Thinking is knowing is thinking [Article]

Nicholas Carr quotes psychologist Daniel Willingham:

It’s hard for many people to conceive of thinking processes as intertwined with knowledge. Most people believe that thinking processes are akin to those of a calculator. A calculator has available a set of procedures  (addition, multiplication, and so on) that can manipulate numbers, and those procedures can be applied to any set of numbers. The data (the numbers) and the operations that manipulate the data are separate. Thus, if you learn a new thinking operation (for example, how to critically analyze historical documents), it seems like that operation should be applicable to all historical documents, just as a fancier calculator that computes sines can do so for all numbers.

 During the K – 12 years, developing a solid store of knowledge is essential to learning how to think. There’s still no substitute for a well-furnished mind.

The real reason women are opting out of Wall Street [Article]

Margo Epprecht explains, quoting a woman who she admired in her first job:

“The business has changed,”… “It is not as intellectually challenging as it used to be. It’s more like cage fighting. Long-term investment today means a month; mathematicians convince themselves they can quantify risk in their arcane products that no one can understand; and fee structures are out of line with investor returns. No wonder people are cynical about Wall Street.”

The philosophy of creating your own currency [Article]

Brett Scott’s article, “So you want to invent your own currency” makes for fascinating reading.

If money is an object, it must be an enchanted one, charged up with value by a subtle cultural process. Why else would anyone exchange a box of coffee for a rectangle of paper? Shopkeepers accept the paper because they believe that it has abstract value — because, in turn, they believe that others believe it, too. The value is circular, predicated on each person believing that others believe in it. You hand over your money and claim something from the shopkeeper, almost as if the coffee were owed to you. Then they take the claim that was previously yours and use it to claim something from someone else. We all trust each other to value money — but this still means that every monetary transaction is a leap of faith. And faith has to be carefully maintained.

Why teach (and study) English? [Article]

Adam Gopnik explains why should English majors exist:

 Why should English majors exist? Well, there really are no whys to such things, anymore than there are to why we wear clothes or paint good pictures or live in more than hovels and huts or send flowers to our beloved on their birthday. No sane person proposes or has ever proposed an entirely utilitarian, production-oriented view of human purpose. We cannot merely produce goods and services as efficiently as we can, sell them to each other as cheaply as possible, and die. Some idea of symbolic purpose, of pleasure-seeking rather than rent seeking, of Doing Something Else, is essential to human existence. That’s why we pass out tax breaks to churches, zoning remissions to parks, subsidize new ballparks and point to the density of theatres and galleries as signs of urban life, to be encouraged if at all possible.

Parents’ Harsh Words Might Make Teen Behaviors Worse

According to a study by the University of Pittsburgh,

The parents who used more harsh words when the child was 13 were more likely to see increases in their teenager’s conduct problems when asked again a year later. And the children who faced high levels of harsh verbal discipline were more likely to have symptoms of depression at age 14.

Pricing the priceless child [Article]

When it comes to pricing a human life, the answer seems simple. Human life is precious, unquantifiable, priceless. In practice, however, court cases, insurance claims, and victim funds often demand a monetary value for a lost life. Read “The Price of a Child“

As the author says,

Children are our future, but it’s only recently that they’ve been valued as such.

Why kids around the world can’t read [Article]

This western-world view at why kids in developing countries can’t read.

Of the world’s population, about 7 out of 10 live in a country where pretty much every child completes primary school. The proportion of secondary-school-aged kids who are in classes has climbed from about half to two-thirds over the past 15 years. The trouble is, a lot of those enrolled appear to be learning very little. In India only a little more than a quarter of the children who complete primary school can read a simple passage, perform division, tell time, and handle money—all skills that should be mastered by the end of second grade. And while eighth-grade enrollment increased to 87 percent from 82 percent of school-aged children in the country from 2006 to 2011, the fraction of enrolled children who could do long division fell to 57 percent from 70 percent—suggesting that despite more of them going to school, fewer kids actually learned basic math over that time.

Sure, but what about access to food, electricity, rest/sleep, books, teachers, housing etc.. ? Realities on the ground don’t usually make their way into these explanations – the pat answer from most armchair economists seems to be “if you can’t afford it, don’t have kids”.