History- sine ira et studio?

To what extent should history be written without bias? Can it even be written without it? And if it can be, then do we lose something important?

I think that it all depends on what one considers the purpose of history to be. If it is meant to be taken as completely reliable, even perhaps as knowledge, then yes, it should avoid bias if it can. However, there are a few reasons why bias might actually be unavoidable. One is selection bias: it’s impossible to comment and write about every single aspect of history, and so naturally the boring (and possibly very important stuff) may be left out, providing an incomplete account. Confirmation bias is where the writer believes something to be true and so warps the evidence to support their point. Finally, National bias is simply the cultural and national biases of the time that influence the historian.These cannot be ignored or avoided. We are all human, after all, and we naturally will have some sort of opinion on things.

Bias is a very important part of understanding historical events, especially if the culture has changed a lot since they occurred. Imagine reading some Tacitus (the Latin quote is his, so it seems fitting to use him here) and reading about a battle where the fallen were not buried. We wouldn’t fully understand how deeply that affected the Romans without Tacitus’ bias attached. If he wrote in a completely objective manner we could assume that it was not seen as a problem in that culture, seriously warping our view on the subject. So not only could we not write without bias, we couldn’t even truly understand the culture’s and people’s reactions to events without it.

Obedience

The Milgram experiment was one that took the world of psychology by storm. Shortly after WWII, when the Nazi trials were in full force, Milgram conducted an experiment that seemed to show strong evidence of obedience to authority- even if it meant killing another human being.

The concept is quite simple: A volunteer is duped into thinking that they are playing a memory learning game with another person, who is an actor and is not actually being harmed in any way. They must ask them questions and give them an electric shock if they are wrong. They increase the voltage each time, up until a deadly 450 volts. If they attempt to stop, a scientist will tell them that they must continue. And they do. The stats differ, but 65% of people on average go all the way. That’s two out of three people.

It’s scary isn’t it? Knowing that your friends, your family, anyone, could easily kill you if an intimidating man in a lab coat told them to. But should we be ashamed? Can we stop ourselves from being the weak and feeble pawns that this experiment makes us out to be? Is it just society that forces us to be this way?  Can we, however,  take no responsibility for our actions?

The problem with this experiment is that if you accept the findings as true and relevant, then you essentially accept that Nazis were not to blame for their abhorrent acts. Milgram even posed the question in his book- “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” Can we truly say that obedience to authority is a legitimate reason for abandoning all semblance of human conscience? As disturbing as it sounds, I think it can be. I do not condone the Nazi’s actions in any way, but the power of authority, especially a violent and oppressive one, can be incredibly strong. Combine that with mindless mob mentality, dehumanisation of the victims, and the apathy shown by many towards anything that doesn’t directly affect them, and you begin to have a situation where people no longer think what they are doing is wrong. We hardly stop to consider the things that we do in daily life, and we often don’t think of the consequences behind them. We should be ashamed of a society where we aren’t taught to question authority. I’ll accept that the terrifying power of authority can easily cause people to commit horrific acts, but that doesn’t mean it should be ignored as something that we cannot change. If our society forces us to abandon our humanity, then it is not a society we should accept as our own.

I’ll finish with a quote from V for Vendetta by Alan Moore:

“People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.”

Battle of the sciences

There tends to be a hierarchy of the sciences. Physicists love to assert that physics is the ultimate science which lays the foundation for all the others, and that they would not exist without it (the sciences, not the physicists). This, however, assumes that all the sciences are aiming to achieve the same thing, or viewing things in the same way. Physics looks at particles, chemistry at elements and compounds, biology at living things, and human sciences at mankind. These cover a diverse range and will all need to be observed and experimented on differently. This leads to the question- Can we test the human sciences in the same way as natural sciences?

The short answer is No. A key part of good scientific experimentation is the ability to control variables. That is near-impossible in most situations involving human sciences. In fact in economic theory, the term ceteris paribus is used- with other things the same. Economics has to declare that all its theories exist in a perfect market world where people are completely rational money-spending objects who never go on shopping binges, and aren’t affected by any external factors. Experiments in the human sciences are also difficult to repeat, and not easily reviewed by peers. You can’t exactly ask a country to restart its economy so you can just check whether inflation actually affects unemployment. Nor can you repeat psychological experiments in different countries and cultures and expect to get the same results. Society plays such a large part in our development and the way we act that it is hardly possible to separate ourselves from our cultural bias. Objective judgements are essential in science, and human sciences do not always offer these. Even studies involving surveys are flawed- our language is inherently biased and does not always fully express all the options available. You’re not going to be able to understand someone’s mind by a couple of tick boxes. Especially if they lie- I’ll be honest for once here- I’ve lied in tests like these before, which is probably very unhelpful of me, but what do you expect when they ask me how many hours of exercise I do per week?

Although it seems like I’ve just been destroying human sciences; natural sciences are not completely without their flaws. I must admit that I am biased towards the natural sciences, but they aren’t perfect. The observer effect in quantum physics means that we can never be sure that the act of us observing something doesn’t affect it. This concept also appears in psychology- people act differently when you know they are watching them (most disturbing phrase ever?). Observation plays such a large part in all scientific study, but it is often untrustworthy, with confirmation biases and other irritating problems like that.

I don’t want to completely disregard the human sciences as pseudoscience, but they seem to deal more in correlation than causation- observing trends and patterns rather than finding the ‘why’. I think, however, as technology progresses, it may become possible to improve the experimentation process in the human sciences (mind-reading or something) and so then we will have to take notice of it. Until then, I feel that it is based a little too much on superficial, subjective judgements on something that is constantly changing- society and humankind itself.

 

Mathematics

A collective groan ripples around the classroom. Possibly one of the most universally hated subjects, just for its sheer sense of uselessness (why do I need to find x???) and the mind-numbingly dull sensation of Déjà vu that you get when yet another virtually identical quadratic equation appears on the page. Every wave of students has wondered- why would anyone create maths? But what if humans didn’t make maths up? What if mathematics was a self-proving, perfect system that exists whether we like it or not? The language to express it may be artificial, but mathematics itself is not made by us. Mathematics does not exist because it can be found empirically in the world; the world only exists because of fundamental mathematical and physical laws that we have observed, not invented.

To what extent is it possible to use scientific evidence from the world around us to develop new mathematical concepts?

How far can intuition be used in mathematical understanding and discovery?

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry In Translation

So we all had to translate a poem from any language into English and make it sound decent, which is so much harder than it sounds! As a translator, I tend to be incredibly literal and precise about translation, partially because some mark schemes are that way, but also because I don’t want to lose any of the original meaning. Of course, my translation ends up as a completely meaningless jumble of strangely misplaced cases that the author probably used just for fun.

I translated a poem by Seneca the Younger, a known philosopher of Stoicism and advisor to Nero.

Starving time devours all worlds,

All things it will seize away.

Disturbing all from its rest-

Nothing permitted to be still forever.

Rivers run dry, whilst a runaway sea

Is swallowed by its shores.

Mountains sink themselves to the ground,

Mighty ridges are ruined.

 

What is so small that I speak of?

The most glorious parts of all the heavenly sky

Will burn with time’s fires suddenly;

Death demands all.

It is the law, not a punishment to die- in another time-

This world will be nothing.

Here is the original Latin…

This is my first run-through, so hopefully I’ll be able to vastly improve it. I chose to do it in sonnet format, with an octet and a sestet, because I found that the subject matter of the poem neatly divided into two sections- a descriptive beginning and a more philosophical ending. The sonnet also is meant to be romantic, contrasting with this brutal description of time’s power. I wanted to write the poem in iambic pentameter, to fit with the sonnet, but that was very difficult considering the short length of the Latin stanzas; the rhythm is something that I still need to sort out.  I used simple language, reflecting the Latin’s unadorned vocabulary.

 

 

New Year’s Resolutions

Love them or hate them, New year’s resolutions are yet another topic for small talk after Christmas and a rather convenient way for people to attempt to motivate themselves. As you can probably tell, I think they’re useless. Why does a new year mean that we should start doing things differently? If your new year’s resolution is to ‘be nicer to people’ (good luck with that), then you can try, but if someone hates you, then it seems unlikely that your ‘fresh start’ is going to be effective simply because we now write a 6 instead of a 5. The new year makes completely no difference to anything except us. Even different cultures have different dates for the new year. Why do we as humans feel the need to set units of time? To what extent can we know what time it is? Does it actually matter what time it is?

As an obsessively punctual person, I know the horror of having a clock that is even slightly out of time, even though my friends constantly tell me to relax, or more recently, they quote Oscar Wilde, (you can always tell which ones are the English students…)

“Punctuality is the thief of time”

I usually acknowledge this with an exasperated glance, or on a good day, a witty response. There is something quite disorientating about being unsure of what time it is, even by a few minutes. CH runs on its own little time system which is two minutes ahead from everywhere else, but does that affect anything? Is it a problem that we say that 11.22 is 11.24? In this fast-paced, time-orientated culture, perhaps it does. As our technology advances, our accuracy increases and we can divide time into increasingly smaller subsections. Time used to be measured vaguely by the position of the sun, which depended on your guessing skills and experience to have even the slightest idea of the time. If I turned up an hour late to a lesson, not only would I have almost missed all of it, but it wouldn’t be acceptable, whereas, without a way to quantify the time, my rough interpretation of the sun would be close enough. I would simply be arriving slightly after the sun was in the position when I should’ve been there.

Our basic units of time are invented by humans of course. The 365 days that make up a year, although roughly based on the orbit of the earth, are not accurate. And what’s worse is that we can’t see seconds or minutes, unlike mm or grams. All we can do is observe the effects of time and just desperately cling to our system because it is the only way that we can comprehend time itself. Maybe our lives would be better without our time system (mine certainly would- I’m writing this at 1 in the morning and the precious hours of sleep will soon slip away into the abyss), or maybe we would just spend ages waiting for people to turn up (if we don’t do that already.) We are trapped by our own invention of time, and time is bound in our minds to something much more simple than it actually is.

Reason vs Emotion

“Stop being so emotional!”

I’m sure most people have heard this at least once in their life. But is being emotional really such a bad thing? Our society values reason so much more than emotion because it can be standardised and it forms the basis of many knowledge systems, for example, science and mathematics. Emotions are ignored as a way of knowing because they can’t be always be explained and everyone experiences them differently. Showing or even experiencing strong emotions is sometimes seen as a sign of weakness, but it is part of what makes us human. Just imagine someone with no emotions whatsoever- would you really be able to understand them?

Emotions are an important part of life, but to what extent should we trust their judgement? It is a very fine line to tread between reason and emotion. Too much emotion and you become an irritating wreck of tears and hysteria, acting impulsively without thoroughly thinking through your actions. Too much reason and you become unable to understand your emotions, making yourself unhappy by only choosing the options that are most reasonable rather than the ones that make you feel good. It may seem like a difficult choice, but most of the time people use a mix of both, in a way that they feel is appropriate to the situation.

So what is the problem? Surely all we have to do is choose the right one to use? The problem that arises is that we can’t and we don’t. Both reason and emotion are fallible and so we have to be pragmatic when using them in everyday life to make decisions.

Logical Fallacies and Rhetorical tricks: The wonders of Politics

As most people should be aware: Politicians lie. They may not lie completely openly, but they use illogical arguments and flamboyant language to distract you from the highly biased truth you are receiving. Now, I am going to concentrate on a speech recently made by the one and only David Cameron at the Tory Party Conference this year. The first thing that I noticed is how sickeningly smooth and calculated it is. Speeches are meant to be said out loud, and for good reason too. When you actually just read a speech in writing, it reveals the true extent of their attempt to manipulate you. You can see all the needless repetition that has come straight out of ‘Rhetorical Speech for Dummies’, desperately trying to rouse the people of England to be passionate about our ‘Greater Britain’.

He uses a false dilemma and also argumentum in terrorem,

“And the choice I faced was this:

Act – and we could stop them carrying out their plans.

Stall – and we could see innocent people murdered on our streets.”

He uses ad hominem on Corbyn,

“My friends – we cannot let that man inflict his security-threatening, terrorist-sympathising, Britain-hating ideology on the country we love.”

Regardless of whether you agree with this or not; this is a vicious attack on Corbyn but not his arguments or policies. A lazy way to convince the public: make them hate everyone else more than you.

“It’s not just that their arguments are wrong; it’s the self-righteous way they make them.”

Hypocrisy much? This entire speech is so incredibly pompous that it might actually develop its own opinion and try and run for PM.  (Cameron’s attack here is on Labour of course)

I picked this out just because it dripped with propaganda:

“The party that doesn’t care where you come from, but only where you’re going”

Using the experiences of this elderly man is hasty generalisation- one person does not represent Britain, and the personal aspect of this appeals to our emotions (argumentum ad misericordiam):

“Aged 82, this is possibly my last election.

In my life I have foolishly voted Labour, believing it served the working class.

How wrong I was. Labour is against all I aspire to.”

I’m sure that there are many more that I simply do not have the willpower to find, but this just shows how many problems and fallacies that a single person can find in only one speech made by only one politician. He used repetition to attempt to strengthen his speech- the number of times ‘we will’ came up was innumerable. Desperately trying to drum up a sense of British pride and community, perhaps. However, I must admit that being a politician is certainly not the easiest job in the world, and so Cameron is really not as bad as people say he is.

Of course, this kind of rhetoric has been around for a very long time; it’s definitely nothing new. That still doesn’t mean that we should accept it without questioning. As the lines of morality become increasingly blurred in today’s world; we must learn to find and process the information for ourselves, rather than blindly receiving lies from the mouths of those who need us to believe what they say to stay afloat in politics.

And to finish my overly extended rant, a very apt quote from Cicero (who was definitely a much better orator than David Cameron):

“When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff.”

Even the greatest may sometimes have to resort to fallacy…

Language, Emotion, and Poetry (oh my)

Try to think without words in your mind. It’s pretty difficult, isn’t it? Even if you think of something that you don’t know the name of; you still describe it to yourself in words. Even emotions that don’t fit into the simple happy, sad, angry categories can be described with adjectives or other words- apathetic rage, bitter contempt, seething resentment (I only chose those just because they are so deliciously reflective of those incredibly pompous books that feel the need to throw in an obscure classical reference or half of the dictionary every two pages). We have such a wide range of words on offer, but is it enough? There are always some things that we can never express fully, even in description, and even the meaning of these abstract concepts often varies from person to person. Take the classic example of Love: it can’t effectively be defined in words because it doesn’t exist that way. It exists outside the boundaries of what we can define- even babies can show what we would call love towards their family, without language. The Ancient Greeks had split love up into multiple words- eros, agape, philia and storge; the words all denote different kinds of love. But even this expansion of language can never reach the true root of the problem. We cannot say for sure what love is since we all feel it differently (and for some people it seems not at all…)

The untranslatable quality of abstract concepts into reality also links to the difficulty of translating poetry. Poetry as an art form is designed to elicit emotions from its reader, to make them feel what the poet wanted them to. Perhaps it is a way of getting around the problem of abstract concepts: Poetry explains and defines through metaphor that which we cannot define with certainty. Everyone interprets poems differently, reflecting their own views and experiences onto what they are reading, drawing a completely different conclusion from anyone else. This shows the ambiguity of language, and how useful it can be; people can have the freedom to decide for themselves exactly what the poem means and is trying to say. This metaphorical language, however, can often be lost in translation.

There is something personal about reading poetry in your own language, like an old house that you’ve lived in for years. You know every corner of the house, and in your native tongue, every little nuance; the words carry a deeper meaning for you. You know how it all fits together, in a blend of imagery and sound and syntax. But in another language that you don’t know so well, the poetry is just a jumble of words that you remember from 3rd form vocab tests. It always makes me feel slightly wistful, that I will never truly access such a great wealth of beautiful poetry. Even books that have been translated lose something in translation. There is a great book called 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, translated from Japanese, which I have always wanted to read in its original language (if I could actually read Japanese), but would it even be the same? Would it have the same meaning to me as it did to a native speaker? Probably not, and so for now it is best just to read the watered-down English versions (even though the translation was very good), only unearthing half of the whole story, never fully appreciating the masterful penmanship of the original author. Maybe one day everyone will be raised as polylingual, swapping between languages to express different things, using the strengths of each one to reach a higher level of meaning. Or of course, all languages except one could die, and the world would be a much less diverse and interesting place.

If a tree falls in the Matrix, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Are we living in the Matrix?

A question that no one really wants to ask themselves. However, today in TOK we were asked which pill we would take if we were asked the same question as Neo:

“You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”- Morpheus

I feel that for the purposes of TOK, choosing the red pill is almost compulsory. It shows a desire to go beyond the automatic assumptions of your reality,
not to simply believe without thinking. On the other hand, TOK is unlikely to make the ‘reality’ we live in (illusion or not) uninhabitable. If you took the red pill, nothing would ever be the same again; you’d lose everything that you had worked for (even if it wasn’t real), but hopefully TOK won’t cause that to happen.

We like the security of believing that the world around us exists as we see it,
and until we have evidence to show us that we are all completely deluded; we will carry on this way. There are some days when I couldn’t care less if everything around me was just an illusion, because I’ve never known anything else, and doubt that I ever will. But what if I could know? Would I actually take the red pill? I hate the idea that we are pawns in someone’s game, that we are being blindly pushed on in a certain direction, making decisions that we believe are free will, when they are actually the machinations of a greater force. That is the harsh truth if the world is an illusion- we are being played with. Even our brain lies to us. Our sense perception is warped by our bias and what we are expecting to see.

Now for the tree. Everyone knows the question, that has been argued over in every philosophical discussion ever, so much so that it is almost ‘old news’. If no one is there to hear something, does it make a sound? Does it happen at all? Mr Saha told us that the answer is no and that it will always be no. A sound is something that is heard; the sound can only exist if we hear and process it. The world doesn’t exist as we perceive it, until we perceive it that way. I find this way of thinking overly egocentric.

We are not the only living beings capable of acquiring sense data and processing it, in fact many animals have senses far better than ours. This means that we don’t experience a large part of the world because we simply can’t detect it. We can’t see in ultraviolet, or hear sounds above 20 kHz, or even smell as well as many other animals can. So how can we say that events do not occur or ‘the tree doesn’t fall’, when we are only receiving a tiny part of reality through our senses? If something happened to cause a very high pitched noise; we would say that there wasn’t a sound, because we couldn’t hear it. Of course there is no way to say that trees make sounds when they fall, or if sounds exist if we aren’t there to hear them. But sounds are simply vibrations of particles, and although physics is a human construct; we have to believe that the laws of physics remain the same, even if we are not there to process the data.

Anyway, this post probably isn’t even here, the evil overlords of our brains are just creating it to cause mental anguish among those who don’t want to think, so let’s just forget that this ever happened, for the sake of our sanity, if nothing else.