Author: Mr. Lakhaney

TOK Teacher

The Politics of Bangladesh’s Genocide Debate

April 6, 2016

What does this article tell us about the role of history in creating a national identify? What does this tell us about how current circumstances shape our perceptions of the past?

Is it ever ethical to censor scholarship or the media? What if the three million figure was accurate? Inaccurate?

Is it ethical to make illegal debates and scholarship questioning the death toll of the Holocaust (it is illegal in much of Europe but not in the United States)?

“Where does the truth about the numbers lie? The three million figure was popularized by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the leader of the Awami League in 1971, the country’s first president and the father of the current prime minister. Mujib, as he is popularly known, is a revered figure, particularly within the Awami League. But his biographer, Sayyid A. Karim, who was also Sheikh Rahman’s first foreign secretary, viewed the number as ‘a gross exaggeration.'”

“For others, however, questions are necessary on this and other aspects of the 1971 war, including the widespread killings of members of the Bihari ethnic group, who supported the Pakistanis during the conflict, by Bengali nationalists. We should question this because nationalist narratives about the past often serve contemporary political interests, and we should beware of an orthodoxy being used to silence dissent.”

Is Voting Out of Self-Interest Wrong?

April 4, 2016

“Some philosophers argue that self-interested voting is always wrong and that we should vote instead for what we see as best for society as a whole (the “common good”). There may be cases where my self-interest happens to coincide with the common good. A tax cut or a minimum wage from which I profit may be good for the economy as a whole. But it’s naïve to think that’s true of every tax deduction and credit that serves a personal or corporate self-interest. It’s tempting, therefore, to think that I’m wrong to vote my self-interest when it’s opposed to the common good.”

The Go-playing program captures elements of human intuition, an advance that promises far-reaching consequences.

March 29, 2016

Is AlphaGo Really Such a Big Deal?

“This ability to replicate intuitive pattern recognition is a big deal. It’s also part of a broader trend. In an earlier paper, the same organization that built AlphaGo — Google DeepMind — built a neural network that learned to play 49 classic Atari 2600 video games, in many cases reaching a level that human experts couldn’t match. The conservative approach to solving this problem with a computer would be in the style of Deep Blue: A human programmer would analyze each game and figure out detailed control strategies for playing it.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160329-why-alphago-is-really-such-a-big-deal/

Some women are born with hyper-sensitive eyes that can see the world in ways most of us cannot even imagine. What’s it like to live with this gift?

March 29, 2016

“Some women, however, are “tetrachromat”. Thanks to two different mutations on each of the X chromosomes, they have four cones – increasing the combination of colours they should be able to see. The mutation isn’t very rare (estimates of the prevalence vary and depend on your heritage, but it could be as high as 47% among women of European descent), but scientists struggled to find someone who reliably demonstrated enhanced perception.”

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160316-i-can-see-colours-you-cannot-perceive-or-imagine?ocid=gnl.ppc.sponsored-post.facebook..KeyWee_March_US&kwp_0=122626&kwp_4=568355&kwp_1=298926

Overreacting to Terrorism?

March 29, 2016

“The basic problem is this: The human brain evolved so that we systematically misjudge risks and how to respond to them. Our visceral fear of terrorism has repeatedly led us to adopt policies that are expensive and counterproductive, such as the invasion of Iraq.”

In N.F.L., Deeply Flawed Concussion Research and Ties to Big Tobacco

March 24, 2016

This article connects to some interesting TOK issues. Clearly we can discuss the ethics, or lack of ethics, in the NFL’s manipulation of data to disprove conclusions that undermine its business.

This also illustrates how math can help us understand and possibly prove complex issues like the connection between football and health issues like concussions and CTE.  Rather than observing or intuiting a causal relationship between two phenomenon, we have to use math along with the methods of proof in the natural sciences to establish truth and construct knowledge. By misrepresenting data, one might reach incorrect conclusions, which seems to have been the case here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/sports/football/nfl-concussion-research-tobacco.html

A second article about how flawed data undermines our ability to construct knowledge.

“Researchers primed to believe that the NFL has concussions under control, a data set that’s missing important information, and publication in a journal edited by a consultant to the NFL — it looks more like an attempt to create evidence for a predetermined message than good science. But even if we throw out these studies, we can’t yet conclude that football inevitably leads to lasting brain damage.”

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-nfls-shoddy-science-means-we-know-even-less-about-concussions/

Should Parents of Children With Severe Disabilities Be Allowed to Stop Their Growth?

March 22, 2016

“Caring for people with severe mental and physical limitations becomes vastly harder as they get older. Some parents believe medically stunting them is the answer — but is it ethical?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/magazine/should-parents-of-severely-disabled-children-be-allowed-to-stop-their-growth.html?_r=0

 

Human cycles: History as science Advocates of ‘cliodynamics’ say that they can use scientific methods to illuminate the past. But historians are not so sure.

March 20, 2016

“What is new about cliodynamics isn’t the search for patterns, Turchin explains. Historians have done valuable work correlating phenomena such as political instability with political, economic and demographic variables. What is different is the scale — Turchin and his colleagues are systematically collecting historical data that span centuries or even millennia — and the mathematical analysis of how the variables interact.”

http://www.nature.com/news/human-cycles-history-as-science-1.11078