http://io9.com/5974468/the-most-common-cognitive-biases-that-prevent-you-from-being-rational
Related: Distorted Thinking • TOK"Pro-American" History Textbooks Hurt Native Americans I teach Native American Studies and virtually none of my university students has had any education whatsoever in the history of this country's treatment of the 10 million or so people who lived here before Europeans arrived. They generally believe that the continent was more or less wide-open and that the few people who were here aided the Pilgrims with a harvest fest and then after a few skirmishes with settlers complied with their destiny as the vanishing Indian. The Texas State Board of Education wants to reinforce this knowledge gap, forcing Texas high schoolers to learn a sanitized version of U.S. history in the name of being "pro-American." The Texas board recently voted to allow state-defined curriculum for the Advanced Placement History Exam to trump that of the federally-defined curriculum on which the exam will be based in order to sidestep aspects of U.S. history they find distasteful.
The Selective Laziness Of Human Reasoning : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture Gary Waters/Getty Images/Ikon Images Democrat: "Those arguments by Republicans are preposterous!" Republican: "Those arguments by Democrats are absurd!" Sound familiar? There are plenty of reasons why political disputes can be divisive, and a host of psychological mechanisms that contribute to a preference for one's own views. Inductive Reasoning - How Small Observations Infers a Theory Inductive reasoning is the process where a small observation is used to infer a larger theory, without necessarily proving it. Most scientists use this method to generate theories about how the universe works and discover the laws governing our very existence. Many ancient philosophers used induction for making observations and constructing theories. For example, the Ancient Greek philosophers believed that theories could be proved by logic alone and did not need experiments. They thought that mathematically strict laws, deduced from smaller observations, governed the universe. Science has moved on over the millennia and now we realize the necessity of research by deductive reasoning.
The Po-Mo Page: Postmodern to Post-postmodern Approaching the Main Questions Postmodernism/Postmodernity is associated with an awareness of societal and cultural transitions after World War II and the rise of mass-mediated consumerist popular culture in the 1960s-1970s. In culture and the arts, interpreters of this era describe the kinds of cultural hybrids that emerge from mixing (or rendering inoperative) the categories of "high" and "low" cultures, and hybrids in cultural forms that have developed in regions where local identities seek definition against, or in dialog with, Western "hegemonic" cultures (the mixing of "official" cultures and those defined as "other" in modernist ideologies). Postmodern views of history and national identity typically cancel a commitment to modern "master narratives" or "metanarratives" like progress and goal-directed history, and disrupt myths of national and ethnic identities as "natural" foundations of "unity." Primary Problem: Constructing Trajectories of History and Culture
This Columbus Day, Seeking the Real History of Native Americans A Q&A with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. By Mark Trecka CHICAGO -- When Howard Zinn published A People's History of the United States in 1980, historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz told Zinn that he had largely failed to include the narratives of Native Americans. Zinn replied that it was up to Dunbar-Ortiz to write that book. 8 math talks to blow your mind Mathematics gets down to work in these talks, breathing life and logic into everyday problems. Prepare for math puzzlers both solved and unsolvable, and even some still waiting for solutions. Ron Eglash: The fractals at the heart of African designs When Ron Eglash first saw an aerial photo of an African village, he couldn’t rest until he knew — were the fractals in the layout of the village a coincidence, or were the forces of mathematics and culture colliding in unexpected ways?
5 Logical Fallacies That Make You Wrong More Than You Think The Internet has introduced a golden age of ill-informed arguments. You can't post a video of an adorable kitten without a raging debate about pet issues spawning in the comment section. These days, everyone is a pundit. But with all those different perspectives on important issues flying around, you'd think we'd be getting smarter and more informed. Unfortunately, the very wiring of our brains ensures that all these lively debates only make us dumber and more narrow-minded. For instance ... People Who Achieve Their Goals Do These 5 Things When Angela Duckworth was 27, she left her high-pressure management-consulting job for an even tougher gig: teaching seventh-grade math at a New York City public school. Duckworth quickly learned it wasn’t smarts that determined whether her students accomplished their goals and got good grades—not by a long shot. “I was convinced every one of my students could learn the material if they worked long and hard enough,” she says in her popular TED talk. After a few years of teaching, Duckworth found herself asking the question, “What if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily?” She’s made a career of that question, becoming a psychologist who has studied how and why people set and—most importantly—achieve their goals.
The Lesson of the Monkeys I was first told of this experiment* by a former work colleague, and later discovered this illustration of it. It’s both illuminating and disturbing. There is a clunky word that describes this phenomenon: filiopietism, or the reverence of forebears or tradition carried to excess. Celebrating the Genocide of Native Americans The sad reality about the United States of America is that in a matter of a few hundreds years it managed to rewrite its own history into a mythological fantasy. The concepts of liberty, freedom and free enterprise in the “land of the free, home of the brave” are a mere spin. The US was founded and became prosperous based on two original sins: firstly, on the mass murder of Native Americans and theft of their land by European colonialists; secondly, on slavery. This grim reality is far removed from the fairytale version of a nation that views itself in its collective consciousness as a virtuous universal agent for good and progress.
The Periodic Table of the Figures of Speech: 40 Ways to Improve Your Writing At the root of all good writing lies an understanding of how sentences are built. In kindergarten, we learn the fundamentals of grammar and the basic concepts of how sentences are constructed. For most of our elementary and secondary training in writing, we are taught simply to improve those grammatical and mechanical skills. A good writer, however, understands the complexities and rhetorical effects of how modifying sentence structure (known as sentence “schemes”) improves the flow, interest, and even persuasive qualities of their writing.
5 Logical Fallacies from the Gun Debate - ReThink In 1764, before the United States was even a nation, four Lenape warriors entered a school in Pennsylvania, shot a schoolmaster, and killed nine children. Urged to do something as a result of this tragedy, the Pennsylvania Assembly reintroduced the scalp bounty system, in which the province would pay settlers to bring them the scalps of enemy American Indians. Thus began the long, long controversy over gun control laws in America. The debate has raged ever since, and everyone who engages in it is bound to come across well-worn arguments from all sides, most of which are completely and utterly fallacious. Unless you've been a shut-in without access to the Internet, newspapers, or cable television for the last month or two, you are probably getting sick of hearing about gun control.
The Top 100 Documentaries We Can Use to Change the World By Films For Action / filmsforaction.org/ Jun 10, 2015 Documentaries have an incredible power to raise awareness and create transformative changes in consciousness both at the personal and global levels. Over the last 8 years, we've watched hundreds of social change documentaries and cataloged the best of them on the site. There's now so many that we realized we needed to filter this down even further. So what follows is our list of the very best 100 - hand-picked for their quality, insight and potential to inspire positive change.