Brain Greene explains why science matters:
Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.
The interesting outcome of Pizarro’s study shows that people’s memory of facts can be distorted by changing details about an individual’s character. If the subjects thought Frank was a good guy, they remembered the bill at being $55; if they thought he is a bad guy, they remember the bill was $65.
David Sloan Wilson on designing the Humanities Initiative, a course conceived to cross the cultural chasm between the sciences and the humanities, bringing together the strengths of both mindsets to issues in evolutionary biology, and to avoid romanticizing science or presenting it as the ultimate arbiter of meaning:
You can study music, dance, narrative storytelling and artmaking scientifically, and you can conclude that yes, they’re deeply biologically driven, they’re essential to our species, but there would still be something missing, and that thing is an appreciation for the work itself, a true understanding of its meaning in its culture and context.
The neurological underpinnings surrounding the therapeutic benefits of expressive writing are not clear. What is clear is that people coping with cancer diagnoses and other serious conditions are increasingly seeking–and finding–solace in the blogosphere.
Some brains do deteriorate with age. But for most aging adults, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention and sifting through a clutter of information that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact like a name or a phone number. This is a good thing.; it may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.
Pat Shipman explores the ironic legacy of Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene (1976): “The benefit to science of ‘The Selfish Gene’ in triggering a new understanding of the magnificent complexity of evolutionary processes must be weighed against the harm the book has done in provoking a backlash against science.
David Brooks explains that economic change is not the product of globalization, but rather a skills revolution in the Cognitive Age:
The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches — the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived?
Carefully structured training in working memory based on a variation of the Concentration card game leads to improvements in fluid intelligence–the kind of mental ability that lets us solve new problems without having any previous experience, and that had been widely believed to be an imutable trait.
While the dominant trope about public intellectuals is that they ain’t what they used to be, Daniel Drezner is relatively bullish:
Over time the academization of intellectual output created barriers to the flourishing of public intellectuals. The proliferation of blogs reverses that trend in several ways. Weblogs have facilitated the rise of a new class of non-academic intellectuals….For academics aspiring to be public intellectuals, weblogs allow networks to develop that cross the disciplinary and hierarchical strictures of the academy – and expand beyond the academy.
People can vastly overestimate their ability to communicate unambiguously by email. We find it hard to take another person’s perspective when communicating electronically. Even worse, our recipients tend to interpret emails more negatively than other forms of communication, making them even more likely to respond aggressively.
Realizing an authentic life can be painful, exhausting, seemingly impossible, and one of our deepest psychological needs. Psychotherapist and former monk Thomas Moore on the role that failures in play understanding self: “People carry around a heavy burden of not feeling authentic because they have failed marriages and their work life hasn’t gone the way it should, and they’ve disappointed everybody, including themselves. When people think of these as just failures, as opposed to learning experiences, they don’t have to feel the weight of their lives or the choices they’ve made. That disowning creates a division that becomes the sense of inauthenticity.”
Steven Pinker dismisses “dignity” as a basis for bioethics discussions in biomedical research, which US conservatives and religious leaders are invoking to dismiss potentially life-saving medical advances. Unfortunately “overweening hubris” characterizes most formal discussions of real revolutions:
In every age, prophets foresee dystopias that never materialize, while failing to anticipate the real revolutions. Had there been a President’s Council on Cyberethics in the 1960s, no doubt it would have decried the threat of the Internet, since it would inexorably lead to 1984, or to computers “taking over” like HAL in 2001. Conservative bioethicists presume to soothsay the outcome of the quintessentially unpredictable endeavor called scientific research. And they would stage-manage the kinds of social change that, in a free society, only emerge as hundreds of millions of people weigh the costs and benefits of new developments for themselves, adjusting their mores and dealing with specific harms as they arise, as they did with in vitro fertilization and the Internet.
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein articulate an approach to designing social and economic policies that incorporates an understanding of people’s cognitive limitations: policy makers should nudge people into making good decisions.
Why can’t we stick to our goals like “I will lose weight” or “I plan to finish this article before the deadline. “Nice thoughts, but not formulated in terms that your ancestral, reflexive brain might understand,” says psychologist Gary Marcus. The work around? “Translate those abstract goals into a form your ancestral systems–which traffic largely in dumb reflexes–can understand: if-then. If you find yourself in a particular situation, then take a specific action.”
The spacing effect posits that the best time to study something is at the moment you are about to forget it–an insight that is useless in the real world, until Piotr Wozniak introduced SuperMemo.
Chris Taylor calls “desk updates” the travel guidebook industry’s “dirty secret.” “In times past, the only way to research a guidebook was to actually go there—the alternative, plagiarising another guidebook, was, and still is, difficult to cover up. Today, you can sit at home and Google the town you might otherwise be exploring on foot, and hopefully some random blogger has done the legwork for you.” But the dirty part is not the fact that they stayed at home, it is the misrepresentation of the source of their expertise and the betrayal of their readers’ trust. They should learn from the best bloggers: write everywhere (including from home), borrow from everyone, give credit where it’s due, and add value to the conversation from your own genuine experiences.
Natalie Angier explains biobigotry: “If you have two important birds from the same region of Latin America, said Mr. Fraser [psychological conservationalist], one a hyacinth macaw that looks like flying jewelry and can vocalize like a human, the other a storm petrel that is brown, squawky and cakes the coastline with guano, guess which face ends up on the next fund-raising calendar.”
Classical game theory predicts that people inevitably act in their self-interest, leading to “Nash equilibrium.” Team reasoning theory suggests individual self-interest is not always foremost in the way people act as they will act in the best interest of their “team.” A recent study suggests that the latter is a better predictor of decision-making.
