andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2009-07-15 12:01 pm
andrewducker) wrote2009-07-15 12:01 pm
Entry tags:
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 7-15-2009
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How to train yourself to think better
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A board game for all the family!
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Fallout 3 and Half Life 2, I think.
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Right. Crossing that one off the marriage plans
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Oooh, the fun.
no subject
Or, to use an actual example, a company to send along a representitive to say that Omega 3 fish oils aid concentration etc and that this would aid learning? (Durham Fish oil trials) In order to sell more fish oil?
Asides from that I just noticed this paragraph (which I missed last time round):
"Obviously, in limited time there is much that must be omitted on a subject as large as tough learning. There is one important omission I’d like to at least mention. The three principles I describe are focused largely on individual actions, and ignore the larger social context – the norms and institutions of the societies in which we live, and how those affect the applicability of the principles. This social context obviously has an enormous impact on tough learning, and deserves separate treatment."
Which does hedge the talk back into the realms of respectability somewhat... The three priciples are still however at too high a level of abstraction to be considered as anything other then platitudes but.
no subject
Yes, provided that they were clear that they were talking purely about their own experience. I'd expect that anything that came out in the question and answer session to point out anything stupid they'd said, of course.
I _like_ the open and free exchange of ideas. Anyone who changes their life based on a single talk by someone who explicitly says they don't have any science behind their argument is going to be having more problems than we can solve here.
I'd much rather that physicists talked about how they learned, psychologists discussed strange rock formations they've seen, geologists mention the strange footprints they saw in the snow, and biologists mentioned the time they saw ball lightning.
Some of these things will be nonsense, some of them will be well known in other fields, and some of them will point out things that people had never thought of before. And that's great!
Companies hawking their products is a different matter, of course.
no subject
I'm all for the open exchange of ideas. My initial ire was perhaps misguided as the hedging seems to make it reasonable. So the anger about how I believed him to be presenting his idea was wrong.
I mean the problem with the argument as I was arguing against it is peoples tendencies not to employ critical thinking and condescend to their own preconceptions. You can sleepwalk into a whole lot of bad doing that.
Also nothing I have said discounts any of the above or precludes the free and open exchange of ideas. To do so implies a false dichotomy. I can quite happily disagree with people using their position to imply the veracity of an argument from their position of authority. Because that is wrong. This doesn't not make me against the free and open exchange of ideas.
I may be mistaken in this case but if it were a genuine abuse of position... Say people using Watsons (it wasn't Crick come to think of it was it?) authority, as one of discoverers of the double helix, to back up their racist ideas and claim that those damned blacks are congenitally and genetically inferior to humans... Then the implication that I am against the free and open exchange of ideas doesn't hold.