Author: Mr. Lakhaney

TOK Teacher

Would you kill baby Hitler?

October 26, 2015

“Imagine for a moment that you discovered a way to travel through time, making it possible for you to ensure either that Hitler never be born, or that if born, he would not live long enough to rise to political power.  Under what circumstances do you think it would be morally justified to kill to prevent the Final Solution (and for those who can’t get past the emotional problem of what it would be like to personally pull the trigger, assume that you could send someone else to perform the deed)?”

https://theosophical.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/would-you-kill-baby-hitler/

Forget ghosts and zombies this Halloween. Americans’ greatest fear is their government.

October 22, 2015

“Fear can impact behavior. The Chapman researchers found that nearly one-quarter of Americans said they’ve voted for a political candidate solely out of fear. Fears also often ebb and flow with the news cycle. Remember the crippling anxiety around the Ebola crisis last year, even though the chance of catching the disease was infinitesimal?”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/10/21/forget-ghosts-and-zombies-this-halloween-americans-greatest-fear-is-their-government/

How Texas Teaches History

October 21, 2015

An interesting article on a familiar topic but this article delves into the use of language to obfuscate historical truth. Below is a passage from the article about some of the phrasing from a textbook commonly used in Texas.

Families were often broken apart when a family member was sold to another owner.

“Note the use of the passive voice in the verbs ‘were broken apart’ and ‘was sold.’ If the sentence had been written according to the principles of good draftsmanship, it would have looked like this: Slave owners often broke slave families apart by selling a family member to another owner. A bit more powerful, no? Through grammatical manipulation, the textbook authors obscure the role of slave owners in the institution of slavery.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/opinion/how-texas-teaches-history.html?_r=0

A User’s Guide to Rational Thinking Cut through flawed assumptions and false beliefs — including your own — with these strategies.

October 20, 2015

“Irrational thinking stems from cognitive biases that strike us all. “People don’t think like scientists; they think like lawyers. They hold the belief they want to believe and then they recruit anything they can to support it,” says Peter Ditto, a psychologist who studies judgment and decision-making at the University of California, Irvine. Motivated reasoning — our tendency to filter facts to support our pre-existing belief systems — is the standard way we process information, Ditto says. “We almost never think about things without some preference in mind or some emotional inclination to want one thing or another. That’s the norm.”

http://discovermagazine.com/2015/july-aug/16-user-guide-rational-thinking

Life Without a Sense of Smell

October 20, 2015

“We don’t think of ourselves as being particularly good smellers, especially compared with other animals. But research shows that smells can have a powerful subconscious influence on human thoughts and behavior. People who can no longer smell — following an accident or illness — report a strong sense of loss, with impacts on their lives they could never have imagined. Perhaps we don’t rank smell very highly among our senses because it’s hard to appreciate what it does for us — until it’s gone.”

http://discovermagazine.com/2015/sept/0-losing-smell

What’s the Color of Your Favorite Song?

October 20, 2015

“Imagine yourself as a graphic designer for New Age musician Enya, tasked with creating her next album cover. Which two or three colors from the grid below do you think would ‘go best’ with her music?

“Would they be the same ones you’d pick for an album cover or music video for the heavy metal band Metallica? Probably not.”

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2015/08/21/color-song/

How To Say “This Is Crap” In Different Cultures

October 20, 2015

“Managers in different parts of the world are conditioned to give feedback in drastically different ways. The Chinese manager learns never to criticize a colleague openly or in front of others, while the Dutch manager learns always to be honest and to give the message straight. Americans are trained to wrap positive messages around negative ones, while the French are trained to criticize passionately and provide positive feedback sparingly.”

https://hbr.org/2014/02/how-to-say-this-is-crap-in-different-cultures/

The Killing of Osama bin Laden

October 20, 2015

This was a really interesting article about the story about Osama bin Laden’s death. This investigative piece contradicts the “official” government account of the events and paints a very troubling picture of how the events unfolded and were subsequently reported on.

This story raises interesting questions about how history is written. What actually happened here? Can we ever really know? Whose accounts and reporting can we trust?

With regards to ethics…was this killing ethical? Was the subsequent potential cover up ethical? What if it saved lives? Protected sources? How do we judge?

With regards to language…do we call this an assassination? A murder? Homicide? Or a justified killing in a larger war? What are the implications of each of these terms?

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

Gamblers, Scientists and the Mysterious Hot Hand

October 20, 2015

“The opposite of that is the hot-hand fallacy — the belief that winning streaks, whether in basketball or coin tossing, have a tendency to continue, as if propelled by their own momentum. Both misconceptions are reflections of the brain’s wired-in rejection of the power that randomness holds over our lives. Look deep enough, we instinctively believe, and we may uncover a hidden order.”