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The Science of Snobbery: How We're Duped Into Thinking Fancy Things Are Better - The At... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...279571 psychology judgment intuition bias unconscious expertise perception
shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Expert judges and amateurs alike claim to judge classical musicians based on sound. But Tsay’s research suggests that the original judges, despite their experience and expertise, judged the competition (which they heard and watched live) based on visual information, just as amateurs do.
  • just like with classical music, we do not appraise wine in the way that we expect. 
  • Priceonomics revisited this seemingly damning research: the lack of correlation between wine enjoyment and price in blind tastings, the oenology students tricked by red food dye into describing a white wine like a red, a distribution of medals at tastings equivalent to what one would expect from pure chance, the grand crus described like cheap wines and vice-versa when the bottles are switched.
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  • Taste does not simply equal your taste buds. It draws on information from all our senses as well as context. As a result, food is susceptible to the same trickery as wine. Adding yellow food dye to vanilla pudding leads people to experience a lemony taste. Diners eating in the dark at a chic concept restaurant confuse veal for tuna. Branding, packaging, and price tags are equally important to enjoyment. Cheap fish is routinely passed off as its pricier cousins at seafood and sushi restaurants. 
  • Just like with wine and classical music, we often judge food based on very different criteria than what we claim. The result is that our perceptions are easily skewed in ways we don’t anticipate. 
  • What does it mean for wine that presentation so easily trumps the quality imbued by being grown on premium Napa land or years of fruitful aging? Is it comforting that the same phenomenon is found in food and classical music, or is it a strike against the authenticity of our enjoyment of them as well? How common must these manipulations be until we concede that the influence of the price tag of a bottle of wine or the visual appearance of a pianist is not a trick but actually part of the quality?
  • To answer these questions, we need to investigate the underlying mechanism that leads us to judge wine, food, and music by criteria other than what we claim to value. And that mechanism seems to be the quick, intuitive judgments our minds unconsciously make
  • this unknowability also makes it easy to be led astray when our intuition makes a mistake. We may often be able to count on the price tag or packaging of food and wine for accurate information about quality. But as we believe that we’re judging based on just the product, we fail to recognize when presentation manipulates our snap judgments.
  • Participants were just as effective when watching 6 second video clips and when comparing their ratings to ratings of teacher effectiveness as measured by actual student test performance. 
  • The power of intuitive first impressions has been demonstrated in a variety of other contexts. One experiment found that people predicted the outcome of political elections remarkably well based on silent 10 second video clips of debates - significantly outperforming political pundits and predictions made based on economic indicators.
  • In a real world case, a number of art experts successfully identified a 6th century Greek statue as a fraud. Although the statue had survived a 14 month investigation by a respected museum that included the probings of a geologist, they instantly recognized something was off. They just couldn’t explain how they knew.
  • Cases like this represent the canon behind the idea of the “adaptive unconscious,” a concept made famous by journalist Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink. The basic idea is that we constantly, quickly, and unconsciously do the equivalent of judging a book by its cover. After all, a cover provides a lot of relevant information in a world in which we don’t have time to read every page.
  • Gladwell describes the adaptive unconscious as “a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.”
  • In a famous experiment, psychologist Nalini Ambady provided participants in an academic study with 30 second silent video clips of a college professor teaching a class and asked them to rate the effectiveness of the professor.
  • In follow up experiments, Chia-Jung Tsay found that those judging musicians’ auditions based on visual cues were not giving preference to attractive performers. Rather, they seemed to look for visual signs of relevant characteristics like passion, creativity, and uniqueness. Seeing signs of passion is valuable information. But in differentiating between elite performers, it gives an edge to someone who looks passionate over someone whose play is passionate
  • Outside of these more eccentric examples, it’s our reliance on quick judgments, and ignorance of their workings, that cause people to act on ugly, unconscious biases
  • It’s also why - from a business perspective - packaging and presentation is just as important as the good or service on offer. Why marketing is just as important as product. 
  • Gladwell ends Blink optimistically. By paying closer attention to our powers of rapid cognition, he argues, we can avoid its pitfalls and harness its powers. We can blindly audition musicians behind a screen, look at a piece of art devoid of other context, and pay particular attention to possible unconscious bias in our performance reports.
  • But Gladwell’s success in demonstrating how the many calculations our adaptive unconscious performs without our awareness undermines his hopeful message of consciously harnessing its power.
  • As a former world-class tennis player and coach of over 50 years, Braden is a perfect example of the ideas behind thin slicing. But if he can’t figure out what his unconscious is up to when he recognizes double faults, why should anyone else expect to be up to the task?
  • flawed judgment in fields like medicine and investing has more serious consequences. The fact that expertise is so tricky leads psychologist Daniel Kahneman to assert that most experts should seek the assistance of statistics and algorithms in making decisions.
  • In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he describes our two modes of thought: System 1, like the adaptive unconscious, is our “fast, instinctive, and emotional” intuition. System 2 is our “slower, more deliberative, and more logical” conscious thought. Kahneman believes that we often leave decisions up to System 1 and generally place far “too much confidence in human judgment” due to the pitfalls of our intuition described above.
  • Not every judgment will be made in a field that is stable and regular enough for an algorithm to help us make judgments or predictions. But in those cases, he notes, “Hundreds of studies have shown that wherever we have sufficient information to build a model, it will perform better than most people.”
  • Experts can avoid the pitfalls of intuition more easily than laypeople. But they need help too, especially as our collective confidence in expertise leads us to overconfidence in their judgments. 
  • This article has referred to the influence of price tags and context on products and experiences like wine and classical music concerts as tricks that skew our perception. But maybe we should consider them a real, actual part of the quality.
  • Losing ourselves in a universe of relativism, however, will lead us to miss out on anything new or unique. Take the example of the song “Hey Ya!” by Outkast. When the music industry heard it, they felt sure it would be a hit. When it premiered on the radio, however, listeners changed the channel. The song sounded too dissimilar from songs people liked, so they responded negatively. 
  • It took time for people to get familiar with the song and realize that they enjoyed it. Eventually “Hey Ya!” became the hit of the summer.
  • Many boorish people talking about the ethereal qualities of great wine probably can't even identify cork taint because their impressions are dominated by the price tag and the wine label. But the classic defense of wine - that you need to study it to appreciate it - is also vindicated. The open question - which is both editorial and empiric - is what it means for the industry that constant vigilance and substantial study is needed to dependably appreciate wine for the product quality alone. But the questions is relevant to the enjoyment of many other products and experiences that we enjoy in life.
  • Maybe the most important conclusion is to not only recognize the fallibility of our judgments and impressions, but to recognize when it matters, and when it doesn’t
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Most Campaign Outreach Has No Effect on Voters - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...541485 campaign election partisan outreach voters politics psychology research
shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • David Broockman, a Stanford University assistant professor, and Joshua Kalla, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed data from 49 field experiments—state, local, and federal campaigns that let political scientists access their data to evaluate their methods
  • For every flyer stuck in a mailbox, every door knocked by an earnest volunteer, and every candidate message left on an answering machine, there was no measurable change in voting outcomes. Even early outreach efforts, which are somewhat more successful at persuading voters, tend to fade from memory by Election Day.
  • Broockman and Kalla also estimated that the effect of television and online ads is zero, although only a small portion of their data speaks directly to that point.
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  • The findings suggest that a lot of the time, energy, and money poured into traditional campaigning methods is wasted, and that the campaign operatives hawking tried-and-true tactics don’t have the evidence to back up their claims.
  • It also casts doubt on the theory of the swing voter who can be persuaded with enough flyers, ad exposure, and conversations with earnest volunteers
  • In reality, Broockman and Kalla find, direct outreach is most effective at improving voter turnout, suggesting that campaigns should focus on getting their core supporters to the polls than reaching out to a mythical middle.
  • This new study suggests that intentionally curated, issue-specific persuasion campaigns may shift people’s views more easily than partisan political campaigns.
  • Emma Green: So, is political campaigning useless?Joshua Kalla: The short answer is ‘no.
  • There are lots of things that campaigning can accomplish. Two decades of research on voter registration and hundreds of field experiments show really cost-effective ways to increase turnout in the base.But on persuasion, yes, we find that on average, there are very small effects.
  • Kalla: A lot of campaign operatives think there’s this big pool of moderate, undecided voters that we can spend money on to persuade them to our side. That strategy is probably not the right strategy. And we should be skeptical of big claims of persuasion.
  • Kalla: All the money is being poured into the same time and the same place. It’s hard to imagine that the hundredth TV ad that a person views is really worth it from a monetary perspective, versus that same money spent in a different race or a lower race. There’s a case to be made that too much money is being spent in the same ways and on the same people.
  • But the takeaway from this paper should not be that campaigns should stop. Campaigns do a lot of work that is measurable in return on getting voters to vote, and persuading voters. It’s just a question of how the money is spent.
  • Kalla: The first order of understanding an election and how people vote is partisan identity. Most people vote based on whether there’s a D or an R next to their name. Unpacking that should be more the focus than the horserace.
  • We don’t see persuasive effects in general elections where a Democrat is talking to a Republican. But in ballot-measure campaigns and primaries and the transgender work, it seems that persuasion is possible.
  • Most Americans view themselves in a partisan lens. When it comes time to vote, it’s less a function of a person running for office than a person with a party label beside his or her name.
  • Green: But what about the roughly 39 percent of Americans who identify as independents?Kalla: A lot of independents tend to be what political scientists term as “closeted partisans.” They might not explicitly identify with a party, but if you ask them which party they lean toward, they’ll often give you an answer. Their behavior tends to look a lot like the behavior of people who explicitly identify as partisans.
  • Green: Our democracy is based on this romantic idea that encounters in the public square—conversations, essays, speeches, etc.— have the power to change how people view the world. If you’re saying that’s basically not true, where does that leave us? Are we all just destined to remain isolated in the prisons of our own convictions?
  • Kalla: I want to draw a distinction with the transgender canvassing work. That was very much focusing on getting people to be introspective and think about times that they or their loved ones have been discriminated against, and how that made them feel, and how that real, lived experience informs their views on non-discrimination laws and views toward LGBT people. That’s close to an ideal of how we want democracy to function.
  • That’s not the type of discourse you see in campaigns. I don’t think TV ads or every glossy postcard is really going to lead to enlightened discourse among the American public.
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The teaching of economics gets an overdue overhaul - 0 views

www.economist.com/...eal-world-very-beginning-their economics teaching textbook theory
shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Change, however, has been slow to reach the university economics curriculum. Many institutions still pump students through introductory courses untainted by recent economic history or the market shortcomings it illuminates.
  • A few plucky reformers are working to correct that: a grand and overdue idea. Overhauling the way economics is taught ought to produce students more able to understand the modern world. Even better, it should improve economics itself.
  • Yet the standard curriculum is hardly calibrated to impart these lessons. Most introductory texts begin with the simplest of models. Workers are paid according to their productivity; trade never makes anyone worse off; and government interventions in the market always generate a “deadweight loss”. Practising economists know that these statements are more true at some times than others
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  • Economics teaches that incentives matter and trade-offs are unavoidable. It shows how naive attempts to fix social problems, from poverty to climate change, can have unintended consequences. Introductory economics, at its best, enables people to see the unstated assumptions and hidden costs behind the rosy promises of politicians and businessmen.
  • A Chilean professor, Oscar Landerretche, worked with other economists to design a new curriculum. He, Sam Bowles, of the Santa Fe Institute, Wendy Carlin, of University College London (UCL), and Margaret Stevens, of Oxford University, painstakingly knitted contributions from economists around the world into a text that is free, online and offers interactive charts and videos of star economists. That text is the basis of economics modules taught by a small but growing number of instructors.
  • Students pay $300 or more for textbooks explaining that in competitive markets the price of a good should fall to the cost of producing an additional unit, and unsurprisingly regurgitate the expected answers. A study of 170 economics modules taught at seven universities found that marks in exams favoured the ability to “operate a model” over proofs of independent judgment.
  • “The Economy”, as the book is economically titled, covers the usual subjects, but in a very different way. It begins with the biggest of big pictures, explaining how capitalism and industrialisation transformed the world, inviting students to contemplate how it arrived at where it is today.
  • That could mean, eventually, a broader array of perspectives within economics departments, bigger and bolder research questions—and fewer profession-shaking traumas in future.
  • Messy complications, from environmental damage to inequality, are placed firmly in the foreground.
  • It explains cost curves, as other introductory texts do, but in the context of the Industrial Revolution, thus exposing students to debates about why industrialisation kicked off when and where it did.
  • Thomas Malthus’s ideas are used to teach students the uses and limitations of economic models, combining technical instruction with a valuable lesson from the history of economic thought.
  • “The Economy” does not dumb down economics; it uses maths readily, keeping students engaged through the topicality of the material. Quite early on, students have lessons in the weirdness in economics—from game theory to power dynamics within firms—that makes the subject fascinating and useful but are skimmed over in most introductory courses.
  • Homa Zarghamee, also at Barnard, appreciates having to spend less time “unteaching”, ie, explaining to students why the perfect-competition result they learned does not actually hold in most cases. A student who does not finish the course will not be left with a misleading idea of economics, she notes.
  • But the all-important exceptions are taught quite late in the curriculum—or, often, only in more advanced courses taken by those pursuing an economics degree.
  • Far from an unintended result of ill-conceived policies, she argues, the roughly 4m deaths from hunger in 1932 and 1933 were part of a deliberate campaign by Josef Stalin and the Bolshevik leadership to crush Ukrainian national aspirations, literally starving actual or potential bearers of those aspirations into submission to the Soviet order
  • The politics in this case was the Sovietisation of Ukraine; the means was starvation. Food supply was not mismanaged by Utopian dreamers. It was weaponised.
  • . “Red Famine” presents a Bolshevik government so hell-bent on extracting wealth and controlling labour that it was willing to confiscate the last remaining grain from hungry peasants (mostly but not exclusively in Ukraine) and then block them from fleeing famine-afflicted areas to search for food.
  • . Stalin was not only aware of the ensuing mass death (amounting to roughly 13% of Ukraine’s population). He actively sought to suppress knowledge of it (including banning the publication of census data), so as not to distract from the campaign to collectivise Soviet agriculture and extend the Communist Party’s reach into the countryside—a campaign Ms Applebaum calls a “revolution...more profound and more shocking than the original Bolshevik revolution itself”
  • The book’s most powerful passages describe the moral degradation that resulted from sustained hunger, as family solidarity and village traditions of hospitality withered in the face of the overwhelming desire to eat. Under a state of siege by Soviet authorities, hunger-crazed peasants took to consuming, grass, animal hides, manure and occasionally each other. People became indifferent to the sight of corpses lying in streets, and eventually to their own demis
  • While stressing Stalin’s goal of crushing Ukrainian nationalism, moreover, Ms Applebaum passes over a subtler truth. For along with its efforts to root out “bourgeois” nationalisms, the Kremlin relentlessly promoted a Soviet version of Ukrainian identity, as it did with most other ethnic minorities. Eight decades on, that legacy has done even more to shape today’s Ukraine than the Holodomor.
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Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...Valley-Is-Not-Your-Friend.html silicon valley tech dystopia manipulation monopoly disruption research technology bias
shared by Javier E on 14 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • By all accounts, these programmers turned entrepreneurs believed their lofty words and were at first indifferent to getting rich from their ideas. A 1998 paper by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, then computer-science graduate students at Stanford, stressed the social benefits of their new search engine, Google, which would be open to the scrutiny of other researchers and wouldn’t be advertising-driven.
  • The Google prototype was still ad-free, but what about the others, which took ads? Mr. Brin and Mr. Page had their doubts: “We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”
  • He was concerned about them as young students lacking perspective about life and was worried that these troubled souls could be our new leaders. Neither Mr. Weizenbaum nor Mr. McCarthy mentioned, though it was hard to miss, that this ascendant generation were nearly all white men with a strong preference for people just like themselves. In a word, they were incorrigible, accustomed to total control of what appeared on their screens. “No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful,” Mr. Weizenbaum wrote, “has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.”
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  • In his epic anti-A.I. work from the mid-1970s, “Computer Power and Human Reason,” Mr. Weizenbaum described the scene at computer labs. “Bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be as riveted as a gambler’s on the rolling dice,” he wrote. “They exist, at least when so engaged, only through and for the computers. These are computer bums, compulsive programmers.”
  • Welcome to Silicon Valley, 2017.
  • As Mr. Weizenbaum feared, the current tech leaders have discovered that people trust computers and have licked their lips at the possibilities. The examples of Silicon Valley manipulation are too legion to list: push notifications, surge pricing, recommended friends, suggested films, people who bought this also bought that.
  • Growth becomes the overriding motivation — something treasured for its own sake, not for anything it brings to the world
  • Facebook and Google can point to a greater utility that comes from being the central repository of all people, all information, but such market dominance has obvious drawbacks, and not just the lack of competition. As we’ve seen, the extreme concentration of wealth and power is a threat to our democracy by making some people and companies unaccountable.
  • As is becoming obvious, these companies do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. We need greater regulation, even if it impedes the introduction of new services.
  • We need to break up these online monopolies because if a few people make the decisions about how we communicate, shop, learn the news, again, do we control our own society?
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The Problem With History Classes - The Atlantic - 3 views

www.theatlantic.com/...387823 history historiography teaching memory AP myth American idea bias
shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The passion and urgency with which these battles are fought reflect the misguided way history is taught in schools. Currently, most students learn history as a set narrative—a process that reinforces the mistaken idea that the past can be synthesized into a single, standardized chronicle of several hundred pages. This teaching pretends that there is a uniform collective story, which is akin to saying everyone remembers events the same.
  • Yet, history is anything but agreeable. It is not a collection of facts deemed to be "official" by scholars on high. It is a collection of historians exchanging different, often conflicting analyses.
  • rather than vainly seeking to transcend the inevitable clash of memories, American students would be better served by descending into the bog of conflict and learning the many "histories" that compose the American national story.
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  • Perhaps Fisher offers the nation an opportunity to divorce, once and for all, memory from history. History may be an attempt to memorialize and preserve the past, but it is not memory; memories can serve as primary sources, but they do not stand alone as history. A history is essentially a collection of memories, analyzed and reduced into meaningful conclusions—but that collection depends on the memories chosen.
  • Memories make for a risky foundation: As events recede further into the past, the facts are distorted or augmented by entirely new details
  • people construct unique memories while informing perfectly valid histories. Just as there is a plurality of memories, so, too, is there a plurality of histories.
  • Scholars who read a diverse set of historians who are all focused on the same specific period or event are engaging in historiography
  • This approach exposes textbooks as nothing more than a compilation of histories that the authors deemed to be most relevant and useful.
  • In historiography, the barrier between historian and student is dropped, exposing a conflict-ridden landscape. A diplomatic historian approaches an event from the perspective of the most influential statesmen (who are most often white males), analyzing the context, motives, and consequences of their decisions. A cultural historian peels back the objects, sights, and sounds of a period to uncover humanity’s underlying emotions and anxieties. A Marxist historian adopts the lens of class conflict to explain the progression of events. There are intellectual historians, social historians, and gender historians, among many others. Historians studying the same topic will draw different interpretations—sometimes radically so, depending on the sources they draw from
  • Jacoba Urist points out that history is "about explaining and interpreting past events analytically." If students are really to learn and master these analytical tools, then it is absolutely essential that they read a diverse set of historians and learn how brilliant men and women who are scrutinizing the same topic can reach different conclusions
  • Rather than constructing a curriculum based on the muddled consensus of boards, legislatures, and think tanks, schools should teach students history through historiography. The shortcomings of one historian become apparent after reading the work of another one on the list.
  • Although, as Urist notes, the AP course is "designed to teach students to think like historians," my own experience in that class suggests that it fails to achieve that goal.
  • The course’s framework has always served as an outline of important concepts aiming to allow educators flexibility in how to teach; it makes no reference to historiographical conflicts. Historiography was an epiphany for me because I had never before come face-to-face with how historians think and reason
  • When I took AP U.S. History, I jumbled these diverse histories into one indistinct narrative. Although the test involved open-ended essay questions, I was taught that graders were looking for a firm thesis—forcing students to adopt a side. The AP test also, unsurprisingly, rewards students who cite a wealth of supporting details
  • By the time I took the test in 2009, I was a master at "checking boxes," weighing political factors equally against those involving socioeconomics and ensuring that previously neglected populations like women and ethnic minorities received their due. I did not know that I was pulling ideas from different historiographical traditions. I still subscribed to the idea of a prevailing national narrative and served as an unwitting sponsor of synthesis, oblivious to the academic battles that made such synthesis impossible.
  • Although there may be an inclination to seek to establish order where there is chaos, that urge must be resisted in teaching history. Public controversies over memory are hardly new. Students must be prepared to confront divisiveness, not conditioned to shoehorn agreement into situations where none is possible
  • When conflict is accepted rather than resisted, it becomes possible for different conceptions of American history to co-exist. There is no longer a need to appoint a victor.
  • More importantly, the historiographical approach avoids pursuing truth for the sake of satisfying a national myth
  • The country’s founding fathers crafted some of the finest expressions of personal liberty and representative government the world has ever seen; many of them also held fellow humans in bondage. This paradox is only a problem if the goal is to view the founding fathers as faultless, perfect individuals. If multiple histories are embraced, no one needs to fear that one history will be lost.
  • History is not indoctrination. It is a wrestling match. For too long, the emphasis has been on pinning the opponent. It is time to shift the focus to the struggle itself
  • There is no better way to use the past to inform the present than by accepting the impossibility of a definitive history—and by ensuring that current students are equipped to grapple with the contested memories in their midst.
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Opinion | How to Fix the Debate Over Guns - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gun-reform-us.html
shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • We can find real solutions to gun violence if we recognize the trauma it causes.
  • In the span of a week, two acts of public violence have stolen the lives of 18 people and provided a stark reminder of the mass gun violence that characterized the pre-Covid United States
  • Gun violence did not go away during 2020. Gun homicides jumped 25 percent from the year before, apparently fueled in part by a rise in intimate partner violence
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  • In the U.S., people often reach for more guns as a response to mass shootings and in anticipation of needing a method of home protection, but also — as we saw in 2020 and into 2021 — in response to presidential elections, political unrest and mass-scale infectious disease.
  • Gun violence entails immediate physical trauma, but it also elicits forms of trauma that can ricochet far beyond its initial target
  • If we understand trauma as social, psychological and physical responses to experiences that cannot be assimilated into an individual’s existing understandings of themselves and the world around them, then gun trauma goes far beyond
  • Having someone taken through gun violence, surviving gun violence oneself, even hearing gunshots tears at our basic sense of safety, of security and of self
  • Research has found that surviving or being exposed to gun violence survival is associated with an increased risk of symptoms linked with PTSD (including anxiety and depression) in both urban and rural contexts, short-term decreases in reading ability, vocabulary, and impulse control, unemployment and substance use and even shifts in friendship formation
  • While gun trauma most certainly shapes the aftermath of shootings, it also shapes our day-to-day decisions and sensibilities far beyond specific acts of gun violence
  • Policies that purport to end the trauma of gun violence by increasing the punitive surveillance of individuals with mental illness, increasing police presence and surveillance of students at schools, or bringing more people into contact with the criminal justice system may ultimately create more, if different, trauma.
  • This trauma-violence cycle cannot break itself — but certainly has the power to break us.
  • Gun trauma is implicated in how guns harm us, why we turn to guns, and — to the extent that we depend on punitive criminal justice approaches to address it — how we attempt to solve the problem of gun violence.
  • We must dismantle this trauma-violence cycle, and the first step is centering gun trauma within the gun debate and addressing gun violence
  • what this might look like: the Community Justice Action Fund and Revolve Impact’s By Design campaign, which aims to “change the conversation” on gun violence by elevating leaders of color to “interrupt systems of violence and ultimately build power for communities most impacted by gun violence”
  • Approaching guns from the perspective of trauma will require some imagination — and some courage
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Why economics needs economic history | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal - 1 views

voxeu.org/...onomics-needs-economic-history
shared by caelengrubb on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The current economic and financial crisis has given rise to a vigorous debate about the state of economics, and the training which graduate and undergraduates economics students are receiving.
  • Employers are increasingly complaining that young economists don’t understand how the financial system actually works, and are ill-prepared to think about appropriate policies at a time of crisis.
  • Knowledge of economic and financial history is crucial in thinking about the economy in several ways.
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  • A second, related point is that economic history teaches students the importance of context
  • Third, economic history is an unapologetically empirical field, exclusively dedicated to understanding the real world.
  • Fourth, economic history is a rich source of informal theorising about the real world, which can help motivate more formal theoretical work later on (Wren-Lewis 2013).
  • ifth, even once the current economic and financial crisis has passed, the major long run challenges facing the world will still remain.
  • Sixth, economic theory itself has been emphasising – for well over 20 years now – that path dependence is ubiquitous (David 1985)
  • Finally, and perhaps most importantly from the perspective of an undergraduate economics instructor, economic history is a great way of convincing undergraduates that the theory they are learning in their micro and macro classes is useful in helping them make sense of the real world.
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Full article: Functionalism and the role of psychology in economics - 0 views

www.tandfonline.com/...1350178X.2020.1798016
shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Should economics study the psychological basis of agents’ choice behaviour? I show how this question is multifaceted and profoundly ambiguous. There is no sharp distinction between ‘mentalist’ answers to this question and rival ‘behavioural’ answers. What's more, clarifying this point raises problems for mentalists of the ‘functionalist’ variety [Dietrich, F., & List, C. (2016). Mentalism versus behaviourism in economics: A philosophy-of-science perspective. Economics and Philosophy, 32(2), 249–281. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267115000462]. Firstly, functionalist hypotheses collapse into hypotheses about input–output dispositions, I show, unless one places some unwelcome restrictions on what counts as a cognitive variable. Secondly, functionalist hypotheses make some risky commitments about the plasticity of agents’ choice dispositions.
  • This controversy over the proper role of psychological concepts, explanations and evidence in economics is multifaceted and profoundly indeterminate, this paper will argue. In what way multifaceted? One facet of this controversy is the issue of whether economics should study the anatomical structures in the brain that underlie decision-making (Section 3). A second facet is the issue of whether economics should study the causes and effects of cognitive variables (Section 4). A third facet, I suggest, is the issue of whether economics should study the plasticity of agents’ choice dispositions (Section 6).
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Is there a universal hierarchy of human senses? -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...181105160852.htm
shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Research at the University of York has shown that the accepted hierarchy of human senses -- sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell -- is not universally true across all cultures.
  • Study revealed that cultures which placed particular value on their specialist musical heritage were able to communicate more efficiently on describing sounds, even when non-musicians were tested. Similarly, living in a culture that produces patterned pottery made people better able to talk about shapes.
  • The findings could prove significant for a range of practices in education and other professions to help further enhance how people understand and utilise their sensory perceptions of the world
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  • Scientists have spent hundreds of years trying to understand how human sensory organs work, concluding that sight is the most important sense, followed hearing, touch, taste and smell.
  • To answer this question, an international team led by Professor Majid, conducted a large-scale experiment to investigate the ease with which people could communicate about colors, shapes, sounds, textures, tastes and smells
  • Speakers of 20 diverse languages, including three different sign languages, from across the globe were tested, ranging from hunter-gatherers to post-industrial societies
  • If the commonly accepted hierarchy of the senses were true, participants in the study should have been able to communicate about vision most easily, followed by sounds, such as loud and quiet; textures, such as smooth and rough; taste, such as sweet and sour; and smell, such as chocolate and coffee
  • "While English speakers behaved as predicted, describing sight and sound with ease, this was not the case across all cultures
  • What this study shows us is that we can't always assume that understanding certain human functions within the context of the English language provides us with a universally relevant perspective or solution
  • In a modern digital-led world, which typically engages sight and hearing, it could be worthwhile learning from other cultures in the way that taste and smell can be communicated
  • This could be particularly important for the future of some professions, such as the food industry, for example, where being able to communicate about taste and smell is essential
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Sense Perception Notes - ToK - 0 views

www.ibmastery.com/...tion-notes-theory-of-knowledge
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  • "Perception by the senses rather than by the intellect." (Dictionary.com)
  • "Perception by or based on stimulation of the senses." (Medical Dictionary)
  • We perceive the world through our five senses. (Hearing, Sight, Smell, Touch, Taste) Our sense receptors are stimulated by sensory information. The brain translates the sensory information into sensations such as sound, taste, temperature, etc. Higher centres in the brain either ignore or recognize the sensations and their meanings, based on neuronal networks of past association and expectation. (Some of this stage 3 work actually involves reasoning).  Click the video to see a coffee-taste expert discuss the intricacies of how different coffees taste.    Sense perception is an important dimension of comprehending the world around us. It allows us to gather information from the outside world, so we can then go on to hopefully make sense of it
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  • Stimuli are involuntarily being compared and contrasted with previous experiences. For example, when you see when you see stop light change from red to green, your mind perceives this change in colour, not so much as a change in colour, but more as a signal to move forward.
  • What we perceive depends on what is important and interest in at the time for each person (Cultural Influences on Perception). Our perceptions and conceptions are affected by things such as biases, motivations emotions cultural perspectives interests, expectations and background experiences (existing knowledge)
  • Optical illusions are very popular with students just starting out in ToK. They are clear evidence that we have weaknesses in terms of how our mind interprets stimuli. Often things are not as they appear. Our previous experiences with similar stimulai impairs our perception.
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Opinion | Your Brain Is Not for Thinking - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...brain-neuroscience-stress.html
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  • This new activity of hunting started an evolutionary arms race. Over millions of years, both predators and prey evolved more complex bodies that could sense and move more effectively to catch or elude other creatures.
  • Eventually, some creatures evolved a command center to run those complex bodies. We call it a brain.
  • Your brain’s most important job isn’t thinking; it’s running the systems of your body to keep you alive and well. According to recent findings in neuroscience, even when your brain does produce conscious thoughts and feelings, they are more in service to the needs of managing your body than you realize.
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  • Much of your brain’s activity happens outside your awareness. In every moment, your brain must figure out your body’s needs for the next moment and execute a plan to fill those needs in advance.
  • The budget for your body tracks resources
  • Each action that spends resources, such as standing up, running, and learning, is like a withdrawal from your account. Actions that replenish your resources, such as eating and sleeping, are like deposits.
  • Every thought you have, every feeling of happiness or anger or awe you experience, every kindness you extend and every insult you bear or sling is part of your brain’s calculations as it anticipates and budgets your metabolic needs.
  • This view of the brain has many implications for understanding human beings. So often, for example, we conceive of ourselves in mental terms, separate from the physical
  • There is no such thing as a purely mental cause, because every mental experience has roots in the physical budgeting of your body
  • When an unpleasant thought pops into your head, like “I can’t take this craziness anymore,” ask yourself body-budgeting questions. “Did I get enough sleep last night? Am I dehydrated? Should I take a walk? Call a friend? Because I could use a deposit or two in my body budget.”
  • I’m suggesting that it’s possible to acknowledge what your brain is actually doing and take some comfort from it. Your brain is not for thinking. Everything that it conjures, from thoughts to emotions to dreams, is in the service of body budgeting. This perspective, adopted judiciously, can be a source of resilience in challenging times.
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WHO Team Arrives In Wuhan To Investigate Coronavirus Pandemic Origins | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...ins_n_600022c6c5b63642b7022404 covid wuhan pandemic origins research WHO
shared by cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Scientists suspect the virus that has killed more than 1.9 million people since late 2019 jumped to humans from bats or other animals, most likely in China’s southwest.
  • Fifteen team members were to arrive in Wuhan on Thursday, but two tested positive for coronavirus antibodies before leaving Singapore
  • The team includes virus and other experts from the United States, Australia, Germany, Japan, Britain, Russia, the Netherlands, Qatar and Vietnam.
    • cvanderloo
      cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21
       
      They all will have different perspectives which is crucial.
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  • China rejected demands for an international investigation after the Trump administration blamed Beijing for the virus’s spread, which plunged the global economy into its deepest slump since the 1930s.
  • The coronavirus’s exact origin may never be traced because viruses change quickly, Woolhouse said
  • pinning down an outbreak’s animal reservoir is typically an exhaustive endeavor that takes years of research including taking animal samples, genetic analysis and epidemiological studies.
  • he incident “raises the question if the Chinese authorities were trying to interfere,”
  • Beijing retaliated by blocking imports of Australian beef, wine and other goods.
    • cvanderloo
      cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21
       
      This feels very petty to me.
  • A year after the virus was first detected in Wuhan, the city is now bustling, with few signs that it was once the epicenter of the outbreak in China. But some residents say they’re still eager to learn about its origin.
  • covering closely related viruses might help explain how the disease first jumped from animals and clarify what preventive measures are needed to avoid future epidemics.
  • “Now is not the time to blame anyone,” Shih said. “We shouldn’t say, it’s your fault
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Why 1.2 billion people in China share the same 100 surnames - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html China surnames dialects knowledge science language
shared by cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • five most common surnames in China -- shared by more than 433 million people, or 30% of the population
  • With 1.37 billion citizens, China has the world's largest population, but has one of the smallest surname pools. Only about 6,000 surnames are in use, according to the Ministry of Public Security. And the vast majority of the population -- almost 86% -- share just 100 of those surnames.
  • To put that in perspective, the United States -- with less than a quarter of China's population -- reported 6.3 million surnames in its 2010 census
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  • It also has to do with language; you can't just add a random stroke to a Chinese character and create a new surname, the way you can add a letter to an English name.
    • cvanderloo
      cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21
       
      Language!
  • people with rare characters in their names, which aren't compatible with existing computer systems, can get left behind -- pushing many to change their names for the sake of convenience, even if it means abandoning centuries of heritage and language.
  • China's history, full of migration, political turmoil and warfare, meant people's names were often in flux -- which is partly why many have since vanished.
  • People sometimes changed their names for convenience, too -- for instance, simplifying complex characters by adopting similar-sounding ones with fewer strokes. Other times they did it out of superstition, abandoning a name believed to bring ill fortune, said Chen, the associate professor.
  • surnames are lost or die out over time with each new generation as women take on their husbands' surnames.
  • With China roaring into the digital age, nearly everything -- from making appointments to buying train tickets -- has moved online. That meant a world of trouble if you happened to have a rare character in your name, that might not be in the database.
  • China's digitized ID cards made the problem even more pressing. The first generation of these cards allowed people to hand-write their names on -- but the second-generation cards, launched in 2004 and dubbed "smart cards" for their digital features, exclusively used computer-printed text.
    • cvanderloo
      cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21
       
      Reminds me of requiring people in Guatemala to fill out a form in Spanish even though half of the population doesn't speak spanish.
  • Another factor exacerbating the increasing commonness of Chinese names is the government's efforts to standardize and regulate the language.
  • Various dialects of Mandarin are spoken between the provinces, with some so different that speakers are unintelligible to each other.
    • cvanderloo
      cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21
       
      Dialects vs languages and the bariors they form
  • To try to address this, experts have increased the database from 32,000 characters to 70,000 characters, according to the government. They're still working to expand it to include more than 90,000 character
  • This struggle, and the cost of adapting to the modern age, was exemplified in a village in the eastern Shandong province in the late 2000s. Many villagers shared the ancestral name "Shan" -- but when they began applying for the digitized ID cards, local officials advised them to change their surnames to "Xian," a similar-sounding but more common character, according to state-owned news service CNTV.
  • In the end, more than 200 villagers were forced to change their surnames, a source of sorrow for many.
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Britain, dubbed 'plague island', wants tourists to return | CNN Travel - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html UK brexit Britain covid travel
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  • Boris Johnson plunged the country into harsh new restrictions, blaming a new variant of the disease that had been spreading in London and the southeast of England since September.
  • Country after country closed their borders to flights from the UK, in a bid to keep the new variant confined to "plague island,"
  • UK travelers are still banned from much of the world -- including EU countries -- because of the homegrown variant.
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  • In the end, 2020 saw a 76% decline in visitors and an 80% drop.
  • "A lot of our multi-country trips including England used to fly round-trip to London, and now we're looking to see if from a traveler's perspective that will be the most convenient."
  • DaSilva said that potential Brexit complications were on the radar of travelers' concerns last year, but, with a no-deal averted and the pandemic taking center stage, it's no longer an issue for her guests. In fact, three of the top five most searched trips on their website involve Great Britain.
  • "Early on in the pandemic, people were searching for places that had more open green spaces, like New Zealand and Ireland," she says. "But as news of the vaccine came out and people became more confident about trips for this year, England popped back up to the top."
  • And there's one big bonus for those traveling to the UK this year --- the tanking pound.
  • The UK made a great play that it was an international and welcoming destination over the 2012 Olympics, but that message was withdrawn with Brexit. The posturing of the government -- especially the threat to put gunboats in the Channel -- didn't play well with a lot of origin markets," he says.
  • "There may be differences with the import of goods and transmission of services that means London isn't as prosperous as it was."
  • "Suddenly, using the UK as gateway to Europe becomes enormously less attractive. Travelers will have to think about whether it's sensible to come to the UK as part of a European destination. They may wish to look at the UK as a single destination, but that isn't nearly as attractive as the UK being part of a European vacation."
  • "The UK won't be ignored, but it's unlikely to recover as strongly as Europe.
  • About 20% of the Intercontinental's staff left the UK before Brexit, says Ouseph; but while in normal times that would be a crisis, he thinks that Covid-induced job losses will mean hotels can fill these positions for now -- at least, the customer-facing ones. Instead, it's the less visible, but crucial roles, where they'll struggle.
  • Not everyone thinks Brexit will make a big difference to the inbound UK travel industry.
  • Maine -- who hasn't run tours since October -- says that he thinks the vaccine "will get us out of it -- it's a matter of when, not if." And he predicts that "when" could be as early as Easter.
  • "Rolling out the vaccine is the acid test of being a coherent holiday destination, and the UK looks like it's doing a reasonably good job in comparison to everyone else."
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Linguistic Relativity: the Impact of Language & Society | THE ELLIPSIS... - 0 views

www.theellipsis.org/the-impact-of-language-society
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  • As English speakers, we experience life in English. Our every thought is formulated with the English terminology available to us. But how might our experience and our thinking be different if our primary language was not English but German or Arabic?
  • It is this very question that has motivated linguists for hundreds of years to grapple with the validity of linguistic relativity
  • When we consider the theory of linguistic relativity, we must take into account that languages develop within and emerge from distinct cultures
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  • Those who subscribe to the theory of linguistic relativity believe that a person’s way of thinking is influenced by the language he or she speaks
  • Language is a result of society. Therefore, language does not deserve the credit for shaping the way we process information.
  • Differences in the thought processes of speakers of different languages should be accredited to the distinct cultures from which these languages emerge.
  • Nevertheless, language is an important factor in the way a culture evolves. Ultimately, although it is our society rather than our language that shapes the way we think, language helps to enforce the way society is.
  • Language cannot be said to be responsible for the way a society functions since language itself is a result of that society. A key example of this can be found in the substance of a language, which tends to reflect the values of its speakers and the culture it comes from
  • A proponent of linguistic relativity might argue that this is an example of language shaping the way people think by defining age as the primary quality to know about a person.
  • However, this assertion fails to recognize the big picture. A more accurate analysis might indicate that society is responsible for this way of thinking, not language.
  • However, language still plays an important role in affecting cultures and social norms. Although languages are reflections of cultures, languages do influence how cultures will look in the future.
  • We can see this phenomenon in the history of the English language, which dates back to sometime between the 5th and 7th century AD, with Modern English gaining prominence in the late 17th century.
  • As we see with English sentence structure, the influence of cultural institutions on a language is often left intact even after that institution has weakened or disappeared.
  • Since language is our only proficient method of communication, what we can communicate is limited to the words and phrases available to us. While the society we live in may limit our perspective, the extent and strength of these limitations do not compare to that which language imposes. Cultural change comes more easily to us than linguistic change.
  • t took centuries for the Great Vowel Shift to occur while the world experienced revolutions, literary movements, great awakenings and deadly plagues at a much faster pace. This pattern is demonstrated in American culture as the language we speak fails to keep up with the progress we make. Patterns in our vocabulary tend to reflect this.
  • A commonly cited phenomenon is the negative and positive associations that English seems to make with “black” and “white.”
  • The limits of language may prevent us from progressing as quickly as we may want to, but we do have the ability to overcome some of these linguistic limits.
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February 2016: 400 Years Ago the Catholic Church Prohibited Copernicanism | Origins: Cu... - 0 views

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shared by caelengrubb on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In February-March 1616, the Catholic Church issued a prohibition against the Copernican theory of the earth’s motion.
  • This led later (1633) to the Inquisition trial and condemnation of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) as a suspected heretic, which generated a controversy that continues to our day.
  • In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. This book elaborated the (geokinetic and heliocentric) idea that the earth rotates daily on its own axis and revolves yearly around the sun
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  • Since antiquity, this idea had been considered but rejected in favor of the traditional (geostatic and geocentric) thesis that the earth stands still at the center of the universe.
  • The objections to the geokinetic and heliocentric idea involved astronomical observations, the physics of motion, biblical passages, and epistemological principles (e.g., the reliability of human senses, which reveal a stationary earth)
  • The Inquisition launched an investigation. Galileo’s writings were evaluated and other witnesses interrogated. The charges against Galileo were unsubstantiated. However, the officials started worrying about the status of heliocentrism and consulted a committee of experts.
  • These discoveries did not conclusively prove Copernicanism, but provided new evidence in its favor and refutations of some old objections.
  • Galileo became more explicit in his pursuit of heliocentrism, and this soon got him into trouble.
  • In February-March 1615, one Dominican friar filed a written complaint against him, and another one testified in person in front of the Roman Inquisition. They accused Galileo of heresy, for believing in the earth’s motion, which contradicted Scripture, e.g., the miracle in Joshua 10:12-13.
  • Copernicus did not really refute these objections, but he elaborated a novel and important astronomical argument. Thus, Copernicanism attracted few followers. At first, Galileo himself was not one of them, although he was interested because his new physics enabled him to answer the mechanical objections.
  • On February 24, 1616, the consultants unanimously reported the assessment that heliocentrism was philosophically (i.e., scientifically) false and theologically heretical or at least erroneous.
  • The following day, the Inquisition, presided by Pope Paul V, considered the case. Although it did not endorse the heresy recommendation, it accepted the judgments of scientific falsity and theological error, and decided to prohibit the theory.
  • the Church was going to declare the idea of the earth’s motion false and contrary to Scripture, and so this theory could not be held or defended. Galileo agreed to comply.
  • Without mentioning Galileo, it publicly declared the earth’s motion false and contrary to Scripture. It prohibited the reading of Copernicus’s Revolutions, and banned a book published in 1615 by Paolo Antonio Foscarini; he had argued that the earth’s motion was probably true, and certainly compatible with Scripture.
  • The 1616 condemnation of Copernicanism was bad enough for the relationship between science and religion, but the problems were compounded by Galileo’s trial 17 years later.
  • Galileo kept quiet until 1623, when a new pope was elected, Urban VIII, who was a great admirer of Galileo.
  • The Inquisition summoned him to Rome, and the trial proceedings lasted from April to June 1633. He was found guilty of suspected heresy, for defending the earth’s motion, and thus denying the authority of Scripture.
  • “Suspected heresy” was not as serious a religious crime as “formal heresy,” and so his punishment was not death by being burned at the stake, but rather house arrest and the banning of the Dialogue.
  • The Church’s condemnation of Copernicanism and Galileo became the iconic illustration of the problematic relationship between science and religion.
  • This controversy will probably not end any time soon. This may be seen from Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, with its focus on climate change. Whatever its merits, it could be criticized for having failed to learn, from the Galileo affair, the lesson that the Church should be wary of interfering in scientific matters.
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Why we believe fake news - BBC Future - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...overloaded-by-the-21st-century
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  • Less commonplace is the acknowledgement that human judgements also rely upon secondary information that doesn’t come from any external source – and that offers one of the most powerful tools we possess for dealing with the deluge itself. This source is social information. Or, in other words: what we think other people are thinking.
  • Your senses inform you that other people are moving frantically. But it’s the social interpretation you put on this information that tells you what you most need to know: these people believe that something bad is happening, and this means you should probably be trying to escape too.
  • Assuming they have no first-hand knowledge of the claim, it’s theoretically possible for them to look it up elsewhere – a process of laborious verification that involves trawling through countless claims and counter-claims. They also, however, possess a far simpler method of evaluation, which is to ask what other people seem to think.
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  • As Hendricks and Hansen put it, “when you don’t possess sufficient information to solve a given problem, or if you just don’t want to or have the time for processing it, then it can be rational to imitate others by way of social proof”
  • When we either know very little about something, or the information surrounding it is overwhelming, it makes excellent sense to look to others’ apparent beliefs as an indication of what is going on. In fact, this is often the most reasonable response, so long as we have good reason to believe that others have access to accurate information; and that what they seem to think and what they actually believe are the same.
  • Networks where members are, for example, randomly exposed to a range of views are less likely to experience cascades of unchallenged belief
  • And the more we understand the chain of events that led someone towards a particular perspective, the more we understand what it might mean to arrive at other views – or, equally importantly, to sow the seeds of sceptical engagement.
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Is there a scientific method? - TOK RESOURCE.ORG - 0 views

www.tokresource.org/method
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  • This unit of inquiry is first on the list in the Areas of Knowledge section for good reason. In its detail and specificity, it provides a benchmark for exploring all the other Areas of Knowledge. Through a series of generative meta-questions this unit allows students to explore and critique sometimes counterintuitive nuances of methodology in the Natural Sciences. 
  • From the TOK teacher perspective, audio selections like this one taken from a TED Radio Hour podcast, provide an interesting alternative to viewing an entire TED talk.  The format is tightly edited and combines interview interactions with relevant extracts from the original TED talk. 
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How Does Science Really Work? | The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...how-does-science-really-work science scientific method history research knowledge culture progress discovery
shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • I wanted to be a scientist. So why did I find the actual work of science so boring? In college science courses, I had occasional bursts of mind-expanding insight. For the most part, though, I was tortured by drudgery.
  • I’d found that science was two-faced: simultaneously thrilling and tedious, all-encompassing and narrow. And yet this was clearly an asset, not a flaw. Something about that combination had changed the world completely.
  • “Science is an alien thought form,” he writes; that’s why so many civilizations rose and fell before it was invented. In his view, we downplay its weirdness, perhaps because its success is so fundamental to our continued existence.
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  • In school, one learns about “the scientific method”—usually a straightforward set of steps, along the lines of “ask a question, propose a hypothesis, perform an experiment, analyze the results.”
  • That method works in the classroom, where students are basically told what questions to pursue. But real scientists must come up with their own questions, finding new routes through a much vaster landscape.
  • Since science began, there has been disagreement about how those routes are charted. Two twentieth-century philosophers of science, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, are widely held to have offered the best accounts of this process.
  • For Popper, Strevens writes, “scientific inquiry is essentially a process of disproof, and scientists are the disprovers, the debunkers, the destroyers.” Kuhn’s scientists, by contrast, are faddish true believers who promulgate received wisdom until they are forced to attempt a “paradigm shift”—a painful rethinking of their basic assumptions.
  • Working scientists tend to prefer Popper to Kuhn. But Strevens thinks that both theorists failed to capture what makes science historically distinctive and singularly effective.
  • Sometimes they seek to falsify theories, sometimes to prove them; sometimes they’re informed by preëxisting or contextual views, and at other times they try to rule narrowly, based on t
  • Why do scientists agree to this scheme? Why do some of the world’s most intelligent people sign on for a lifetime of pipetting?
  • Strevens thinks that they do it because they have no choice. They are constrained by a central regulation that governs science, which he calls the “iron rule of explanation.” The rule is simple: it tells scientists that, “if they are to participate in the scientific enterprise, they must uncover or generate new evidence to argue with”; from there, they must “conduct all disputes with reference to empirical evidence alone.”
  • , it is “the key to science’s success,” because it “channels hope, anger, envy, ambition, resentment—all the fires fuming in the human heart—to one end: the production of empirical evidence.”
  • Strevens arrives at the idea of the iron rule in a Popperian way: by disproving the other theories about how scientific knowledge is created.
  • The problem isn’t that Popper and Kuhn are completely wrong. It’s that scientists, as a group, don’t pursue any single intellectual strategy consistently.
  • Exploring a number of case studies—including the controversies over continental drift, spontaneous generation, and the theory of relativity—Strevens shows scientists exerting themselves intellectually in a variety of ways, as smart, ambitious people usually do.
  • “Science is boring,” Strevens writes. “Readers of popular science see the 1 percent: the intriguing phenomena, the provocative theories, the dramatic experimental refutations or verifications.” But, he says,behind these achievements . . . are long hours, days, months of tedious laboratory labor. The single greatest obstacle to successful science is the difficulty of persuading brilliant minds to give up the intellectual pleasures of continual speculation and debate, theorizing and arguing, and to turn instead to a life consisting almost entirely of the production of experimental data.
  • Ultimately, in fact, it was good that the geologists had a “splendid variety” of somewhat arbitrary opinions: progress in science requires partisans, because only they have “the motivation to perform years or even decades of necessary experimental work.” It’s just that these partisans must channel their energies into empirical observation. The iron rule, Strevens writes, “has a valuable by-product, and that by-product is data.”
  • Science is often described as “self-correcting”: it’s said that bad data and wrong conclusions are rooted out by other scientists, who present contrary findings. But Strevens thinks that the iron rule is often more important than overt correction.
  • Eddington was never really refuted. Other astronomers, driven by the iron rule, were already planning their own studies, and “the great preponderance of the resulting measurements fit Einsteinian physics better than Newtonian physics.” It’s partly by generating data on such a vast scale, Strevens argues, that the iron rule can power science’s knowledge machine: “Opinions converge not because bad data is corrected but because it is swamped.”
  • Why did the iron rule emerge when it did? Strevens takes us back to the Thirty Years’ War, which concluded with the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648. The war weakened religious loyalties and strengthened national ones.
  • Two regimes arose: in the spiritual realm, the will of God held sway, while in the civic one the decrees of the state were paramount. As Isaac Newton wrote, “The laws of God & the laws of man are to be kept distinct.” These new, “nonoverlapping spheres of obligation,” Strevens argues, were what made it possible to imagine the iron rule. The rule simply proposed the creation of a third sphere: in addition to God and state, there would now be science.
  • Strevens imagines how, to someone in Descartes’s time, the iron rule would have seemed “unreasonably closed-minded.” Since ancient Greece, it had been obvious that the best thinking was cross-disciplinary, capable of knitting together “poetry, music, drama, philosophy, democracy, mathematics,” and other elevating human disciplines.
  • We’re still accustomed to the idea that a truly flourishing intellect is a well-rounded one. And, by this standard, Strevens says, the iron rule looks like “an irrational way to inquire into the underlying structure of things”; it seems to demand the upsetting “suppression of human nature.”
  • Descartes, in short, would have had good reasons for resisting a law that narrowed the grounds of disputation, or that encouraged what Strevens describes as “doing rather than thinking.”
  • In fact, the iron rule offered scientists a more supple vision of progress. Before its arrival, intellectual life was conducted in grand gestures.
  • Descartes’s book was meant to be a complete overhaul of what had preceded it; its fate, had science not arisen, would have been replacement by some equally expansive system. The iron rule broke that pattern.
  • by authorizing what Strevens calls “shallow explanation,” the iron rule offered an empirical bridge across a conceptual chasm. Work could continue, and understanding could be acquired on the other side. In this way, shallowness was actually more powerful than depth.
  • it also changed what counted as progress. In the past, a theory about the world was deemed valid when it was complete—when God, light, muscles, plants, and the planets cohered. The iron rule allowed scientists to step away from the quest for completeness.
  • The consequences of this shift would become apparent only with time
  • In 1713, Isaac Newton appended a postscript to the second edition of his “Principia,” the treatise in which he first laid out the three laws of motion and the theory of universal gravitation. “I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses,” he wrote. “It is enough that gravity really exists and acts according to the laws that we have set forth.”
  • What mattered, to Newton and his contemporaries, was his theory’s empirical, predictive power—that it was “sufficient to explain all the motions of the heavenly bodies and of our sea.”
  • Descartes would have found this attitude ridiculous. He had been playing a deep game—trying to explain, at a fundamental level, how the universe fit together. Newton, by those lights, had failed to explain anything: he himself admitted that he had no sense of how gravity did its work
  • Strevens sees its earliest expression in Francis Bacon’s “The New Organon,” a foundational text of the Scientific Revolution, published in 1620. Bacon argued that thinkers must set aside their “idols,” relying, instead, only on evidence they could verify. This dictum gave scientists a new way of responding to one another’s work: gathering data.
  • Quantum theory—which tells us that subatomic particles can be “entangled” across vast distances, and in multiple places at the same time—makes intuitive sense to pretty much nobody.
  • Without the iron rule, Strevens writes, physicists confronted with such a theory would have found themselves at an impasse. They would have argued endlessly about quantum metaphysics.
  • ollowing the iron rule, they can make progress empirically even though they are uncertain conceptually. Individual researchers still passionately disagree about what quantum theory means. But that hasn’t stopped them from using it for practical purposes—computer chips, MRI machines, G.P.S. networks, and other technologies rely on quantum physics.
  • One group of theorists, the rationalists, has argued that science is a new way of thinking, and that the scientist is a new kind of thinker—dispassionate to an uncommon degree.
  • As evidence against this view, another group, the subjectivists, points out that scientists are as hopelessly biased as the rest of us. To this group, the aloofness of science is a smoke screen behind which the inevitable emotions and ideologies hide.
  • At least in science, Strevens tells us, “the appearance of objectivity” has turned out to be “as important as the real thing.”
  • The subjectivists are right, he admits, inasmuch as scientists are regular people with a “need to win” and a “determination to come out on top.”
  • But they are wrong to think that subjectivity compromises the scientific enterprise. On the contrary, once subjectivity is channelled by the iron rule, it becomes a vital component of the knowledge machine. It’s this redirected subjectivity—to come out on top, you must follow the iron rule!—that solves science’s “problem of motivation,” giving scientists no choice but “to pursue a single experiment relentlessly, to the last measurable digit, when that digit might be quite meaningless.”
  • If it really was a speech code that instigated “the extraordinary attention to process and detail that makes science the supreme discriminator and destroyer of false ideas,” then the peculiar rigidity of scientific writing—Strevens describes it as “sterilized”—isn’t a symptom of the scientific mind-set but its cause.
  • The iron rule—“a kind of speech code”—simply created a new way of communicating, and it’s this new way of communicating that created science.
  • Other theorists have explained science by charting a sweeping revolution in the human mind; inevitably, they’ve become mired in a long-running debate about how objective scientists really are
  • In “The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science” (Liveright), Michael Strevens, a philosopher at New York University, aims to identify that special something. Strevens is a philosopher of science
  • Compared with the theories proposed by Popper and Kuhn, Strevens’s rule can feel obvious and underpowered. That’s because it isn’t intellectual but procedural. “The iron rule is focused not on what scientists think,” he writes, “but on what arguments they can make in their official communications.”
  • Like everybody else, scientists view questions through the lenses of taste, personality, affiliation, and experience
  • geologists had a professional obligation to take sides. Europeans, Strevens reports, tended to back Wegener, who was German, while scholars in the United States often preferred Simpson, who was American. Outsiders to the field were often more receptive to the concept of continental drift than established scientists, who considered its incompleteness a fatal flaw.
  • Strevens’s point isn’t that these scientists were doing anything wrong. If they had biases and perspectives, he writes, “that’s how human thinking works.”
  • Eddington’s observations were expected to either confirm or falsify Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which predicted that the sun’s gravity would bend the path of light, subtly shifting the stellar pattern. For reasons having to do with weather and equipment, the evidence collected by Eddington—and by his colleague Frank Dyson, who had taken similar photographs in Sobral, Brazil—was inconclusive; some of their images were blurry, and so failed to resolve the matter definitively.
  • it was only natural for intelligent people who were free of the rule’s strictures to attempt a kind of holistic, systematic inquiry that was, in many ways, more demanding. It never occurred to them to ask if they might illuminate more collectively by thinking about less individually.
  • In the single-sphered, pre-scientific world, thinkers tended to inquire into everything at once. Often, they arrived at conclusions about nature that were fascinating, visionary, and wrong.
  • How Does Science Really Work?Science is objective. Scientists are not. Can an “iron rule” explain how they’ve changed the world anyway?By Joshua RothmanSeptember 28, 2020
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Opinion | Why a Digital Diary Will Change Your Life - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...digital-diary.html diary journal app reflection private
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  • At first, my plan was to do what I always do when I see something halfway noteworthy, which is to tell a few hundred thousand people on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or, in my lowest moments, even LinkedIn.
  • Smartphones and social networks have turned me into a lonely, needy man who requires constant affirmation. In desperate pursuit of such affirmation, my mind has come to resemble one of those stamping-machine assembly lines you see in cartoons, but for shareable content: The raw, analog world in all its glory enters via conveyor belt on one end, and, after some raucous puffs of smoke, it gets flattened and packaged in my head into insipid quips meant to inspire you to tap a tiny heart on a screen.
  • instead of sharing the silly lampshade joke, I journaled it in Day One, a magnificent digital diary app that has transformed my relationship with my phone, improved my memory, and given me a deeper perspective on my life than the one I was getting through the black mirror of social media.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • In recent years, Twitter and much of the rest of the internet have been getting hotter, more reflexively outraged, less fun. Venturing onto social media these days, I often feel like a cat burglar stepping through a field of upturned rakes. I could imagine my dumb joke getting picked apart for all the ways it was problematic — “New York Times writer casually encourages bestial sexual assault! #deertoo” — bringing me ever closer to cancellation.
  • Think of Day One as a private social network for an audience of one: yourself.
  • You post updates to it just as you might on Instagram or Facebook.
  • The app — which runs on Macs, iPhones and iPads, syncing your entries between your devices — can handle long text journals, short picture-focused status updates, and pretty much anything else that comes across the digital transom.
  • I use it to jot down my deepest thoughts and shallowest jokes; to rant and to vent; to come to terms with new ideas I’m playing with, ideas that need time to marinate in secret before they’re ready for the world; and to collect and reflect upon all the weird and crazy and touching artifacts of life
  • It’s unsocial. Indeed, it’s downright antisocial. Nothing about the app is meant to be shared — it is protected with your Apple security credentials and backs up its data to the cloud using end-to-end encryption, so that the only way someone can get into your diary is by getting hold of your device and your system passcode.
  • Day One creates something so rare it feels almost sacred: A completely private digital space.
  • The best way to describe this feeling is to liken it to friendship. I feel comfortable dishing to Day One the way I would to a close friend I trust completely.
  • one of the few digital spaces that provides you mental space for contemplation and consideration
  • journaling has been shown to be good for mind and body, reducing stress and anxiety, improving interpersonal relationships, and promoting creativity
  • a digital journal offers several benefits over paper. Easy accessibility is a big one
  • you can tap out a journal while you’re in line at the supermarket
  • because so much happens on screens now, Day One offers greater fidelity to daily life. Instead of describing the insane conversation I had with my co-worker, I can just post a screenshot.
  • photography, which adds emotional heft to the rigidity of text.
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