27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
Measuring Progress by the Cost of Light
Time is not the only life-enriching resource granted to us by technology. Another is light. Light is so empowering that it serves as the metaphor of choice for a superior intellectual and spiritual state: enlightenment. In the natural world we are plunged into darkness for half of our existence, but human-made light allows us to take back the night for reading, moving about, seeing people’s faces, and otherwise engaging with our surroundings. The economist William Nordhaus has cited the plu...Folksonomies: human progress quantification
Folksonomies: human progress quantification
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notes24 DEC 2016 by ideonexus
Different Measure of Intelligence Peak at Different Ages
One potential concern with cross-sectional data is that it may be subject to cohort effects. Our findings in Experiment 2 are consistent with the possibility that people born in 1945 have unusually large vocabularies, people born in 1980 have unusually good working memory, and people born in 1990 have unusually fast processing speed. Such concerns can be mitigated by converging results from cross-sectional datasets collected at different times (Schaie, 2005). Here, we compared results derived... 1 notes
notes30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Scientific Reasoning Explains Increases in IQ
The bombshell is that the Flynn Effect is almost certainly environmental. Natural selection has a speed limit measured in generations, but the Flynn Effect is measurable on the scale of decades and years. Flynn was also able to rule out increases in nutrition, overall health, and outbreeding (marrying outside one’s local community) as explanations for his eponymous effect.241 Whatever propels the Flynn Effect, then, is likely to be in people’s cognitive environments, not in their genes, d...
1 09 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
The Center of the Earth
Of all regions of the earth none invites speculation more than that which lies beneath our feet, and in none is speculation more dangerous; yet, apart from speculation, it is little that we can say regarding the constitution of the interior of the earth. We know, with sufficient accuracy for most purposes, its size and shape: we know that its mean density is about 5½ times that of water, that the density must increase towards the centre, and that the temperature must be high, but beyond thes... 1 notes
notesInvites speculation and is the realm of mathematics, not observation.
08 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
John Locke VS Babies
Another great English philosopher, John Locke, posed another classical epistemological problem. What would happen if you miraculously restored the sight of someone who had been blind from birth? Would that person recognize all the objects he had known so intimately through touch, or would he have to painstakingly learn that the smooth, hard, curved surface looked like a porcelain teacup, or that the familiar, soft, yielding swells and silky hairs translated into a visual wife? Locke thought t... 1 notes
notesLocke wondered if a blind person given sight would need to learn how to associate this new sense with the others, but babies make these associations instinctively.
19 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
Ignoring Inconvenient Truths In Astronomy
Metaphysically speaking, no one paradigm
is innately any better than any other. A universe that began at
9 a.m. on October 10, 4004 B.C. (which was official back in the
seventeenth century) is intrinsically no less valuable for those who
live by a belief in it than is our present uncertain universe, perhaps
built like a yo-yo, forever destroying and remaking itself in
never-ending big bangs. Each of the cosmological theories has, at
different times, found totally ironclad evidence to support ...In order to keep the Earth at the center of the Universe, theologians and astronomers had to come up with wild explanatory theories that did not fit the evidence.
19 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
How Science Changes Society
Change is one of mankind’s most mysterious
creations. The factors that operate to cause it came
into play when man produced his first tool. With it he
changed the world forever, and bound himself to the
artifacts he would create in order, always, to make
tomorrow better than today. But how does change
operate? What triggers a new invention, a different
philosophy, an altered society? The interactive
network of man’s activities links the strangest,
most disparate elements, bringing togethe... 1 notes
notesScience brings change upon society, forcing society to adapt to technological change and forcing more technological change.
