About this site

July 29, 2020

This is a site where I post articles, videos, and various resources relevant to a Theory of Knowledge teacher or student. You can find handouts, activities, and day to day plans on the resources for the TOK class page.

You can find folders for day to day lessons as I’ve taught them there. You can also find a greater variety of ideas and resources if you look at the pages for Areas of Knowledge or Theme.

I have only had the chance to teach Year 1 of the new course one time. I will no longer be teaching Theory of Knowledge so I won’t be updating this site any further.

Take a look at the sites for other course I have taught (but no longer do):

IB Global Politics

American Government

Economics

Please contact me by email if you have any questions.

TOKTopics[at]gmail.com

Americans disagree about what art is: Ceci N’Est Pas Une Pollapalooza

January 29, 2024

What is art? According to the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, the activity of art is “to evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling.” But, according to a new poll, many Americans believe art is just old paintings and sculptures they couldn’t make themselves.

Article link

The limits of our personal experience and the value of statistics

January 29, 2024

It’s tempting to believe that we can simply rely on personal experience to develop our understanding of the world. But that’s a mistake. The world is large, and we can experience only very little of it personally. To see what the world is like, we need to rely on other means: carefully-collected global statistics.

https://ourworldindata.org/limits-personal-experience

Beethoven vs. Baby Shark: Is good art better than bad art?

December 10, 2023

A very thoughtful and thorough discussion of an important question. Many You might hypothesize that the Beethoven fans get more enjoyment per listen than the Baby Shark fans. But this really isn’t obvious; children can get quite excited about Baby Shark. Anyway, even if that’s true, it’s unlikely to outweigh the huge advantage that Baby Shark has in terms of sheer volume.

https://fakenous.substack.com/p/beethoven-vs-baby-shark?

Nick Cave on AI generated art

April 19, 2023

Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.

https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chat-gpt-what-do-you-think/

“Why I Look at Data Differently” by Emily Oster

March 24, 2023

A really thorough and easy to read discussion about the nature of data collection and different types of studies and the nature of the conclusions we can draw from them. Really useful for discussions in the Human or Natural Sciences. She covers the concept of data broadly but supports with many different examples include breastfeeding and IQ.

The question of whether a controlled effect in observational data is “causal” is inherently unanswerable. We are worried about differences between people that we cannot observe in the data. We can’t see them, so we must speculate about whether they are there. Based on a couple of decades of working intensely on these questions in both my research and my popular writing, I think they are almost always there. I think they are almost always important, and that a huge share of the correlations we see in observational data are not close to causal.

https://www.parentdata.org/p/why-i-look-at-data-differently

On the differences between western and indigenous sciences

February 21, 2023

One of the powers of Western science that has brought us so much understanding and benefit is this separation of the observer and the observed; to say that we could be rational and objective and empirically know the truth of the world. Absolutely, but there are lots of truths. I like to say that there are multiple ways of knowing, and we could benefit by engaging more of them. I do recognize the slippery-slope argument, because people have said to me, Does that mean that you think that creation science is valid science? No, I don’t, because it is not empirically validatable. But sometimes what we call conventional Western science is in fact scientism. Scientism being this notion that Western science is the only way to truth. It’s a powerful way to truth, but there are other ways, too. Traditional ecological knowledge, Indigenous science, is a more holistic way of knowing. In Western science, for often very good reasons, we separate our values and our knowledge. In Indigenous science, knowledge and values are always coupled. It’s an ethically driven science.

Article Link

The rise and fall of peer review

January 2, 2023

Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that’s a great thing

For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.

The results are in. It failed.

https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review?

The internet wants to be fragmented: Throwing the whole world into a single room together doesn’t work.

January 2, 2023
Centralized social media, as Jack Dorsey wrote, was a grand experiment in collective global human consciousness. It was a modern-day Tower of Babel, the Human Instrumentality project from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Yes it was a way to make some people rich, but it was also an experiment in uniting the human race. Perhaps if we could all just get in one room and talk to each other, if we could just get rid of our echo chambers and our filter bubbles, we would eventually reach agreement, and the old world of war and hate and misunderstanding would melt into memory.

That experiment failed. Humanity does not want to be a global hive mind. We are not rational Bayesian updaters who will eventually reach agreement; when we receive the same information, it tends to polarize us rather than unite us. Getting screamed at and insulted by people who disagree with you doesn’t take you out of your filter bubble — it makes you retreat back inside your bubble and reject the ideas of whoever is screaming at you. No one ever changed their mind from being dunked on; instead they all just doubled down and dunked harder. The hatred and toxicity of Twitter at times felt like the dying screams of human individuality, being crushed to death by the hive mind’s constant demands for us to agree with more people than we ever evolved to agree with.

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-fragmented

Cautionary Conversation: Flying on Empty (Followed by a great conversation on the utility and danger of relying on math)

January 2, 2023

Great podcast episode discussing how disasters can happen when we get the math wrong. This particular story is about unit conversions but is followed by a great conversation about the nature of math.

“A metre is longer than a yard. An ounce is heavier than a gram. We harmlessly mix them up sometimes, but a “unit conversion error” when you’re filling up the fuel tanks of an airliner can be fatal. Which is exactly what happened to Air Canada Flight 143.”

The episode itself is fascinating but the conversation with the author upon whose work this story was based is equally fascinating. Below is a quote from that conversation that explains some of the utility and dangers of math.

“The underlying issue is that as humans we’re not naturally good at mathematics…the human brain doesn’t do maths natively…because we have maths we can do so much more than our brains could do intuitively. We don’t have to make a building by eyeballing it and superoverengineering it, we can do the mathematics and figure out exactly what we need and how it is going to work. Using maths we can do far more than the human brain was ever designed to do. The cost, however, is that we can we are beyond our intuition and have to do the maths and do it very carefully.”

I have the link below queued to the section quoted above.

https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/cautionary-conversation-flying-on-empty/embed?t=27m59s

Full episode linked below

Six Lyrics That Show Why ‘Hamilton’ Is Tough to Translate

September 14, 2022

The original “Hamilton” score includes a number of quotations from American hip-hop songs. Most of them were cut from the German version because the translations made them unrecognizable…The original language is packed with American metaphors and idioms that just don’t translate. So the translators were given license to come up with their own turns of phrase.