Tag: Truth

Replied to Why Can’t We Agree On What’s True? | Dr. Ian O’Byrne (Dr. Ian O’Byrne | Literacy, technology, and education)

Blaming social media or the Internet for what people choose to say is not looking at the root of the problem. It’s like blaming soapboxes for the people standing on them.

In my opinion, this is one of the biggest threats to humanity. With fewer and fewer people getting educated, these mass misinformation and disinformation campaigns easily influence a growing population.

Education is no longer important for individual success, education is critical for the success of society and humanity as a whole.

This is an intriguing piece Ian. Personally, I am reminded of my own education, and Stanley Fish’s idea of interpretative communities. Although we may use the same words, the meaning is something different.
Bookmarked Malcolm Gladwell Reaches His Tipping Point by Andrew Ferguson (The Atlantic)

I can’t imagine the typical Gladwell reader will be satisfied with this agnostic shrug. But Talking to Strangers can also be seen as an advance for the author—an unexpected step in the right direction. Rather than offering made-up rules and biases and effects, Gladwell has chosen to issue a plea, asking that we recognize how difficult it is for us to understand one another.

Of course, if Malcolm Gladwell had practiced epistemological humility for the past 20 years, he would have sold millions fewer books. But let’s pass over the irony. When you’re talking to millions of strangers, as Gladwell does, saying nothing in particular is better than telling them things that aren’t so. He may have embarked on an exciting new career.

In a review of Talking to Strangers, Andrew Ferguson unpacks Malcolm Gladwell’s pivot from rules and biases to questions. According to Ferguson, the thesis for the book is never actually achieved. Although Gladwell touches on issues with translation and default to truth, these never actually achieve the clarity of previous books.

In a separate piece, Tom Tey pushes back on Gladwell’s use of the Penn State scandal to prove a theory:

Gladwell’s after nothing more than his own gratification here, and the fact that he’s willing to use two infamous sexual assault cases as rhetorical springboards tells you all you need to know about how shallow his well of ideas has gotten.

After reading this section of Gladwell’s book, I was left with the impression of a writer furiously and desperately working backwards. It seems to me that Levine’s “Truth-Default Theory” captured Gladwell’s imagination, which sent him combing through recent history to find the sort of culturally important moments to which the theory could be applied in a way that would grab readers’ attention. The Penn State scandal! That was a big deal, right? Let’s take it for a spin!

Liked Truth in Education by jennymackness (jennymackness.wordpress.com)

Baggini discusses empirical, authoritative and reasoned truths, the idea that truth should be grounded in evidence, that truths can be known and that reason can lead to truth. All these seem to be the kinds of truths that Heather Heying focuses on as the basis for real conversations with her students.

But there are also, according the Baggini, eternal truths, esoteric truths, creative truths, relative truths, powerful truths,  moral truths and holistic truth. These seem to emphasise different aspects to how we recognise truth than the empirical truth focussed on by Heying. This made me wonder whether the idea that there can be many types of truth was discussed by her students and how this idea might influence the outcome of a ‘real conversation’.

Liked A philosopher explains how our addiction to stories keeps us from understanding history by Angela Chen (The Verge)

historical narratives seduce you into thinking you really understand what’s going on and why things happened, but most of it is guessing people’s motives and their inner thoughts. It allays your curiosity, and you’re satisfied psychologically by the narrative, and it connects the dots so you feel you’re in the shoes of the person whose narrative is being recorded. It has seduced you into a false account, and now you think you understand.

The second part is that it effectively prevents you from going on to try to find the right theory and correct account of events. And the third problem, which is the gravest, is that people use narratives because of their tremendous emotional impact to drive human actions, movements, political parties, religions, ideologies. And many movements, like nationalism and intolerant religions, are driven by narrative and are harmful and dangerous for humanity.

Liked There are No Things. There are patterns. by jennymackness (Jenny Connected)

‘The statement that ‘there is no such thing as truth’ is itself a truth statement, and implies that it is truer than its opposite, the statement that ‘truth exists’. If we had no concept of truth, we could not state anything at all, and it would even be pointless to act. There would be no purpose, for example, in seeking the advice of doctors, since there would be no point in having their opinion, and no basis for their view that one treatment was better than another. None of us actually lives as though there were no truth. Our problem is more with the notion of a single, unchanging truth.’ (McGilchrist, p.150)