Prerna brought home this book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
They started a book club at her work and she brought back a torn and tatted edition of the book. She had other things to read so I skimmed the back cover and thought it would be good to pick up. It is a good read and very timely with all of the activity in the world with Brazil and farmers burning the rain forests in the Amazon and the Indonesian fires which sounds like a little of the same thing. People clearly have an effect on the climate. Of course natural events have a lot to do with rising carbon dioxide levels (volcanic activity) as well as agriculture (cows the world's best methane machine). However, the effects of man are clearly demonstrated in the historical record.
I really liked this passage in the first few pages of chapter 5 - Welcome to the Anthropocene about paradigm shifts and the work of Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn coined the term paradigm shift - scientific knowledge undergoes periodic "paradigm shifts rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way.
Kolbert in The Sixth Extinction relates the story of a 1949 experiment that two Harvard Psychologists performed in which they created a special deck of playing cards with non-standard cards such as "red six of spades" or "black four of hearts." They asked the subjects to call out the cards as they were shown rapidly. As Kolbert related,
They started a book club at her work and she brought back a torn and tatted edition of the book. She had other things to read so I skimmed the back cover and thought it would be good to pick up. It is a good read and very timely with all of the activity in the world with Brazil and farmers burning the rain forests in the Amazon and the Indonesian fires which sounds like a little of the same thing. People clearly have an effect on the climate. Of course natural events have a lot to do with rising carbon dioxide levels (volcanic activity) as well as agriculture (cows the world's best methane machine). However, the effects of man are clearly demonstrated in the historical record.
I really liked this passage in the first few pages of chapter 5 - Welcome to the Anthropocene about paradigm shifts and the work of Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn coined the term paradigm shift - scientific knowledge undergoes periodic "paradigm shifts rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way.
Kolbert in The Sixth Extinction relates the story of a 1949 experiment that two Harvard Psychologists performed in which they created a special deck of playing cards with non-standard cards such as "red six of spades" or "black four of hearts." They asked the subjects to call out the cards as they were shown rapidly. As Kolbert related,
"the students tended to overlook the incongruities; they would, for example, assert that the red six of spades was a six of hearts, or call the black four of hearts a four of spades. When the cards went by more slowly, they struggled to make sense of what they were seeing. Confronted with a red spade, some said it looked "purple" or "brown" or "rusty black." Others were completely flummoxed.
The psychologists wrote up their findings in a paper titled "on the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm." Among those who found this paper intriguing was Thomas Kuhn. To Kuhn, the twentieth century's most influential historian of science, the experiment was indeed paradigmatic: it reveled how people process disruptive information. Their first impulse is to force it into a familiar framework: hearts, spades, clubs. Signs of mismatch are disregarded for as long as possible --a the red spade looks "brown" or "rusty." At the point the anomaly becomes simply too glaring, a crisis ensues -- what the psychologists dubbed the " 'My God!' reaction."
...Data that did not fit the commonly accepted assumptions of a discipline would be discounted or explained away for as long as possible. The more the contractions accumulated, the more convoluted the rationalizations became. "In science, as in playing card experiment, novely emerges only with difficulty," Kuhn wrote.This is a really powerful exposition of the idea that people are hard pressed to accept any change when it deviates from what they have been taught or take to be true. This explains our tribal behaviors. It is why we struggle with changing our habits and modifying our our mental models to accept new ideas which go against or challenge our old comfortable ideas of what we have come to accept as an understanding of reality.
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