“We altered four images from recent political history, took a fifth out of context, and mixed them with three unadulterated scenes. We wanted to test the power of photographic editing to warp people’s memories.”
“But just having a strange and powerful experience doesn’t determine what you believe. I walked off that train with a new respect for why people believed in magic, not a new understanding of reality. Sometimes people have remarkable experiences, and then tuck them away as events they can’t explain.”
“Research shows the appeal of untestable beliefs, and how it leads to a polarized society
“As public debate rages about issues like immunization, Obamacare, and same-sex marriage, many people try to use science to bolster their arguments. And since it’s becoming easier to test and establish facts—whether in physics, psychology, or policy—many have wondered why bias and polarization have not been defeated. When people are confronted with facts, such as the well-established safety of immunization, why do these facts seem to have so little effect?”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-people-fly-from-facts/?WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20150303
“A psychology professor argues that the brain’s greatest attribute is knowing what other people are thinking. And that a Queen song, played backwards, can improve your mind-reading skills.”
“‘Another One Bites the Dust‘ — when played backward — contains a secret message that, in the end, may help people communicate better.”
http://freakonomics.com/2014/03/13/its-fun-to-smoke-marijuana-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/
On the same topic, here’s a compilation of songs along with lyrics played forward and then backwards with the alleged secret messages.
If you watch the video, try not to watch the words on the video when listening backwards and decide what you think the “secret” message is. It seems only to be “clear” when you see the words on the screen and are otherwise unintelligible.
“Critical thinkers have a passionate drive for clarity, precision, accuracy, relevance, consistency, logicalness, completeness, and fairness.
“Uncritical thinkers pretend they know more than they do and ignore their limitations.”
How do you see yourself?
http://learn.roguecc.edu/developmental/rjiron/sk41/crituncrit.pdf
“Universal intellectual standards are standards which must be applied to thinking whenever one is interested in checking the quality of reasoning about a problem, issue, or situation. To think critically entails having command of these standards. To help students learn them, teachers should pose questions which probe student thinking; questions which hold students accountable for their thinking; questions which, through consistent use by the teacher in the classroom, become internalized by students as questions they need to ask themselves.”
http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/universal-intellectual-standards/527
“Rarely does anyone weigh facts before deciding what to believe.”
“At TEDGlobal 2010, author Matt Ridley shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. It’s not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is.”
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