it became a kind of position of industry that then took on a life of its own because it got mixed in with a whole bunch of other assumptions, whether it was about political norms, government overreach, guns.

There are countless reasons why tiny mistakes or embellishments might happen each time we recall past events, ranging from what we believe is true or wish were true, to what someone else told us about the event, or what we want that person to think. And whenever these flaws happen, they can have long-term effects on how we’ll recall that memory in the future.

Take storytelling for example. When we describe our memories to other people, we use artistic licence to tell the story differently depending on who’s listening.

And we might change the story’s details depending on the listener’s attitudes or political leaning.

Research shows that when we describe our memories differently to different audiences it isn’t only the message that changes, but sometimes it’s also the memory itself. This is known as the “audience-tuning effect”.

memories can change spontaneously over time, as a product of how, when, and why we access them. In fact, sometimes simply the act of rehearsing a memory can be exactly what makes it susceptible to change. This is known as “retrieval-enhanced suggestibility”.

One theory is that rehearsing our memories of past events can temporarily make those memories malleable. In other words, retrieving a memory might be a bit like taking ice-cream out of the freezer and leaving it in direct sunlight for a while. By the time our memory goes back into the freezer, it might have naturally become a little misshapen, especially if someone has meddled with it in the meantime.

Striking the right balance between markets and government is the central issue in policy debates over economic developmen

What is the role of governments in promoting economic growth?

What can governments do to seize the opportunities of globalization, while minimizing its downsides?

we have to recognize that the tension between markets and government is not new. In fact, it has been the central issue in the evolution of political economy over the last 200 years.

There have been three distinct phases in this evolution.

Phase One: The rise of the market

The “rise of the market” began in the late 18th century, shaped by the writings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. The “invisible hand” of the market guided supply and demand toward equilibrium and efficiency.

This phase came to an end in the 1930s, when the concept of self-correcting markets collapsed under the weight of the Great Depression.

Falling prices, instead of bringing demand and supply into equilibrium,

Phase Two: The rise of government

markets were inherently unstable. Left on their own, they may not always self-correct

Government intervention was necessary to boost aggregate demand during periods of high unemployment.

The 1940s also saw the advent of the welfare state.

The welfare state was enabled through redistributive taxation and government regulation.

Phase Three: The return of the market

This phase began with growing disenchantment with government’s ability to deliver and was driven forward mainly by U.S.-based economists

The stagflation of the 1970s — persistently high inflation and unemployment — called into question the ability of governments to fine-tune the economy. Meanwhile, the welfare state began to impose an unsustainable fiscal burden,

Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman led the charge against “Big Government.” They argued eloquently how an overreaching government dulled the fundamental human instincts that power the capitalist system:

In the 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher reduced taxes, deregulated industries, privatized state-owned enterprises, curbed union power, and scaled back welfare programs. The global economy boomed.

Phase Four: Balancing markets and governments

The financial crisis has revealed significant imperfections in market mechanisms: information asymmetry, moral hazard, systemic risks and behavioral or nonrational motivators of choice.

In a more globalized and complex economy, governments have fewer levers to pull

It has also revealed the inherent limitations of governmen

Neither market fundamentalism nor central planning has worked.

Yet one thing is certain: The choice is not between big government and small government. It is about creating effective government. What matters is what governments do, not how big they are.

different cultures have a predominant fashion in which they use their language and they have differences which cannot be underestimated.

one of the most well known linguists in the world, argues that all languages are dialects of one language, which is the human language. He says that even though they appear very different, they are in fact very similar.

there is no doubt that language and culture are closely connected.

Direct and Indirect Styles

We are encouraged to be direct and to speak our mind.

Asian cultures use an indirect style of communication. Words such as “perhaps" and “maybe" are used much more frequently than “yes", “no" or “for sure".

Personal and Contextual Styles

Two of the most frequently used words in our culture are “I" and “you".

American culture is not very formal, so it is appropriate to say “you" to your boss, to the President, to a stranger, to your spouse or to your child.

In Thai language there are twelve forms of the pronoun “you", which depend of factors such as status or level of intimacy.

The style of language is focused on speaker and depends on someone’s status and identity.

Japanese pay a lot of attention to someone’s status and they use linguistic forms called honorifics, which are used according to the rank of the person who is speaking

Untranslatable Words

Many people don’t realize that there are plenty of words that cannot be translated from one language to another simply because they don’t exist in another language.

The word “shopping", which describes one of the most favorite activities of Americans, doesn’t exist in some other languages (such as for example in Russian) as a noun.

Another interesting example is the word “ilunga".

Republic of Congo and is considered to be the most untranslatable word in the world.

a person who is ready to forgive any transgression a first and a second time, but never for a third time.

Language Is Changing Along with the Culture

he and his were used generically in English language.

Since the United States and most of the English-speaking Western Europe are becoming less and less male-dominant cultures, the grammar rules have been changed and new gender agreement rules were created.

Fifty years ago nobody was suspecting that one day in the United States the words “mother" and “father" would become controversial and that some schools would agree to change them both to “parent".

Learning a foreign language helps improve memory

(Working memory deals with the storage and processing of information over a short period of time.)

Speaking a second language helps you focus, and deal with distractions appropriately

A bilingual person is accustomed to switching between different languages, deciding which is the appropriate language to use in a given situation

This gives the brain plenty of practice in focusing and filtering information.

Related to your attention span is your ability to multi-task.

Speaking two languages, and switching between them, makes you better at multi-tasking in other tasks, too.

Speaking more than one language provides constant exercise for your brain, and keeping your brain active is one way in which to delay the onset of dementia.

What this perceptual sensitivity could mean, is that babies raised with two languages will find it easier to learn other languages later in life, as a result of the ability to easily distinguish between different sounds.

Bilingual people have also been shown to have better cognitive abilities than monolinguals.

Interestingly, this is regardless of what age the person learns the foreign language, so even a person who learns a foreign language as an adult will benefit from these improved skills.

By learning another language, your mother tongue can improve as a result. As you learn a second language, your knowledge of grammar improves.

In fact, as crazy as it may sound, learning a foreign language can actually increase the size of your brain.

In this study, two groups of subjects underwent brain scans. One group did an intensive language course for three months while the other, the control group, did intensive courses in a subject that was not a language. What the scientists found was that specific parts of the language learners’ brains became bigger than those of the non-language learners.

Given all the benefits outlined in this article, it’s hardly surprising that learning a foreign language keeps your brain healthy for longer

The benefits of multiple languages can start as early as before a baby is able to speak

Whatever your age, the health benefits of learning a foreign language make it a surefire way to upgrade your life, and future-proof your brain for old age.

preconditions for attributing these functions to knowledge include critical reflections of the nature of knowledge, its possibilities and limitations.

cover the sources of knowledge, its history, and justification narratives, its strengths, limitations, and the distinctive levels of knowledge,

The formation of knowledge is taken to refer to the construction of normative orders

These normative orders are formed by distinctions such as true-untrue, good-bad, justified-unjustified, beautiful-ugly, as in science, art, law, history, philosophy, economy, sociology, anthropology, and religion.

The discussions of these normative orders cover the analyses of their formation, embodiment, application and education, their histories and their constituents.

Artificial intelligence pioneer Ray Kurzweil was among the first to recognize how the link between pattern recognition and human intelligence could be used to build the next generation of artificially intelligent machines.

where human "expertise" has always trumped machine "expertise."

It turns out patterns matter, and they matter a lot.

The more you think about it, the more you can see patterns all around you. Getting to work on time in the morning is the result of recognizing patterns in your daily commute

it's really just a matter of recognizing the right patterns faster than anyone else, and machines just have so much processing power these days it's easy to see them becoming the future doctors and lawyers of the world.

The future of intelligence is in making our patterns better, our heuristics stronger.

One thing is clear – being able to recognize patterns is what gave humans their evolutionary edge over animals.

How we refine, shape and improve our pattern recognition is the key to how much longer we'll have the evolutionary edge over machines.

A valid argument is one where if all the premises are true, so that the conclusion necessarily follows

A non-valid argument is one where even if the premises are true, the conclusion does not necessarily follow

A sound argument is a valid argument with true premises, whereas an unsound argument has at least one false premise.

Example of a non-valid argument: If Dr. Litfin were Catholic, he would pray in chapel. Dr. Litfin does pray in chapel. Therefore, Dr. Litfin is Catholic.

Invalidity and unsoundness are often difficult to spot at first glance.

Begging the Question: the conclusion assumes or restates what is explicitly stated in the premise.

Appeal to Ignorance: argues that, since a certain statement or point has not been shown to be false, it must be true—or vice versa.

problem—the complete lack of evidence that they’re true. 

Even if events that affect human lives do not happen by quantum chance, many of them should be viewed as happening by accident, in the sense that they are the improbable result of the intersection of independent causal chains.

The German philosopher Hegel maintained that in historical development the real is rational and the rational is real.

n history, economics, biology, and psychology, we should always be willing to consider evidence for the alternative hypothesis that some events occur because of a combination of chance, accidents, and human irrationality.

But if the real isn’t rational, how can we cope with life’s disasters?

Life can be highly meaningful even if some things that happen are just accidents. Stuff happens and you deal with it.

Primary emotions are our first emotional reaction. They’re often followed by a more defended secondary emotion.

However, if we look at our initial reaction, our primary emotion, we may recognize that we had more vulnerable feelings, such as feeling hurt, unwanted, or ashamed

t is a vital feeling that often leaves the [person] feeling very open and perhaps vulnerable.”

If we imagine a moment of feeling tense, frustrated or stuck in a bad feeling, driven to react without a sense of relief, we were probably caught in a secondary emotion

able to access the deeper, more vulnerable feeling, perhaps a want or a need, or a core feeling of sadness or shame, we were then experiencing a primary emotion

Primary emotions can be either adaptive reactions to the moment or maladaptive reactions based on schemas from our past.

We may experience what I often refer to as a “critical inner voice,” a negative internal commentary that tells us things like, “You made such a fool of yourself. Look at how they’re looking at you. They all think you’re an idiot. You should just get out of here.”

The maladaptive secondary emotions can also lead us to react in ways that are not in our best interest: lashing out to defend ourselves, acting resentful or enraged, driven by thoughts

The good news is we can transform our emotions to become adaptive.

We can take our side by challenging our critical self-attacks and, thereby, offering ourselves compassion and love.

When we live in harmony with our emotions, we become more in touch with who we are.

students were surveyed on how much they agreed or disagreed with statements

Students were also tested on how much they learned in the class with 12 multiple-choice questions.

that students felt as if they learned more from the lectures, but in fact

scored higher on tests following the active learning sessions.

Source: “Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom,” Louis Deslauriers, Logan S. McCarty, Kelly Miller, Kristina Callaghan, and Greg Kestin

appreciate the importance of their own involvement in active learning.”

While they work, we walk around the room to observe them and answer questions

It also explains why instructors and students cling to the belief that listening to lectures constitutes learning. I recommend every lecturer reads this article.”

“Students might give fabulous evaluations to an amazing lecturer based on this feeling of learning, even though their actual learning isn’t optima