Reminder: First draft of "Blink Response Response" essay due Monday night 5月17日 at 22:00, to Google Docs. Please make sure your English name is in the title somewhere. Final draft due Monday 5月24日, but I will not make detailed comments on the first draft, only about paragraph transitions. So you can revise or not revise as it suits you. I propose that this essay be changed to 800-1000 words and 17.5% of the final grade, and the next essay be 1200-1500 words and 32.5% of the final grade... you can email me individually if you think this is unfair for you.
Read: They Say / I Say 92-100 ("So What? Who Cares?)
Read: Black Swan Prologue, Part I Introduction, Chapters 1-4 (pages xvii-xxviii, 1-50)
35. (都學生!!!) Post a one sentence answer to "so what?" for your current essay. You may find the templates on They Say I Say 98-99 useful.
36 (Alice). Find one "so what?" move in Moneyball, one in Blink, and one in Black Swan. (And copy them for us here.) The easiest place to look is probably the introductions, but also possibly the conclusions.
37 (Cathy). Find one good/effective paragraph transition in Moneyball (according to the guidelines for transitional logic given in They Say I Say 105-118), one in Blink, and one in Black Swan. (And copy for us here.)
38 (Catherine). Find one good/effective paragraph transition in Moneyball (according to the guidelines for transitional logic given in They Say I Say 105-118), one in Blink, and one in Black Swan. (And copy for us here.)
39 (Elsa). Identify two more events that fit Taleb's criteria for black swan (rarity, extreme impact, retrospective but not prospective predictability). I suppose to translate from English to Chinese idiom, we should say white crow?
40 (Tiara). Explain what Taleb means by "Platonification" or "nerd-ification," and give two examples of this epistemological mistake.
41 (Kim). Ask a question about something confusing to you in Black Swan.
42 (Doll). Ask a question about something confusing to you in Black Swan (different than #42).
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ReplyDeleteThis is Tiara answering Q40.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Taleb, Platonicity is what makes us think that we understand more than we actually do. That is, we will restrict ourselves with some ideas and crisp constructs. Therefore, we are not able to accept other objects. The example that I think about is divination. Some people using some methods, like the crystal ball to predict or answer others' condition and future. However, such knowledge may not be believable.
Moreover, when we are discussing the history, like discussing the Age of Discovery, we may lost in one aspect and neglect other things which seem to be trivial but important. We may only put our attention on the whites, but forget the aborigine. Thus, people may end up restricting themselves in an area.
catherine's answer:
ReplyDeleteMoneyball:
Cliff Floyd, in short, was a guy for whom the Red Sox simply had to overpay. And if Omar Minaya hasn’t the stomach to extract every last hunk of flesh the Boston Red Sox are willing to pay with in exchange for Floyd, Billy will do it for him.
Blink:
Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt.
Black Swan:
Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do—except, of course, when we think about it.
Q37.
ReplyDeleteMoneyball:
A baseball man might call it “patience” but it was more like “thoughtfulness.” Mattingly, like him, but unlike a lot of the guys he played with, did not treat hitting a baseball a pure physical reaction.
Blink:
Doctors would do better in these cases if they know less about their patients—if, that is, they had no idea whether the people they were diagnosing were white or black, male or female.
Black Swan:
What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it.
Q41
ReplyDeleteI still don't quite understand the idea of "platonicity". Does that simply mean the human being's tendency of explaining the unexplainable? By the way, what is so bad about ignoring the Black Swan anyway?
Also, I'm a bit confused why Taleb made up the writer Yevgenia to illustrate his idea. I mean, if Black Swan is a prevailing problem, wouldn't it be more convincing to use real incident in proving his point?
42 (Doll)
ReplyDeleteI personally am not adapted to, nor good at, “thinking.” Especially when some writer argues in their famous new book about new idea to overthrow what the mass generally think, I am the kind who “got it” quite late. So let me get Black Swan straight, it is basically about that people should mind the uncertainty, the unusual, and “what we do not know,” etc. Now, yet, comes the confusion: if Taleb wants us to notice what we don’t know, then what we don’t know would become “what we know,” then what next? I am lost…
In the 911 example, it would have been prevented, if the event had been “reasonably conceivable,” said Taleb, then this is “what we know”! Is it “what we don’t know”? Confused.
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ReplyDeleteMoneyball(p.XI)
ReplyDeleteI wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major Leagues Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it – before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent quesiton: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games?
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Blink (p.16)
There are lots of books that tackle broad themes, that analyze the world from great remove. This is not one of them. Blink is concerned with the very smallest components of our daily lives - the content and origin of those instantaneous impressions and conclusions that spontaneously arise whenever we meet a new person or confront a complex situation or have to make a decision under conditions of stress[...].But what would happen if we took our instincts seriously?....What if… (Another question).
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The Black Swan(Prologue)
Before the discovery of Australia, people in the Old World were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence. The sighting of the first black swan might have been an interesting surprise for a few ornithologists(and others extremely concerned with the coloring of birds), but that is not where the significance of the story lies. It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge.
Aaron Chen
ReplyDeleteIf we are right about recent experiences will give people direction when developing some thoughts about something, then major consequences follow for Catherine and I have similiar thoughts in our blink-write because of taking the same class before.
Though my essay mainly talks about my own ideas, I think it's still important that those ideas are inspired by both Peter's blink and mine. It seems that this is only about Peter and me, but I think in our daily conversation, we usually have to relate each other's ideas in order to continue the conversation. Since I am not good at it, I think this essay is a good practice for me, and also, the readers might surprisingly find there're still some relationship and connection between Peter's and my blink, which seemingly doesn't exist.
ReplyDeleteElsa said:
ReplyDelete(to the all students question) Although it may seems that nobody cares about the situation and why that what one feels doesn't equal to others do. However, it actually relates to our daily life such as when a quarrel happens between one and his family or friends.
(to my question) I've saw a news talking about the found of a strange animal in China. It looks like a ship blending with human without fur. But in the end of the news, the research tends to identify it as a genetic mutation instead of challenging it more deeply. Maybe it's some kind of unknown beast in the wild. Another event that I thought of is nature's striking back. Human always think that they can control and foretell what will happen in the world. Though recently there are many movies about the striking back from the nature, the foretell is too narrow. Besides, people still don't pay that much attention about it, just take it as a movie with the thought that scientist will find the cure to control it. But nature is so unpredictable.
Esther's delayed "so what" sentence:
ReplyDeleteOne might think the way I connect food and human thought is far-fetched, for everything can be the extension of our thought － if you really want to give them a linking. But the reason why food is the representation of human culture and thought is because that we need to eat them everyday ever since we were born. And it is from this aspect that we say food has a stronger connection with us.