Category: Wisdom
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Inherited strength & Arrogance in religion, science and elsewhere.
Nowadays we often talk about the arrogance of people in various fields. Arrogant scientists do things simply because they can do them, without thinking about the consequences. Arrogant priests are almost celebrating that they quit the church and "moved on". Arrogant managers in companies behave unacceptably without any empathy for colleagues or customers. And the…
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Education. Short- sightedness. Non-thinking. Not seeing.
Spending more years in full time education is associated with a greater risk of developing short-sightedness (myopia). (1) Seeing a lot. Reading a lot. Thinking a lot. A blind man can do that. But it takes a full working brain to think nothing. It takes a wise man to know nothing. It takes two pair…
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Language. Civilization. Silence. Re-death.
Sixty years ago, renowned Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner published one of the most important books ever written about language. Verbal Behavior offered a comprehensive account of our unique capacity for symbolic communication, arguing forcefully over nearly 500 pages that it was learned rather than innate. The culmination of years of work, it was certainly…
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Clever raccoon. Wise humans?
A raccoon managed to solve an intelligence problem by bypassing it. In a study, the researchers set up a cylinder with a floating marshmallow too low for the raccoons to grab. For the training session, the team balanced some stones on the rim of the tube. When the raccoons knocked them in, it showed how…
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Pre-fabricated phrases… Light instead of dreams…
A new doctoral dissertation by Parvin Gheitasi at Umeå University in Sweden explores the different functions of prefabricated phrases in young learners' oral language production. These phrases provided learners with an instrument to overcome their lack of knowledge, to improve their fluency, and to enjoy some language play. "The young learners in this study remind…
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