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marleen_ueberall

Knowledge formation and its history - Research themes - CLUE+ Research Institute for Culture, History and Heritage, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam - 0 views

clue.vu.nl/...index.aspx

history Knowledge

shared by marleen_ueberall on 27 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Knowledge is a key concept and an instrument of high value in contemporary society.
  • The ambition illustrates the idea that knowledge is conceived as a goal and an ideal for education and development of individuals and groups, including academic education and research, as well as a profitable instrument for researchers, employers, entrepreneurs, and government institutions in our society.
  • And these discussions of knowledge
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • 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.
Javier E

The Philosopher Redefining Equality | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...hilosopher-redefining-equality

philosophy equality political theory culture

shared by Javier E on 26 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The bank experience showed how you could be oppressed by hierarchy, working in an environment where you were neither free nor equal. But this implied that freedom and equality were bound together in some way beyond the basic state of being unenslaved, which was an unorthodox notion. Much social thought is rooted in the idea of a conflict between the two.
  • If individuals exercise freedoms, conservatives like to say, some inequalities will naturally result. Those on the left basically agree—and thus allow constraints on personal freedom in order to reduce inequality. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the opposition between equality and freedom an “intrinsic, irremovable element in human life.” It is our fate as a society, he believed, to haggle toward a balance between them.
  • What if they weren’t opposed, Anderson wondered, but, like the sugar-phosphate chains in DNA, interlaced in a structure that we might not yet understand?
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  • At fifty-nine, Anderson is the chair of the University of Michigan’s department of philosophy and a champion of the view that equality and freedom are mutually dependent, enmeshed in changing conditions through time.
  • She has built a case, elaborated across decades, that equality is the basis for a free society
  • Because she brings together ideas from both the left and the right to battle increasing inequality, Anderson may be the philosopher best suited to this awkward moment in American life. She builds a democratic frame for a society in which people come from different places and are predisposed to disagree.
  • she sketched out the entry-level idea that one basic way to expand equality is by expanding the range of valued fields within a society.
  • The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one’s identities in other domains?” She paused. “That is what it is to be free.”
  • How do you move from a basic model of egalitarian variety, in which everybody gets a crack at being a star at something, to figuring out how to respond to a complex one, where people, with different allotments of talent and virtue, get unequal starts, and often meet with different constraints along the way?
  • The problem, she proposed, was that contemporary egalitarian thinkers had grown fixated on distribution: moving resources from lucky-seeming people to unlucky-seeming people, as if trying to spread the luck around.
  • Egalitarians should agree about clear cases of blameless misfortune: the quadriplegic child, the cognitively impaired adult, the teen-ager born into poverty with junkie parents. But Anderson balked there, too. By categorizing people as lucky or unlucky, she argued, these egalitarians set up a moralizing hierarchy.
  • In Anderson’s view, the way forward was to shift from distributive equality to what she called relational, or democratic, equality: meeting as equals, regardless of where you were coming from or going to.
  • By letting the lucky class go on reaping the market’s chancy rewards while asking others to concede inferior status in order to receive a drip-drip-drip of redistributive aid, these egalitarians were actually entrenching people’s status as superior or subordinate.
  • To the ugly and socially awkward: . . . Maybe you won’t be such a loser in love once potential dates see how rich you are.
  • . To the stupid and untalented: Unfortunately, other people don’t value what little you have to offer in the system of production. . . . Because of the misfortune that you were born so poorly endowed with talents, we productive ones will make it up to you: we’ll let you share in the bounty of what we have produced with our vastly superior and highly valued abilities. . . 
  • she imagined some citizens getting a state check and a bureaucratic letter:
  • This was, at heart, an exercise of freedom. The trouble was that many people, picking up on libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own actions.
  • To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces, markets, and all the rest).
  • Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences.
  • A society in which everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t something you could simply tax into existence. “People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies,”
  • Her first book, “Value in Ethics and Economics,” appeared that year, announcing one of her major projects: reconciling value (an amorphous ascription of worth that is a keystone of ethics and economics) with pluralism (the fact that people seem to value things in different ways).
  • Philosophers have often assumed that pluralistic value reflects human fuzziness—we’re loose, we’re confused, and we mix rational thought with sentimental responses.
  • She offered an “expressive” theory: in her view, each person’s values could be various because they were socially expressed, and thus shaped by the range of contexts and relationships at play in a life. Instead of positing value as a basic, abstract quality across society (the way “utility” functioned for economists), she saw value as something determined by the details of an individual’s history.
  • Like her idea of relational equality, this model resisted the temptation to flatten human variety toward a unifying standard. In doing so, it helped expand the realm of free and reasoned economic choice.
  • Anderson’s model unseated the premises of rational-choice theory, in which individuals invariably make utility-maximizing decisions, occasionally in heartless-seeming ways. It ran with, rather than against, moral intuition. Because values were plural, it was perfectly rational to choose to spend evenings with your family, say, and have guilt toward the people you left in the lurch at work.
  • The theory also pointed out the limits on free-market ideologies, such as libertarianism.
  • In ethics, it broke across old factional debates. The core idea “has been picked up on by people across quite a range of positions,” Peter Railton, one of Anderson’s longtime colleagues, says. “Kantians and consequentialists alike”—people who viewed morality in terms of duties and obligations, and those who measured the morality of actions by their effects in the world—“could look at it and see something important.”
  • Traditionally, the discipline is taught through a-priori thought—you start with basic principles and reason forward. Anderson, by contrast, sought to work empirically, using information gathered from the world, identifying problems to be solved not abstractly but through the experienced problems of real people.
  • “Dewey argued that the primary problems for ethics in the modern world concerned the ways society ought to be organized, rather than personal decisions of the individual,”
  • In 2004, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy asked Anderson to compose its entry on the moral philosophy of John Dewey, who helped carry pragmatist methods into the social realm. Dewey had an idea of democracy as a system of good habits that began in civil life. He was an anti-ideologue with an eye for pluralism.
  • She started working with historians, trying to hone her understanding of ideas by studying them in the context of their creation. Take Rousseau’s apparent support of direct democracy. It’s rarely mentioned that, at the moment when he made that argument, his home town of Geneva had been taken over by oligarchs who claimed to represent the public. Pragmatism said that an idea was an instrument, which naturally gave rise to such questions as: an instrument for what, and where, and when?
  • In “What Is the Point of Equality?,” Anderson had already started to drift away from what philosophers, following Rawls, call ideal theory, based on an end vision for a perfectly just society. As Anderson began a serious study of race in America, though, she found herself losing faith in that approach entirely.
  • Broadly, there’s a culturally right and a culturally left ideal theory for race and society. The rightist version calls for color blindness. Instead of making a fuss about skin and ethnicity, its advocates say, society should treat people as people, and let the best and the hardest working rise.
  • The leftist theory envisions identity communities: for once, give black people (or women, or members of other historically oppressed groups) the resources and opportunities they need, including, if they want it, civil infrastructure for themselves.
  • In “The Imperative of Integration,” published in 2010, Anderson tore apart both of these models. Sure, it might be nice to live in a color-blind society, she wrote, but that’s nothing like the one that exists.
  • But the case for self-segregation was also weak. Affinity groups provided welcome comfort, yet that wasn’t the same as power or equality, Anderson pointed out. And there was a goose-and-gander problem. Either you let only certain groups self-segregate (certifying their subordinate status) or you also permitted, say, white men to do it,
  • Anderson’s solution was “integration,” a concept that, especially in progressive circles, had been uncool since the late sixties. Integration, by her lights, meant mixing on the basis of equality.
  • in attending to these empirical findings over doctrine, she announced herself as a non-ideal theorist: a philosopher with no end vision of society. The approach recalls E. L. Doctorow’s description of driving at night: “You can see only as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
  • or others, though, a white woman making recommendations on race policy raised questions of perspective. She was engaging through a mostly white Anglo-American tradition. She worked from the premise that, because she drew on folders full of studies, the limits of her own perspective were not constraining.
  • Some philosophers of color welcomed the book. “She’s taking the need for racial justice seriously, and you could hardly find another white political philosopher over a period of decades doing that,”
  • Recently, Anderson changed the way she assigns undergraduate essays: instead of requiring students to argue a position and fend off objections, doubling down on their original beliefs, she asks them to discuss their position with someone who disagrees, and to explain how and why, if at all, the discussion changed their views.
  • The challenge of pluralism is the challenge of modern society: maintaining equality amid difference in a culture given to constant and unpredictable change.
  • Rather than fighting for the ascendancy of certain positions, Anderson suggests, citizens should fight to bolster healthy institutions and systems—those which insure that all views and experiences will be heard. Today’s righteous projects, after all, will inevitably seem fatuous and blinkered from the vantage of another age.
  • Smith saw the markets as an escape from that order. Their “most important” function, he explained, was to bring “liberty and security” to those “who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbours, and of servile dependency upon their superiors.”
  • Anderson zeroed in on Adam Smith, whose “The Wealth of Nations,” published in 1776, is taken as a keystone of free-market ideology. At the time, English labor was subject to uncompensated apprenticeships, domestic servitude, and some measure of clerical dominion.
  • Smith, in other words, was an egalitarian. He had written “The Wealth of Nations” in no small part to be a solution to what we’d now call structural inequality—the intractable, compounding privileges of an arbitrary hierarchy.
  • It was a historical irony that, a century later, writers such as Marx pointed to the market as a structure of dominion over workers; in truth, Smith and Marx had shared a socioeconomic project. And yet Marx had not been wrong to trash Smith’s ideas, because, during the time between them, the world around Smith’s model had changed, and it was no longer a useful tool.
  • mages of free market society that made sense prior to the Industrial Revolution continue to circulate today as ideals, blind to the gross mismatch between the background social assumptions reigning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and today’s institutional realities. We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.
  • Today, people still try to use, variously, both Smith’s and Marx’s tools on a different, postindustrial world:
  • The unnaturalness of this top-heavy arrangement, combined with growing evidence of power abuses, has given many people reason to believe that something is fishy about the structure of American equality. Socialist and anti-capitalist models are again in vogue.
  • Anderson offers a different corrective path. She thinks it’s fine for some people to earn more than others. If you’re a brilliant potter, and people want to pay you more than the next guy for your pottery, great!
  • The problem isn’t that talent and income are distributed in unequal parcels. The problem is that Jeff Bezos earns more than a hundred thousand dollars a minute, while Amazon warehouse employees, many talented and hardworking, have reportedly resorted to urinating in bottles in lieu of a bathroom break. That circumstance reflects some structure of hierarchical oppression. It is a rip in the democratic fabric, and it’s increasingly the norm.
  • Andersonism holds that we don’t have to give up on market society if we can recognize and correct for its limitations—it may even be our best hope, because it’s friendlier to pluralism than most alternatives are.
  • we must be flexible. We must remain alert. We must solve problems collaboratively, in the moment, using society’s ears and eyes and the best tools that we can find.
  • “You can see that, from about 1950 to 1970, the typical American’s wages kept up with productivity growth,” she said. Then, around 1974, she went on, hourly compensation stagnated. American wages have been effectively flat for the past few decades, with the gains of productivity increasingly going to shareholders and to salaries for big bosses.
  • What changed? Anderson rattled off a constellation of factors, from strengthened intellectual-property law to winnowed antitrust law. Financialization, deregulation. Plummeting taxes on capital alongside rising payroll taxes. Privatization, which exchanged modest public-sector salaries for C.E.O. paydays. She gazed into the audience and blinked. “So now we have to ask: What has been used to justify this rather dramatic shift of labor-share of income?”
  • It was no wonder that industrial-age thinking was riddled with contradictions: it reflected what Anderson called “the plutocratic reversal” of classical liberal ideas. Those perversely reversed ideas about freedom were the ones that found a home in U.S. policy, and, well, here we were.
peterconnelly

German Chancellor accused of comparing climate activists to Nazis - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

climate cnn

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was accused Monday of comparing climate activists to Nazis, in allegations that his spokesperson said were "completely absurd."
  • "I'll be honest: These black-clad displays at various events by the same people over and over again remind me of a time that is, thank God, long gone by," he said in an exchange captured on camera.
  • Scholz was speaking about the phase-out of coal-fired power generation and resulting jobs losses in open cast mining when he was interrupted.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Prominent German Climate scientist Friederike Otto commented that "Scholz 'forgets' our worst history, dismisses every generation that comes after him as irrelevant & the audience just applauds."
  • "Where does one begin? In just one half-sentence, the Chancellor of the Federal Republic relativizes the Nazi regime and, in a paradoxical way, also the climate crisis," she wrote on Twitter. "He stylizes climate protection as an ideology with parallels to the Nazi regime. In 2022. Jesus. This is such a scandal."
  • "I have also been to events where five people sat dressed in the same way, each had a well-rehearsed stance, and then they do it again every time," he said. "And that's why I think that is not a discussion, that is not participation in a discussion, but an attempt to manipulate events for one's own purposes. One should not do this."
  • The chancellor leads a three-party coalition with partners the Greens and pro-business Free Democrats, and their pledge to improve climate change action was central to their campaign.
peterconnelly

Elon Musk Hates Ads. Twitter Needs Them. That May Be a Problem. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...elon-musk-twitter-ads.html

ads new york times

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Since he started pursuing his $44 billion purchase of Twitter — and for years before that — the world’s richest man has made clear that advertising is not a priority.
  • Ads account for roughly 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue.
  • They have cited a litany of complaints, including that the company cannot target ads nearly as well as competitors like Facebook, Google and Amazon.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Now, numerous advertising executives say they’re willing to move their money elsewhere, especially if Mr. Musk eliminates the safeguards that allowed Twitter to remove racist rants and conspiracy theories.
  • “At the end of the day, it’s not the brands who need to be concerned, because they’ll just spend their budgets elsewhere — it’s Twitter that needs to be concerned,” said David Jones
  • On Wednesday night, at Twitter’s annual NewFronts presentation for advertisers at Pier 17 in New York, company representatives stressed Twitter’s value for marketers: as a top destination for people to gather and discuss major cultural moments like sporting events or the Met Gala, increasingly through video posts.
  • Twitter differs from Facebook, whose millions of small and midsize advertisers generate the bulk of the company’s revenue and depend on its enormous size and targeting abilities to reach customers. Twitter’s clientele is heavily weighted with large, mainstream companies, which tend to be wary of their ads appearing alongside problematic content.
  • Twitter earns the vast majority of its ad revenue from brand awareness campaigns, whose effectiveness is much harder to evaluate than ads that target users based on their interests or that push for a direct response, such as clicking through to a website.
  • Twitter’s reach is also narrower than many rivals, with 229 million users who see ads, compared with 830 million users on LinkedIn and 1.96 billion daily users on Facebook.
  • “Even the likes of LinkedIn have eclipsed the ability for us to target consumers beyond what Twitter is providing,” he said. “We’re going to go where the results are, and with a lot of our clients, we haven’t seen the performance on Twitter from an ad perspective that we have with other platforms.”
  • “Twitter’s done a better job than many platforms at building trust with advertisers — they’ve been more progressive, more responsive and more humble about initiating ways to learn,” said Mark Read
  • On Twitter, he has criticized ads as “manipulating public opinion” and discussed his refusal to “pay famous people to fake endorse.”
  • “There’s a fork in the road, where Path A leads to an unfiltered place with the worst of human behavior and no brands want to go anywhere near it,” said Mr. Jones of Brandtech. “And Path B has one of the world’s genius entrepreneurs, who knows a lot about running companies, unleashing a wave of innovation that has people looking back in a few years and saying, ‘Remember when everyone was worried about Musk coming in?’”
Javier E

Why Being Interrupted Is So Irritating, and Tips for Dealing With It - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nversations-relationships.html

interruption conversation discussion psychology research social skills

shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Why is it so annoying when people interrupt? For many of us, it can feel diminishing and condescending, said Maria Venetis, an associate professor of communication at Rutgers University. Sometimes it’s even “enraging,” she added, “because it suggests that my ideas or my participation aren’t valid.”
  • Interrupters often have more “achieved or ascribed power” and are used to having people quiet down when they want to speak
  • If you decide to cut in, Swann suggested “lifting your hand up ever so slightly and saying, ‘Hold on, I’d like to finish my thought.’”
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Dealing with interruptions at work
  • If you’re frequently cut off during meetings, find a work buddy who can jump in and refocus the conversation, Swann said. (“I’d love to hear what Sandra was saying.”)
  • Dr. Venetis recommended saying “just a second, and I’ll yield the floor.” Doing that acknowledges the other person while being an advocate for yourself, she said.
  • You can also address interruptions before they start, Swann said. “Set the stage by saying: ‘I have something to share. I’ll only take about five minutes,’” and let people know they will have time to chime in when you’re done
  • Handling interruptions in your relationship
  • Explore the root cause of the problem, Dr. Solomon said. Ask each other questions like: How would you describe our conversation patterns? How did people have discussions in your family growing up? How do you feel when you’re interrupted?
  • Constant interruptions can cause real rifts in understanding, connection and trust, Dr. Solomon said. If interrupting is a pattern in your relationship, she recommends starting a “curious conversation” with your partner when you’re not in the heat of the moment.
  • Subtle body language can work at home, too, she said. If one partner is “coming in hot,” she suggests leaning forward and putting a hand on the partner’s forearm, or lifting a “hang on” finger.
  • What to do if you’re the interrupter
  • Are you hogging the mic? Watch your listener for cues, Dr. Solomon said. Does the person look impatient or disengaged
  • If you read a transcript of the conversation, she said, are the two of you speaking for roughly the same amount of time?
  • That’s what you should aim for, Dr. Solomon said. “We tend to want our conversations to feel like a tennis game, with a lot of back and forth,” she said.
Emily Horwitz

Religion, Science And Magic Fairy Cellphones : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR - 2 views

www.npr.org/...on-science-and-no-easy-answers

religion science npr belief

shared by Emily Horwitz on 25 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Heaven and Hell. God and the Devil. For many folks these polar opposites are what religion is all about. And for many folks in science who consider themselves atheists, this is what makes religion so impossible to bear. How can the nature of the world be seen in such simplistic terms? How can such beliefs co-exist with the technologies on which we've built our everyday lives?
  • What is remarkable about the fundamentalist perspective, however, is an unwillingness to see spiritual life in the same light. Instead of seeing subtlety and complication that require a lifetime of intense dedicated effort — a genuine personal investigation of the world — to understand, everything is reduced to magic-marker outlines with unwavering, absolute answers.
  • Acknowledging that truth, in both science and religion, could be one way to raise the discussion to a plane where we might all learn something.
Javier E

Commentary: The problem with Wikipedia - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...2-dc76641cb8d4_singlePage.html

wikipedia policies

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The site does not allow corporations, individuals or organizations to defend themselves transparently or submit information on their own behalf. This is a serious flaw and a real challenge for a site that has become a fundamental source for so many around the world. This policy results in many articles on the site that are inaccurate or even blatantly false.
  • I decided to provide a resource to the Wikipedia editors and help them get the story straight. I signed up as a Wikipedia editor under the name QorvisEditor. Under this handle, my goal was not to edit client or Qorvis pages, but to become a direct source from which established Wikipedia editors could ask questions about our company and work. Within minutes of signing up, I was blocked by established editors for personally representing the interests of the firm — not for editing anything incorrectly, mind you. This action prevented me from having any direct interaction with any editor in the future, and thus prevented me from providing any first-hand information to any editor. This action also prevents any other Wikipedia editor from having a direct dialogue with the firm.
  • This inane policy would violate the basic tenets of even the most partisan of small-town newspapers or the most crooked court rooms. This dangerous policy violates the fundamental rules of reporting, of debate and of discussion
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Wikipedia thus has a responsibility to find an avenue for living subjects to contribute directly to articles. It is a disservice to not allow direct, transparent contributions by primary sources — especially since these sources often hide their identities in an effort to have their arguments heard.
Sean Kirkpatrick

Ethics and Politics : Joseph Roblat - 1 views

www.pugwash.org/...EthicsandPolitics.pdf

shared by Sean Kirkpatrick on 26 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Sean Kirkpatrick on 26 Feb 13
     
    Ethics and Politics Discussion by Joseph Roblat
Javier E

Messages Galore, but No Time to Think - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lore-but-no-time-to-think.html

online communications costs

shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • “Nobody can think anymore because they’re constantly interrupted,” said Leslie Perlow, a Harvard Business School professor and author of “Sleeping With Your Smartphone.” “Technology has enabled this expectation that we always be on.”
  • To lessen the disruptive nature of e-mail and other messages, teams need to discuss how to alter their work process to allow blocks of time where they can disconnect entirely,
Grace Carey

Buddhist Meditation - 0 views

www.accesstoinsight.org/...bl015.html

sense perception illusion

shared by Grace Carey on 14 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Grace Carey on 14 Jan 13
     
    Much of this makes me think of TOK issues, especially the parts discussing all of life being an illusion or hallucination. "Physics, by showing that the realm of phenomena we know through these channels of cognition (sense perception) does not really correspond to the physical world known to science, has confirmed this Buddhist truth. "
Javier E

The Ignorance Caucus - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gman-the-ignorance-caucus.html

evidence critical science research Republicans motivated reasoning knowledge

shared by Javier E on 13 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Last year the Texas G.O.P. explicitly condemned efforts to teach “critical thinking skills,” because, it said, such efforts “have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”
  • even when giving a speech intended to demonstrate his ope
  • nness to new ideas, Mr. Cantor felt obliged to give that caucus a shout-out, calling for a complete end to federal funding of social science research. Because it’s surely a waste of money seeking to understand the society we’re trying to change.
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  • Mr. Cantor’s support for medical research is curiously limited. He’s all for developing new treatments, but he and his colleagues have adamantly opposed “comparative effectiveness research,” which seeks to determine how well such treatments work.
  • , Hillary Clinton said of her Republican critics, “They just will not live in an evidence-based world.”
  • in his home state of Virginia — have engaged in furious witch hunts against scientists who find evidence they don’t like. True, the state has finally agreed to study the growing risk of coastal flooding; Norfolk is among the American cities most vulnerable to climate change. But Republicans in the State Legislature have specifically prohibited the use of the words “sea-level rise.”
  • the parties aren’t just divided on values and policy views, they’re divided over epistemology. One side believes, at least in principle, in letting its policy views be shaped by facts; the other believes in suppressing the facts if they contradict its fixed beliefs.
  • while Democrats, being human, often read evidence selectively and choose to believe things that make them comfortable, there really isn’t anything equivalent to Republicans’ active hostility to collecting evidence in the first place.
  • for all the talk of reforming and reinventing the G.O.P., the ignorance caucus retains a firm grip on the party’s heart and mind.
  • It would be helpful to these discussions if we had a good grasp of the facts about firearms and violence. But we don’t, because back in the 1990s conservative politicians, acting on behalf of the National Rifle Association, bullied federal agencies into ceasing just about all research into the issue.
Grace Carey

News at Tipitaka Network - 0 views

www.tipitaka.net/...news.php

dogmatism falsification religion ignorance bias faith dual-causation logic Quantum-Physics measurement Reality Heisenberg uncertainty 5-senses perception

shared by Grace Carey on 27 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Grace Carey on 27 Jan 13
     
    Finding some interesting and very much TOK articles while I'm working on my religious investigation about the science behind Buddhist beliefs. I found this one particularly intriguing as it discusses why the theory of reincarnation is scientifically sound and why scientists are often narrow-minded and overly trusted. "I was once told by a Buddhist G.P. that, on his first day at a medical school in Sydney, the famous Professor, head of the Medical School, began his welcoming address by stating "Half of what we are going to teach you in the next few years is wrong. Our problem is that we do not know which half it is!" Those were the words of a real scientist." "Logic is only as reliable as the assumptions on which it is based." "Objective experience is that which is free from all bias. In Buddhism, the three types of bias are desire, ill-will and skeptical doubt. Desire makes one see only what one wants to see, it bends the truth to fit one's preferences." "Reality, according to pure science, does not consist of well ordered matter with precise massed, energies and positions in space, all just waiting to be measured. Reality is the broadest of smudges of all possibilities, only some being more probable than others." "At a recent seminar on Science and Religion, at which I was a speaker, a Catholic in the audience bravely announced that whenever she looks through a telescope at the stars, she feels uncomfortable because her religion is threatened. I commented that whenever a scientist looks the other way round through a telescope, to observe the one who is watching, then they feel uncomfortable because their science is threatened by what is doing the seeing! "
Emily Horwitz

Upside of Distraction - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...upside-of-distraction

distractions human sciences writing

shared by Emily Horwitz on 05 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Writing a book consists largely of avoiding distractions. If you can forget your real circumstances and submerge yourself in your subject for hours every day, characters become more human, sentences become clearer and prettier. But utter devotion to the principle that distraction is Satan and writing is paramount can be just as poisonous as an excess of diversion.
  • Monomania is what it sounds like: a pathologically intense focus on one thing.
  • It’s the opposite of the problem you have, in other words, if you are a normal, contemporary, non-agrarian 30-something.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • There was nothing to do besides read, write, reflect on God and drink. It was a circumstance favorable to writing fiction. But it was also conducive to depravity, the old Calvinist definition thereof: a warping of the spirit.
  • When I socialized, it was often with poets, who confirmed by their very existence that I had landed in a better, vanished time. Even their physical ailments were of the 19th century. One day, in the depths of winter, I came upon one of them picking his way across the snow and ice on crutches, pausing to drag on his cigarette.
  • The disaster unfolded slowly. The professors and students were diplomatic, but a pall of boredom fell over the seminar table when my work was under discussion. I could see everyone struggling to care. And then, trying feverishly to write something that would engage people, I got worse. First my writing became overthought, and then it went rank with the odor of desperation. It got to the point that every chapter, short story, every essay was trash.
  • It took me a long time to realize that the utter domination of my consciousness by the desire to write well was itself the problem.
  • When good writing was my only goal, I made the quality of my work the measure of my worth. For this reason, I wasn’t able to read my own writing well. I couldn’t tell whether something I had just written was good or bad, because I needed it to be good in order to feel sane.
  • I purged myself of monomania — slowly, and somewhat unwittingly. I fell in love, an overpowering diversion, and began to spend more time at my girlfriend’s place, where she had Wi-Fi, a flat-screen TV and a DVD player.
  • One morning, after I diversified my mania, my writing no longer stank of decay.
  • I’m glad I went to 19th-century Russia. But I wish I had been more careful, more humble, and kept one foot in modernity. The thing about 19th-century Russia is that if you race in, heedless of all but conquest and glory, you get stuck.
  • Emily Horwitz on 05 Feb 13
     
    An interesting article about the need for distractions - if we focus too much on one thing at a time, we lose the capacity to tell whether it is good or not.
Lindsay Lyon

Largest Prime Discovered | Mathematics | LiveScience - 0 views

www.livescience.com/t-prime-number-discovered.html

TOK mathematics

shared by Lindsay Lyon on 06 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The largest prime number yet has been discovered — and it's 17,425,170 digits long. The new prime number crushes the last one discovered in 2008, which was a paltry 12,978,189 digits long.
  • The number — 2 raised to the 57,885,161 power minus 1 — was discovered by University of Central Missouri mathematician Curtis Cooper as part of a giant network of volunteer computers
  • "It's analogous to climbing Mt. Everest," said George Woltman, the retired, Orlando, Fla.-based computer scientist who created GIMPS. "People enjoy it for the challenge of the discovery of finding something that's never been known before."
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • mathematicians have devised a much cleverer strategy, that dramatically reduces the time to find primes. That method uses a formula to check much fewer numbers.
  • the number is the 48th example of a rare class of primes called Mersenne Primes. Mersenne primes take the form of 2 raised to the power of a prime number minus 1. Since they were first described by French monk Marin Mersenne 350 years ago, only 48 of these elusive numbers have been found, including the most recent discovery. [The Most Massive Numbers in the Universe]
  • mber is the 48th example of a rare class of primes called Mersenne Primes. Mersenne primes take the form of 2 raised to the power of a prime number minus 1. Since they were first described by French monk Marin Mersenne 350 years ago, only 48 of these elusive numbers have been found
  • the 48th example of a rare class of primes called Mersenne Primes. Mersenne primes take the form of 2 raised to the power of a prime number minus 1
  • Emily Horwitz on 06 Feb 13
     
    An interesting article that reminded me of the discussions we had last year on whether math was invented or discovered. With regard to prime numbers, could we ever stop finding "new" ones? Can we ever find a formula to pinpoint every single prime number without dividing it by other numbers?
Javier E

Of Cannibals, Kings and Culture: The Problem of Ethnocentricity - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...on-ethnocentrism

ethnocentrism relativism moral reasoning morality

shared by Javier E on 18 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Ethnocentrism – our culture’s tendency to twist our judgment in favor of homegrown beliefs and practices and against foreign alternatives – is not, I take it, a phenomenon in need of further empirical confirmation
  • in his recent book, “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion,” Jonathan Haidt argues that, far from being a way of holding our moral beliefs up to critical scrutiny, moral reasoning is generally something we use merely to convince others of long-held beliefs that we are unwilling to abandon.
  • often, no amount of persuasive reasoning, clear argument or exposed contradiction can shake us from what we already believe.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Is ethnocentrism something we’re doomed to? Can we avoid it? If so, should we avoid it? Is it even a bad thing?
  • Philosophers have responded to the pervasive influence of culture on our moral beliefs in various ways. Many have embraced some form of skepticism.
  • Many have argued, for instance, that the influence of culture on our moral beliefs is evidence not of error theory but of moral relativism: the idea that the moral truth, for any given people, is determined by their culture — the set of shared practices and beliefs that they ascribe to.
  • it is nevertheless very hard to prove that our moral beliefs are entirely determined by our culture, or to rule out the possibility that cultures themselves take some direction from objective moral facts.
  • it’s not at all clear why the influence of culture on our moral beliefs should be taken as evidence that cultures influence the moral truth itself — so that, for instance, child sacrifice would be morally permissible in any community with enough members that believe it to be so. Not only does that conclusion seem unmotivated by the phenomenon under discussion, it would also paradoxically convert ethnocentrism into a kind of virtue
  • there are other, more straightforward, and less overtly skeptical, ways of responding to ethnocentrism. Chief among these, in my view, is the simple but humbling acknowledgment that ethnocentrism is a danger that confronts us all, but not one that should disillusion us from the pursuit of truth altogether.
  • The fact that our deepest-held beliefs would be different had we been born elsewhere on the planet (or even, sometimes, to different parents farther down the street), should disconcert us, make us more open to the likelihood of our own error, and spur us to rigorously evaluate our beliefs and practices against alternatives, but it need not disillusion.
Emily Horwitz

With Limited Budgets, Pursuing Science Smartly - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-pursuing-science-smartly.html

science politics space exploration mars rover nytimes

shared by Emily Horwitz on 02 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • With the first presidential debate coming up on Wednesday, it is striking — if not surprising — how bland and predictable the candidates have been in discussing America’s role in space.
  • neither candidate, and neither party, has addressed the scientific question of why we want to bother with exploring space.
  • Maybe scientists should simply face reality and accept that science doesn’t play a central role in the government’s equation.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • unmanned space exploration seems to me much more exciting and scientifically worthwhile than human spaceflight, especially at a time of restricted budgets and nascent technology.
  • human geologist could do in a few days what Curiosity may do in a year or two. But we aren’t likely to send geologists there anytime soon — and if we did, they wouldn’t be able to stay much longer than a few days, while Curiosity can silently and gently move about the planet for a decade or more, powered by its plutonium generator. Moreover, by the time we might get around to sending humans, in two to three decades at best, robots will have advanced to the point where they might easily compete in real time.
  • Over the coming decades we may send more robotic explorers to even harsher climes, maybe to explore deep oceans on Jupiter’s moon Europa, or to search on comets for telltale signs of life’s origins.
Javier E

Jonathan Haidt: Reasons Do Matter - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...er-when-intuitions-dont-object

moral reasoning Haidt intuition emotion reason philosophers

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • I never said that reason plays no role in judgment. Rather, I urged that we be realistic about reasoning and recognize that reasons persuade others on moral and political issues only under very special circumstances.
  • two basic kinds of cognitive events are “seeing-that” and “reasoning-why.” (These terms correspond roughly to what the psychologist Daniel Kahneman and others call “System 1” and “System 2” and that I call the “elephant” and the “rider.”)
  • We effortlessly and intuitively “see that” something is true, and then we work to find justifications, or “reasons why,” which we can give to others.  Both processes are crucial for understanding belief and persuasion. Both are needed for the kind of democratic deliberation that Lynch (and I) want to promote.
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  • as an intuitionist, I see hope in an approach to deliberative democracy that uses social psychology to calm the passions and fears that make horizontal movement so difficult.
  • if your opponent succeeds in defeating your reasons, you are unlikely to change your judgment. You’ve been dragged into the upper-left quadrant, but you still feel, intuitively, that it’s wrong
  • This, I suggest, is how moral arguments proceed when people have strong intuitions anchoring their beliefs. And intuitions are rarely stronger than when they are part of our partisan identities. So I’m not saying that reasons “play no role in moral judgment.” In fact, four of the six links in my Social Intuitionist Model are reasoning links. Most of what’s going on during an argu
  • ment is reasoning
  • I’m saying that reason is far less powerful than intuition, so if you’re arguing (or deliberating) with a partner who lives on the other side of the political spectrum from you, and you approach issues such as abortion, gay marriage or income inequality with powerfully different intuitive reactions, you are unlikely to effect any persuasion no matter how good your arguments and no matter how much time you give your opponent to reflect upon your logic.
  • According to Margolis, people don’t change their minds unless they move along the horizontal dimension. Intuition is what most matters for belief. Yet a moral argument generally consists of round after round of reasoning. Each person tries to pull the other along the vertical dimension.
  • One of the issues I am most passionate about is political civility. I co-run a site at www.CivilPolitics.org where we define civility as “the ability to disagree with others while respecting their sincerity and decency.” We explain our goals like this: “We believe this ability [civility] is best fostered by indirect methods (changing contexts, payoffs and institutions) rather than by direct methods (such as pleading with people to be more civil, or asking people to sign civility pledges).” In other words, we hope to open up space for civil disagreement by creating contexts in which elephants (automatic processes and intuitions) are calmer, rather than by asking riders (controlled processes, including reasoning) to try harder.
  • We are particularly interested in organizations that try to create a sense of community and camaraderie as a precondition for political discussions.
  • if you want to persuade someone, talk to the elephant first. Trigger the right intuitions first.
  • This is why there has been such rapid movement on gay marriage and gay rights. It’s not because good arguments have suddenly appeared, which nobody thought of in the 1990s
  • younger people, who grew up knowing gay people and seeing gay couples on television, have no such disgust. For them, the arguments are much more persuasive.
  • I love Aristotle’s emphasis on habit — and I had a long section on virtue ethics in Chapter 6 that got cut at the last minute, but which I have just now posted online here
  • philosophers have the best norms for good thinking that I have ever encountered. When my work is critiqued by a philosopher I can be certain that he or she has read me carefully, including the footnotes, and will not turn me into a straw man. More than any other subculture I know, the philosophical community embodies the kinds of normative pressures for reason-giving and responsiveness to reasons that Allan Gibbard describes in “Wise Choices, Apt Feelings.”
Javier E

Is Confidence in Science as a Source of Progress Based on Faith or Fact? - NYTimes.com - 3 views

dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/...rogress-based-on-faith-or-fact

science progress faith fact justification application ssss

shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • There’s been a range of interesting reactions to my piece on Pete Seeger’s question about whether confidence in science as a source of human progress is underpinned by fact or faith.
  • the discussion was not about confidence in science as an enterprise, but confidence that benefits would always accrue to society from applications of scientific knowledge
  • Theologically speaking, science constantly reminds us of the sense in which we are nearly – but clearly not quite – gods. Perhaps the trickiest value issues surrounding science are hidden behind the seemingly innocent metaphors of ‘getting into the mind of God’ (physics) and ‘playing God’ (biomedicine). Notwithstanding scientists’ own disclaimers, as a matter of fact science has done as well as it has because scientists have adopted a ‘godlike’ attitude toward nature. We have allowed ourselves to imagine and intervene in things at very high levels of abstraction and in ways that can only be justified in terms of the power unleashed by the resulting systematic view of things. The costs incurred have included devaluing our most immediate experiences of nature and subjecting things to quite artificial conditions in order to extract knowledge.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • For Francis Bacon and the other early Scientific Revolutionaries, this was a fair price to pay for doing divine work – God, after all, was thought to be himself transcendent and perhaps even alienated from nature. But without this theistic assumption, it becomes difficult to justify the unfettered pursuit of science, once both the costs and benefits are each given their due. Of course, we could simply say that science is what turns humans into gods. For all its hubris, this response would at least possess the virtues of candor and consistency. As it stands, scientists shy away from any such strong self-understandings, preferring to hide behind more passive accounts of their activities – e.g. they ‘describe’ rather than generate phenomena, they ‘explain’ rather than justify nature, etc. Lost in this secular translation of an originally sacred mission is the scientist’s sense of personal responsibility qua scientist.
  • Rather than thinking of science as a “force for good”, we should think of it as an inherent human activity, like com
  • merce.
Javier E

Putting Economic Data Into Context - The New York Times - 0 views

economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...ing-economic-data-into-context

economic data context historical analysis history research

shared by Javier E on 17 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • economic historians have been wrestling with this problem for years and have produced an excellent calculator for converting historical data into contemporary figures. The site is called Measuring Worth,
  • Today we use price indexes to convert monetary values from the past into “real” values today. The best-known such index is the Consumer Price Index published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For those interested only in a simple inflation adjustment, the bureau maintains a useful calculator.
  • The area where this is the biggest problem is probably large budget numbers. The raw data is almost universally useless. Saying that the budget deficit was $680.3 billion in fiscal year 2013 tells the average person absolutely nothing of value. It’s just a large number that sounds scary. It would help to at least know that it is down from $1.087 trillion in 2012 and a peak of $1.413 trillion in 2009, but that’s not entirely adequate.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • it makes no sense to compare the federal budget to a family budget, which is what the Consumer Price Index is based on. One needs to use a broader index, like the gross domestic product deflator, which measures price changes throughout the entire economy.
  • For large numbers, the percentage of the gross domestic product is both the easiest to find and best to use.
  • Since the “burden” of the debt basically falls on the entire economy, the debt-to-G.D.P. ratio is generally considered the best measure of that burden. It also facilitates international comparisons without having to worry about exchange-rate adjustments.
  • international price comparisons can be especially tricky because current market exchange rates may not accurately reflect relative values or standards of living. Economists generally prefer to use something called “purchasing power parity,” but such data is not always easy to come by
  • There is much more to say on this topic. I recommend an essay on the Measuring Worth website that discusses different measures of value over time and how they materially affect our perceptions. There are also new statistical measures coming online that may provide even better data, like the Billion Prices Project from M.I.T., which gathers price data in real time directly from store price scanners.
  • This is an area where trial and error is the best strategy. The important thing is to make an effort to provide proper context where it appears necessary and not to simply ignore the problem.
Javier E

Why Partisans Can't Explain Their Views - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-cant-explain-their-views.html

politics partisan extremism knowledge ignorance discourse

shared by Javier E on 20 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • we have grown so accustomed to this divide that we no longer flinch at the brazen political attacks on either side — even when the logic underlying these attacks is hard to fathom.
  • attack ads work, in large part, because we don’t understand them. Statements take advantage of a fact about human psychology called the “illusion of explanatory depth,” an idea developed by the Yale psychologist Frank Keil and his students. We typically feel that we understand how complex systems work even when our true understanding is superficial.
  • it is not until we are asked to explain how such a system works — whether it’s what’s involved in a trade deal with China or how a toilet flushes — that we realize how little we actually know.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • we report on experiments showing that people often believe they understand what is meant by well-worn political terms like the “flat tax,” “sanctions on Iran” or “cap and trade” — even when they don’t.
  • The real surprise is what happens after these same individuals are asked to explain how these policy ideas work: they become more moderate in their political views — either in support of such policies or against them. In fact, not only do their attitudes change, but so does their behavior
  • asking people to justify their position — rather than asking them to explain the mechanisms by which a policy would work — doesn’t tend to soften their political views. When we asked participants to state the reasons they were for or against a policy position, their initial attitudes held firm. (Other researchers have found much the same thing: merely discussing an issue often makes people more extreme, not less.)
  • asking people to “unpack” complex systems — getting them to articulate how something might work in real life — forces them to confront their lack of understanding.
  • rarely is anybody — candidate or voter — asked to explain his or her positions. American political discourse, in short, is not discourse at all.
  • The answer implied by our research is not that we should all become policy wonks. Instead, we voters need to be more mindful that issues are complicated and challenge ourselves to break down the policy proposals on both sides into their component parts. We have to then imagine how these ideas would work in the real world — and then make a choice: to either moderate our positions on policies we don’t really understand, as research suggests we will, or try to improve our understanding. Either way, discourse would then be based on information, not illusion.
  • whether or not we citizens make this effort, our leaders should. We should demand that Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney explain how in addition to why.
  • We have a problem in American politics: an illusion of knowledge that leads to extremism. We can start to fix it by acknowledging that we know a lot less than we think.
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