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My prediction of an explosion of ill-understood 19th century categories has come even more true than I anticipated. Malcolm Gladwell explains one more time the function of context in intelligence tests...context that is not based on the richness of the environmental stimuli but on whether one's frame of reference is abstract or associative in terms of function (e.g., whether dogs and rabbits have in common the condition of being mammals or whether their link is that dogs are used to hunt rabbits):
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/12/17/071217crbo_books_gladwell?printable=true
Noticing in the "New Ideas of 2007" issue of the NY Times Magazine a couple of entries on how we tend to evaluate evidence (propositions accompanied by brain scans, no matter how irrelevant to the issue at hand the scan might be, were received as more likely to be valid; objects with more than one function were less likely to be selected for use in accomplishing a task than objects useful only for the task at hand), I was reminded of teaching stories designed to address exactly these tendencies of the human mind...tendencies that, in their general structure, predate the era of brain scans by, presumably, millennia. It would be surprising if some proto-psychologist had not developed a treatment for the deficiency in question in some past century, even if the treatment were extremely localized and not recognized as such. Human behavior is not rocket science; you do not have to have discovered a whole set of chemical interactions to notice that something has gone wrong, and speculate on how to fix it or at least reduce its negative effects.
But I have said this so many times that it has clearly become my idée fixe, not least because I can't do much about the inbuilt deficiencies in my own ways of functioning.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/12/17/071217crbo_books_gladwell?printable=true
Noticing in the "New Ideas of 2007" issue of the NY Times Magazine a couple of entries on how we tend to evaluate evidence (propositions accompanied by brain scans, no matter how irrelevant to the issue at hand the scan might be, were received as more likely to be valid; objects with more than one function were less likely to be selected for use in accomplishing a task than objects useful only for the task at hand), I was reminded of teaching stories designed to address exactly these tendencies of the human mind...tendencies that, in their general structure, predate the era of brain scans by, presumably, millennia. It would be surprising if some proto-psychologist had not developed a treatment for the deficiency in question in some past century, even if the treatment were extremely localized and not recognized as such. Human behavior is not rocket science; you do not have to have discovered a whole set of chemical interactions to notice that something has gone wrong, and speculate on how to fix it or at least reduce its negative effects.
But I have said this so many times that it has clearly become my idée fixe, not least because I can't do much about the inbuilt deficiencies in my own ways of functioning.
