Scientists show how we start stereotyping the moment we see a face
June 25, 2016
‘The moment we actually glimpse another person … [stereotypes] are biasing that processing in a way that conforms to our already existing expectations’
Author: Mr. Lakhaney
TOK Teacher
The Violence of Forgetting
June 25, 2016
“The warning signs from history are all too clear. Failure to learn from the past has disastrous political consequences. Such ignorance is not simply about the absence of information. It has its own political and pedagogical categories whose formative cultures threaten both critical agency and democracy itself.”
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/opinion/the-violence-of-forgetting.html
Mass Shooting or Terrorist Attack? Depends on Your Party
June 25, 2016
Sorry, There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast
May 23, 2016
“Good reviews of all the observational research note the methodological flaws in this domain, as well as the problems of combining the results of publication-bias-influenced studies into a meta-analysis. The associations should be viewed with skepticism and confirmed with prospective trials.
“Few randomized controlled trials exist. Those that do, although methodologically weak like most nutrition studies, don’t support the necessity of breakfast.”
This article raises some interesting points about what is “good science” and also raises the issue of how hard it is to “know” things when it comes to nutrition. Though not the main focus, the article also touches upon whether the funding source of a study affects the conclusion and how ethical it is to fund a self serving study.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/upshot/sorry-theres-nothing-magical-about-breakfast.html?_r=0
Stop Saying ‘I Feel Like’
May 2, 2016
“The imperfect data that linguists have collected indicates that ‘I feel like’ became more common toward the end of the last century. In North American English, it seems to have become a synonym for “I think” or “I believe” only in the last decade or so. Languages constantly evolve, and curmudgeons like me are always taking umbrage at some new idiom. But make no mistake: “I feel like” is not a harmless tic. George Orwell put the point simply: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” The phrase says a great deal about our muddled ideas about reason, emotion and argument — a muddle that has political consequences.
“Natasha Pangarkar, a senior at Williams College, hears “I feel like” “in the classroom on a daily basis,” she said. “When you use the phrase ‘I feel like,’ it gives you an out. You’re not stating a fact so much as giving an opinion,” she told me. “It’s an effort to make our ideas more palatable to the other person.'”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/opinion/sunday/stop-saying-i-feel-like.html
In new Egyptian textbooks, ‘it’s like the revolution didn’t happen’
April 29, 2016
“Since Egypt’s 1952 revolution, when a group of army officers overthrew the monarchy, the public education system has been an extension of the government. Textbooks and curriculums offered pro-government narratives, conveniently omitting facts or tweaking the truth. But now, the politicization in the schools has reached new heights, marked by efforts to erase or play down opponents’ contributions to history.”
The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality
April 29, 2016
“The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman uses evolutionary game theory to show that our perceptions of an independent reality must be illusions.”
“As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions — sights, sounds, textures, tastes — are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it — or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion — we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/
Tweaking Genes to Save Species
April 18, 2016
Should humans intentionally try to kill of a species? What if this tactic resulted in the complete extinction of these mosquitos? What if this extinction resulted in saving human lives?
“BIOTECHNOLOGISTS have engineered the mosquito that spreads the Zika virus to pass a lethal gene to its offspring. Another team of researchers has devised a way to spread sterility through the mosquito population, using a technique called gene drive to wipe out the offending insects.
“If regulators approve this genetic tinkering, these insects could become a powerful weapon against the spread of mosquito-borne diseases to humans. But bugs like these, and the techniques used to create them, might have another role to play: helping to protect the earth’s biodiversity.”
Another article on the same topic.
https://www.statnews.com/2016/02/03/zika-gene-drive-gene-editing/
What If We Just Gave Poor People a Basic Income for Life? That’s What We’re About to Test.
April 18, 2016
“By ‘rigorous’ we mean a few things. First, the test must be experimental, so that we generate unbiased and transparent estimates of impact. Second, the guarantee must be a long-term commitment. We already know quite a bit about the beneficial effects of giving people money for a few years; the key question is how the knowledge that your livelihood is secured for more than a decade affects your behavior now. Do you take more risk? Get more schooling? Look for a better job? Third, the guarantee needs to be universal within well-defined communities, since the goal is as much to understand social dynamics as individual behaviors. While various other basic income pilots have been conducted in the past, none so far have met all three of these criteria.”
The New Case for Hunting Hunters, tree-huggers, and animal welfare advocates should be allies.
April 14, 2016
“In the absence of people, nature would establish its own balance among species. But having shaped (and disrupted) the natural environment so extensively, humans can’t very well wash their hands of responsibility for what happens when certain species over-expand. Hunting is one way to keep wildlife numbers in check, for the good of people, plants, land and other animals.”
http://reason.com/archives/2013/12/05/the-new-case-for-hunting
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