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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]

Media Cleansing for Writers | BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog Gila Lyons A guest post from Gila Lyons: In our culture of excess, cleanses are the new panacea. Cut out carbs, meat, wheat, plastics, microwaves, gluten, dairy, eggs, and you will glow with radiant health and well-being. There are juice cleanses, raw food cleanses, water fasts, the cabbage soup diet, and now, a media cleanse too. Media informs, educates, and occasionally enlightens, but it also serve as an escape from one’s own mind, experience, ideas, and creative impulses. For a week this summer, the members of my Artist’s Way class were instructed to deprive ourselves of media – all books, newspapers, magazines, Facebook, and emails were off-limits. I teach writing during the academic year, and I’ve designated this summer solely for my own writing. When writing, especially personal essay and memoir as I am, I dig myself into a deep hole. But I dread realizing I’ve squandered my summer on Facebook once September descends and it’s back to the halls of the college where I teach.

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.

Essay on importance of writing that may never be published Recently I had the opportunity to attend a conference with an old friend. The conference was at a relatively remote, logistically inconvenient campus. So we made the best of it. On my own way up from western North Carolina through the Shenandoah Valley and onward to our destination, I detoured off my route, picked him up at a regional airport, and we turned the rest of the journey into a road trip. The time in the car afforded us a much-needed opportunity to catch up socially, but also to update one another on our scholarly projects. Much of our conversation focused on writing, and how much writing has to be done in order to complete even an article of modest length. I believe, though -- and research supports the idea -- that even the preliminary, never-to-reach-a-public writing that we produce is cognitively important, and indispensable in terms of how it moves us closer to and allows us to generate the additional writing that does go into our finished products.

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