Anger isn't Necessary and Gets In the Way

A prominent author who recently disagreed with me on a technical matter quickly labelled me as belonging to a ‘department of bullshit’. Ouch! How is it possible not to get offended by this sort of thing, especially when it’s coming not from an anonymous troll, but from a famous guy with more than 200,000 followers? By implementing the advice of another Stoic philosopher, the second-century slave-turned-teacher Epictetus, who admonished his students in this way: ‘Remember that it is we...

 The Web Enslaves Us With Convenience

In The Matrix, Neo learns that humanity is enslaved by machines. The populace “lives” in a virtual world, unaware that their body heat is being used as an energy source. I see a sort of low-fi parallel of this in our relationship with Facebook. Every member operates in that “free” forum, largely unaware that they’re powering the thing by relinquishing their user data. This scenario is in stark contrast to what we once hoped the web to be. We imagined it as a means of liberating peo...

 Category Practice

Students appear to use a different kind of thinking when they create original patterns following rules they create (Grabowski, Damasio, & Damasio, 1998). Activities that engage students in building categories can start as early as preschool. Building category practice can be done with a bag of mixed buttons. After first modeling the procedure, you can have students work on their own or in pairs to sketch the categories they discover. Th is would also work as a language arts learning cente...

 Success as Proof of Virtue

Ivanka contrasts “proactive” people, who are “passionate and productive,” with “negative people,” those who are “swayed by the external and are frequently the victim of circumstance.” Her worldview, it turns out, is not so different from her father’s. Both see society through the lens of quasi-mystical corporate self-help, the sort pioneered by Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking and a major influence on Donald Trump. In their schema, success is pr...

 Why Did Everyone Draw that Fancy "S" in Grade School

"The reason kids go through this is probably because it's a Moebius strip," he said, referring to the sort of looped one-surface shapes Escher was fond of drawing. "It can't be drawn continuously, but it does have a perpetual flow." I think he was on to something. Most nine-year-olds can't draw, so when someone hands them a magical recipe to create something fairly cool, on demand—that'll go viral. Especially when the shape has the sophisticated, mathematical lineage of a Moebius strip. Y...

 LSD Mimics a Baby's Brain

So let's think. What is it like to be a baby? What's it like to be a child? Our emotions go up and down. We might be in a sort of happy, sort of ecstatic state one minute, giggling, finding everything funny and silly - similar things happen on psychedelics - and then the next minute there's a sudden shift and we're bawling our eyes out, you know? Similar kind of emotional sensitivities and hyper-imaginative processes occur with a psychedelic. Also something quite intriguing is that sense of ...

 Paul Bloom: Science Can Maximize Our Happiness

How can we determine the happiest society? As Derek Parfit and others have pointed out, even if you can precisely measure the happiness of each individual, this remains a vexingly hard question. Should we choose the society with the highest total happiness? If so, then a trillion people living miserable lives (but not so miserable that they would rather be dead) will be "happier" than a billion immensely happy people. This seems wrong. Do we calculate averages? If so, then a society with a m...

 Write With Style

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style. These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bri...

 Scent on an Airless Planet

Scent seems to have all the disadvantages and none of the advantages, as a long-range sense. However, under special circumstances even a modified nose may fill the need. In a story of my own some years ago ("Uncommon Sense," Astounding Science Fiction, September 1945), I assumed an airless planet, so that molecules could diffuse in nearly straight lines. The local sense organs were basically pinhole cameras, with the retinal mosaic formed of olfactory cells. Since the beings in question were ...

 Teaching as Natural Selection

Teaching is commonly associated with instruction, yet in evolution, immunology, and neuroscience, instructional theories are largely defunct. We propose a co-immunity theory of teaching, where attempts by a teacher to alter student neuronal structure to accommodate cultural ideas and practices is sort of a reverse to the function of the immune system, which exists to preserve the physical self, while teaching episodes are designed to alter the mental self. This is a theory of teaching that ...