Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items matching "encounter" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
anonymous

How the World's Oldest Wooden Sculpture Is Reshaping Prehistory - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...archaeology-shigir-idol-.html

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • How the World’s Oldest Wooden Sculpture Is Reshaping Prehistory
  • At 12,500 years old, the Shigir Idol is by far the earliest known work of ritual art. Only decay has kept others from being found.
  • The world’s oldest known wooden sculpture — a nine-foot-tall totem pole thousands of years old — looms over a hushed chamber of an obscure Russian museum in the Ural Mountains, not far from the Siberian border
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Shigir Idol
  • Dug out of a peat bog by gold miners in 1890, the relic, or what’s left of it, is carved from a great slab of freshly cut larch.
  • Scattered among the geometric patterns (zigzags, chevrons, herringbones) are eight human faces, each with slashes for eyes that peer not so benignly from the front and back planes.
  • “Whether it screams or shouts or sings, it projects authority, possibly malevolent authority. It’s not immediately a friend of yours, much less an ancient friend of yours.”
  • In archaeology, portable prehistoric sculpture is called “mobiliary art.”
  • The statue’s age was a matter of conjecture until 1997, when it was carbon-dated by Russian scientists to about 9,500 years old, an age that struck most scholars as fanciful.
  • The statue was more than twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge, as well as, by many millenniums, the first known work of ritual art.
  • A new study that Dr. Terberger wrote with some of the same colleagues in Quaternary International, further skews our understanding of prehistory by pushing back the original date of the Shigir Idol by another 900 years, placing it in the context of the early art in Eurasia.
  • “During the period of rapid cooling from about 10,700 B.C. to 9,600 B.C. that we call the Younger Dryas, no beavers should have been around in the Transurals,” he said.)
  • Written with an eye toward disentangling Western science from colonialism, Dr. Terberger’s latest paper challenges the ethnocentric notion that pretty much everything, including symbolic expression and philosophical perceptions of the world, came to Europe by way of the sedentary farming communities in the Fertile Crescent 8,000 years ago.
  • “It’s similar to the ‘Neanderthals did not make art’ fable, which was entirely based on absence of evidence,
  • Likewise, the overwhelming scientific consensus used to hold that modern humans were superior in key ways, including their ability to innovate, communicate and adapt to different environments.
  • Nonsense, all of it.”
  • makes it clear that arguments about the wealth of mobiliary art in, say, the Upper Paleolithic of Germany or France by comparison to southern Europe, are largely nonsensical and an artifact of tundra (where there are no trees and you use ivory, which is archaeologically visible) versus open forest environments
  • The Shigir Idol, named for the bog near Kirovgrad in which it was found, is presumed to have rested on a rock base for perhaps two or three decades before toppling into a long-gone paleo-lake, where the peat’s antimicrobial properties protected it like a time capsule.
  • “It was not a scientific construction,”
  • “The rings tell us that trees were growing very slowly, as the temperature was still quite cold,”
  • Dr. Terberger respectfully disagrees.
  • “The landscape changed, and the art — figurative designs and naturalistic animals painted in caves and carved in rock — did, too, perhaps as a way to help people come to grips with the challenging environments they encountered.”
  • And what do the engravings mean? Svetlana Savchenko, the artifact’s curator and an author on the study, speculates that the eight faces may well contain encrypted information about ancestor spirits, the boundary between earth and sky, or a creation myth.
  • The temple’s stones were carved around 11,000 years ago, which makes them 1,500 years younger than the Shigir Idol.
  • One could wonder how many similar pieces have been lost over time due to poor preservation conditions.”
  • The similarity of the geometric motifs to others across Europe in that era, he added, “is evidence of long-distance contacts and a shared sign language over vast areas. The sheer size of the idol also seems to indicate it was meant as a marker in the landscape that was supposed to be seen by other hunter-gatherer groups — perhaps marking the border of a territory, a warning or welcoming sign.”
  • “What do you think is the hardest thing to find in the Stone Age archaeology of the Urals?”A pause: Sites?“No,” he said, sighing softly. “Funding.”
katedriscoll

Knowing that and knowing how - TOK RESOURCE.ORG - 0 views

www.tokresource.org/that-how

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • This first written assignments requires students, in the first weeks of TOK, to grapple with the distinctions between propositional knowledge and various kinds of direct experience. Students are on their own with this in-class written assignment. No previous formal class time has been devoted to introducing these ideas. The assignment represents a very gentle first encounter with TOK writing expectations. The students, unprimed in medias res, usually perform very well and emerge with confidence to tackle the more challenging writing assignments ahead. A selection of the more provocative student responses can be published as stimulus material for short discussion next time the class meets. This echoes the teaching strategy introduced in the Student Knowledge Claims session.
katedriscoll

Confirmation bias - Catalog of Bias - 0 views

catalogofbias.org/...confirmation-bias

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Confirmation bias occurs when an individual looks for and uses the information to support their own ideas or beliefs. It also means that information not supporting their ideas or beliefs is disregarded. Confirmation bias often happens when we want certain ideas to be true. This leads individuals to stop gathering information when the retrieved evidence confirms their own viewpoints, which can lead to preconceived opinions (prejudices) that are not based on reason or factual knowledge. Individuals then pick out the bits of information that confirm their prejudices. Confirmation bias has a long history. In 1620, Francis Bacon described confirmation bias as: “Once a man’s understanding has settled on something (either because it is an accepted belief or because it pleases him), it draws everything else also to support and agree with it. And if it encounters a larger number of more powerful countervailing examples, it either fails to notice them, or disregards them, or makes fine distinctions to dismiss and reject them, and all this with much dangerous prejudice, to preserve the authority of its first Conceptions.” (Bacon 1620)
  • The impact of confirmation bias can be at the level of the individual all the way up to institution level. DuBroff showed that confirmation bias influenced expert guidelines on cholesterol and was highly prevalent when conflicts of interests were present (DuBroff 2017). He found that confirmation bias occurred due to a failure to incorporate evidence, or through misrepresentation of the evidence, which had the potential  to skew guideline recommendations
katedriscoll

Confirmation bias | BehavioralEconomics.com | The BE Hub - 0 views

www.behavioraleconomics.com/...confirmation-bias

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Confirmation bias (Wason, 1960) occurs when people seek out or evaluate information in a way that fits with their existing thinking and preconceptions. The domain of science, where theories should advance based on both falsifying and supporting evidence, has not been immune to bias, which is often associated with people processing hypotheses in ways that end up confirming them (Oswald & Grosjean, 2004). Similarly, a consumer who likes a particular brand and researches a new purchase may be motivated to seek out customer reviews on the internet that favor that brand. Confirmation bias has also been related to unmotivated processes, including primacy effects and anchoring, evident in a reliance on information that is encountered early in a process (Nickerson, 1998).
caelengrubb

How to read the news like a scientist | - 0 views

ideas.ted.com/read-the-news-like-a-scientist

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • “In present times, our risk of being fooled is especially high,” she says. There are two main factors at play: “Disinformation spreads like wildfire in social media,” she adds, “and when it comes to news reporting, sometimes it is more important for journalists to be fast than accurate.”
  • Scientists labor under a burden of proof. They must conduct experiments and collect data under controlled conditions to arrive at their conclusions — and be ready to defend their findings with facts, not emotions.
  • 1. Cultivate your skepticism.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • When you learn a new piece of information through social media, think to yourself: “This may be true, but it also may be false,”
  • 2. Find out who is making the claim.
  • When you encounter a new claim, look for conflicts of interest. Ask: Do they stand to profit from what they say? Are they affiliated with an organization that could be swaying them? Two other questions to consider: What makes the writer or speaker qualified to comment on the topic? What statements have they made in the past?
  • 3. Watch out for the halo effect.
  • The halo effect, says Frans, “is a cognitive bias that makes our feeling towards someone affect how we judge their claims.
  • If we dislike someone, we are a lot more likely to disagree with them; if we like them, we are biased to agree.”
  • New scientific papers under review are read “blind,” with the authors’ names removed. That way, the experts who are deciding whether it’s worthy of publication don’t know which of their fellow scientists wrote it so they’ll be able to react free from pre-judgement or bias.
  • 4. Look at the evidence.
  • Before you act on or share a particularly surprising or enraging story, do a quick Google search — you might learn something even more interesting.
  • 5. Beware of the tendency to cherry-pick information.
  • Another human bias — confirmation bias — means we’re more likely to notice stories or facts that fit what we already believe (or want to believe).
  • When you search for information, you should not disregard the information that goes against whatever opinion you might have in advance.”
  • In your own life, look for friends and acquaintances on social media with alternative viewpoints. You don’t have to agree with them, or tolerate misinformation from them — but it’s healthy and balanced to have some variety in your information diet.
  • 6. Recognize the difference between correlation and causation.
  • However, she says, “there is no evidence supporting these claims, and it’s important to remember that just because two things increase simultaneously, this does not mean that they are causally linked to each other. Correlation does not equal causality.”
caelengrubb

Looking inward in an era of 'fake news': Addressing cognitive bias | YLAI Network - 0 views

ylai.state.gov/news-addressing-cognitive-bias

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • In an era when everyone seems eager to point out instances of “fake news,” it is easy to forget that knowing how we make sense of the news is as important as knowing how to spot incorrect or biased content
  • While the ability to analyze the credibility of a source and the veracity of its content remains an essential and often-discussed aspect of news literacy, it is equally important to understand how we as news consumers engage with and react to the information we find online, in our feeds, and on our apps
  • People process information they receive from the news in the same way they process all information around them — in the shortest, quickest way possible
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • When we consider how we engage with the news, some shortcuts we may want to pay close attention to, and reflect carefully on, are cognitive biases.
  • In fact, without these heuristics, it would be impossible for us to process all the information we receive daily. However, the use of these shortcuts can lead to “blind spots,” or unintentional ways we respond to information that can have negative consequences for how we engage with, digest, and share the information we encounter
  • These shortcuts, also called heuristics, streamline our problem-solving process and help us make relatively quick decisions.
  • Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out and value information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs while discarding information that proves our ideas wrong.
  • Cognitive biases are best described as glitches in how we process information
  • Echo chamber effect refers to a situation in which we are primarily exposed to information, people, events, and ideas that already align with our point of view.
  • Anchoring bias, also known as “anchoring,” refers to people’s tendency to consider the first piece of information they receive about a topic as the most reliable
  • The framing effect is what happens when we make decisions based on how information is presented or discussed, rather than its actual substance.
  • Fluency heuristic occurs when a piece of information is deemed more valuable because it is easier to process or recall
  • Everyone operates under one or more cognitive biases. So, when searching for and reading the news (or other information), it is important to be aware of how these biases might shape how we make sense of this information.
  • In conclusion, we may not be able to control the content of the news — whether it is fake, reliable, or somewhere in between — but we can learn to be aware of how we respond to it and adjust our evaluations of the news accordingly.
kaylynfreeman

Coronavirus 'Hits All the Hot Buttons' for How We Misjudge Risk - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...onavirus-risk-interpreter.html

psychology science research knowledge brain science education

shared by kaylynfreeman on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • But there is a lesson, psychologists and public health experts say, in the near-terror that the virus induces, even as serious threats like the flu receive little more than a shrug. It illustrates the unconscious biases in how human beings think about risk, as well as the impulses that often guide our responses — sometimes with serious consequences.
  • When you encounter a potential risk, your brain does a quick search for past experiences with it. If it can easily pull up multiple alarming memories, then your brain concludes the danger is high. But it often fails to assess whether those memories are truly representative.
  • Risks that we take on voluntarily, or that at least feel voluntary, are often seen as less dangerous than they really are. One study found that people will raise their threshold for the amount of danger they are willing to take on by a factor of one thousand if they see the risk as voluntary.
kaylynfreeman

Coronavirus 'Hits All the Hot Buttons' for How We Misjudge Risk - TOK Topics - 0 views

toktopics.com/...ttons-for-how-we-misjudge-risk

psychology science research knowledge brain science education

shared by kaylynfreeman on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Coronavirus ‘Hits All the Hot Buttons’ for How We Misjudge Risk
  • When you encounter a potential risk, your brain does a quick search for past experiences with it. If it can easily pull up multiple alarming memories, then your brain concludes the danger is high. But it often fails to assess whether those memories are truly representative.
  • If two happen in quick succession, flying suddenly feels scarier — even if your conscious mind knows that those crashes are a statistical aberration with little bearing on the safety of your next flight.
Javier E

Does Your Language Shape How You Think? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...29language-t.html

language reality perception experience Whorf

shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 10 - Cached
  • it turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language.
  • some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie.
  • For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies.
  • Javier E on 28 Aug 10
     
    Fascinating follow-up to Sapir-Whorf.
Javier E

The Lasting Lessons of John Conway's Game of Life - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...math-conway-game-of-life.html

emergent life game lessons programming software simulation chaos

shared by Javier E on 29 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • “Because of its analogies with the rise, fall and alterations of a society of living organisms, it belongs to a growing class of what are called ‘simulation games,’” Mr. Gardner wrote when he introduced Life to the world 50 years ago with his October 1970 column.
  • The Game of Life motivated the use of cellular automata in the rich field of complexity science, with simulations modeling everything from ants to traffic, clouds to galaxies. More trivially, the game attracted a cult of “Lifenthusiasts,” programmers who spent a lot of time hacking Life — that is, constructing patterns in hopes of spotting new Life-forms.
  • The tree of Life also includes oscillators, such as the blinker, and spaceships of various sizes (the glider being the smallest).
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Patterns that didn’t change one generation to the next, Dr. Conway called still lifes — such as the four-celled block, the six-celled beehive or the eight-celled pond. Patterns that took a long time to stabilize, he called methuselahs.
  • The second thing Life shows us is something that Darwin hit upon when he was looking at Life, the organic version. Complexity arises from simplicity!
  • I first encountered Life at the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 1978. I was hooked immediately by the thing that has always hooked me — watching complexity arise out of simplicity.
  • Life shows you two things. The first is sensitivity to initial conditions. A tiny change in the rules can produce a huge difference in the output, ranging from complete destruction (no dots) through stasis (a frozen pattern) to patterns that keep changing as they unfold.
  • Life shows us complex virtual “organisms” arising out of the interaction of a few simple rules — so goodbye “Intelligent Design.”
  • I’ve wondered for decades what one could learn from all that Life hacking. I recently realized it’s a great place to try to develop “meta-engineering” — to see if there are general principles that govern the advance of engineering and help us predict the overall future trajectory of technology.
  • Melanie Mitchell— Professor of complexity, Santa Fe Institute
  • Given that Conway’s proof that the Game of Life can be made to simulate a Universal Computer — that is, it could be “programmed” to carry out any computation that a traditional computer can do — the extremely simple rules can give rise to the most complex and most unpredictable behavior possible. This means that there are certain properties of the Game of Life that can never be predicted, even in principle!
  • I use the Game of Life to make vivid for my students the ideas of determinism, higher-order patterns and information. One of its great features is that nothing is hidden; there are no black boxes in Life, so you know from the outset that anything that you can get to happen in the Life world is completely unmysterious and explicable in terms of a very large number of simple steps by small items.
  • In Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Gravity’s Rainbow,” a character says, “But you had taken on a greater and more harmful illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen.”This is compelling but wrong, and Life is a great way of showing this.
  • In Life, we might say, things only happen at the pixel level; nothing controls anything, nothing does anything. But that doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as action, as control; it means that these are higher-level phenomena composed (entirely, with no magic) from things that only happen.
  • Stephen Wolfram— Scientist and C.E.O., Wolfram Research
  • Brian Eno— Musician, London
  • Bert Chan— Artificial-life researcher and creator of the continuous cellular automaton “Lenia,” Hong Kong
  • it did have a big impact on beginner programmers, like me in the 90s, giving them a sense of wonder and a kind of confidence that some easy-to-code math models can produce complex and beautiful results. It’s like a starter kit for future software engineers and hackers, together with Mandelbrot Set, Lorenz Attractor, et cetera.
  • if we think about our everyday life, about corporations and governments, the cultural and technical infrastructures humans built for thousands of years, they are not unlike the incredible machines that are engineered in Life.
  • In normal times, they are stable and we can keep building stuff one component upon another, but in harder times like this pandemic or a new Cold War, we need something that is more resilient and can prepare for the unpreparable. That would need changes in our “rules of life,” which we take for granted.
  • Rudy Rucker— Mathematician and author of “Ware Tetralogy,” Los Gatos, Calif.
  • That’s what chaos is about. The Game of Life, or a kinky dynamical system like a pair of pendulums, or a candle flame, or an ocean wave, or the growth of a plant — they aren’t readily predictable. But they are not random. They do obey laws, and there are certain kinds of patterns — chaotic attractors — that they tend to produce. But again, unpredictable is not random. An important and subtle distinction which changed my whole view of the world.
  • William Poundstone— Author of “The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge,” Los Angeles, Calif.
  • The Game of Life’s pulsing, pyrotechnic constellations are classic examples of emergent phenomena, introduced decades before that adjective became a buzzword.
  • Fifty years later, the misfortunes of 2020 are the stuff of memes. The biggest challenges facing us today are emergent: viruses leaping from species to species; the abrupt onset of wildfires and tropical storms as a consequence of a small rise in temperature; economies in which billions of free transactions lead to staggering concentrations of wealth; an internet that becomes more fraught with hazard each year
  • Looming behind it all is our collective vision of an artificial intelligence-fueled future that is certain to come with surprises, not all of them pleasant.
  • The name Conway chose — the Game of Life — frames his invention as a metaphor. But I’m not sure that even he anticipated how relevant Life would become, and that in 50 years we’d all be playing an emergent game of life and death.
Javier E

Opinion | Two visions of 'normal' collided in our abnormal pandemic year - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ded-our-abnormal-pandemic-year

pandemic bias normal cognitive bias emergency psychology

shared by Javier E on 31 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The date was Sept. 17, 2001. The rubble was still smoking. As silly as this sounds, I was hoping it would make me cry.
  • That didn’t happen. The truth is, it still looked like something on television, a surreal shot from a disaster movie. I was stunned but unmoved.
  • ADLater, trying to understand the difference between those two moments, I told people, “The rubble still didn’t feel real.”
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • now, after a year of pandemic, I realize that wasn’t the problem. The rubble was real, all right. It just wasn’t normal.
  • it always, somehow, came back to that essential human craving for things to be normal, and our inability to believe that they are not, even when presented with compelling evidence.
  • This phenomenon is well-known to cognitive scientists, who have dubbed it “normalcy bias.”
  • the greater risk is more often the opposite: People can’t quite believe. They ignore the fire alarm, defy the order to evacuate ahead of the hurricane, or pause to grab their luggage when exiting the crashed plane. Too often, they die.
  • Calling the quest for normalcy a bias makes it sound bad, but most of the time this tendency is a good thing. The world is full of aberrations, most of them meaningless. If we aimed for maximal reaction to every anomaly we encountered, we’d break down from sheer nervous exhaustion.
  • But when things go disastrously wrong, our optimal response is at war with the part of our brain that insists things are fine. We try to reoccupy the old normal even if it’s become radioactive and salted with mines. We still resist the new normal — even when it’s staring us in the face.
  • Nine months into our current disaster, I now see that our bitter divides over pandemic response were most fundamentally a contest between two ideas of what it meant to get “back to normal.”
  • One group wanted to feel as safe as they had before a virus invaded our shores; the other wanted to feel as unfettered
  • he disputes that followed weren’t just a fight to determine whose idea of normal would prevail. They were a battle against an unthinkable reality, which was that neither kind of normalcy was fully possible anymore.
  • I suspect we all might have been less willing to make war on our opponents if only we’d believed that we were fighting people not very different from how we were — exhausted by the whole thing and frantic to feel like themselves again
  • Some catastrophes are simply too big to be understood except in the smallest way, through their most ordinary human details
pier-paolo

Opinion | The Smile of Reason - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...19brooks.html

shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • hey say Voltaire glowed with the smile of reason, and Friedman did too. And while I never became a libertarian as he was, the encounter was one of the turning points in my life. It opened new ways of seeing the world and was an exhilarating demonstration of the power of ideas.
  • Friedman’s trek from the intellectual wilderness to global influence is one of the most exhilarating exodus stories of our time
  • He was proudest of his contributions to technical economics, but he also possessed that rarest of gifts, a practical imagination, and was a fountain of concrete policy ideas.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Friedman roared with approving laughter. He believed in clear language, and as Samuel Brittan has noted, preferred the spoken to the written word.
  • because classical economics is under its greatest threat in a generation. Growing evidence suggests average workers are not seeing the benefits of their productivity gains — that the market is broken and requires heavy government correction. Friedman’s heirs have been avoiding this debate. They’re losing it badly and have offered no concrete remedies to address this problem, if it is one.
ilanaprincilus06

How your eyes betray your thoughts | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...your-eyes-betray-your-thoughts

eyes brain thoughts manipulation

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • the eyes not only reflect what is happening in the brain but may also influence how we remember things and make decisions.
  • Our eyes are constantly moving, and while some of those movements are under conscious control, many of them occur subconsciously.
  • one group of researchers, for example, found that watching for dilation made it possible to predict when a cautious person used to saying ‘no’ was about to make the tricky decision to say ‘yes’.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • we somehow link abstract number representations in the brain with movement in space.
  • “When people are looking at scenes they have encountered before, their eyes are frequently drawn to information they have already seen, even when they have no conscious memory of it,”
  • those who were allowed to move their eyes spontaneously during recall performed significantly better than those who fixed on the cross.
  • participants who were told to fix their gaze in the corner of the screen in which objects had appeared earlier performed better than those told to fix their gaze in another corner.
  • which comes first: whether thinking of a particular number causes changes in eye position, or whether the eye position influences our mental activity.
  • One recent study showed – maybe worryingly – that eye-tracking can be exploited to influence the moral decisions we take.
  • “We think of persuasive people as good talkers, but maybe they’re also observing the decision-making process,”
  • “Maybe good salespeople can spot the exact moment you’re wavering towards a certain choice, and then offer you a discount or change their pitch.”
  • eye movements can both reflect and influence higher mental functions such as memory and decision-making
  • This knowledge may give us ways of improving our mental functions – but it also leaves us vulnerable to subtle manipulation by other people.
  • “The eyes are like a window into our thought processes, and we just don’t appreciate how much information might be leaking out of them,
anonymous

The Aha! Moment: The Science Behind Creative Insight » Brain World - 0 views

brainworldmagazine.com/cience-behind-creative-insight

shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The Aha! Moment: The Science Behind Creative Insight
  • For most of us, it usually occurs at the most inopportune times; never when we’re searching for it.
  • To Archimedes, it happened in the bathtub. Newton experienced it while wandering an apple orchard. Arthur Fry: church. Each encountered an epiphany, that powerful moment of spontaneous insight. Archimedes shouted Eureka! upon realizing how to calculate density and volume; to Newton came the law of universal gravity; to Arthur Fry, Post-it notes.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Behold the proverbial “aha!” moment — a key phenomenon that emerges in a range of situations, from offering a solution to a problem or a new interpretation of a situation to more simple feats such as understanding a joke or solving a crossword puzzle.
  • There are many different representations we use colloquially to describe good ideas — sparks, flashes, light-bulb moments; inspirations and innovations; muses and visions.
  • they usually materialize abruptly, without warning and seemingly out of thin air.
  • Laboratories and psychologists have attempted to study this phenomenon using behavioral methods for nearly a century, resulting merely in speculations as to where these ideas come from and how they form. Lately, though, with recent advancements and tools of cognitive neuroscience, researchers are able to explain the inner workings of the brain during moments of insigh
  • scientists have found that these sudden sparks are the result of a complex series of brain states.
  • Findings also suggest that we require more neural processes operating at different time scales in these moments than we use when solving a problem analytically or methodically.
  • Participants were presented with three words (e.g., crab, pine, sauce), and were instructed to think of a single word that forms a familiar two-word phrase with all three (e.g., apple can join with crab, pine, and sauce to form pineapple, crabapple, and applesauce). As soon as participants thought of a solution word, they pressed a button to indicate whether the answer had come to them suddenly (through insight), or if they used a methodical hypothesis testing approach — in other words, a trial-and-error approach.
  • Gamma activity indicates a constellation of neurons binding together for the first time in the brain to create a new neural network pathway.
  • This is the creation of a new idea. Immediately following that gamma spike, the new idea pops into our consciousness, which we identify as the aha! moment.
runlai_jiang

Philosophy and Addiction - The New York Times - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...-cave-philosophy-and-addiction

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Philosophy is one of the oldest areas of inquiry. Out of control behavior fueled by alcohol and other drugs is one of the world’s oldest problems. What could these old timers offer each other? Philosophy has a long, stable relationship with reason and more specifically, the relationship between reason, emotions and the will. Addiction seems to involve a total abdication of reason, a messy tangle of emotions and a lack of will.
  • In his pursuit of knowledge about the nature of virtues, Socrates first had to debunk popular opinions about them. The debunking took the form of a dialogue but in reality more closely resembled a cross examination. Socrates looked for the essence, necessary property or ineliminable trait that made particular acts pious or just. Socrates interrogated every definition offer
  • I introduce the notion of addiction as a subject of philosophical inquiry here for a reason. I am a philosopher, yes, but I am also an alcoholic who has been sober for more than 24 years ― only the last four of them as part of a recovery program. I am often a
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Now imagine that the prisoners are released from their chains. They look behind them and see the objects that caused the shadows. Most likely they will be confused and horrified and unwilling to accept that these objects caused the shadows. Imagine now that the prisoners start to leave the cave. They will be painfully blinded as soon as they encounter light. Once their eyes begin to adjust, they will be confronted by a harsh bright world with a whole host of
knudsenlu

How World War II Spurred a Veteran's Ambition - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...546257

language dialect education war

shared by knudsenlu on 20 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • My first 18 months of military service were uninspiring. Donning the uniform did not fill me with pride, nor did the experience alter my perspective on life. What basic training had taught me was that the best way to get by was to stay out of sight.
  • Accordingly, my detachment expanded its mission: all males—soldiers and others of military serviceable age, no matter where encountered or whether in uniform—were to be taken prisoner unless they had persuasive evidence of either having been exempted or discharged from military service. Anyone without such proof was considered a potential guerilla. A sweep of the countryside would yield scores of German “civilians,” among them soldiers who had simply shed their uniform or party activists suspected of organizing a resistance usually with cover stories that I had to break. Not only did I become very adept at this task, but it also gave me some great insights into postwar German mentalities—insights that would later inspire me to revisit my views on higher education.
  • Wilke and his family had emigrated from Germany in the early 1920s, and he still spoke German with a genuine Saxon dialect.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • As soon as I was released from the hospital, I worked my way step-by-step from France back to Berlin, the capital of the four occupying powers. After some stumbling blocks and a job I despised, I found a position as a research analyst in the intelligence branch of the military government’s information-control division.
  • This job turned out to be extremely challenging, but that also made it a real blessing. I wrote drafts on a wide range of political topics, including the identification of potential political leaders not yet recognized, a catalog of the rumors circulating among the population, incidents indicative of how people felt about American troops, and the dominant mood among German youth. We gleaned information from reports compiled by field representatives stationed in roughly a dozen communities throughout the American occupation zone, supplemented with details from German newspapers—and, in my case, with insights based on contacts and conversation I had whenever I passed myself off as a German civilian.
  • That is how my war and post-war service induced me, in the fall of 1947, after an interlude of more than five years, to enroll in the University of Chicago as a freshman. I stayed for six years, left with a Ph.D., and ever since enjoyed a long academic career as a sociologist, first specializing in the military and then studying propaganda and the effect of television on politics.
  • World War II spurred my ambition by teaching me how to navigate the army. Those lessons led me to confront the society I had once known so well, and to study politics and people living in a time of upheaval.
johnsonel7

The Next Climate Battleground: Your Child's Science Classroom - 0 views

undark.org/...e-science-textbooks-classrooms

climate education misinformation censoring knowledge

shared by johnsonel7 on 20 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Florida Citizens’ Alliance, a conservative, 20,000-member organization based in Naples that spearheaded a successful grassroots effort last year to pass the nation’s first state bill allowing residents to demand a public hearing on local school textbooks. With its passage, parents of students — as well as anyone living in a given district — can challenge the books a school is using to teach their community’s children. It was a seemingly parochial piece of civic legislation, but it was one with potentially great implications for science education in the United States.
  • Prominent on the group’s expanded menu of concerns was climate change, and humanity’s presumed role in driving it. The Alliance’s members began line-reading school textbooks for violations of their beliefs, creating carefully detailed reports on how many times, and in what context, elementary and high school students were learning about rising seas, or melting ice in Antarctica.
  • Vernon said, echoing a prevailing concern among members of the Alliance and likeminded conservatives everywhere: the unchecked power and control over social institutions by perceived liberal elites. “We’re really concerned,” he added, “that our kids are not being educated, [but] simply indoctrinated in the philosophy of the academic aristocracy.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • one that has conservative groups wrestling for control over how climate science will be taught to American students. The science classroom, after all, remains the dominant venue in which those students first encounter the topic, and it greatly informs how students eventually square-up to the veracity of climate change — either as something they believe to be happening and worth responding to politically, or as a phenomenon of nature, underserving of public funds and political action.
  • The outcome matters: Whoever wins over the minds of this upcoming cohort of American voters will, to a large extent, shape the nation’s policies on climate change for decades to come.
  • “Teachers are facing pressure to not only eliminate or de-emphasize climate change science, but also to introduce non-scientific ideas in science classrooms,” the statement said.
  • For advocates of inserting climate change skepticism into the classroom, the notion of “teaching both sides of the debate” is a familiar refrain, and it’s one used to mask the more fundamental motive: Fostering doubt in students that the scientific community conclusively agrees climate change is occurring.
  • For those science teachers who remain in the classroom, a comprehensive understanding of climate science itself is not a given. One recent report found that less than half of K-12 science teachers received formal climate science training during their own college education — a comprehension void that helps explain why political ideology has been shown to be the most consistent indicator of how a teacher presents climate science to their own students.
  • Trying to continue with lessons on climate science despite this intensifying atmosphere of hostility has forced some teachers to become savvier — or more secretive — about how they present the information to their students. In Texas, Nina Corley is careful to keep explicit mentions of climate change out of her lessons, for fear that her skeptical administrators might try to censor the science. “The administrators in a school can have total control, because they’re your boss, you have to remember that. It’s going to be how you word it,” she said. “I’m not going to say my lesson plan is on climate change today, I’ll just talk about how we’re investigating the effects of carbon dioxide.”
  • Recalling one student who was hostile to her lessons on climate change, Erin Stutzman realized the more personal ramifications catalyzed by the student changing his mind. “He was tightly engrossed in the skepticism, that belief was engrained in him. And his initial resistance wasn’t to the science, really, it was that someone was challenging his parents and his friend’s parents,”
tongoscar

LA's high housing costs pose 'grave concern' to economy - Curbed LA - 0 views

la.curbed.com/...sing-costs-los-angeles-economy

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • “The fact that the median Californian household must pay more than seven times its income to afford a home should be grounds for grave concern regarding sustainable economic growth,”
  • It’s the first time the report—which predicts a slowdown in LA’s economy—has considered housing affordability. In the past, it focused largely on areas like developing the local workforce and attracting new businesses.
  • Without “significant policy action” to spur the construction of more homes, the costs of buying and renting will only continue to rise, the report concludes. That could make an already dire situation even worse.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “It’s very easy for people when they encounter someone who is homeless to say, ‘Oh, that’s not me. I have a job. I own a home.’ But what our research shows is that this is impacting you too,”
  • One particular statistic cited in the report illuminates how unaffordable home prices are already. In 2018, California’s median home price was 7.3 times the median household income. The median home price in the U.S., however, was 3.7 times the median household income.
katherineharron

Mysterious fast radio bursts helped detect missing matter in the universe, study says - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 27 May 20 - No Cached
  • Mysterious fast radio bursts have been used to unlock another strange aspect of the universe: the case of the "missing matter."
  • Astronomers have yet to determine what causes these fast radio bursts, which are unpredictable but can be spotted and traced back to their origin using sensitive telescopes.
  • Normal matter, called baryonic matter in this study, is made of the protons and neutrons that comprise both humans and star stuff. But astronomers could only account for about half of it that should exist in the universe.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Unaccounted for, this missing matter was predicted to exist, but hard to find. In fact, astronomers have been searching for it over the last 30 years, the researchers said. Measurements of the Big Bang show how much matter was present in the early days of the universe, suggesting its existence.
  • "It turned out that it was hiding in a density so low that it does not emit light, it doesn't absorb it, and it doesn't reflect it," he said.
  • "The radiation from fast radio bursts gets spread out by the missing matter in the same way that you see the colors of sunlight being separated in a prism," Macquart said.
  • "Their millisecond durations made it very easy to measure the effect of dispersion — the process by which their longer wavelength emission is delayed with respect to their shorter wavelength emission is delayed — and hence to measure exactly how much matter they have encountered on their multi-billion year intergalactic journeys to Earth," Macquart said.
  • Astronomers were able to pin down the source of a repeating fast radio burst in 2017. But single radio bursts are harder to pinpoint because they don't reoccur.
  • "ASKAP both has a wide field of view, about 60 times the size of the full Moon, and can image in high resolution," said Ryan Shannon, study coauthor and associate professor at Swinburne University of Technology, in a statement. "This means that we can catch the bursts with relative ease and then pinpoint locations to their host galaxies with incredible precision.
  • "We've discovered the equivalent of the Hubble-Lemaître Law for galaxies, only for fast radio bursts," Macquart said. "The Hubble-Lemaître Law, which says the more distant a galaxy from us, the faster it is moving away from us, underpins all measurements of galaxies at cosmological distances."
katherineharron

Central Park confrontation sends an ugly message (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 27 May 20 - No Cached
  • he story of Amy Cooper, the white woman who called the police on an African American man who was bird watching in Central Park and who asked her to leash her dog in accordance with park rules, is about racism, yes. But it's also about how racism is more than just whites' hostility toward people of color. Racism is more than a feeling; it's a system in which white people can and do exploit their own social positions, assumptions about their innocence, and the presumption that they're telling the truth.
  • That a black man has to rely on videotaped wrongdoing to be believed -- to protect himself from an agitated stranger advancing up on him, and to ultimately see something resembling justice
  • She refused to leash the dog, and, according to Christian Cooper's account on Facebook (where he posted a video of part of their encounter), he told her "Look, if you're going to do what you want, I'm going to do what I want, but you're not going to like it."
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Instead she stayed and would then escalate what Christian Cooper said had been a polite request into a conflict. That's an odd reaction for someone scared for her life.
  • Yet she walked toward him quickly, filling the video screen as she reaches toward his phone camera, with dog leash and her own phone in hand. He asked her to back away: "please don't come close to me," he said twice in a calm, firm voice.
  • "I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life." Christian Cooper responded, telling her to "please tell them whatever you like." And so she does: "There's a man, African American, he has a bicycle helmet," she said into her phone, her tone breathless and urgent. "He is recording me and threatening me and my dog."
  • "I'm being threatened by a man in the Ramble!" she cried into the phone. "Please send the cops immediately!"
  • Amy Cooper's decision to summon the police against a man who did nothing more than ask her to follow the rules reads as nothing short of a potential threat to his life.
  • She, a white woman (and she didn't have to even say that explicitly; she knew it would be grasped by whoever had answered the phone) would be seen as vulnerable and in need of protection, and her story would be believed on its face; he, a black man, would be seen as menacing and potentially dangerous, and his version of events would be doubted or disregarded.
  • Ahmaud Arbery, a black man in Georgia, was just out for a run last February when, authorities say, Gregory and Travis McMichael, two white men (one of them a former police officer, as it happened), grabbed their guns, chased him down, and shot him to death. They faced no criminal penalties and were simply let off the hook until a video emerged of their attack, and public outcry forced law enforcement to act. (The two have not been asked by a judge for a plea, and attorneys for the men have told reporters they committed no crimes, according to CNN reporting.) Without the video, the wheels of justice would likely never have even begun to turn.
  • We see again and again that African Americans who are victims of serious crimes need unimpeachable video evidence to be believed. Overwhelmingly, though, crimes are not caught on video. And even when they are, we have seen repeatedly that law enforcement often doesn't act until they are compelled by a huge public outcry. Without reliably fair law enforcement, there are simply few avenues for justice.
  • To be sure, it's easy to find legitimate criticism of Twitter "justice." But this only raises the more important question of why our formal mechanisms for justice are so often so inept at providing justice across racial lines -- why the very people and institutions we should be able to trust are instead often threats to the lives and safety of African Americans. When calling the cops is understood as a threat to a black person -- and sometimes even a threat to that person's life-- that's not just an indictment of the cop-caller, that's an indictment of the police, of prosecutors, of juries and of too many in a white American public willing to accept this reality.
  • Amy Cooper has issued an apology (she told CNN she wanted to "publicly apologize to everyone"), but in explaining her egregious actions, said "I'm not a racist. I did not mean to harm that man in any way." How do you not mean to harm someone when you call the police and falsely claim he is threatening you? "I think I was just scared," Amy Cooper said. "When you're alone in the Ramble, you don't know what's happening. It's not excusable, it's not defensible."
  • Her woe-is-me complaints are a bit hard to swallow given her own actions, which could have damaged or destroyed the life of an innocent man.
  • let's keep our eyes on the prize: a justice system that works, rather than one which so often accepts the word of white people at the expense of black lives and freedom.
« First ‹ Previous 101 - 120 of 143 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page