10/26/2012 The Preservation of Culture

by Sissy Nunez

Should languages and civilizations be preserved after most of the people of said culture are imprisoned or dead?

So, we first look at the most extreme example for a benefit.

Rome.  The most concreted faction that gave the undoubtedly the most advancements from almost all cultures,spanning from western civilization, across the ocean again, and back to Islam as far as advancements in invention, medicine, language, and public works go.

Before the sacking of Rome in 410 A.D., Romans had access to running hot and cold water, sanitation that had kept disease more minimalized,and medicine that allowed people to keep living productive lives after serious infection,possible brain trauma,amputation,etc.  The people also had public works like roads and aqueducts, as well as a public system of welfare.

Latin could be easily translated to Greek at the time to help with the language barrier, as implied through the great Library of Alexandria.  The loss of this civilization set us back over a thousand years in terms of the things I mentioned--invention, science & medicine.  The rudimentary observations made by Galen, the surgeon to Marcus Aurelius in the second century and a father to medicine through his works, although largely lost (which is why we should preserve), were still implemented until a reignition of interest in the 16 century, which led us to research his implications and thus led to the expansion of modern medicine.  The loss of sanitation and public works aided the spread of plagues and the deterioration of cultures in general in large expanses.  

The collapse of rome also aids in loss; the unification of language throughout many countries at the same time, with the perpetuation of empires like Rome to flourish at the cost of other civilizations, destroys other cultures and languages--the Gauls, Picts and Celts, to name a few.  Only recently, 2000 years later, is Ireland trying harder than ever to revive Gaelic.  Many of the rituals, practices,and cultures of these people are seen as pagan or new age, and for the most part not taken as seriously as, say, Christianity, as a direct result as the flourish of the Roman Empire and its conquering different countries and dissolving their countries and cultures for the good of Rome.

10/19/2012 The Birth of Tragedy

by Melanie Muller

Deemed by his later self “wildly enthusiastic,” “badly written, clumsy, and embarrassing,” Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy represents his attempt to explain the contradictory elements of Greek tragedy and an exploration of human psychology through an interpretation of the classical past. He argues that tragedy represents a hybrid of two competing artistic impulses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. He argues both impulses arise from a human need to shield itself from the knowledge of suffering and a conviction that:

“The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon.”

The Apollonian mindset takes its name from the Greek god of reason and prophecy. Nietzsche argues that it expresses itself artistically as sculpture and man’s “inner fantasy world.” It is characterized by “calm,” “freedom from wilder impulses,” “restraint” and “beauty.” He describes it as an assertion of “principium individuationis” or the principle of individuality, and its expressions in art are a glorification of this principle. The Apollonian artist creates a perfected semblance of reality; Nietzsche considers any dreamer who creates such perfected images in his mind an Apollonian artist. He argues that those who continually surround themselves with Apollonian images are “compelled to feel this semblance to be that which it is not,” something which will become the empirical reality.

A Dionysian mindset, Nietzsche argues, results when a “break down of the principium individuationis” occurs. The Dionysian is named for the Greek god of wine and associated with excess, a sense of becoming one with nature (thus losing individuality), and an intoxicated state of mind. It is expressed artistically through music and dance. Having recognized the pain of existence, the Dionysian loses themself in intoxication and oneness with nature, perversely taking pleasure from pain. As expressed in Nietzsche’s overblown language:

“Excess revealed itself as the truth; contradiction, bliss born of pain, spoke of itself from out of the heart of nature.”

In this week’s meeting we will discuss these ideas, how Nietzsche uses them to formulate a theory concerning the birth and death of Greek tragedy, and possible implications of the theory.

10/12/2012 Ethics and Historiography: A Semilocal Application

by Nathan Turowsky

Today we will investigate the difference between utilitarian hedonism and deontological systems of morals, in the context of the question ‘Are there some things that can be done to a small group that are so awful that it is better to let a larger group live in very poor conditions, and if so, why?’

Around the turn of the twentieth century there were concerns that the city of Boston and its environs were soon to run out of potable water, a problem both for still-obvious reasons and for, at that time, cholera-related ones. Obviously this was a problem that needed to be fixed, and to this end the options were to conduct an extensive overhaul of the area’s water mains and sewer systems (which were filled with leaks, redundancies, and dead ends) and cut back on consumption—which would have caused Boston’s and by extension New England’s and the North Atlantic’s economy to suffer—or to build a reservoir somewhere where fewer people lived. Eventually in the 1920s it was decided that the Swift River Valley, an area in Western Massachusetts that was home to four incorporated towns and about twenty-five hundred fulltime residents as well as travelers on the at that time marginally important train line between Athol and Springfield, ought to be dammed at its outlets to create a reservoir which would essentially replace the eastern end of Hampshire County on the Massachusetts map.

The project did not go smoothly, and involved, as any such project would have to, dispossessing those twenty-five hundred people, destroying four communities (the psychological trauma that this inflicted on the former inhabitants of Enfield, Greenwich, Prescott, and Dana has not been the subject of much formal study but looms large in Western Massachusetts culture), moving about eight thousand graves, and indirectly wrecking the rural economies of much of the surrounding area. The Quabbin Reservoir took about seven years to fill, after which it began to provide most of Boston’s water, assuaging the crisis for the foreseeable future, especially as the city’s population began to contract starting in the 1950s.

Opinions on the creation of the Quabbin tend to divide sharply along two lines: Whether or not one is aware of the circumstances behind it, and whether one is from Eastern or Western Massachusetts. The justification for the project was and is at its core utilitarian: It is more good for half a million people to have access to safe drinking water, without the economic costs of spending time doing an overhaul of the distribution system, than it is bad for a few thousands of people to be relocated to different parts of rural Western Massachusetts. The opposition to the project, insofar as it was not entirely emotive and based on the preferences of those who lived in the Swift River Valley to continue to do so, was and is at its core deontological: It is wrong to forcibly relocate inconvenient populations, indeed it has since 1949 been against the Geneva Conventions, and if the Quabbin were being constructed nowadays with the state government behaving the same as it did then the Massachusetts General Court would in fact be guilty of a crime against humanity. There is no easy answer here. Orders of magnitude more people were helped by the project than were harmed by it, and whether one would rather be forced to move away from one’s home against one’s will or be unable to find clean drinking water is obviously subjective since these are both horrible things to wish on anyone.

What to do? What do we value, and what do we believe? If you were a Massachusetts resident in the 1920s or 1930s, what would you have done? Can the importance of the Swift River Valley in Western Massachusetts culture and the exercise of remembrance (there was a conscious decision on the part of the people at the Swfit River Valley Historical Society to continually recreate an eternal 1938 rather than evoke a kinetic timespan) even, possibly, redeem the destruction, making it the source of a deontological good relating to memory as well as a utilitarian good relating to bodily health? Might the very fact of the valley’s destruction have in some sense made it eternal? Let’s use the fate of Enfield, Greenwich, Prescott, and Dana to explore how we feel about larger issues of the needs of the many, the fundamental rights of the no-matter-how-many, civic responsibility, and civic and cultural memory.

***

At the meeting we discussed the topic as intended. Nathan gave us the historical background and basic questions; Nathan's visiting mother Lisa explained what eminent domain is and the controversy over what constitutes 'just compensation'. There was an extensive large group discussion and a somewhat shorter than usual small group discussion, and the club was split about evenly on the subject of whether or not the Commonwealth was theoretically justified (most agreed that it was not justified in behaving as it actually did). After the meeting, we had dinner at Worcester and then went to Orchard Hill to straightway partially disperse and/or do nothing in particular in the Grayson lounge.

10/5/2012 Cognitive Biases

gathered from Wikipedia by Brandon Taylor

A cognitive bias describes a replicable pattern in perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality. Cognitive biases are the result of distortions in the human mind that always lead to the same pattern of poor judgment, often triggered by a particular situation.

Broader Concepts
Bounded rationality is the idea that in decision-making, rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make a decision.

Cognitive dissonance is the term used in modern psychology to describe the state of holding two or more conflicting cognitions (e.g., ideas, beliefs, values, emotional reactions) simultaneously. In a state of dissonance, people may sometimes feel surprise, dread, guilt, anger, or embarrassment.[1] The theory of cognitive dissonance in social psychology proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by altering existing cognitions, adding new ones to create a consistent belief system, or alternatively by reducing the importance of any one of the dissonant elements.

Adaptive bias is the idea that the human brain has evolved to reason adaptively, rather than truthfully or even rationally, and that cognitive bias may have evolved as a mechanism to reduce the overall cost of cognitive errors as opposed to merely reducing the number of cognitive errors, when faced with making a decision under conditions of uncertainty.

The salience (also called saliency) of an item – be it an object, a person, a pixel, etc. – is the state or quality by which it stands out relative to its neighbors. Saliency detection is considered to be a key attentional mechanism that facilitates learning and survival by enabling organisms to focus their limited perceptual and cognitive resources on the most pertinent subset of the available sensory data.

The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that uses the ease with which examples come to mind to make judgments about the probability of events. The availability heuristic operates on the notion that "if you can think of it, it must be important."

In sociology and social psychology, impression management is a goal-directed conscious or unconscious process in which people attempt to influence the perceptions of other people about a person, object or event; they do so by regulating and controlling information in social interaction.

Specific Cognitive Biases
Bandwagon effect – the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same.

Confirmation bias – the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.

Fundamental attribution error – the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior.

Dunning–Kruger effect—an effect in which incompetent people fail to realize they are incompetent because they lack the skill to distinguish between competence and incompetence.

Status quo bias is a cognitive bias; an irrational preference for the current state of affairs. The current baseline (or status quo) is taken as a reference point, and any change from that baseline is perceived as a loss.

Hyperbolic discounting – the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, where the tendency increases the closer to the present both payoffs are.

Anchoring – the tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on a past reference or on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (also called "insufficient adjustment").

Outcome bias – the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.

Ultimate attribution error – similar to the fundamental attribution error, in this error a person is likely to make an internal attribution to an entire group instead of the individuals within the group.

Halo effect – the tendency for a person's positive or negative traits to "spill over" from one area of their personality to another in others' perceptions of them (see also physical attractiveness stereotype).[59]

Optimism bias – the tendency to be over-optimistic, overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes

Conservatism (Bayesian) – the tendency to belief update insufficiently but predictably as a result of new evidence (estimates of conditional probabilities are conservative)

Loss aversion – "the disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it".

Questions

Do you agree that with the suggested cognitive biases above?

Are cognitive biases nature or nurture?

Can you match broader concepts with specific cognitive biases?

To what extent do cognitive biases and logical fallacies overlap?

Can you find specific examples of how one of the cognitive biases or general concepts above relates to your everyday life?

Does the existence of cognitive biases have any epistemological implications?