"Speaking to the BBC, he said that the telling of fairytales had pros and cons. "On the one hand you might expect it would inculcate supernaturalism as real." But at the same time it might have a "beneficial effect" as the child learns there are stories which are not true and which one grows out of.
"A degree of magical content supports imaginative development," says Prof Yvonne Kelly of University College London, "and the transmission of the story is important as it creates intimacy, routine and a bonding experience.
"Children who listen to stories show better results in measures such as literacy tests and SATs - but also in terms of social and emotional development.""
"Scientists and biotechnology companies are developing what could become the next powerful weapon in the war on pests - one that harnesses a Nobel Prize-winning discovery to kill insects and pathogens by disabling their genes."
"Epistemology is the study of the nature, source, limits, and validity of knowledge. It is especially interested in developing criteria for evaluating claims people make that they "know" something. In particular, it considers questions such as: What is knowledge? What is the difference between knowledge and opinion or belief? If you know something, does that mean that you are certain about it? Is knowledge really possible?"
"Does handwriting matter?
Not very much, according to many educators. The Common Core standards, which have been adopted in most states, call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, the emphasis quickly shifts to proficiency on the keyboard.
But psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep."
Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? And can learning new ways to talk change how you think? Stanford psychologist Lera Boroditsky examines these questions and more in this insightful look at the developing field of cognitive linguistics.
Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.
If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias.
The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.”
Here the counter-argument couched in evolutionary psych about its adaptive function - hypersociability.
Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.
reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group.
“This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.
Environment changed too quickly for our evolutionary progress to keep up.
People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people.
“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.
When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.
it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain
If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless.
We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together,
This is the opposite side to doubting our group members, once we trust them, we can be somewhat blind in our trust.
This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous,
If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views.
In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for myside bia
This is where the second section begins, arguing that our evolutionary emphasis on social collaboration also operates to short-circuit or undermine the effectiveness of reason as a WOK.