background preloader

Yes, Your Opinion Can Be Wrong

Thursday, July 23, 2015 at 6 a.m. I have had so many conversations or email exchanges with students in the last few years wherein I anger them by indicating that simply saying, "This is my opinion" does not preclude a connected statement from being dead wrong. It still baffles me that some feel those four words somehow give them carte blanche to spout batshit oratory or prose. And it really scares me that some of those students think education that challenges their ideas is equivalent to an attack on their beliefs. -Mick Cullen I spend far more time arguing on the Internet than can possibly be healthy, and the word I’ve come to loath more than any other is “opinion”. There’s a common conception that an opinion cannot be wrong. 1. 2. I’ll help you with the first part. There’s nothing wrong with an opinion on those things. To quote John Oliver, who on his show Last Week Tonight referenced a Gallup poll showing one in four Americans believe climate change isn’t real: Who gives a shit? Related:  Critical ThinkingQuotesINTELLIGENTIA

La parola di un esperto vale più di quella degli altri La parola di un esperto vale più di quella degli altri << Il bello di internet è che si possono trovare informazioni su qualunque argomento, che dicono tutto ed il contrario di tutto. Il brutto è che la maggior parte di queste informazioni sono inattendibili e su internet gli incompetenti e gli esperti vengono messi sullo stesso piano. >> Non è vero che tutte le opinioni hanno la stessa importanza. E no, Facebook, youtube ed i blog non sono una fonte seria. La diffusione dell'ignoranza e del populismo, unita ad una crescente anarchia culturale, ha stravolto il concetto di giusto e sbagliato, ha cominciato a produrre situazioni abominevoli sulla diffusione di informazioni che è riuscita ad arrivare perfino in politica. Riportiamo da qui un articolo che ben evidenzia ed approfondisce questa situazione. Attenzione, scopo di questo scritto non è sancire il principio di autorità nella scienza, concetto ridicolo. Di cosa stiamo parlando?

Quote Investigator | Dedicated to tracing quotations Neurodiversity Neologism used to refer to neurological differences in a non-pathological manner The subsequent neurodiversity paradigm has been controversial among autism advocates, with opponents saying that its conceptualization of the autism spectrum doesn't reflect the realities of individuals who have high support needs.[4][5][6] History[edit] In a New York Times piece written by American journalist and writer Harvey Blume on June 30, 1997, Blume described the foundation of neurodiversity using the term "neurological pluralism".[7] Blume was an early advocate who predicted the role the Internet would play in fostering the international neurodiversity movement.[8] The term "neurodiversity" has since been applied to other conditions and has taken on a more general meaning; for example, the Developmental Adult Neurodiversity Association (DANDA) in the UK encompasses developmental coordination disorder, ADHD, Asperger's syndrome, and related conditions.[16] Within disability rights movements[edit]

Racial Justice, LGBT Groups Urge Collaboration on School Discipline Issues - Rules for Engagement Calls to improve school discipline have become a powerful cause for both groups that deal with racial equity and groups that deal with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender student issues. But if those two groups further collaborated in their efforts, students, particularly LGBT students of color, would benefit, a new report says. The report—released Monday by the Advancement Project, the Gay Straight Alliance Network, and the Equality Federation—is designed to foster collaboration between the groups to help drive down school discipline disparites on the basis of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, and intersections of any of those classifications. The report includes stories from students of color who identify as LGBT or consider themselves allies, examples of successful programs that address the needs of LGBT youth of color, and a list of helpful vocabulary for students to understand issues of race, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound | Maryanne Wolf Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older boys don’t read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds. Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing - a change with implications for everyone from the pre-reading toddler to the expert adult. As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago. This is not a simple, binary issue of print vs digital reading and technological innovation. We know from research that the reading circuit is not given to human beings through a genetic blueprint like vision or language; it needs an environment to develop.

carl sagan thoughts on education 3840 × 2160 - quotefancy.com What If Consciousness Comes First? Source: ColiN00B/Pixabay Despite the success of neuroscience in establishing a wide range of correlations between brain processes and conscious experience, there is at least one question about the relationship between the brain and consciousness that continues to appear unanswerable, even in principle. This is the question of why we have conscious experience at all. article continues after advertisement The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience. What is more, why do our experiences have the particular qualities that they do? Some researchers hold on to the hope that, if we just continue to investigate the brain’s physical properties, we will eventually be able to explain why conscious experience exists and why it has the intrinsic qualities it does. The issue is that physical properties are by their nature relational, dispositional properties.

How Racism Prevents Action on Inequality This piece was co-written with Jason McDaniel. As income inequality has climbed higher and higher in America, government action has stalled. This lack of policy attention persists despite public opinion polls showing a majority of Americans favor some government action to reduce inequality. Are the wealthy to blame for the lack of action? On the one hand, there is plenty of evidence that the wealthy exert overwhelming influence over politics. But that doesn’t explain the whole story. To untangle the complicated connection between racial attitudes, economic insecurity and government inaction on inequality, we turn to data from the 2012American National Election Study (ANES), a rich survey with many detailed questions on public policy, political preferences and racial attitudes. To measure racial resentment toward African-Americans, we created a scale based on five questions; for example, “Irish, Italians, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up.

Related: