Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

who we are is largely determined by the hidden workings of our unconscious minds. Everything we do in life—the careers we choose; even, on a deeper level, the way we experience and perceive the sensation of being alive—emerges from an infinitely complex neuronal network sending out signals (Brooks calls them “scouts”) that, largely unknown to us, assess and determine our behavior. Insights, information, responses to stimuli are governed by our emotions, a rich repository of thoughts and feelings that courses just beneath the surface of our conscious minds. They are “mental sensations that happen to us.”

Behind the elaborate theorizing is Brooks’s desire to articulate a universal feeling: that all of us are caught up in what he calls “the loneliness loop.” We yearn for “community”; we have “the urge to merge.” When two people are having an intense conversation, their breathing synchronizes; laughing to-gether creates a feeling of joy; soldiers drilling in unison experience a surge of power. What drives us, ultimately, is the need to be understood by others.

Brooks has always been more of a public intellectual than a pundit, driven by genuine curiosity about human beings and the world.

have elucidated very real differences between human and nonhuman minds in the realm of conceptual reasoning, particularly with respect to what has been termed "theory of mind." This is the uniquely human ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to perceive that other minds exist and that they can hold ideas and beliefs different from one's own. While human and animal minds share a broadly similar ability to learn from experience, formulate intentions and store memories, careful experiments have repeatedly come up empty when attempting to establish the existence of a theory of mind in nonhumans.

A "theory of mind" is what makes it even possible to formulate abstract notions, to imagine the future, to try out ideas before acting upon them, to reflect about our own conduct and to see things from another's viewpoint. Charles Darwin observed that such a capacity is indeed the sine qua non of moral thought: "A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives—of approving some and disapproving of others," he wrote in "The Descent of Man."

For centuries thinkers have assumed that the uniquely human capacity for reasoning has existed to let people reach beyond mere perception and reflex in the search for truth.

Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments. Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena. According to this view, bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another.

the argumentative theory of reasoning

As a historian, I was influenced by E. H. Carr’s thinking about the past and present as part of a continuum that stretches into the future. In What is History? (1961), Carr argued that concern with the future is what really motivates the study of the past. As a teacher and political activist, I also strongly believe that schools should promote active citizenship as essential for maintaining a democratic society.

in an effort to survive, the NCSS has largely abandoned its commitment to these ideas, twisting itself into a pretzel to adapt to national Common Core standards and to satisfy influential conservative organizations that they are not radical, or even liberal. I suspect, but cannot document, that the organization’s membership has precipitously declined during the past two decades and it has increasingly depended financial support for its conferences and publications from deep-pocketed traditional and rightwing groups who advertise and have display booths.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Since the introduction of NCLB, there has been a steady reduction in the amount of time spent in the teaching of social studies, with the most profound decline noticed in the elementary grades.”

On Monday October 20, 2014, the Regents, as part of their effort to promote new national Common Core standards and mystically prepare students for non-existing 21st century technological careers, voted unanimously that students did not have to pass both United States and Global History exams in order to graduate from high school and maintained that they were actually raising academic standards.

The Global History exam will also be modified so that students will only be tested on events after 1750, essentially eliminating topics like the early development of civilizations, ancient empires, the rise of universal religions, the Columbian Exchange, and trans-Atlantic Slave Trade from the test.

As a result, social studies is no longer taught in the elementary school grades

Crux not only offering reported coverage of one particular Christian denomination; it's also selecting topics and presenting information through the lens of Catholicism. As Winston pointed out, it would be like The New York Times starting a news site just for Jews.

It's common for news sites to propose that technology or politics or economics are the primary modality through which people want to read the world, but it's extremely rare for religion to be considered in the same category of knowledge. "It's hard for news media, which is determinedly secular in nature, to admit that religion is a motivating factor for people,"

“There are two people digging by the side of the road. Can we shoot them?”

In war, of course, there are many ways to kill. I did so by giving orders. I never fired my weapon in combat, but I ordered countless others to

My initial reaction was to ask the question to someone higher up the chain of command.

Common sense tells us that social and emotional skills -- such as perseverance, self-control or agreeableness -- help individuals have more fulfilling lives

Those who work hard are more likely to follow healthier lifestyles and remain fit. Individuals who are capable of coping with their emotions and adapting to change are more likely to cope with job loss, family disintegration or crime.

social and emotional skills matter because they help develop and enforce cognitive skills.

Erik Wemple argues in a very tough critique of Frum's claims for the Washington Post that imbalanced, one-sided skepticism was the main problem with Frum's apology. He was willing to believe the worst about the motives and standards of the nation's leading news organization, while accepting at face value some Pallywood-style fantasies about all-fronts fakery.

For all their blind spots and flaws, reporters on the scene are trying to see, so they can tell, and the photographic and video reporters take greater risks than all the rest, since they must be closer to the action. For people on the other side of the world to casually assert that they're just making things up—this could and would drive them crazy. I'm sure that fakery has occurred. But the claim that it has is as serious as they come in journalism. It goes at our ultimate source of self-respect. As when saying that a doctor is deliberately mis-diagnosing patients, that a pilot is drunk in the cockpit, that a lifeguard is purposely letting people drown, you might be right, but you had better be very, very sure before making the claim.

WHEN measured in terms of academic achievement, Asian Americans are a successful bunch. Forty-nine percent have a bachelor's degree or higher. This compares favourably against white Americans (30%), African-Americans (19%) and Latinos (13%).

Amy Chua, a self-declared "tiger mother" who became famous for promoting the benefits of harsh parenting, would put this down to culture. She has argued that Chinese-American children statistically out-perform their peers because they are pushed harder at home.

she ascribes the success of different cultures in America to a "triple package" comprised of a superiority complex, insecurity and good impulse control. In other words, certain groups tell themselves they are better than other groups, but learn that they have to work hard to succeed, and must resist temptation and distraction in proving themselves.

Luca Maria Aiello and a few pals from the University of Turin in Italy began studying a social network called aNobii.com in which people exchange information and opinions about the books they love. Each person has a site that anybody can visit. Users can then choose to set up social links with others

To map out the structure of the network, Aiello and co-created an automated crawler that starts by visiting one person’s profile on the network and then all of the people that connect to this node in turn. It then visits each of the people that link to these nodes and so on. In this way, the bot builds up a map of the network

people began to respond to the crawler’s visits. That gave the team an idea. “The unexpected reactions the bot caused by its visits motivated us to set up a social experiment in two parts to answer the question: can an individual with no trust gain popularity and influence?”

Two days after the midterm elections, I met up with a man named Ira Glasser, the former longtime head of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Glasser is a First Amendment absolutist. And to him, that means that he supports the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling on Citizens United because he believes virtually all campaign finance laws violate the First Amendment.

But what about what happens after the election? It is not the spending itself that is the problem, but rather the purpose of that spending.

there is a really simple way of thinking of the debate over net neutrality: Is access to the Internet more like access to electricity, or more like cable television service?

For all the technical complexity of generating electricity and distributing it to millions of people, the economic arrangement is very simple: I give them money. They give me electricity. I do with it what I will.

Comcast, my cable provider, offers me a menu of packages from which I might choose, each with a different mix of channels. It goes through long and sometimes arduous negotiations with the owners of those cable channels and has a different business arrangement with each of them. The details of those arrangements are opaque to me as the consumer; all I know is that I can get the movie package for X dollars a month or the sports package for Y dollars and so on.

a broad group of scholars is beginning to demonstrate that religious belief and factual belief are indeed different kinds of mental creatures.

People process evidence differently when they think with a factual mind-set rather than with a religious mind-set

Even what they count as evidence is different

What did Mr. Obama do that was supposed to kill jobs? Quite a lot, actually. He signed the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform, which critics claimed would crush employment by starving businesses of capital.

He raised taxes on high incomes, especially at the very top, where average tax rates rose by about six and a half percentage points after 2012, a step that critics claimed would destroy incentives.

Yet none of the dire predicted consequences of these policies have materialized.

Lots of people have projects they've been sitting on. For some people, it's legitimately because some thing they need to move forward has stalled or because they really do have too much on their plate to get to it.

It's this gripping fear that can set in, making you doubt whether you have any place at all trying to do the work you feel called to do.

That obstacle is called "impostor syndrome."

As an Uber driver, Choudhary has to use an English-language app day in, day out, and he has found it has significantly improved his language skills.

now working for so-called shared economy platforms – business models that allow individuals to borrow or make use of assets or services offered by somebody else – such as Uber, Airbnb, freelance marketplace Fiverr and clothing hire platform Rent the Runway. Since these app-based businesses work primarily in English, Indians who work with them every day are improving their language skills as a side-effect.

some people deliberately choose to travel with Airbnb because it means their children can interact with other children and have exposure to other languages.” 

determined to press the world’s last superpower to do more to care for the planet and its most marginalized inhabitants.

the pope, who has shunned some of the perks of the papacy since his ascension in 2013

the first canonization on American soil, an address to Congress and not a small degree of tension over his message

is the study of wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favour.

Ignorance is power

Agnotology is as important today as it was back when Proctor studied