Monday, July 25, 2011

ideastream science

In addition to perturbing an individual's attention-focus (toward e.g. the buffering of correlations that look in/out from skin, family or culture), unscoped electronic-broadcasts (in any of various forms) can also affect the choice of concepts in terms of which one thinks. Folks unfamiliar with the power of concept-sets to leave blind spots in our awareness (as well as to manipulate neolithic-feelings) may be especially vulnerable to this effect.

Examples of "broadcasts willy-nilly" (i.e. communications to everyone regardless of their mandate) that often do this include:

  • xenophobic, fiscal, and/or territorial threat broadcasts
  • health-risk warnings not accompanied by observational data,
  • cartoonifications of individual people as well as lifeform types, etc.
For this reason education in most fields should likely include an explicit discussion of tools for choosing one's concepts and models, as well as the more reliably covered model-based skills of  e.g. informal reasoning and algorithmic implementation.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

StL Beacon quote

"Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations."
-- Joseph Pulitzer in The North American Review, May 1904


Of course, the means by which ideas travel may have changed a bit between then and now...