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Some typologies on length and style of fictional series.
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I’ve talked before about the different kinds of series, which I summed up as:
Style One, The Lord of the Rings, one book with extra pieces of cardboard.
Style Two, Doctrine of Labyrinths, where you have some volume closure but need to read the books in order.
Style Three, Vlad and Vorkosigan, where the cumulative effect of reading all of them is to give you a story arc and more investment in the characters, but it doesn’t really matter where you start and whether you read them in order.
Style Four, Union Alliance, where the volumes are completely independent of each other though they may reflect interestingly on each other
Scientific interest in the cognitive underpinnings of religious belief has grown in recent years. However, to date, little experimental research has focused on the cognitive processes that may promote religious disbelief. The present studies apply a dual-process model of cognitive processing to this problem, testing the hypothesis that analytic processing promotes religious disbelief. Individual differences in the tendency to analytically override initially flawed intuitions in reasoning were associated with increased religious disbelief. Four additional experiments provided evidence of causation, as subtle manipulations known to trigger analytic processing also encouraged religious disbelief. Combined, these studies indicate that analytic processing is one factor (presumably among several) that promotes religious disbelief. Although these findings do not speak directly to conversations about the inherent rationality, value, or truth of religious beliefs, they illuminate one cognitive factor that may influence such discussions.
The authors test the hypothesis that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism. In Study 1, alcohol intoxication was measured among bar patrons; as blood alcohol level increased, so did political conservatism (controlling for sex, education, and political identification). In Study 2, participants under cognitive load reported more conservative attitudes than their no-load counterparts. In Study 3, time pressure increased participants' endorsement of conservative terms. In Study 4, participants considering political terms in a cursory manner endorsed conservative terms more than those asked to cogitate; an indicator of effortful thought (recognition memory) partially mediated the relationship between processing effort and conservatism. Together these data suggest that political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought; when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases.
“People endorse conservative ideology more when they have to give a first or fast response,” Eidelman said. “This low-effort thinking seems to favor political conservatism, suggesting that it may be our default ideology. To be clear, we are not saying that conservatives think lightly.”
"Mathematics has universal standards of validity. Nevertheless, there are local styles in mathematics. These may be the legacy of a dominant individual (e.g. the Newtonianism of 18th century British mathematics). Or, there may be social or economic reasons (such as the practical bent of early modern Dutch mathematics). Sometimes, a local style results from deliberate policy. For example, in the 1920s and 1930s, Polish officials identified ‘foundations of mathematics’ in the style of topology and real analysis as something that Polish mathematicians should excel in. Local mathematical cultures can reflect the uneven geographical spread of a methodological division. For example, in theoretical computer science, there are two main directions: ‘Algorithms and Complexity’, and ‘Logic in Computer Science’ . In many countries, the split between those areas is heavily uneven. "
commentary by William Cronon
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One of the paradoxes of history is that no other academic discipline has done a better job of retaining a large public audience—even though many nonhistorians find most academic history boring in the extreme. If one takes as rough-and-ready measures of public interest the allocation of topics among History Channel programs, museum exhibitions that draw large crowds, or books that make it onto best-seller lists, the distribution of subjects they cover is generally quite different from specialties represented by the faculties of history departments at most colleges and universities. When one also acknowledges that many of history's most popular interpreters lack graduate training in the subject—think here of Barbara Tuchman, David McCullough, Ken Burns, Robert Massie, Dava Sobel, or even past AHA President Allan Nevins—the complicated relationship of professional history to its public audiences becomes all the more intriguing.
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When one defines professional history according to the norms of the academy, certain attributes tend to be valued above most others in defining what counts as "good history"—which is to say, history that professional historians recognize as "good." Good history is accurate. Professionals work extraordinarily hard to avoid errors, and can be quite contemptuous of those who make foolish mistakes when describing the past. Getting facts right generally trumps good storytelling. Good history is rigorous in its argumentation, deeply grounded in archival sources, fully in dialogue with the best recent work by leading scholars, and richly nuanced in its interpretative claims. The best professional historians spend years of their lives immersing themselves in the primary and secondary sources of their chosen subjects with the goal of attaining such a complex understanding that only scholars comparably immersed will recognize just how well the resulting work of history reflects the past it interprets. If such history is also written with elegance and grace, then it is very good indeed.
"What I wrote in my appreciation of Beach was that he’d converted me to valuing this kind of fine-grained empiricism more than I previously had. I came to admire the professional craft that it took to research and relate this knowledge (and Cronon notes that he similarly values this kind of effort) but I also realized more completely how scholarship is a very old and deep practice of collaboration between thousands of people separated by time and space. The exciting, engaging, communicative work that Cronon and I esteem often relies upon scholars who do “boring” work. You can’t synthesize or generalize without specialists doing their work first. "
"Several recent discussions on a variety of unrelated topics with different people have gotten me thinking about two different attitudes towards dialectical processes. They are generalized versions of the professional attitudes required of lawyers and judges, so I’ll refer to them as lawyer mind and judge mind.
In the specialized context of the law, the dialectical process is structurally constrained and the required attitudes are codified and legally mandated to a certain extent. Lawyers must act as though they were operating from a lawyer-mindset, even if internally they are operating with a judge-mind."
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The lawyer mind allows you to make up the best possible defense or prosecution strategy with the available evidence. Within limits, even if the defense lawyer is convinced his client is guilty, s/he is duty-bound to make the best possible case and is not required to share evidence that incriminates the defendant or weakens the case.
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The judge’s nominal role is to act as a steward of the dialectic itself and make sure it is as fair as can be at any given time, without attempting to push its limits outside of certain codified mechanisms. The judge is charged with explicitly driving towards the “truth” in the particular case, and also improving the system’s potential — it’s dialectical vitality — so that it discovers the truth better in the future
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"Imagine that economists were surveyed and had to choose how they’d best like to describe economic policy recommendations, as:
Morals – Arguing for the morality of actions,
Deals – Helping groups find and make deals, or
Showing Off – Academics do hard things in order to be certified by other academics as impressive, so that students, patrons, and readers can gain status by affiliating with them. Economic policy analysis is such a hard thing.
I’d bet that at least 25% would choose option #2, and even more among those whose style leans sci/tech. And #2 seems to me a better public face for economists to present to the world – economists will prosper more overall if they say this is what they are doing."
"For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new."
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Formatting of titles. One of the most important things to understand about bibtex is that the capitalization of titles is determined by the bibliography style, and not by the form in which the title is given in the "title" field. Some styles use lower case titles for all bibliography entries, while others capitalize book titles, but set titles of journal articles in lower case. To allow these variations, bibtex ignores capitalization in the title field. For example, a title "Concrete Mathematics" will be set as "Concrete mathematics" if the bibliography style calls for lower case titles. If a title includes words that should not be converted to lower case, those words need to be "protected" by enclosing the first (upper case) letter in braces. This is illustrated by the first example above: To prevent the words "Riemann Hypothesis" from being set in lower case, enclose the letters R and H in braces: "{R}iemann {H}ypothesis".
Our immersive digital environment demands new responses from writers. What does it mean to be a poet in the Internet age? These two movements, Flarf and Conceptual Writing, each formed over the past five years, are direct investigations to that end.
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