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Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • reason may have more to do with winning arguments than with thinking straight.
    • Adam Clark
       
      Sums up one of the main points of the article right here.
  • Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”
    • Adam Clark
       
      Impressions or beliefs remain even in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary. Sounds like confirmation bias to me.
  • Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,”
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • reason is an evolved trait
  • 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.”
    • Adam Clark
       
      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.
    • Adam Clark
       
      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,
    • Adam Clark
       
      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
    • Adam Clark
       
      This connects to the "methodology" of the Natural Sciences very clearly.
  • the system
    • Adam Clark
       
      aka Area of Knowledge
  • They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs.
    • Adam Clark
       
      The dopamine, however, functions to reward adaptive behaviors so is not the ultimate aim in and of itself.
  • Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it.
  • emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science
  • figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”
  • Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown, and Philip Fernbach, a professor at the
    • Adam Clark
       
      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.
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Biggest run-on sentence ever? This man wrote a 52,438-word dissertation without punctua... - 0 views

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    But this wacky stunt performed on Stewart's 'Indigenous Architecture through Indigenous Knowledge' dissertation was all done for a reason. It was designed to raise awareness about the 'blind acceptance of English language conventions in academia' and to also make a statement about Aboriginal culture and colonialism.
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23 Charming Illustrations Of Untranslatable Words From Other Languages - 0 views

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    "Illustrator Anjana Iyer created these lovely designs for her 100 Days Project. She's accepting commissions, and on the strength of this she must get a lot… "
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15 Unique Illnesses You Can Only Come Down With in German | Mental Floss - 1 views

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    "The German language is so perfectly suited for these syndromes, coming down with them in any other language just won't do."
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Je Suis Ahmed | - 1 views

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    "I posted about the attack on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo on Facebook and offered my condolences to the victims and their families. I spent the next 24 hours moderating comments, at first arguing with people who were quoting the Qur'an, then wholesale deleting comments and banning users. Most of them were trolling the trending topic and commenting on my page for the first time. There seems to be a small army of hate-filled anti-Islam racists ready and eager to turn this tragedy into their personal platform for why all Muslims should be (take your pick): shipped back home, eradicated, banned from immigrating or stripped of their religion. "
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Charlie Hebdo cartoons: The anti-clerical newspaper tradition that's as French as Champ... - 0 views

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    "the phrase #JeSuisCharlie-"I am Charlie"-was soon adopted worldwide by individuals and organizations eager to stand in solidarity with the magazine. But before we were all Charlie Hebdo, before Charlie Hebdo was a symbol of free speech and editorial courage, Charlie Hebdo was, for many, a symbol of Islamophobia, its cartoon depictions of the prophet Mohammed less an exercise in political courage than a gratuitous provocation of a marginalized religious group that has long been made to feel unwelcome in France. This is worth remembering, even now, even if, like me, you don't agree with the charges. Missing in much of the coverage of the events of the past few days is a sense of the demographic context in which they occurred. "We're talking about a country with 6 million Muslims, the biggest population in Europe, where Muslims experience all sorts of discriminations on a day-to-day basis," the French-Algerian journalist Nabila Ramdani told Sky News in 2011. "Many view [the Charlie Hebdo cartoons] as pure racism dressed up as satire.""
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Unmournable Bodies - The New Yorker - 0 views

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    "A northern-Italian miller in the sixteenth century, known as Menocchio, literate but not a member of the literary élite, held a number of unconventional theological beliefs. He believed that the soul died with the body, that the world was created out of a chaotic substance, not ex nihilo, and that it was more important to love one's neighbor than to love God. He found eccentric justification for these beliefs in the few books he read, among them the Decameron, the Bible, the Koran, and "The Travels of Sir John Mandeville," all in translation. For his pains, Menocchio was dragged before the Inquisition several times, tortured, and, in 1599, burned at the stake. He was one of thousands who met such a fate."
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Joe Sacco: On Satire - a response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks | World news | theguardi... - 0 views

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    "The acclaimed graphic artist and journalist Joe Sacco on the limits of satire - and what it means if Muslims don't find it funny"
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I Am Not Charlie Hebdo - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    "The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let's face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn't have lasted 30 seconds. Student and faculty groups would have accused them of hate speech. The administration would have cut financing and shut them down. Public reaction to the attack in Paris has revealed that there are a lot of people who are quick to lionize those who offend the views of Islamist terrorists in France but who are a lot less tolerant toward those who offend their own views at home."
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Why I am not Charlie | a paper bird - 0 views

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    "There is no "but" about what happened at Charlie Hebdo yesterday. Some people published some cartoons, and some other people killed them for it.  Words and pictures can be beautiful or vile, pleasing or enraging, inspiring or offensive; but they exist on a different plane from physical violence, whether you want to call that plane spirit or imagination or culture, and to meet them with violence is an offense against the spirit and imagination and culture that distinguish humans. Nothing mitigates this monstrosity. There will be time to analyze why the killers did it, time to parse their backgrounds, their ideologies, their beliefs, time for sociologists and psychologists to add to understanding. There will be explanations, and the explanations will be important, but explanations aren't the same as excuses. Words don't kill, they must not be met by killing, and they will not make the killers' culpability go away."
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Capturing the faces and feelings of Paris - CNN Video - 0 views

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    "Paris-based photojournalist Peter Turnley reflects on photographing the city's reaction to recent terrorist attacks."
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Mehdi Hasan - Islam Is A Peaceful Religion Debate In Oxford University - YouTube - 0 views

shared by Adam Clark on 13 Jan 15 - No Cached
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    "Mehdi Hasan - Islam Is A Peaceful Religion Debate In Oxford University"
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BBC News - Charlie Hebdo attack: Three days of terror - 0 views

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    "France is emerging from one of its worst security crises in decades after three days of attacks by gunmen brought bloodshed to the capital Paris and its surrounding areas. It began with a massacre at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday 7 January and ended with a huge police operation and two sieges two days later. Here is what we know about how events unfolded"
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Mehdi Hasan - Islam Is A Peaceful Religion Debate In Oxford University - YouTube - 0 views

shared by Adam Clark on 13 Jan 15 - No Cached
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    "Mehdi Hasan - Islam Is A Peaceful Religion Debate In Oxford University"
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Global Language Network - 0 views

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    "In the Global Language Network (GLN) each node represents a language and links connect languages that are likely to be co-spoken. In the example above, languages are connected according to the frequency of book translations. Node sizes represent the number of native and non-native speakers of a language and edge thickness represents the number of translations from one language to another"
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