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19 Oct 09

Language Log » Freakonomics: the intellectual’s Glenn Beck?

  • We might call this the Pundit's Dilemma — a game, like the Prisoner's Dilemma, in which the player's best move always seems to be to take the low road, and in which the aggregate welfare of the community always seems fated to fall. And this isn't just a game for pundits. Scientists face similar choices every day, in deciding whether to over-sell their results, or for that matter to manufacture results for optimal appeal.
  • the trap of counterintuitiveness
26 Aug 09

When Cognitive Science Enters Politics — Rockridge Institute

  • In thinking, the old view comes originally from Descartes’ 17th
    Century rationalism. A view of thought as symbolic logic was
    formalized by Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege around the turn of the
    20th Century, and a rationalist interpretation was revived by Chomsky
    in the 1950’s. In that view, thought is a matter of (as Pinker puts it)
    “old-fashioned … universal disembodied reason.” Here reason is seen as
    the manipulation of meaningless symbols, as in symbolic logic.


    The new view is that reason is embodied in a nontrivial way. The
    brain gives rise to thought in the form of conceptual frames,
    image-schemas, prototypes, conceptual metaphors, and conceptual blends.
    The process of thinking is not algorithmic symbol manipulation, but
    rather neural computation, using brain mechanisms. Jerome Feldman’s
    recent MIT Press book, From Molecules to Metaphors, discusses such mechanisms.


    Contrary
    to Descartes, reason uses these mechanisms, not formal logic. Reason
    is mostly unconscious, and as Antonio Damasio has written in Descartes’
    Error,     rationality requires emotion.

  • “Old-fashioned …
    universal disembodied reason” also claims that everyone reasons the
    same way, that differences in world-view don’t matter. But anybody
    tuning in to contemporary talk shows will notice that not everybody
    reasons the same way and that world-view does matter.
  • 5 more annotations...

Word Spy - YIMBY

  • YIMBY

    n.
    A person who favors a project that would add a dangerous or unpleasant feature to his or her neighborhood. [Acronym from the phrase yes in my back yard.]
25 Feb 08

Jargon Gets Lost in Academic Translation | Columbia Spectator

  • a growing trend: the specialization of vocabulary within academic disciplines to the point where it becomes almost another language
  • This specialized discourse, whatever field it arises in, can be off-putting—hence the pejorative term “academic jargon.” For those who don’t “speak the language,” the experience of listening to two people who do can be about as much fun hanging out with two of your friends after they have both watched Napoleon Dynamite without you. It sets reference points that are common to some but not to others. But what is such language really doing, and why does it become so different from the speech you exchange with your parents?
  • 3 more annotations...
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