The Cogitator

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Propositions and Corollaries: Rant: The lack of female role models in Math/Physics →

Last night I was discussing the feminist values that my (all-girls, Catholic) high school tried so hard to instill in its students with Kelly and I began to grow upset as a realization dawned on me.

You see, this school integrated awareness of sexism and feminism into all of its coursework—or,…

There is no history of racism in this country that chalked ‘up only to race.’ You can’t really talk about stereotypes of, say, black laziness unless you understand stereotypes of the poor stretching back to 17th century Great Britain. You can’t really talk about the Southern slave society without grappling with the relationship between the demand for arable land and the demand for labor. You can’t understand the racial pogroms at the turn of the century without understanding the increasing mobility of American women.

And this works the other way too. If you’re trying to understand the nature of American patriotism without thinking about anti-black racism, you will miss a lot. If you’re trying to understand the New Deal, without thinking about Southern segregationist senators you will miss a lot. If you’re trying to understand the very nature of American democracy itself, and not grappling with black you, you will miss almost all of it.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on white resentment, Obama, and Appalachia. (via theatlantic)

(via theatlantic)

theinternetaccordingtoadrian:

brilliant

Africa’s a wreck and it’s not because it was hit by an asteroid. It’s a wreck largely because it was hit by Europe.

Noam Chomsky (via antisocial-socialist)

(via noam-chomsky)

chomsky

(via backwardinduction)

Instead of taking the time to read deeply and widely about policy, we watch the claptrap that the media serves and parrot it back to each other. We rarely seek to understand the opposition’s arguments. Instead, we act like simpletons, watching only the shows that we think we already agree with so that we don’t have to think too deeply. Instead of debating with civility with others about issues, we mimic the talking heads on our favorite cable talk shows by attacking the opposition’s character. We take this easy route since it is so much easier to dismiss those we disagree with by portraying them as utterly evil. Instead of demanding that mass media coverage dive deeper into public policy issues, we continue to watch the junk the media shows, providing them with high ratings and little incentive to change their ways.

How the Media Wastes Our Time During Political Campaigns (via azspot)

(via azspot)

politics

wilwheaton:

Makes me laugh every time I see it.

Culture, Not Biology, Shapes Human Language →

There’s no language gene.

There’s no innate language organ or module in the human brain dedicated to the production of grammatical language.

There are no meaningful human universals when it comes to how people construct sentences to communicate with each other. Across the languages of the world (estimated to number 6,000-8,000), nouns, verbs, and objects are arranged in sentences in different ways as people express their thoughts. The powerful force behind this variability is culture.

I haven’t read the book in question, but this is shear nonsense. Yes, language is culturally transmitted, but without the brain’s capability to produce language, how could it be produced in the first place? And since brains all tend to have things in common and language is used for similar purposes by everyone, languages tend to have things in common. This statement in particular,

There’s no innate language organ or module in the human brain dedicated to the production of grammatical language.

is patently false. There are multiple regions in the brain dedicated to language and if these regions are damaged then patients can lose the capability to speak or to understand language. This is called aphasia.

The Piraha language lacks recursion. The reasons for this may be culturally based. Of course it is also possible that the Piraha language developed that way, and then cultural reasons were created to explain it. Either way, that does not provide evidence that the structure of language does not have a biological basis and has to have structure that lies within a certain space of possibilities.

Suppose that there are cultural reason why Latin has declensions for it’s nouns and English does not. Or supposed that there are cultural reasons why English has conjugated verb tenses and Chinese does not. Would any of that mean that language does not have a foundation in biology?

theatlantic:

Why Men Love Guns: Holding One Makes Them Look Taller and More Muscular

University of California, Los Angeles, anthropologists led by Daniel Fessler asked 628 online respondents to guess the height of four men based solely on photographs of their hands holding either a caulk, electric drill, large saw, or handgun. They also showed photos of progressively taller and pictures of increasingly more muscular men, and asked the subjects to estimate which images came closest to the probable size and strength of the hand model. […]

The participants judged the men who were holding a gun to be taller and more muscular than the men with the other objects, even though the hands of the models were all the same size. On average, they judged pistol-packers to be 17 percent bigger and stronger than the ones holding the sealant, who were considered the wimpiest of the bunch. […]

We may have an unconscious mental mechanism that projects our assessment of a potential threat in terms of the size and strength of our adversary. “There’s nothing about the knowledge that gun powder makes lead bullets fly through the air at damage-causing speeds that should make you think that a gun-bearer is bigger or stronger, yet you do,” says Fessler in a statement. “Danger really does loom large — in our minds.”

Read more. [Image: Shutterstock]