17 OCT 2021 by ideonexus
Treat Children as Rational Creatures
But if you take away the rod on one hand, and these little encouragements, which they are taken with, on the other; how then (will you say) shall children be governed? Remove hope and fear, and there is an end of all discipline. I grant, that good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature; these are the spur and reins, whereby all mankind are set on work and guided, and therefore they are to be made use of to children too. For I advise their parents and gove...Folksonomies: education
Folksonomies: education
17 OCT 2021 by ideonexus
Belief Discovers No New Qualities
SINCE therefore belief implies a conception, and yet is something more; and since it adds no new idea to the conception; it follows, that it is a different MANNER of conceiving an object; something that is distinguishable to the feeling, and depends not upon our will, as all our ideas do. My mind runs by habit from the visible object of one ball moving towards another, to the usual effect of motion in the second ball. It not only conceives that motion, but feels something different in the con...Folksonomies: philosophy empiricism
Folksonomies: philosophy empiricism
14 OCT 2021 by ideonexus
The Mind as a Blank Slate
1. Idea is the object of thinking.—Every man being conscious to himself that he thinks, and that which his mind is applied about whilst thinking being the ideas that are there, it is past doubt that men have in their minds several ideas, such as are those expressed by the words, “whiteness, hardness, sweetness, thinking, motion, man, elephant, army, drunkenness,” and others. It is in the first place then to be enquired, How he comes by them? I know it is a received doctrine, that men ha...Folksonomies: enlightenment reason
Folksonomies: enlightenment reason
14 OCT 2021 by ideonexus
I Think, Therefore I Am
I had long before remarked that, in relation to practice, it is sometimes necessary to adopt, as if above doubt, opinions which we discern to be highly uncertain, as has been already said; but as I then desired to give my attention solely to the search after truth, I thought that a procedure exactly the opposite was called for, and that I ought to reject as absolutely false all opinions in regard to which I could suppose the least ground for doubt, in order to ascertain whether after that the...Folksonomies: philosophy metaphysics
Folksonomies: philosophy metaphysics
The first paragraph is sound, but then the conclusions drawn in the second are not.
02 MAR 2021 by ideonexus
Top-Down VS Bottom-Up Approaches to Design in Software
One of the hallmarks of the Athena project was that faculty were asked to build their own educational software. Most worked with a set of assumptions about learning: students begin by learning “fundamental concepts”; formal, mathematical representation is always the best approach; students would use simulations the way designers intended. As Athena unfolded, none of these assumptions proved true. To begin with, students approached simulation with a wide range of personal intellectual styl...Folksonomies: simulation abstraction
Folksonomies: simulation abstraction
07 NOV 2019 by ideonexus
The Science of Wisdom
A bulk of research has already shown that this kind of third-person thinking can temporarily improve decision making. Now a preprint at PsyArxiv finds that it can also bring long-term benefits to thinking and emotional regulation. The researchers said this was ‘the first evidence that wisdom-related cognitive and affective processes can be trained in daily life, and of how to do so’.
[...]
Grossmann’s aim is to build a strong experimental footing for the study of wisdom, which had lon...Folksonomies: wisdom third-person thinking
Folksonomies: wisdom third-person thinking
10 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Asimov Story on Computation
■ N 1958, American science fiction legend Isaac Asimov wrote a very short story called "The Feeling of Power." In it, lowly technician MyI ron Aub discovers that he is capable of duplicating the work of his computer by multiplying two numbers together on a piece of paper. Amazing! This miraculous discovery makes its way up the chain of command, where the generals and politicians are stunned by Aub's black magic. The top general is intrigued by the possibility that human calculations could g...10 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
The Chess Stress Response
Another aspect of chess as a sport is the intense psychological and physiological exertion involved in a competitive chess game, and the crisis after the game. What sports science calls the "stress response process" is at least as powerful in chess as it is in more physical sports. When I say exertion, I am not referring only to the mental gymnastics of moving the pieces in our minds, but also the huge nervous tension that fills you before and during the game, tension that rises and falls wit...31 OCT 2018 by ideonexus
Homo Laborans and Homo Faber
Homo Laborans sails in the sea of “making things” where work is an end in itself, and is dictated by the needs imposed by technology. Subjected to technology or pleasantly attracted by it, we are ‘Animal laborans’, as Arendt would say, being enslaved to the tasks we are immersed in by the will of technology. Our doing is comparable to the manual work of past industrial revolutions. Think, for example, of the smartest machines, which can alert their human handlers when they will need m...Folksonomies: two cultures
Folksonomies: two cultures
27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus