11 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2023
  2. Mar 2023
    1. Common sense is actually a pretty bad indicator of truth. Because of cognitive biases and preconceived opinions, ideas that sound right are often wrong. “Common sense is actually nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind prior to the age of eighteen,” Einstein presumably said.
  3. Jul 2022
    1. 5.5 Logic, reason, and common sense are your best tools for synthesizing reality and understanding what to do about it.

      5.5 Logic, reason, and common sense are your best tools for synthesizing reality and understanding what to do about it.

  4. Jan 2022
  5. May 2021
  6. Apr 2021
    1. by an Arizona man or another person's attempt to run over a Pakistani woman in a Huntington, N.Y., parking lot. It

      Well, someone needs to educate these people

  7. Jul 2020
  8. Aug 2019
    1. According to Polanyi the universe is not a uniform sea, it contains emergent comprehensive entities, with discernable levels of organisation, which via boundary conditions operate independently of the lower levels from which they emerge. These emergent levels realise various purposes. As Pirsig explains, each level of order has a characteristic defining Quality, material, biological, social, and intellectual. Indwelling within articulations enables us to pursue and reflect upon abstract ideals such as truth, goodness, and beauty. For Polanyi a computer, indeed every sort of machine, is contrived to achieve a purpose. A machine can be programmed to achieve this purpose if the desired behaviour can be described in a way that can be simulated by a universal machine. AI offers the prospect of machines which learn without us having to define every detail of its procedures. But they need to do the right thing in every circumstance. This returns us to our problem, because defining criteria for correct behaviour, for making the right choices, amounts to giving a machine “common sense”. Humans excel in making choices in complex situations because we are guided by our tacit awareness.
  9. Feb 2019
    1. As with neoliberalism more generally, New Public Management is invisible, part of a new “common sense” that has somehow become hegemonic, whereby the “entrepreneurial spirit” has infused the public sector, leading to “businesslike government”. As with the claims of neoliberalism more generally as to its positive outputs in terms of prosperity, NPM has never been shown to have been successful even in its own terms. NPM “introduced punishments and rewards to produce better services with lesser staff. Instead of having freed energies and creativity of employees formerly shackled by their bureaucratic turfs, NPM reforms have bound energies into theatrical audit performances at the cost of work and killed creativity in centralizing resources and hollowing out professional autonomy... Fundamental deprivation of the legitimacy of public employees . . .has traumatized many most-committed employees and driven others toward a Soviet-type double standard.” (Juha Siltala, New Public Management : The evidence-based worst practice?, Administration; Vol. 45, No. 4.; 2013 pp. 468-493) Sekera quotes Christopher Pollitt et al., who “after compiling a database of 518 studies of NPM in Europe, determined that “more than 90% of what are seen by experts as the most significant and relevant studies contain no data at all on outcomes” and that of the 10% that had outcomes information, only 44% of those, or 4% of the total, found any improvements in terms of outcomes.” But in the end, the point of NPM is less that of measureable outcomes, and more that of the ideological victory of turning the public and its good into customers exercising their “choices” (see tax revolt example in Duggan), along of course with the radical disempowering of public administration workers and their unions, instituting “cost savings” by cutting their real income and putting more and more of the public sector’s production directly into the profit-making market.
    1. prudence, excel--i Jenee is accorded to those who ferret out the WO; greatest possible number of causes

      He is defining prudence by turning scientific inquiry on its head (or just pointing out that prudence is scientific inquiry on its head).

  10. Mar 2017
    1. Dr. Max Dunbar

      Dr. Maxwell John Dunbar, mentioned later in the text as the author of Environment and Common Sense which was published in 1971, began his “lifelong involvement with the Arctic” in August 1935 during an expedition to map the western Greenland coast (Grainger 1995, 306). Dunbar was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, attended the Merchiston Preparatory School followed by the Dalhousie Castle School, and finally, Fettes College. In 1933, Dunbar began attending the Trinity College in Oxford, England to study zoology where he met ecologist Charles Elton. After meeting Elton, Dunbar was introduced to the Oxford University Exploration Club. Through this club, Dunbar was invited to join the expedition in Greenland. He received a B.A. in 1937 and subsequently attended Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut on a Henry Fellowship (for more information on the Henry Fellowship see Yale University’s webpage https://yale.communityforce.com/Funds/FundDetails.aspx?4438534B376C50326C63483341496C39582F4435696B6F6554694364593150486764566B344156473663736768494B34585863553574432B646D5868384E6275). While studying at Yale University, Dunbar was able to take a trip to explore the glaciers of Alaska. He returned to Oxford, England, when Elton offered him the opportunity to join the 1939 eastern Canadian Arctic patrol. After accepting Elton’s offer, Dunbar enrolled at McGill University in Montreal, Canada as a graduate student. During his time at McGill University, Dunbar experienced the Canadian arctic for the first time by joining the R.M.S Nascopie. Dunbar began serving as the consular representative of the Canadian consulate in Greenland in 1942, and again in 1946. After leaving Greenland, Dunbar was employed by McGill University in the Department of Zoology. After beginning research for the Fisheries Research Board of Canada, he designed the first Canadian arctic research vessel Calanus. In 1947, Dunbar founded the Eastern Arctic Investigations laboratory at McGill University. His active involvement with McGill University continued until he retired and was appointed Professor Emeritus in 1982. He continued his quest for knowledge after “retiring” and published at least 32 articles after 1982 (Grainger 1995, 306-307).

      References

      Grainger, E. H. "Maxwell John Dunbar (1914-1995)." Arctic 48, no. 3 (1995): 306-07. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40511670.