Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Drawings on Found Photograph by Davud Ernst Davud Ernst is a... crss





















Drawings on Found Photograph by Davud Ernst

Davud Ernst is a 22-years-old artist and illustrator from Northern Germany. His drawings are mostly defined by stripes and dots. Follow him on Tumblr: @davudernst.tumblr.com/

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Human Minds Have Limitations In Reasoning, What You Believe Is Right Likely Is Wrong

How often do you ride on a car? Even if you don’t have your own car, you must have seen one. I want to start this piece with a small challenge for you. Using only your memory, recall it in your mind a car you often see.

Okay, I see the wheels, the window, and the overall car frame. Does it look anything like this?

Oh but wait, what about the headlights and tail lights? Where’s the handle for opening the doors? And where’re the mirrors?

Why would we miss so many of those things? Don’t we all have a clear idea what a car is like?

We believe that we know way more than we actually do.

Yes we do. In a study conducted at Yale[1], graduate students were asked about their understanding in everyday devices like toilets. Most thought that they were familiar with the device, only after they were asked to explain step-by-step how the device works did they find out how ignorant they were. Toilets are more complicated than they look.

We believe that we know way more than we do because most of the time, we only need to rely on others’ expertise to operate something. Take the bicycle and toilets as examples, we don’t really need to figure out how the whole thing works in order to operate them. As written by the authors of The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone,[2]

“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge, and those of other members of the group”

Very often, our knowledge and beliefs are actually someone elses’ without us even realizing it. Maybe you’ve already started to be more aware of this fact especially when the social media has such a great impact on our daily lives these days.

When deep understanding is not always required, biases arise.

The tendency that people embrace only information that supports their own beliefs is commonly known as “confirmation bias”, and it is dangerous. When we believe what we think is always right, our faulty thinking will harm the truth and disrupt our growth.

Did everyone really understand the political situations in the US before they voiced out their opinions? And it’s pretty obvious that not everyone in the UK understood the whole Brexit thing before they voted for it, right? These are just some of the many examples of how others’ beliefs and knowledge got easily spread over the internet and people just picked up those thoughts without further understanding the truth.

Business journalists often suffer from the confirmation bias. In the books The Art of Thinking Clearly[3], there’s an example about a statement “Google is so successful because the company nurtures a culture of creativity”, and how once this idea goes on paper, journalists only need to support the statement by mentioning other same successful companies without seeking disconfirming evidence. No more different perspectives, people will always see just one tip of the iceberg.

When winning becomes more important than reasoning, chaos come.

On the other hand, when presented with someone else’s argument, we tend to be more skeptical; and there comes the term “myside bias”.

In an experiment performed by a cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier,[4] participants had to answer some questions, and later they were presented their own answers but were made to believe those were others’ answers. They became a lot more critical about the answers than when they were simply asked to modify their answers to be better.

In some situations, when winning seems to be more beneficial, reasoning clearly becomes unimportant to most of us. And this makes us more blinded than ever to spot out our own weaknesses.

To think more clearly, “murder your darlings”.

“Murder your darlings” is the literary critic Arthur Quiller-Couch’s advice[5] for writers who are reluctant to cut their cherished redundant sentences in their works. We can apply this concept to how we think too.

To fight against biases, let go of your “cherished thoughts” that you have to be right, and set out to find disconfirming evidence of all your beliefs — whether they be relationships, political views or career objectives. The stronger you believe in something, the more you should seek out alternative views of it.

The rule of three

An even more effective way to overcome bias is using the rule of three[6] — identify three potential causes of an outcome. In fact, the more possibilities you can come up with, the less biased you’d be towards any single outcome.

Say next time, if you see an outcome that isn’t what you expect at work, instead of thinking it must be that irresponsible and careless guy who messed up the stuff, try to think of three potential causes: Maybe there’re instructions missing at the beginning? Maybe the guy already did his job but something went wrong afterwards? Maybe it’s something external that affected the outcome of this?

Thinking through alternative possibilities help unravel the unnecessary attachments we have to the “cherished” thoughts, so we can have a more complete picture of how things are. When you learn to “murder your darlings” and embrace different views, your horizon will be widened and you’ll see a limitless world.

Featured photo credit: Stocksnap via stocksnap.io

Reference

[1] Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown & Philip Fernbach, a professor at the University of Colorado, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone
[2] Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown & Philip Fernbach, a professor at the University of Colorado, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone
[3] Role Dobelli: The Art of Thinking Clearly
[4] Cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber: The Enigma of Reason (Harvard)
[5] Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch: On the Art of Writing
[6] Benjamin L. Luippold, Ph.D.; Stephen Perreault, CPA, Ph.D.; and James Wainberg, Ph.D.: Overcome Confirmation Bias

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True Winners Don't Just Aim To Win, They Appreciate And Learn From Their Competitors

So the Academy Award Shows’ over, I bet one of your most remarkable moments would be the mixing up mistake for the Best Picture Award. After all, nothing like this had ever happened over the past 89 years of Academy Award Shows.

While people are hotly debating over the internet whether it’s the host or Leonardo DiCaprio for causing the mix-up of the Best Picture, I would rather stick my focus to the incredible crew and cast of both Moonlight and La La Land.

Once the La La Land team realized that the Best Picture actually went to Moonlight, La La Land’s producer Fred Berger felt proud to hand the award to their friends in Moonlight, and the team graciously handed over their statues to the people behind Moonlight. And during the thank you speech, the director of Moonlight, Barry Jenkins, also said “my love to La La Land” which showed his support and respect for the movie.

True winners see competitors as friends, not enemies.

Imagine the moment you realized you weren’t the award winner right after you’d delivered your thank you speech, how would you feel? It probably feels like something super precious being taken away forcefully with no mercy showed. You probably would feel so disappointed that you wouldn’t feel like your competitors could be your friends.

Everyone works hard to play their best in any competitions. Both movies La La Land and Moonlight have an amazing team of crew and cast, they all did their very best to wow the audience and both movies are trying to deliver some really meaningful messages that would inspire people’s lives. The crew behind the two movies demonstrated to everyone how “competitors” are like friends who should respect and support each other’s effort.

True winners understand that they’re not “best of the world”, there’re always something they can learn from others. Instead of seeing the competitors as enemies, they’re friends who are passionate about the same thing (which is amazing), and they can learn from each other.

When passionate people come together, they can grow and win together.

Well, most of us may not be taking part in competitions very often, or have the opportunity to be nominated for some very huge awards; but there must be something that you really love doing and want to do it better than others.

Say for me, I love writing. Though winning any writing awards is not my aspiration, I’d love to write better and have more readers who’d be inspired by what I write. If I see all other writers as my enemies, I’d just focus on winning over them instead of learning and improving myself. I might miss out all the amazing works all those great writers write and would never learn some of the best ideas or writing skills others demonstrate.

But if I look at other writers from another perspective, I can see a lot of talented writers who are as passionate as me. I see friends, and I see mentors. When I learn to appreciate others, I see what’s lack in me and what I can do to get better.

Try to surround yourself with people who are passionate about the same thing like you do. Discuss your ideas with them, learn from them. Instead of just trying to show off how good you’re doing something, try to be humble and gather more perspectives from them. That’s how you can learn and grow, and become a true winner.

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Why People Often Fail To Lose Belly Fat

Losing belly fat always seems to be a hard task. One reason is that there are many myths that make people’s efforts wasted. Below are 4 common ones .

Myth #1 Ab exercise is the most effective way

Many people believe in “spot reduction”, which means losing fat in an area by exercising that part. However, such exercise only strengthens the muscles there. Still, it would be covered by a thick layer of fat. This applies to all kinds of body fat.

So doing sit-ups or crunches wouldn’t be particularly effective if the aim is to burn belly fat.

The best exercise for fat loss is actually whole-body aerobic exercise. It can speed up our metabolism and hence burn calories faster.

Myth #2 Avoiding meat is a must

Many people think that meat makes us fat, probably due to its relatively high fat content. However, fat doesn’t make us fat. Excessive fat does. In fact, fat is one of the three key nutrients we need to ensure we have enough every day. The ideal ratio is roughly like this:

Carbohydrates: 50%

Fat: 30%

Protein: 20%

Fat is responsible for a lot of bodily functions like forming part of our cells. Instead of aiming at avoiding fat, look for healthy fats like those in fatty fish or egg.

Apart from fat, meat also contains a lot of nutrients like protein and iron. Lean meats like chicken are recommended. For red meat it is advised to be consumed once or twice a week.

Myth #3 Drastically cutting calories helps

If a person only eats an apple a day, he will lose weight soon and the belly would become smaller. But such change isn’t sustainable. Because when our bodies are getting far from required, metabolism will be automatically slowed down, which means the progress of losing weight will become slower, as the body learns how not to burn energies quickly.

Instead of drastically cutting calories, just have the right amount of calories.

Myth #4 Following one special diet works

From time to time a magic potion will appear and go viral. Headlines like these are common:

Drinking This Before Going to Bed Burns Belly Fat Like Crazy

Magic Drink To Lose Belly Fat In a WEEK

But there’s no one trick to lose belly fat. The only way out is balanced diet plus exercise.

Even if we’re talking about green tea which was proven by studies that three cups of it a day can help losing weight, it is still not enough to burn belly fat if we don’t pay attention to what we eat.

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Ancient Trees: Beth Moon Spends 14 Years Photographing World’s... crss





















Ancient Trees: Beth Moon Spends 14 Years Photographing World’s Oldest Trees

Beth Moon, a photographer based in San Francisco, has been searching for the world’s oldest trees for the past 14 years. She has traveled all around the globe to capture the most magnificent trees that grow in remote locations and look as old as the world itself.

“Standing as the earth’s largest and oldest living monuments, I believe these symbolic trees will take on a greater significance, especially at a time when our focus is directed at finding better ways to live with the environment” writes Moon in her artist statement.

Sixty of Beth Moon’s duotone photos were published in a book titled “Ancient Trees: Portraits Of Time”. Here you can have a sneak preview of the book, full of strangest and most magnificent trees ever.

More info: bethmoon.com | abbeville.com

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