There are two blogs I have read recently which make the good point that reading “classics” is important . At the New York Times, Philosopher Gary Gutting makes the point that a college education is not so much about “the content,” (or presumably the major) but about the habits of reading and inquiry developed. Or as he writes: “We should judge teaching not by the amount of knowledge it passes on, but by the enduring excitement it generates.”…
Jason Richwine, Scientist?
“We destroy people with the inappropriate tools we use to study them” – Ray Birdwhistell
Jason Richwine has emerged to defend himself in a National Review editorial. As you might expect, Richwine contextualizes his dissertation as an exercise in scientific fortitude and paints himself as a heroic seeker of truth. For example, he sums up the past month this way:
…The furor will soon pass. Mercifully, the media are starting to forget about me.
“1 + 1”: More than an Equation
by Amina Tawasil
Schooling is supposed to either spark or augment IQ/cognitive ability which is then exhibited as ‘skills’. Thus, it only follows that schooling increases the chances of upward mobility for girls, women and people of color. And, for men and women in ‘small villages of ailing countries’, schooling is considered a pillar to a successful rural to urban labor migration. In short, schooling is supposed to guarantee financial security.…
The All-Time Stupidest Question to Ask a Language Learner: Did You Understand what He/She said????!!!!” (Repeated loudly)
I’ve been living in Germany for the last nine months. One of my goals is to improve my German skills, and guess what, I am getting better. But still my German is still far from perfect. Occasionally I will be in a conversation (ok more than occasionally) and I will try to guess about meaning. Sometimes I guess kind of right, which means that I will make a kind of odd response to a question. …
Does PCA Have Politics?
This morning, armchair scientist and noted fan of this blog, Razib Khan, decided it would be prudent to write about race. It comes by way of Khan issuing a corrective, of sorts, to Ta-Nehisi Coates.
The Coates article is wonderful. He takes a historical look at how race has been deployed over the last 150 years. Along the way, he makes all the good points that can be made with the census, and some others as well.…
Inter-disciplinary Work Sounds Exhausting
We have had a good week on Ethnography.com grappling with the diffrerences between the Social Sciences, and the Cognitive Sciences. Last month it was the Social Sciences and Population Genetics.
I am of course a Social Scientist, and much more in tune with what Michael Scroggins and Max Holland write. They are squarely in the traditions of the social sciences regarding the nature of culture, definitions, and interpretations of data. They are also well-read in the natural sciences, and trying to tie the two fields together, a difficult task. …
Campbell’s Law and the Fallacies of Standardized Testing
Donald Campbell was one of the leading psychologists of the second half of the twentieth century. His was a time of optimism for planners—there was a belief that the power of technology could be brought to bear on many of the world’s ills. And indeed they were, often with positive effects. As a result of central planning, more people receive water, more places are electrified, more children educated, and more diseases eradicated. …
A note to Evolutionary Psychologists: Culture and science are two sides of the same coin
by Maximilian Holland
There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination (Dennett 1995)
An inherent feature of the practice of observation in empirical science is its dependence upon how perception is ordered into description via language and communicated to others. This is true for social, physical, behavioral and other sciences; all are inextricably dependent upon language and pre-existing concepts. …
The Political Economy of IQ, Or Tilting At Windmills with Steve Hsu (and Jason Richwine)
Steve Hsu has been on a tear lately. Giving talks about IQ, here and here, and partnering with BGI to sequence the genomes of “high cognition” individuals in a quest to solve the giant “problem” of IQ. This effort has hit Vice magazine, Slate, and, more recently, NPR. To give you the CliffsNotes version of Hsu’s argument: IQ is a quantitative trait, just like height and can therefore be selected for improvement.…
Incidental Anthropology: American Parenting, Mendeley, and “Japan’s Modern Divide”
In this installment of the seriocomic series Incidental Anthropology, I bring you three more media stories which incidentally illustrate anthropological points. Given the recent back and forth on this blog over genetics, I highly recommend the first link.
1) Why are Americans so focused on how “cognitively advanced” their children are?
2) Some thoughts on Elsevier’s purchase of Mendeley and what this might mean for Open Access and academic publishing.
3) The complex career and photography of Hiroshi Hamaya with a view towards the relation of snow and spirit.…
The Case of Myriad Genetics
As Tony pointed out, the back and forth on this blog over population genetics has produced some smoke, some heat and some insights into what a gene might be and how much it can say about the everyday lives of human beings.
Today the Supreme Court is hearing arguments in the case of Association for Molecular Pathology vs. Myriad Genetics. At stake are some the same questions we have been debating at ethnography.com…
A Review of the Jared Diamond Reviews
Jared Diamond has created a lot of heat in the anthropological blogosphere in the last few months. So much heat in fact, that Rex at Savage Minds is now in a position to write a “review of the reviews” in an April 2013 post here. Quite and achievement for a 512 page book published on December 31, 2012! When do reviewers have time to read such a book, and also come up with a thoughtful review?…