Experts cannot even agree whether it is an alphabet, a syllabary, a mnemonic, or a rebus.

With the vacuum of verifiable information that the government has created on the matter, and all the rumor and speculation, one's truth compass begins to spin with reckless abandon as you dig into these issues.

Art is always done within the constraints of a box.

But with the temptation of mistaking the familiar for the superior still etched into the mind, it is not beyond the human species to go to war over which country’s people carry out the most noble acts of random kindness.

You can’t reason people out of a stance they weren’t reasoned into in the first place.

Nationalism is a product of human cognition, so cognition should be able to dismantle it, too.

At every turn, humans make automatic, value-laden judgments about social groups.

 but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them.

The attribution is empirically unconstrained.

Loosely speaking, behaviorism is an attitude -- a way of conceiving of empirical constraints on psychological state attribution. Strictly speaking, behaviorism is a doctrine -- a way of doing psychological science itself.

But is the classroom really where most of the serious learning occurs?

You prototype and iterate

“game atoms,”

. Vision is not generally held by committees, and it has to be someone’s job to hold the vision.

hey are therefore a bit of a visual artist, a bit of a programmer, a bit of a logician and a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a psychologist and a bit of a manipulator.

Programmers are irrelevant to computer game design.

Explain why they disliked a film without being in the slightest capable of making one.

It is absorbed by the intuition, not by the mind, and it is learned by doing. It is not taught.

e. An artist’s name, or brand name, or company’s name, are only as good as their product.

”how did he do that?”

There is no area of human endeavor which lacks antecedents

there are no arts that are not also crafts.

“The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games.”

To explain the mind, we have to show how minds are built from mindless stuff, from parts that are much smaller and simpler than anything we'd consider smart.

How can intelligence emerge from nonintelligence?

Information is interpreted more easily and more uniformly if it is placed where most readers expect to find it.

ince we read from left to right, we prefer the context on the left, where it can more effectively familiarize the reade

But, more significantly, the structure of the second table provides the reader with an easily perceived context (time) in which the significant piece of information (temperature) can be interpreted.

Why do people with “die-hard opinions” not know what they are talking about? Are the “experts” always right?

issues should be depoliticized as much as is feasible

Intellectuals

But Pinker largely fails to deal with the inconvenient fact that, at the time, it was not so obviously bad science.

An average person of 1910, if he or she had entered a time machine and materialized today, would be borderline retarded by our standards.”

inequality matters less than actual levels of income and comfort

The Better Angels of Our Nature

ffspring were larger when their mother first mated with a male that had been well fed as a maggot, even if this male was not their father.

distinction between genetic and nongenetic variation

“Instead, you’re expected to find some small problem, like students don’t understand historical chronology, so you might add a reading to address that. You’re supposed to make something up every semester, then write up a narrative”

Faced with outrage over the high cost of higher education, universities responded by encouraging expensive administrative bloat.

It was politically convenient to hold universities accountable for all this, rather than to scrutinize neoliberal austerity measures.

“It has forced academic departments to use data that’s not very good,” he added. “And the process of getting this data that’s not very good can be very painful.”

On many campuses, professors must include a list of skills-based “learning outcomes” on every syllabus and assess them throughout the semester.

But the ballooning assessment industry — including the tech companies and consulting firms that profit from assessment — is a symptom of higher education’s crisis, not a solution to it.

quantifiable data that reveal what skills students are learning.

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens (2011)

We lost our exclusive position in the animal kingdom, not because we overestimated ourselves, but because we underestimated our cousins.

digestive trac

If the custom emerged this early, it could explain a defining feature of our species: the increase in brain size that occurred around this time.

modern humans are biologically dependent on cooking.

Newton saw religious and philosophical truth as two almost wholly distinct entities, each to be pursued with its own methodology and rhetorical strategy

But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.

“Why don’t you American in- tellectuals ever get to them; talk to them?”

He is certainly an intellectual, but an intellectual smelling slightly of cow barns and damp tweeds.

Mr. G will never be a Nazi, because he will never be anything. His brain operates quite apart from the rest of his apparatus. He will certainly be able, however, fully to explain and apologize for Nazism if it ever comes along.

She will titillate with pleased excitement to the first popular hero who proclaims the basic subordination of women.

Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal—a murderer. But he is subtle and cruel.

He was a poor white-trash

Although he has no money, his unostentatious distinction and education have always assured him a position. He has never been engaged in sharp competition. He is a free man. I doubt whether ever in his life he has done anything he did not want to do or anything that was against his code. Nazism wouldn’t fit in with his standards and he has never become accustomed to making concessions.

He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.

And our brains – only temporarily hijacked by books – will now be hijacked by whatever comes next.

The deep reading that a novel demands doesn't come easy and it was never "natural." Our default state is, if anything, one of distractedness.

he needed the panoply, the stream, the comfort of attending entertainments.

This doesn't mean we're reading less – not at all. In fact, we live in a text-gorged society in which the most fleeting thought is a thumb-dash away from posterity. What's at stake is not whether we read. It's how we read.

We become, "more intolerant of moments of time that pass without the arrival of new stimuli."

“A company of bomb throwers can’t start hiding the evidence when a bomb goes astray,”

Information’s most consistent quality is its evanescence. Information is fugitive in its very nature.

Because history is a fight we’re having every day. We’re battling to make the truth first by living it, and then by recording and sharing it, and finally, crucially, by preserving it. Without an archive, there is no history.

Just because hundreds of people found something offensive doesn’t mean that it was, in fact, offensive.

They can skim the abstract, mine the literature review, scan the data, and grab the conclusions without wasting valuable time actually reading.

grading papers for meaning takes a lot more time and involves a lot more judgment than grading for form

much more difficult for both student and teacher.

Now students use Google as their primary ‘research’ tool, and the top search result for most topics tends to be Wikipedia.

these systems are better at identifying the formal characteristics of these essays than at discerning their meaning.

The key distinction here is between form and formalism. A form is useful and necessary as a means for achieving a valued outcome. But when form becomes the valued outcome, then it has turned into formalism.

Goodhart’s Law, which says: ‘When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.’

Content, meaning, style, originality and other such values are extraneous – nice but not necessary.

The issue is this: as so often happens in subjects that are taught in school, the template designed as a means toward attaining some important end turns into an end in itself.

The point is that learning to write is extraordinarily difficult, and teaching people how to write is just as hard.

Anything physical can be made virtual.

This is the intellectual tradition we work in. Take it or leave it.’

European intellectuals increasingly accepted and systematised views of white racial superiority that entailed that no non-Caucasian group could develop philosophy.

I realize he hadn’t felt left out, because he’d already left.

indicating a cognitive interaction between motor production and visual recognition of letters. That’s one reason, incidentally, why it’s valuable to train children to write by hand at all, not just to use a keyboard.

There’s also some suggestion that the difference in appearance between cursive and manuscript could inhibit the acquisition of reading skills, making it harder for children to transfer skills between learning to read and learning to write because they simply don’t see cursive in books.

s. Because cursive writing is more challenging for motor coordination and for sheer complexity of the letters, some early research from the 1930s to the 1960s indicated that children develop their writing skills sooner and more legibly with manuscript.

It suggests that what teachers “know” about how children learn is sometimes more a product of the culture in which they’re immersed than a result of research and data.

There is ample evidence that writing by hand aids cognition in ways that typing does not:

The both of us agreed that the only reason we continue to write is because we love to write. And that the time spent in writing is the only time we feel are pure and sacred. I suspect it may be the kind of moments the spiritually inclined may feel when in prayer.

They also imagine themselves as more intelligent than everybody else because they are professional critics often employed at a media house. So, they think it incumbent to criticise everything.

“If you think I lean to the Left, yes, I lean to the left, because I am among those who got left out.”

To do that, he was deploying rhetoric, not logic.

especially in areas such as medicine and psychology

When a new feature is evolved it's much easier to slap it on the end of existing embryonic development than to modify an intermediate stage where any change could cause cascading effects throughout the entire embryo.

Medication ain’t hold a candle to how far away from your true self you feel during depression.

According to our model, open forums such as Twitter, in which anyone can interact with anyone else, might be great for sharing information, but terrible at promoting cooperation between users. Institutions that encourage fewer, stronger connections might have a better shot at getting individuals to work together for their common good.

for cooperation to thrive, a few strong ties are better than a myriad weak ones.

. Because it was a choice of 0 or 1, it was a “binary digit.” In one of the only pieces of collaboration Shannon allowed on the entire project, he put it to a lunchroom table of his Bell Labs colleagues to come up with a snappier name. Binit and bigit were weighed and rejected, but the winning proposal was laid down by John Tukey, a Princeton professor working at Bell. Bit.

“He never argued his ideas. If people didn’t believe in them, he ignored those people,”

There are many subsystems. Not two, but dozens or hundreds or thousands of little mechanisms that are highly specialized and interact in our brain.

Plants stay put, so they don’t need cognition. They stay in the same place. They don't take the risk of moving. Moving provides new opportunities, but also huge risks.

You can still overcome the limits of trust by producing arguments that they can evaluate on their own merits, and if they find that these arguments are good enough, then they will possibly be convinced by what you’re saying.    

One way we converge is by reasoning together or by exchanging reasons and coming to see things in the same way.

that what makes culture possible is high fidelity copying.

Plan 1

The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times.

What Peter gets is extracted from Paul.

People experiencing unusually high levels of negative affect search for relief; if healthy and effective means are not available, they may choose dangerous means for palliation.

Research distillation doesn’t have to be you, but it does have to be us.

It’s tempting to think of explaining an idea as just putting a layer of polish on it, but good explanations often involve transforming the idea.

Conversely, if we can’t explain an idea well, that’s often a sign that we don’t understand it as well as we could.

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none.

You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

"The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to.

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.

Kuhn's own demarcation criterion is the capability of puzzle-solving that he sees as an essential characteristic of normal science.

Belief in authority: It is contended that some person or persons have a special ability to determine what is true or false. Others have to accept their judgments. Unrepeatable experiments: Reliance is put on experiments that cannot be repeated by others with the same outcome. Handpicked examples: Handpicked examples are used although they are not representative of the general category that the investigation refers to. Unwillingness to test: A theory is not tested although it is possible to test it. Disregard of refuting information: Observations or experiments that conflict with a theory are neglected. Built-in subterfuge: The testing of a theory is so arranged that the theory can only be confirmed, never disconfirmed, by the outcome. Explanations are abandoned without replacement. Tenable explanations are given up without being replaced, so that the new theory leaves much more unexplained than the previous one. (Hansson 1983)

a research program is progressive if the new theories make surprising predictions that are confirmed. In contrast, a degenerating research programme is characterized by theories being fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts.

Popper's demarcation criterion has been criticized both for excluding legitimate science (Hansson 2006) and for giving some pseudosciences the status of being scientific

science changes over time, science is heterogenous, and established science itself is not free of the defects characteristic of pseudoscience.

why fraud in science is not usually regarded as pseudoscientific.

I am asking what kinds of innovation are liable to produce radical change in how children learn.

bricolage

vivent les differences!

constructionism as a matter of "taste and preference" rather than a matter of "scientific truth."

Constructionism--the N word as opposed to the V word--shares constructivism's connotation of learning as "building knowledge structures" irrespective of the circumstances of the learning. It then adds the idea that this happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it's a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe.

Welcome to my parlour: