Showing posts with label Seminar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Seminar. Show all posts

Noam Chomsky: The Philosopher

Noam Chomsky: The Philosopher
Introduction to Professor Noam Chomsky.
Ahnaf Anjish | June 23, 2021

Speechless!!! Stunned!!!

Saw the FB Live between Noam Chomsky and someone called Miraj Ripon or somethin' a couple of hours ago[1]. What on earth was that? How can someone insult another person like that? I can't be ashamed anymore.

Anyways, let's take a quick look at the life of Noam Chomsky and his best works.

Professor Noam Chomsky is one of the best philosophers, linguists, and political activists of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is also regarded as one of the founders of Cognitive Science.[2] Born on December 7 in 1928, Noam Chomsky was interested in Anarchism from a very early age. His philosophy aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism. Chomsky has written more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media so far. He wrote his first article about the spread of fascism when he was only 10 years old.[3] In his first book called Syntactic Structures, which was published in 1957, he argued that for the independence of syntax (the study of sentence structures) from semantics (the study of meaning). It had a major impact on the study of knowledge, mind and mental processes; becoming an influential work in the formation of the field of cognitive science.[4]

Chomsky is Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was also named "Killian Lecturer"[5] on May 22, 1991. His works have influenced Computer Science, Visual Perception, and the Field of Immunology. On the other hand, many of his political comments have gained him international fame. He also got arrested multiple times for his strong opinions. The Killian Award Committee quoted,

"His criticism of the actions of government and of press for the way in which it has reported these actions have received world-wide attention. They also have disturbed many. Chomsky's response has always been that it is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth as they see it and that the reaction to his views is less due to the content of his message than to the effectiveness of the media in manufacturing consent."

You can find the list of Noam Chomsky's books here.

References:

Asking Why? A discussion about the BYLC Workshop I took.

Asking Why?
Mind, Critical Thinking, Cognitive Bias, Conformity Bias, Anchoring Bias.
Ahnaf Anjish | January 2, 2021
Hi there! Hope you are well. I attended a workshop a couple of weeks ago on "Asking Why?", and it was taken by our beloved Chomok Hasan vaia at the BYLC Yearly Seminar. It was about Critical Thinking, and he was kind enough to speak about Cognitive Bias and some of its classifications as well. I would love to discuss some key points he mentioned in the workshop, and I will also try to add a summary at the end of the post. Please feel free to comment and join the discussion.

At first, what is this Critical Thinking? Is it something to eat or wear? No. Well, to take an in-depth look at critical thinking; what we need to know first is something called Mind. Mind is a process, or a mechanism of your thinking paths. We can think about something in many ways. For example; I think that mental health is equally important to physical health, if not more; while my friend, which is you, may believe that mental health is not important at all: while some other friend of ours may have a belief that mental health does not exist. All of them are thoughts, processed by an important mechanism called Mind.

But what is Critical Thinking? You just gave an explanation on mind, but what is the relation between mind and critical thinking? To answer these questions, I'd like to ask YOU a question - WHY we call the RHS of a Cartesian Graph positive, and the LHS negative? The question may seem irrelevant, but that's the basic of critical thinking: Asking WHY. But is asking Why in every occasion possible means that I am a critical thinker? Nope. Here are some precautions that we need to follow when thinking deeply or critically,

  • Your question must be Objective. Well, here's a good point. What is meant by this "Objective" thing? Let me copy from the internet,
    From the image above, we can simply say that you have to be more object-oriented rather than being personal. For example: you may ask people about many incidents, but it's not really a critical thinking when you ask for opinions and things like that. Why? Because you can be easily get skewed by people, and that leads us to the next point.

  • Think from a Neutral POV. There are various kinds of bias that you may find while studying fallacies, but we'll keep things simple here. Cognitive Bias. What is cognitive bias? "Cognitive Bias" is something of an error, that often occurs when a man "Think" about something. As we've seen earlier, thinking is a process called Mind. But we should also be aware that this process is analytical, and its result is known as Mentality. But the matter that one should be aware of is that you might be biased by your emotion or you might often think subjectively, which produces a high chance for you to be biased.

  • Be aware of Conformity Bias and Anchoring Bias. Conformity Bias and Anchoring Bias are two of the sub-types of Cognitive Bias. Conformity Bias can mostly be seen when you are with your peers or with your seniors; because in most of these cases, you have to agree to their opinions in order to avoid confrontations. And you are familiar to Anchoring Bias as well I believe, cause that's what a salesperson does to you when you are in a market. Yes, you got it right! That's the reason they ask for more price in the beginning, cause that's what gets stuck in your head; more commonly known as Anchoring Bias. You should overcome these two and think freely, if you want to become a critical thinker.


    • The post is quite lengthy already, and I have discussed most of the topics covered in the workshop. While discussing, I tried to come up with my own examples. Now I would love to shortly summarize the whole concept again:

    Mind is a process, by which you think something or analyze things thoroughly. But critical thinking starts when you think through something that isn't subjective, meaning that no personal influence has acted upon your mind. You may often get biased or prejudicial, so you should better have a good control over your thoughts. You may have a major hole in your thinking, you may agree to things reluctantly due to peer pressure or due to the fear of losing a relationship, you may not know the price of a product and pay more than enough when buying one - all these things happen very often; and they are the biggest problems you will encounter when thinking critically.

    Thank you for reading this lengthy post with patience. Stay happy, stay safe.

    - Ahnaf Anjish
     
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