Uncategorized – Page 5 – Four Cultures

Beyond Enclaves in Palestine (Part 2)

I’m examining three very different visions of a planned future for Palestine in a week when the issue has been very much in the news. Of the Israel-Palestine conflict, Desmond Tutu said this week:

“you can give up on all other problems. You can give up on nuclear disarmament, you can give up on ever winning a war against terror, you can give it up. You can give up any hope of our faiths ever working really amicably and in a friendly way together. This, this, this is the problem, and it is in our hands”.

And US President Obama said: “I think it is important not to assume the worst but to assume the best.”

The first part of this series looked at a very dark vision for the future of the West Bank. The second plan I’m examining here certainly ‘assumes the best’ as Obama puts it. Continue reading Beyond Enclaves in Palestine (Part 2)

Niche construction: what does it tell us about culture?

Meika recently posted a comment on this site, highlighting the concept of niche construction as a driver of evolution.
I found it fascinating, which, partly is why it’s taken me so long to respond. (The other reason is a total computer melt down). Anyway, I’m intrigued with the niche construction material, which I hadn’t come across. I’d agree with the authors of the book that this area is worthy of greater study, but can’t help wondering whether it really does constitute a new way of looking at evolution… Continue reading Niche construction: what does it tell us about culture?

In the crowd, does everyone really think they’re king?

The idea is suggested in a Wall St Journal article about mass sporting events. Why do the Americans sit down when the British (historically) stand up? The answer: in the US a universal sense of nobility and in the UK a tradition of wallowing in mud. Apparently.

The article is interesting because it points out the connection between cultural norms and the concept of risk. In the UK, the author observes, safety issues were used to enable a shift away from standing and towards seated-only stadia. But it would be interesting to see what clear evidence there is for this common claim that standing at sports events is more dangerous than the alternatives. The Bradford fire of 1985, for instance, (see below) wasn’t caused by people standing. The dangers there related more to terrible stand construction, to the locking of escape exits, and to the lack of any evacuation plan that could work. I’d tentatively suggest that this is an example of risk being used as the occassion for a particular cultural bias to argue its case. If you can successfully argue that the alternatives to your plan are ‘just too risky’, you’ve won the argument. Remember, though, that what from one cultural perspective seems like a threat, from another angle is no threat at all. I think people actually like whatever sense of edginess there is to standing in a crowd of thousands. For many the risk is worth it.

John Dewey on practical intelligence

For philosopher John Dewey, intelligence – knowledge in the absence of certainty – was a matter of judgement.

“A man[sic] is intelligent not in virtue of having reason which grasps first indemonstrable truths about fixed principles, in order to reason deductively from them to the particulars which they govern, but in virtue of his capacity to estimate the possibilities of a situation and to act in accordance with his estimate. In the large sense of the term intelligence is as practical as reason is theoretical”
(The Quest for Certainty, 1933: 170, quoted in Westbrook, 357)

It strikes me, reading this, that ‘the possibilities of a situation’ are not necessarily obvious, nor exhaustively explored in a given ‘estimate’. But that grid-group cultural theory offers a means of describing a fourfold field of possibility.

The estimate is conditioned both by what is considered personally to be the limits of possibility and by the institutional context in which certain possibilities may be expressed and others may not.

Reference: Robert B. Westbrook 1993 John Dewey and American Democracy. 2nd Edn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Windows 7, 911.

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Without the vowels?

The last sentence of this is the funniest thing I’ve heard this week.

Fatalist access to scientific knowledge: a case study

The way academic and scientific knowledge becomes accessible online has been a hot subject for some time. I want to suggest that this process is structured according to the four cultures identified by Grid-group cultural theory. Here I am focussing on the idea that there may be a Fatalist paradigm of knowledge sharing at work, which provides access in a capricious manner – and I make a tentative suggestion as to how this particular deficiency in the availability of access may be overcome . Continue reading Fatalist access to scientific knowledge: a case study

David Hoffman of Temple University and the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale recently mentioned this site over at Concurring Opinions, a blog about law and policy. He said he thought the comments here were pretty good – so thank you to everyone who has commented on something written here. Continue reading High Quality Blog Comments

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