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Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wikimedia Commons
At least when I was in grade school, we learned the very basics of how the Third Reich came to power in the early 1930s. Paramilitary gangs terrorizing the opposition, the incompetence and opportunism of German conservatives, the Reichstag Fire. And we learned about the critical importance of propaganda, the deliberate misinforming of the public in order to sway opinions en masse and achieve popular support (or at least the appearance of it). While Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels purged Jewish and leftist artists and writers, he built a massive media infrastructure that played, writes PBS, "probably the most important role in creating an atmosphere in Germany that made it possible for the Nazis to commit terrible atrocities against Jews, homosexuals, and other minorities."

How did the minority party of Hitler and Goebbels take over and break the will of the German people so thoroughly that they would allow and participate in mass murder? Post-war scholars of totalitarianism like Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt asked that question over and over, for several decades afterward. Their earliest studies on the subject looked at two sides of the equation. Adorno contributed to a massive volume of social psychology called The Authoritarian Personality, which studied individuals predisposed to the appeals of totalitarianism. He invented what he called the F-Scale ("F" for "fascism"), one of several measures he used to theorize the Authoritarian Personality Type.

Arendt, on the other hand, looked closely at the regimes of Hitler and Stalin and their functionaries, at the ideology of scientific racism, and at the mechanism of propaganda in fostering "a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member... is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders." So she wrote in her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism, going on to elaborate that this "mixture of gullibility and cynicism... is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements":

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true... The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Why the constant, often blatant lying? For one thing, it functioned as a means of fully dominating subordinates, who would have to cast aside all their integrity to repeat outrageous falsehoods and would then be bound to the leader by shame and complicity. "The great analysts of truth and language in politics"-writes McGill University political philosophy professor Jacob T. Levy -including "George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel-can help us recognize this kind of lie for what it is.... Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It's something that was endemic to totalitarianism."

Arendt and others recognized, writes Levy, that "being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you're powerless." She also recognized the function of an avalanche of lies to render a populace powerless to resist, the phenomenon we now refer to as " gaslighting ":

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world-and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end-is being destroyed.

The epistemological ground thus pulled out from under them, most would depend on whatever the leader said, no matter its relation to truth. "The essential conviction shared by all ranks," Arendt concluded, "from fellow traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the 'first commandment' of the movement: 'The Fuehrer is always right,' is as necessary for the purposes of world politics, i.e., world-wide cheating, as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war."

"We too," writes Jeffrey Isaacs at The Washington Post, "live in dark times"-an allusion to another of Arendt's sobering analyses-"even if they are different and perhaps less dark." Arendt wrote Origins of Totalitarianism from research and observations gathered during the 1940s, a very specific historical period. Nonetheless the book, Isaacs remarks, "raises a set of fundamental questions about how tyranny can arise and the dangerous forms of inhumanity to which it can lead." Arendt's analysis of propaganda and the function of lies seems particularly relevant at this moment. The kinds of blatant lies she wrote of might become so commonplace as to become banal. We might begin to think they are an irrelevant sideshow. This, she suggests, would be a mistake.

via Michiko Kakutani
Related Content: Hannah Arendt's Original Articles on "the Banality of Evil" in the New Yorker Archive Enter the Hannah Arendt Archives & Discover Rare Audio Lectures, Manuscripts, Marginalia, Letters, Postcards & More Hannah Arendt Discusses Philosophy, Politics & Eichmann in Rare 1964 TV Interview Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Hannah Arendt Explains How Propaganda Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Morality: Insights from The Origins of Totalitarianism

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Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wikimedia Commons At least when I was in grade school, we learned the very basics of how the Third Reich came to power in the early 1930s. Paramilitary gangs terrorizing the opposition, the incompetence and opportunism of German conservatives, the Reichstag Fire.

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Oldie but goodie article on Biases in research

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Oldie but goodie article on Biases in research

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Illustration by Dale Edwin Murray

In 2013, five years after he co-authored a paper showing that Democratic candidates in the United States could get more votes by moving slightly to the right on economic policy, Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University in New York City, was chagrined to learn of an error in the data analysis. In trying to replicate the work, an undergraduate student named Yang Yang Hu had discovered that Gelman had got the sign wrong on one of the variables.

Gelman immediately published a three-sentence correction, declaring that everything in the paper's crucial section should be considered wrong until proved otherwise.

Reflecting today on how it happened, Gelman traces his error back to the natural fallibility of the human brain: "The results seemed perfectly reasonable," he says. "Lots of times with these kinds of coding errors you get results that are just ridiculous. So you know something's got to be wrong and you go back and search until you find the problem. If nothing seems wrong, it's easier to miss it."

This is the big problem in science that no one is talking about: even an honest person is a master of self-deception. Our brains evolved long ago on the African savannah, where jumping to plausible conclusions about the location of ripe fruit or the presence of a predator was a matter of survival. But a smart strategy for evading lions does not necessarily translate well to a modern laboratory, where tenure may be riding on the analysis of terabytes of multidimensional data. In today's environment, our talent for jumping to conclusions makes it all too easy to find false patterns in randomness, to ignore alternative explanations for a result or to accept 'reasonable' outcomes without question - that is, to ceaselessly lead ourselves astray without realizing it.

Failure to understand our own biases has helped to create a crisis of confidence about the reproducibility of published results, says statistician John Ioannidis, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The issue goes well beyond cases of fraud. Earlier this year, a large project that attempted to replicate 100 psychology studies managed to reproduce only slightly more than one-third. In 2012, researchers at biotechnology firm Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, reported that they could replicate only 6 out of 53 landmark studies in oncology and haematology. And in 2009, Ioannidis and his colleagues described how they had been able to fully reproduce only 2 out of 18 microarray-based gene-expression studies.

Although it is impossible to document how often researchers fool themselves in data analysis, says Ioannidis, findings of irreproducibility beg for an explanation. The study of 100 psychology papers is a case in point: if one assumes that the vast majority of the original researchers were honest and diligent, then a large proportion of the problems can be explained only by unconscious biases. "This is a great time for research on research," he says. "The massive growth of science allows for a massive number of results, and a massive number of errors and biases to study. So there's good reason to hope we can find better ways to deal with these problems."

"When crises like this issue of reproducibility come along, it's a good opportunity to advance our scientific tools," says Robert MacCoun, a social scientist at Stanford. That has happened before, when scientists in the mid-twentieth century realized that experimenters and subjects often unconsciously changed their behaviour to match expectations. From that insight, the double-blind standard was born.

"People forget that when we talk about the scientific method, we don't mean a finished product," says Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. "Science is an ongoing race between our inventing ways to fool ourselves, and our inventing ways to avoid fooling ourselves." So researchers are trying a variety of creative ways to debias data analysis - strategies that involve collaborating with academic rivals, getting papers accepted before the study has even been started and working with strategically faked data.

The problem

Although the human brain and its cognitive biases have been the same for as long as we have been doing science, some important things have changed, says psychologist Brian Nosek, executive director of the non-profit Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia, which works to increase the transparency and reproducibility of scientific research. Today's academic environment is more competitive than ever. There is an emphasis on piling up publications with statistically significant results - that is, with data relationships in which a commonly used measure of statistical certainty, the p-value, is 0.05 or less. "As a researcher, I'm not trying to produce misleading results," says Nosek. "But I do have a stake in the outcome." And that gives the mind excellent motivation to find what it is primed to find.

"I'm not trying to produce misleading results - but I do have a stake in the outcome."

Another reason for concern about cognitive bias is the advent of staggeringly large multivariate data sets, often harbouring only a faint signal in a sea of random noise. Statistical methods have barely caught up with such data, and our brain's methods are even worse, says Keith Baggerly, a statistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. As he told a conference on challenges in bioinformatics last September in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, "Our intuition when we start looking at 50, or hundreds of, variables sucks."

Andrew King, a management specialist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, says that the widespread use of point-and-click data-analysis software has made it easy for researchers to sift through massive data sets without fully understanding the methods, and to find small p-values that may not actually mean anything. "I believe we are in the steroids era of social science," he says. "I've been guilty of using some of these performance-enhancing practices myself. My sense is that most researchers have fallen at least once."

Just as in competitive sport, says Hal Pashler, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, this can set up a vicious circle of chasing increasingly better results. When a few studies in behavioural neuroscience started reporting improbably strong correlations of 0.85, Pashler says, researchers who had more moderate (and plausible) results started to worry: "Gee, I just got a 0.4, so maybe I'm not really doing this very well."

Hypothesis myopia

One trap that awaits during the early stages of research is what might be called hypothesis myopia: investigators fixate on collecting evidence to support just one hypothesis; neglect to look for evidence against it; and fail to consider other explanations. "People tend to ask questions that give 'yes' answers if their favoured hypothesis is true," says Jonathan Baron, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

For example, says Baron, studies have tried to show how disgust influences moral condemnation, "by putting the subject in a messy room, or a room with 'fart spray' in the air". The participants are then asked to judge how to respond to moral transgressions; if those who have been exposed to clutter or smells favour harsher punishments, researchers declare their 'disgust hypothesis' to be supported. But they have not considered competing explanations, he says, and so they ignore the possibility that participants are lashing out owing to anger at their foul treatment, not simply disgust. By focusing on one hypothesis, researchers might be missing the real story entirely.

Courtrooms face a similar problem. In 1999, a woman in Britain called Sally Clark was found guilty of murdering two of her sons, who had died suddenly as babies. A factor in her conviction was the presentation of statistical evidence that the chances of two children in the same family dying of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) were only 1 in 73 million - a figure widely interpreted as fairly damning. Yet considering just one hypothesis leaves out an important part of the story. "The jury needs to weigh up two competing explanations for the babies' deaths: SIDS or murder," wrote statistician Peter Green on behalf of the Royal Statistical Society in 2002 (see go.nature.com/ochsja). "The fact that two deaths by SIDS is quite unlikely is, taken alone, of little value. Two deaths by murder may well be even more unlikely. What matters is the relative likelihood of the deaths under each explanation, not just how unlikely they are under one explanation." Mathematician Ray Hill of the University of Salford, UK, later estimated that a double SIDS death would occur in roughly 1 out of 297,000 families, whereas two children would be murdered by a parent in roughly 1 out of 2.7 million families - a likelihood ratio of 9 to 1 against murder. In 2003, Clark's conviction was overturned on the basis of new evidence. The Attorney General for England and Wales went on to release two other women who had been convicted of murdering their children on similar statistical grounds.

The Texas sharpshooter

A cognitive trap that awaits during data analysis is illustrated by the fable of the Texas sharpshooter: an inept marksman who fires a random pattern of bullets at the side of a barn, draws a target around the biggest clump of bullet holes, and points proudly at his success.

His bullseye is obviously laughable - but the fallacy is not so obvious to gamblers who believe in a 'hot hand' when they have a streak of wins, or to people who see supernatural significance when a lottery draw comes up as all odd numbers.

Nor is it always obvious to researchers. "You just get some encouragement from the data and then think, well, this is the path to go down," says Pashler. "You don't realize you had 27 different options and you picked the one that gave you the most agreeable or interesting results, and now you're engaged in something that's not at all an unbiased representation of the data."

Psychologist Uri Simonsohn at the University of Pennsylvania, gives an explicit nod to this naivety in his definition of ' p-hacking': "Exploiting - perhaps unconsciously - researcher degrees of freedom until p < 0.05." In 2012, a study of more than 2,000 US psychologists suggested how common p-hacking is. Half had selectively reported only studies that 'worked', 58% had peeked at the results and then decided whether to collect more data, 43% had decided to throw out data only after checking its impact on the p-value and 35% had reported unexpected findings as having been predicted from the start, a practice that psychologist Norbert Kerr of Michigan State University in East Lansing has called HARKing, or hypothesizing after results are known. Not only did the researchers admit to these p-hacking practices, but they defended them.

This May, a journalist described how he had teamed up with a German documentary filmmaker and demonstrated that creative p-hacking, carried out over one "beer-fueled" weekend, could be used to 'prove' that eating chocolate leads to weight loss, reduced cholesterol levels and improved well-being (see go.nature.com/blkpke). They gathered 18 different measurements - including weight, blood protein levels and sleep quality - on 15 people, a handful of whom had eaten some extra chocolate for a few weeks. With that many comparisons, the odds were better than 50-50 that at least one of them would look statistically significant just by chance. As it turns out, three of them did - and the team cherry-picked only those to report.

Asymmetric attention

The data-checking phase holds another trap: asymmetric attention to detail. Sometimes known as disconfirmation bias, this happens when we give expected results a relatively free pass, but we rigorously check non-intuitive results. "When the data don't seem to match previous estimates, you think, 'Oh, boy! Did I make a mistake?'" MacCoun says. "We don't realize that probably we would have needed corrections in the other situation as well."

"When the data don't seem to match previous estimates, you think, 'oh, boy! Did I make a mistake?'"

The evidence suggests that scientists are more prone to this than one would think. A 2004 study observed the discussions of researchers from 3 leading molecular-biology laboratories as they worked through 165 different lab experiments. In 88% of cases in which results did not align with expectations, the scientists blamed the inconsistencies on how the experiments were conducted, rather than on their own theories. Consistent results, by contrast, were given little to no scrutiny.

In 2011, an analysis of over 250 psychology papers found that more than 1 in 10 of the p-values was incorrect - and that when the errors were big enough to change the statistical significance of the result, more than 90% of the mistakes were in favour of the researchers' expectations, making a non-significant finding significant.

Just-so storytelling

As data-analysis results are being compiled and interpreted, researchers often fall prey to just-so storytelling - a fallacy named after the Rudyard Kipling tales that give whimsical explanations for things such as how the leopard got its spots. The problem is that post-hoc stories can be concocted to justify anything and everything - and so end up truly explaining nothing. Baggerly says that he has seen such stories in genetics studies, when an analysis implicates a huge number of genes in a particular trait or outcome. "It's akin to a Rorschach test," he said at the bioinformatics conference. Researchers will find a story, he says, "whether it's there or not. The problem is that occasionally it ain't real."

Another temptation is to rationalize why results should have come up a certain way but did not - what might be called JARKing, or justifying after results are known. Matthew Hankins, a statistician at King's College London, has collected more than 500 creative phrases that researchers use to convince readers that their non-significant results are worthy of attention (see go.nature.com/pwctoq). These include "flirting with conventional levels of significance ( p > 0.1)", "on the very fringes of significance ( p = 0.099)" and "not absolutely significant but very probably so ( p > 0.05)".

The solutions

In every one of these traps, cognitive biases are hitting the accelerator of science: the process of spotting potentially important scientific relationships. Countering those biases comes down to strengthening the 'brake': the ability to slow down, be sceptical of findings and eliminate false positives and dead ends.

"Science is an ongoing race between our inventing ways to fool ourselves, and our inventing ways to avoid fooling ourselves."

One solution that is piquing interest revives an old tradition: explicitly considering competing hypotheses, and if possible working to develop experiments that can distinguish between them. This approach, called strong inference, attacks hypothesis myopia head on. Furthermore, when scientists make themselves explicitly list alternative explanations for their observations, they can reduce their tendency to tell just-so stories.

In 2013, researchers reported using strong-inference techniques in a study of what attracts female túngara frogs ( Engystomops pustulosus) during mating calls. The existing data could be explained equally well by two competing theories - one in which females have a preset neural template for mating calls, and another in which they flexibly combine auditory cues and visual signals such as the appearance of the males' vocal sacs. So the researchers developed an experiment for which the two theories had opposing predictions. The results showed that females can use multisensory cues to judge attractiveness.

Transparency

Another solution that has been gaining traction is open science. Under this philosophy, researchers share their methods, data, computer code and results in central repositories, such as the Center for Open Science's Open Science Framework, where they can choose to make various parts of the project subject to outside scrutiny. Normally, explains Nosek, "I have enormous flexibility in how I analyse my data and what I choose to report. This creates a conflict of interest. The only way to avoid this is for me to tie my hands in advance. Precommitment to my analysis and reporting plan mitigates the influence of these cognitive biases."

An even more radical extension of this idea is the introduction of registered reports: publications in which scientists present their research plans for peer review before they even do the experiment. If the plan is approved, the researchers get an 'in-principle' guarantee of publication, no matter how strong or weak the results turn out to be. This should reduce the unconscious temptation to warp the data analysis, says Pashler. At the same time, he adds, it should keep peer reviewers from discounting a study's results or complaining after results are known. "People are evaluating methods without knowing whether they're going to find the results congenial or not," he says. "It should create a much higher level of honesty among referees." More than 20 journals are offering or plan to offer some format of registered reports.

Team of rivals

When it comes to replications and controversial topics, a good debiasing approach is to bypass the typical academic back-and-forth and instead invite your academic rivals to work with you. An adversarial collaboration has many advantages over a conventional one, says Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist at Princeton University in New Jersey. "You need to assume you're not going to change anyone's mind completely," he says. "But you can turn that into an interesting argument and intelligent conversation that people can listen to and evaluate." With competing hypotheses and theories in play, he says, the rivals will quickly spot flaws such as hypothesis myopia, asymmetric attention or just-so storytelling, and cancel them out with similar slants favouring the other side.

Psychologist Eric-Jan Wagenmakers of the University of Amsterdam has engaged in this sort of proponent-sceptic collaboration, when he teamed up with another group in an attempt to replicate its research suggesting that horizontal eye movements help people to retrieve events from their memory. It is often difficult to get researchers whose original work is under scrutiny to agree to this kind of adversarial collaboration, he says. The invitation is "about as attractive as putting one's head on a guillotine - there is everything to lose and not much to gain". But the group that he worked with was eager to get to the truth, he says. In the end, the results were not replicated. The sceptics remained sceptical, and the proponents were not convinced by a single failure to replicate. Yet this was no stalemate. "Although our adversarial collaboration has not resolved the debate," the researchers wrote, "it has generated new testable ideas and has brought the two parties slightly closer." Wagenmakers suggests several ways in which this type of collaboration could be encouraged, including a prize for best adversarial collaboration, or special sections for such collaborations in top journals.

Blind data analysis

One debiasing procedure has a solid history in physics but is little known in other fields: blind data analysis (see page 187). The idea is that researchers who do not know how close they are to desired results will be less likely to find what they are unconsciously looking for.

One way to do this is to write a program that creates alternative data sets by, for example, adding random noise or a hidden offset, moving participants to different experimental groups or hiding demographic categories. Researchers handle the fake data set as usual - cleaning the data, handling outliers, running analyses - while the computer faithfully applies all of their actions to the real data. They might even write up the results. But at no point do the researchers know whether their results are scientific treasures or detritus. Only at the end do they lift the blind and see their true results - after which, any further fiddling with the analysis would be obvious cheating.

Perlmutter used this method for his team's work on the Supernova Cosmology Project in the mid-2000s. He knew that the potential for the researchers to fool themselves was huge. They were using new techniques to replicate estimates of two crucial quantities in cosmology - the relative abundances of matter and of dark energy - which together reveal whether the Universe will expand forever or eventually collapse into a Big Crunch. So their data were shifted by an amount known only to the computer, leaving them with no idea what their findings implied until everyone agreed on the analyses and the blind could be safely lifted. After the big reveal, not only were the researchers pleased to confirm earlier findings of an expanding Universe, Perlmutter says, but they could be more confident in their conclusions. "It's a lot more work in some sense, but I think it leaves you feeling much safer as you do your analysis," he says. He calls blind data analysis "intellectual hygiene, like washing your hands".

Data blinding particularly appeals to young researchers, Perlmutter says - not least because of the sense of suspense it gives. He tells the story of a recent graduate student who had spent two years under a data blind as she analysed pairs of supernova explosions. After a long group meeting, Perlmutter says, the student presented all her analyses and said that she was ready to unblind if everyone agreed.

"It was 6 o'clock in the evening and time for dinner," says Perlmutter. And everyone in the audience said, "If the result comes out wrong, it's going to be a very disappointing evening, and she's going to have to think really hard about what she's going to do with her PhD thesis. Maybe we should wait until morning."

"And we all looked at each other, and we said, 'Nah! Let's unblind now!' So we unblinded, and the results looked great, and we all cheered and applauded."

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How scientists fool themselves - and how they can stop

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Illustration by Dale Edwin Murray In 2013, five years after he co-authored a paper showing that Democratic candidates in the United States could get more votes by moving slightly to the right on economic policy, Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University in New York City, was chagrined to learn of an error in the data analysis.

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Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them.

"In the three years I've spent at Facebook, I've found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions," wrote Zhang, who declined to talk to BuzzFeed News. Her LinkedIn profile said she "worked as the data scientist for the Facebook Site Integrity fake engagement team" and dealt with "bots influencing elections and the like."

Kenzo Tribouillard / Getty Images

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Brussels, Feb. 17, 2020.

"I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I've lost count," she wrote.

The memo is a damning account of Facebook's failures. It's the story of Facebook abdicating responsibility for malign activities on its platform that could affect the political fate of nations outside the United States or Western Europe. It's also the story of a junior employee wielding extraordinary moderation powers that affected millions of people without any real institutional support, and the personal torment that followed.

"I know that I have blood on my hands by now," Zhang wrote.
These are some of the biggest revelations in Zhang's memo:

It took Facebook's leaders nine months to act on a coordinated campaign "that used thousands of inauthentic assets to boost President Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras on a massive scale to mislead the Honduran people." Two weeks after Facebook took action against the perpetrators in July, they returned, leading to a game of "whack-a-mole" between Zhang and the operatives behind the fake accounts, which are still active.

In Azerbaijan, Zhang discovered the ruling political party "utilized thousands of inauthentic assets... to harass the opposition en masse." Facebook began looking into the issue a year after Zhang reported it. The investigation is ongoing.

Zhang and her colleagues removed "10.5 million fake reactions and fans from high-profile politicians in Brazil and the US in the 2018 elections."

In February 2019, a NATO researcher informed Facebook that "he'd obtained Russian inauthentic activity on a high-profile U.S. political figure that we didn't catch." Zhang removed the activity, "dousing the immediate fire," she wrote.

In Ukraine, Zhang "found inauthentic scripted activity" supporting both former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a pro-European Union politician and former presidential candidate, as well as Volodymyr Groysman, a former prime minister and ally of former president Petro Poroshenko. "Volodymyr Zelensky and his faction was the only major group not affected," Zhang said of the current Ukrainian president.

Zhang discovered inauthentic activity - a Facebook term for engagement from bot accounts and coordinated manual accounts- in Bolivia and Ecuador but chose "not to prioritize it," due to her workload. The amount of power she had as a mid-level employee to make decisions about a country's political outcomes took a toll on her health.

After becoming aware of coordinated manipulation on the Spanish Health Ministry's Facebook page during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zhang helped find and remove 672,000 fake accounts "acting on similar targets globally" including in the US.

In India, she worked to remove "a politically-sophisticated network of more than a thousand actors working to influence" the local elections taking place in Delhi in February. Facebook never publicly disclosed this network or that it had taken it down.

"We've built specialized teams, working with leading experts, to stop bad actors from abusing our systems, resulting in the removal of more than 100 networks for coordinated inauthentic behavior," Facebook spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said in a statement. "It's highly involved work that these teams do as their full-time remit. Working against coordinated inauthentic behavior is our priority, but we're also addressing the problems of spam and fake engagement. We investigate each issue carefully, including those that Ms. Zhang raises, before we take action or go out and make claims publicly as a company."

BuzzFeed News is not publishing Zhang's full memo because it contains personal information. This story includes full excerpts when possible to provide appropriate context.

In her post, Zhang said she did not want it to go public for fear of disrupting Facebook's efforts to prevent problems around the upcoming 2020 US presidential election, and due to concerns about her own safety. BuzzFeed News is publishing parts of her memo that are clearly in the public interest.

"I consider myself to have been put in an impossible spot - caught between my loyalties to the company and my loyalties to the world as a whole," she said. "The last thing I want to do is distract from our efforts for the upcoming U.S. elections, yet I know this post will likely do so internally."

Zhang said she turned down a $64,000 severance package from the company to avoid signing a nondisparagement agreement. Doing so allowed her to speak out internally, and she used that freedom to reckon with the power that she had to police political speech.

"There was so much violating behavior worldwide that it was left to my personal assessment of which cases to further investigate, to file tasks, and escalate for prioritization afterwards," she wrote.

That power contrasted with what she said seemed to be a lack of desire from senior leadership to protect democratic processes in smaller countries. Facebook, Zhang said, prioritized regions including the US and Western Europe, and often only acted when she repeatedly pressed the issue publicly in comments on Workplace, the company's internal, employee-only message board.

"With no oversight whatsoever, I was left in a situation where I was trusted with immense influence in my spare time," she wrote. "A manager on Strategic Response mused to myself that most of the world outside the West was effectively the Wild West with myself as the part-time dictator - he meant the statement as a compliment, but it illustrated the immense pressures upon me."

A former Facebook engineer who knew her told BuzzFeed News that Zhang was skilled at discovering fake account networks on the platform.

"Most of the world outside the West was effectively the Wild West with myself as the part-time dictator."

"She's the only person in this entire field at Facebook that I ever trusted to be earnest about this work," said the engineer, who had seen a copy of Zhang's post and asked not to be named because they no longer work at the company.

"A lot of what I learned from that post was shocking even to me as someone who's often been disappointed at how the company treats its best people," they said.

Zhang's memo said the lack of institutional support and heavy stakes left her unable to sleep. She often felt responsible when civil unrest took hold in places she didn't prioritize for investigation and action.

"I have made countless decisions in this vein - from Iraq to Indonesia, from Italy to El Salvador," she wrote. "Individually, the impact was likely small in each case, but the world is a vast place."

Still, she did not believe that the failures she observed during her two and a half years at the company were the result of bad intent by Facebook's employees or leadership. It was a lack of resources, Zhang wrote, and the company's tendency to focus on global activity that posed public relations risks, as opposed to electoral or civic harm.

"Facebook projects an image of strength and competence to the outside world that can lend itself to such theories, but the reality is that many of our actions are slapdash and haphazard accidents," she wrote.

"We simply didn't care enough to stop them"

Zhang wrote that she was just six months into the job when she found coordinated inauthentic behavior - Facebook's internal term for the use of multiple fake accounts to boost engagement or spread content - benefiting Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández.

Orlando Sierra / Getty Images

Two children watch a television screen as Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández speaks on June 16, 2020.

The connection to the Honduran leader was made, Zhang said, because an administrator for the president's Facebook page had been "happily running hundreds of these fake assets without any obfuscation whatsoever in a show of extreme chutzpah." The data scientist said she reported the operation, which involved thousands of fake accounts, to Facebook's threat intelligence and policy review teams, both of which took months to act.

"Local policy teams confirmed that President JOH's marketing team had openly admitted to organizing the activity on his behalf," she wrote. "Yet despite the blatantly violating nature of this activity, it took me almost a year to take down his operation."

That takedown was announced by Facebook in July 2019, but proved futile. Soon, the operation was soon back up and running, a fact Facebook has never disclosed.

"They had returned within two weeks of our takedown and were back in a similar volume of users," Zhang wrote, adding that she did a final sweep for the fake accounts on her last day at Facebook. "A year after our takedown, the activity is still live and well."

In Azerbaijan, she found a large network of inauthentic accounts used to attack opponents of President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan and his ruling New Azerbaijan Party, which uses the acronym YAP. Facebook still has not disclosed the influence campaign, according to Zhang.

The operation detailed in the memo is reminiscent of those of Russia's Internet Research Agency, a private troll farm that tried to influence the 2016 US elections, because it involved "dedicated employees who worked 9-6 Monday-Friday work weeks to create millions of comments" targeting members of the opposition and media reports seen as negative to Aliyev.

"Perhaps they thought they were clever; the truth was, we simply didn't care enough to stop them."

"Multiple official accounts for district-level divisions of the ruling YAP political party directly controlled numerous of these fake assets without any obfuscation whatsoever in another display of arrogance," she wrote. "Perhaps they thought they were clever; the truth was, we simply didn't care enough to stop them."

Katy Pearce, an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies social media and communication technology in Azerbaijan, told BuzzFeed News that fake Facebook accounts have been used to undermine the opposition and independent media in the country for years.

"One of the big tools of authoritarian regimes is to humiliate the opposition in the mind of the public so that they're not viewed as a credible or legitimate alternative," she told BuzzFeed News. "There's a chilling effect. Why would I post something if I know that I'm going to deal with thousands or hundreds of these comments, that I'm going to be targeted?"

Pearce said Zhang's comment in the memo that Facebook "didn't care enough to stop" the fake accounts and trolling aligns with her experience. "They have bigger fish to fry," she said.

A person who managed social media accounts for news organizations in Azerbaijan told BuzzFeed News that their pages were inundated with inauthentic Facebook comments.

"We used to delete and ban them because we didn't want people who came to our page to be discouraged and not react or comment," said the person, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak for their employer. "But since [the trolls] are employees, it's easy for them to open new accounts."

They said Facebook has at times made things worse by removing the accounts or pages of human rights activists and other people after trolls report them. "We tried to tell Facebook that this is a real person who does important work," but it took weeks for the page to be restored.

Zhang wrote that a Facebook investigation into fake accounts and trolling in Azerbaijan is now underway, more than a year after she first reported the issue. On the day of her departure, she called it her "greatest unfinished business" to stop the fake behavior in the country.

"Many others would think nothing of myself devoting this attention to the United States, but are shocked to see myself fighting for these small countries," she wrote. "To put it simply, my methodologies were systematic globally, and I fought for Honduras and Azerbaijan because that was where I saw the most ongoing harm."

"I have blood on my hands"

In other examples, Zhang revealed new information about a large-scale fake account network used to amplify and manipulate information about COVID-19, as well as a political influence operation that used fake accounts to influence 2018 elections in the US and Brazil. Some of these details were not previously disclosed by Facebook, suggesting the company's regular takedown announcements remain selective and incomplete.

Zhang said Facebook removed 672,000 "low-quality fake accounts" after press reports in April that some of the accounts had been engaging with COVID-19 content on the Spanish Health Ministry's page. She said accounts in that network also engaged with content on US pages. Facebook did not disclose how many accounts it removed, or that those accounts engaged with content in other countries, including the US.

Zhang also shared new details about the scale of inauthentic activity during the 2018 midterm elections in the US, and from Brazilian politicians that same year. "We ended up removing 10.5 million fake reactions and fans from high-profile politicians in Brazil and the U.S. in the 2018 elections - major politicians of all persuasions in Brazil, and a number of lower-level politicians in the United States," she wrote.

A September 2018 briefing about Facebook's election work in the US and Brazil disclosed that it had acted against a network in Brazil that used "fake accounts to sow division and share disinformation," as well as a set of groups, pages, and accounts that were "falsely amplifying engagement for financial gain." It did not fully mention Zhang's findings.

The scale of this activity - 672,000 fake accounts in one network, 10.5 million fake engagement and fans in others - indicates active fake accounts are a global problem, and are used to manipulate elections and public debate around the world.

As one of the few people looking for and identifying fake accounts impacting civic activity outside of "priority" regions, Zhang struggled with the power she had been handed.

"We focus upon harm and priority regions like the United States and Western Europe," Zhang wrote, adding that "it became impossible to read the news and monitor world events without feeling the weight of my own responsibility."

In Bolivia, Zhang said she found "inauthentic activity supporting the opposition presidential candidate in 2019" and chose not to prioritize it. Months later, Bolivian politics fell into turmoil, leading to the resignation of President Evo Morales and "mass protests leading to dozens of deaths."

Juan Mabromata / Getty Images

Members of leftist parties and Bolivian citizens watch as people burn an effigy of US President Donald Trump during a demonstration in support of Bolivia's overthrown president Evo Morales in front of the US embassy in Buenos Aires on November 22, 2019.

The same happened in Ecuador, according to Zhang, who "found inauthentic activity supporting the ruling government... and made the decision not to prioritize it." The former Facebook employee then wondered how her decision led to downstream effects on how Ecuador's government handled the COVID-19 pandemic - which has devastated the country - and if that would have been different if she'd acted.

"I have made countless decisions in this vein - from Iraq to Indonesia, from Italy to El Salvador. Individually, the impact was likely small in each case, but the world is a vast place. Although I made the best decision I could based on the knowledge available at the time, ultimately I was the one who made the decision not to push more or prioritize further in each case, and I know that I have blood on my hands by now."

Zhang also uncovered issues in India, Facebook's largest market, in the lead up to the local Delhi elections in February 2020. "I worked through sickness to take down a politically-sophisticated network of more than a thousand actors working to influence the election," she wrote.

Last month, Facebook's Indian operation came under scrutiny after reports in the Wall Street Journal revealed a top policy executive in the country had stopped local staffers from applying the company's hate speech policies to ruling party politicians who posted anti-Muslim hate speech.

"Haphazard Accidents"

In her "spare time" in 2019, Zhang took on tasks usually reserved for product managers and investigators, searching out countries including Ukraine, Turkey, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, "and many many more."

Zhang said she found and took down "inauthentic scripted activity" in Ukraine that supported Yulia Tymoshenko, a complicated political figure who has been involved in controversial gas deals with Russia but taken a more pro-Western tack in her later career, as well as for former prime minister Volodymyr Groysman, an ally of former president Petro Poroshenko. "Volodymyr Zelensky and his faction was the only major group not affected," she wrote.

In another part of her memo, Zhang said she wanted to push back on the idea that Facebook was run by malicious people hoping to achieve a particular outcome. That was not the case, she wrote, attributing actions to "slapdash and haphazard accidents."

"Last year when we blocked users from naming the Ukraine whistleblower, we forgot to cover hashtags until I stepped in," she wrote.

But she also remarked on Facebook's habit of prioritizing public relations over real-world problems. "It's an open secret within the civic integrity space that Facebook's short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention," she wrote, noting that she was told directly at a 2020 summit that anything published in the New York Times or Washington Post would obtain elevated priority.

"It's why I've seen priorities of escalations shoot up when others start threatening to go to the press, and why I was informed by a leader in my organization that my civic work was not impactful under the rationale that if the problems were meaningful they would have attracted attention, became a press fire, and convinced the company to devote more attention to the space."

Zhang mentioned one example in February 2019, when a NATO strategic communications researcher reached out to Facebook, alerting the company that he'd "obtained" Russian inauthentic activity "on a high-profile U.S. political figure that we didn't catch." That researcher said they were planning on briefing Congress the next day.

"I quickly investigated the case, determined what was going on, and removed the activity, dousing the immediate fire," Zhang wrote. "Perhaps motivated by the experience, the same researcher tried the same experiment within a month or two, waiting half a year afterwards before sending the report to the press and finally causing the PR fire."

"Human Resources Are Limited"

Beyond specific examples from around the world, Zhang provided insight into the inner workings at Facebook. She criticized her team's focus on issues related to "99% of activity that's essentially spam."

"Overall, the focus of my organization - and most of Facebook - was on large-scale problems, an approach which fixated us on spam," she said. "The civic aspect was discounted because of its small volume, its disproportionate impact ignored."

Zhang outlined the political processes within Facebook itself. She said the best way for her to gain attention for her work was not to go through the proper reporting channels, but to post about the issues on Facebook's internal employee message board to build pressure.

"In the office, I realized that my viewpoints weren't respected unless I acted like an arrogant asshole."

"In the office, I realized that my viewpoints weren't respected unless I acted like an arrogant asshole," Zhang said.

When she asked the company to do more in terms of finding and stopping malicious activity related to elections and political activity, she said she was told that "human resources are limited." And when she was ordered to stop focusing on civic work, "I was told that Facebook would no longer have further need for my services if I refused."

Zhang was fired this month and posted her memo on her last day, even after offering to stay on through the election as an unpaid volunteer. In her goodbye, she encouraged her colleagues to remain at Facebook and to fix the company from within.

"But you don't - and shouldn't - need to do it alone," she wrote. "Find others who share your convictions and values to work on it together. Facebook is too big of a project for any one person to fix." ●

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"I Have Blood On My Hands": A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation

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Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News.

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https://www.instagram.com/p/CE9YFlFgA1c/?igshid=16i54olfse0s3

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RLS-WOK Emotion & Reason AOK-Ethics/Human science

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Novak Djokovic disqualified from US Open after line judge incident | 7NEWS

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RLS form sense perception & imagination. AOK Biology+History

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"Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere," Rachel Carson wrote in her lyrical 1937 masterpiece , which invited the human imagination to fathom the world of marine creatures for the first time - a world then more mysterious than the Moon - and paved the way for the awakening of the modern ecological conscience.

More than two centuries earlier, a strange and wondrous book titled Poissons, écrevisses et crabes... que l'on trouve autour des Isles Moluques, et sur les côtes des Terres Australes - Fishes, crayfish and crabs, of various colors and extraordinary figures, which one finds around the Moluccas islands and on the coasts of the Austral lands - flashed into being, dizzying and dazzling everyone who chanced upon the 100 precious copies of the first edition with its extraordinary depictions of extraordinary creatures.

The world's first encyclopedia of fishes illustrated in color, promising a "natural history of the rarest curiosities of the fish of the Indies," it advertised these curiosities as "drawn from nature." The author identified himself as a secret British spy. He was, in fact, the Dutch publisher, bookseller, atlas-maker, and engraver Louis Renard (c. 1678-1746), employed at one time by the British Crown in the rather non-secret work of searching vessels as they departed Amsterdam's ports to ensure they weren't smuggling arms for a potential usurper of the British throne. Clickbait existed even in 1719.

The consummate images - 100 plates of them, populated by 460 individual hand-colored copper engravings, based on drawings by an artistically gifted soldier in the Dutch East India Company named Samuel Fallour, who worked with native artists - are even more vibrant than William Saville-Kent's pioneering depictions of the Great Barrier Reef's life-forms, even more otherworldly than Ernst Haeckel's mesmerizing jellyfish, even more detailed than Harriet and Helena Scott's Australian butterflies. They are seaborne butterflies, gilled and finned peacocks, psychedelic dragons of the ocean; they are candy-colored aliens, Earth's proudest freak-flags, floating cosmoses of wonder; they are undulating living poems.

Reminiscent of Hindu deities and the marine creatures of Indian folklore, Renard's creatures are so fanciful one might be tempted to take them for fictitious - a temptation significantly magnified by the depiction of a mermaid on page 220, its human portion appearing like a child's drawing awkwardly appended to the elegant, elaborate paintings of the marine forms.

But while their beauty is embellished - by the artistic imagination filling in the gaps of science, as mythology has always done - it is not invented. When a modern ichthyologist examined the book a quarter millennium after its publication, he determined that only about one in ten of the species depicted was drawn from the imagination; the rest were identifiable down to the genus, many even to the species.

Their strange and wondrous countenances seem both alien and strikingly human, projection screens for our own emotions - their round unblinking eyes frozen in an expression of perpetual astonishment, their toothy underbites agape with aggressive incomprehension.

The wonderful Biodiversity Library has scanned a rare surviving copy of the posthumous edition published in 1754. I have spent some delicious hours - days, really - savoring it, restoring and color-correcting these time-washed treasures to their original splendor, to make them available as prints and, for the artworks that lend themselves to the pre-set cutting pattern, as face masks, with a portion of the proceeds benefiting The Nature Conservancy's tireless stewardship of this irreplaceable world.

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Psychedelic Fishes from the World's First Natural History Encyclopedia of Marine Creatures Illustrated in Color

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Cool RLSs on Faith

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How can you change someone's mind? (hint: facts aren't always enough) - Hugo Mercier

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Link for Knowledge Issues

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In TOK, there are eight different ways we can know something - eight different ways of knowing (WOKs).

Although many people think of emotion as an 'unreliable' way of knowing, which is somehow less useful than reason for instance, it's also often the case that we know things emotionally with more certainty than by any other way of knowing. For example, it's usually very hard to reason someone out of being in love, or being very sad.

Most of what we think we know, we remember. Memory is also vital to our sense of who we are. In other words, it's one of the most important ways of knowing. However, memory can be unreliable, or play tricks on us. Our memories of past experience can also influence how we gain new knowledge using the other ways of knowing.

Without the evidence of our senses we wouldn't even know that the outside world exists. So, sense perception is an absolutely vital way of knowing, covering what we can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste. Although it's vital, people disagree about whether our senses give an accurate picture of the outside world or not.

It's difficult to define what imagination is precisely, but it's still a very important way we know things. People whose imaginations work in unusual ways are often diagnosed with conditions such as autism or synaesthesia. Imagination is also the key to being creative and solving problems.

Working things out logically, using reason, lets us go beyond what we've discovered using sense perception. It's a very important way of knowing, but has lots of different meanings depending on who you ask. A mathematician, for example, might see the definition of reason in their subject very differently from a historian.

This is sometimes seen as the opposite to reason: the idea that we 'just know' something instinctively strikes some people as illogical or unreliable. However, intuition can be extremely useful to us if we need to make very quick judgments.

This is probably the most loudly argued over way of knowing. Religious people often believe that faith is the most certain, useful, and important way of knowing there is, while some non-religious people claim the exact opposite, that faith is completely useless. However, we all have faith (or trust) in things we can't know using other ways of knowing, for instance, that the chair you're sitting on won't collapse under you. How reliable is this knowledge?

Language, whether spoken or written, is a vitally important way of communicating knowledge. If it wasn't, then why would you be reading this? But some people would argue that language is more important than this: that the process of putting our thoughts into words actually shapes what we know - in other words, that what we know can be defined by our ability to put it into words.

When we say that we 'know something' in maths, that's often not the same as saying we 'know something' in history or in art. Why not? The answer is because these are different areas of knowledge. There are eight areas of knowledge in TOK.

Knowledge in mathematics strikes many people as unique: in none of the other areas of knowledge would many people claim that their knowledge is both absolutely certain and able to be shown using rigorous logical proof. Yet this is something mathematicians claim all the time. Are they right? And if they are, what does this tell us about mathematical knowledge, especially when we apply it to the real world?

Knowing the difference between right and wrong is something that all societies demand of their members - and people who disagree can often find themselves labelled as criminals. But is ethical knowledge ever absolutely certain? And if it isn't, then does this mean that our strongly-held ethical views should be up for debate? The debatable nature of much ethical knowledge is important to recognize, and vital to understanding human behaviour.

Is it possible to talk meaningfully about what really happened in the past? Can we know for certain what people were thinking centuries ago? These are some of the big questions that face any student of history, and further questions about the reliability of different types of historical evidence are also important in deciding how reliable and useful knowledge in this area really is.

Human science is not science done in laboratories -rather, it's the scientific study of human behaviour and social interaction. Many of the Group 3 Diploma Programme subjects, such as economics or psychology, count as human science: in them, knowledge can be used to draw general rules or principles, but these are often not as useful as knowledge in the natural sciences when it comes to making predictions for the future.

Religious Knowledge Systems

Knowledge in religious knowledge systems is usually about fundamental and important things: how the world was created, how we should live our lives, and so on. This knowledge is extremely important to very many people, so religious knowledge sometimes needs to be treated sensitively. Religious knowledge might also make claims about a god or gods; but some religious knowledge might not be concerned with gods at all.

Natural science makes claims about the natural world, and attempts to find laws by which the world works. These laws are defined, often, as the result of experiments or tests, and usually claim to be true at all times, under the same conditions. But how certain is knowledge gained by these methods? And how useful are scientific laws for predicting the future?

Indigenous Knowledge Systems

This area of knowledge explores the ever-changing knowledge of indigenous societies, which may have ancient roots, but are still influenced by recent global developments. Indigenous knowledge may often explain significant natural events, and they may do so using methods very different from other areas of knowledge. You could look at indigenous knowledge systems as a whole, or look at one particular system in depth.

The arts cover almost everything creative that people do, from dance to sculpture to painting to creative writing (and reading). What counts as knowledge in the arts is often hotly debated, and some would even claim that all knowledge in the arts is personal, rather than shared (and therefore, that artistic knowledge is very difficult or impossible to express). Yet some would also argue that the arts encompass some of humanity's most important thoughts.

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In TOK, there are eight different ways we can know something - eight different ways of knowing (WOKs). Although many people think of emotion as an 'unreliable' way of knowing, which is somehow less useful than reason for instance, it's also often the case that we know things emotionally with more certainty than by any other way of knowing.

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AOK: Indigenous knowledge systems, History, Arts.

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AOK: Indigenous knowledge systems, History, Arts.

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WOK: Sense perception, language, reason

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The materials collection, at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, MA, houses thousands of pigments, including some of the world's rarest. Dragon's blood, mummy, Indian yellow: these are but a few flashy highlights from the museum's collection.

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A Vault Of Color: Protecting The World's Rarest Pigments

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The materials collection, at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, MA, houses thousands of pigments, including some of the world's rarest. Dragon's blood, mummy, Indian yellow: these are but a few flashy highlights from the museum's collection.

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AOK: Natural Science (Chemistry)/History.

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Why water is really, really weird | BBC Ideas

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Kruti

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1) A Beautiful Mind
2) Dead Poet's Society

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To what extent can change in knowledge systems be attributed to conformity?

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My knowledge question about article (377)

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My knowledge question about article (377)

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To what extent is perception based on subjective imagination and reasoning in human science/ethics

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To what extent can unprecedented change force a response?

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To what extent can unprecedented change force a response?

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“What role does bias play in influencing one’s emotions in making judgements?”

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How to make a kq

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How to formulate a good Knowledge Question?
Step 1
Good questions start with:
To what extent...?
How far...?
How...?
What role does...?
Under what circumstances...?
How can we know...?

Why use TOK terms?
TOK terms are useful because they steer the investigation into clear knowledge areas. By unpacking those you acquire a deeper understanding.
Assessment
Knowledge Questions are at the heart of assessment in TOK but the essay and presentation take different approaches
Step 2
After the question starters use a combination of one or more TOK concepts. You can also add a reference to Ways of knowing and/or areas of knowledge
Examples
What role does
reason
and
emotions
play in the
justification
of scientific claims?

To what extent can
imagination
be considered a
valid
source of
knowledge
?

How far does
art
influence
beliefs
of individuals and groups?

Note!

The aim is NOT to use all the elements but to select a combination of those relevant to our Real Life Situation!

To sum up
How much

evidence
do
scientists
need before they
accept theory
as true?
good starter for an open-ended question
TOK term that refers to a TOK concept of certainty
reference to an AoK - natural or human sciences
central TOK concept of certainty
KQ
RLS
essay focus
presentation focus

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How to formulate a good Knowledge Question?

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How to formulate a good Knowledge Question? Step 1 Good questions start with:To what extent...?How far...?How...?What role does...?Under what circumstances...?How can we know...? Why use TOK terms?TOK terms are useful because they steer the investigation into clear knowledge areas.

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Tok Terms to be mindful of when form a KQ

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–What role do reason and faith play in the justification of ethical values?

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- Catalan Protests 2019                     (Barcelona)

To what extend does language and faith (emotion) affect the perceived historical claims?  (CATALAN PROTEST)

- Manchester City financial fair play breach (Ban from champions    league)

To what extend does reason and sense perception affect ethics? (MAN CITY FFP BAN)

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To what extent do imagination and reason lead to subjective moral values.

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To what extent do imagination and reason lead to subjective moral values.

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The organizers of one alien-themed party have gone their separate ways, leading to accusations of secrecy and poor planning.

The Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction is in Amargosa Valley, Nev. Credit... Etienne Laurent/EPA, via Shutterstock

A wildly popular Facebook joke about "storming" Area 51 inspired a trio of parties in Nevada, including one event on Thursday in Las Vegas that featured alien-themed cans of Bud Light.

If they're watching, the aliens probably have a few questions for humanity. You might, too, so here's a closer look at what's happening.

There's not much to it: In late June, Matty Roberts, a college student, created an event on Facebook called " Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us. "

The event, scheduled for Friday, was meant as a joke about making a run on the mysterious and well-protected military test site in southern Nevada, fabled to be dedicated to the research of real, honest-to-goodness alien spacecraft.

The joke caught fire.

Within three weeks, more than a million people marked themselves down as planning to attend. (By the day of the event, the number had reached 2.1 million.) Even the Air Force noticed: In July, a spokeswoman told The New York Times that "any attempt to illegally access military installations or military training areas is dangerous."

Concerned that some might take the call to action seriously and be arrested or hurt, Mr. Roberts decided to plan a sizable "Alienstock" music festival nearby as an alternative, according to reports, teaming up with Brock Daily, a co-host of the Facebook event, and Connie West, of the Little A'Le'Inn, in rural Rachel, Nev., which is home to fewer than 100 residents.

Mr. Roberts and Mr. Daily parted ways this week with Ms. West, according to Frank DiMaggio, an event planner who worked with the two men on an alternative party that happened in Las Vegas on Thursday.

Attendance at the Rachel event has suffered as a result, Ms. West said in a Thursday interview with KTNV, a local ABC affiliate.

"We've lost a good two-thirds of our campsites due to all the confusion and upset," she said.

In a statement, the three men said that they had pulled out of Ms. West's event for fear that it would be "FYREFEST 2.0," a rerun of a famously hyped party in 2017 that failed spectacularly.

Instead, they directed their followers on Facebook and elsewhere to an event held on Thursday, hosted by the Downtown Las Vegas Events Center and sponsored by Bud Light, which sold limited-edition alien-themed beer. The event was well-attended, according to footage posted online by KVVU, a local Fox affiliate.

It was a relatively easy move for Mr. Roberts and Mr. Daily because the Las Vegas event was already in the works as a sort of pregame to the bigger desert party, according to Mr. DiMaggio.

"It was exactly what they wanted to happen out in the desert, but all the infrastructure's there," he said.

According to Mr. DiMaggio, the Rachel event had been plagued by a lack of infrastructure, poor planning and secrecy, which had led to concerns among Mr. Roberts and Mr. Daily.

"We foresee a possible humanitarian disaster in the works, and we can't participate in any capacity at this point," the three said of the festival in Rachel in a statement.

Some of those living in the area were glad to hear that the men were directing visitors elsewhere, according to Joerg Arnu, one of the fewer than 100 Rachel residents. "We are very, very relieved," he said.

Mr. Arnu accused Ms. West of keeping residents in the dark about the event, while Mr. DiMaggio said she did the same to her fellow organizers.

Ms. West did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but said in the KTNV interview on Thursday that she was pleased with the early showing for the weekend event.

"I think I'm on my highest high I've ever been in my entire life," she said. About 250 campsites had been paid for in advance, she said.

While the Rachel event was in the works, another group of organizers was planning a gathering scheduled for Friday, Sept. 20, and Saturday, Sept. 21, in nearby Hiko, home to the Alien Research Center, a gift shop.

While that event, the Storm Area 51 Basecamp, is slated to feature food, drink and music, it also includes a lineup of speakers intended to appeal to those interested in aliens and the secretive military base.

"We're focusing on the true believers, we're not looking for a rave in the desert," said Keith Wright, managing partner of Production Specialists of Las Vegas, an events company, and one of the organizers of the Basecamp event.

The speakers include Jeremy Corbell, the director of a movie on Netflix about Bob Lazar, who says he reverse-engineered alien spaceships at Area 51 - both of whom reportedly served as inspiration for Mr. Roberts's Facebook post.

In an interview, Mr. DiMaggio gave his blessing to the Hiko event and said that Mr. Roberts was considering checking it out: "They're cool people and they've got a killer event," he said.

Mr. Wright said he and the other organizers were spending about $200,000 of their own money and planned to bring myriad amenities into the desert, including about 80 portable bathrooms, generators, food trucks, security and emergency services, and a semi truck filled with bottled water.

Mr. Wright said that he hoped to host no more than 5,000 people at the event in Hiko, which he also said was on the way to both Rachel and Area 51.

"From everything that we're being told, the people are coming," he said. "All we have to do is capture them."

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The Area 51 'Raid' Is Today. Here's How It Spun Out of Control.

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The organizers of one alien-themed party have gone their separate ways, leading to accusations of secrecy and poor planning. A wildly popular Facebook joke about "storming" Area 51 inspired a trio of parties in Nevada, including one event on Thursday in Las Vegas that featured alien-themed cans of Bud Light.

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To what extend do emotions and language influence cultural values and mindsets?

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To what extent does our religious beliefs affect our ability to reason and remain rational when dealing with ethical problems.

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RLS: Ban of political comics in new york times global  - Vedha

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RLS: Ban of political comics in new york times global  - Vedha

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To what extent can an authoritative figure rewrite history?

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https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/21/vladimir-putin-wants-to-rewrite-the-history-of-world-war-ii/
Vladimir Putin rewrites history of world war 2

K.Q
To what extent can we speak of certainty when it comes to claims made in history?

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HOW RELIABLE IS FAITH TO MAKE REASONABLE DECISIONS.
Under what circumstances does faith affect our intuition and ability to reason

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Nike plus size mannequin controversy-2019
KNOWLEDGE QUESTION:-

To what extent is shared knowledge influenced by perception?

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/29/business/forever-21-bankruptcy.html

Forever 21 announcing its bankruptcy

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TOK topic

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Is South Korea's caustic obsession with celebrity to blame for the early demise of another young starlet? Steven Borowiec discusses the soul-searching in the country after Sulli's death.

(Updated: )
Share this content

SEOUL: As a South Korean celebrity, Sulli stood out for her individuality. She was unique in the boldness with which she presented her life online. She refused to grovel or apologise when criticised.

In a country with strict social norms, she was a breath of fresh air, who demonstrated that not everyone must follow the crowd.

It was therefore all the more shocking last week when Sulli, a former member of popular girl group (f)x and an actor, was found dead at the age of 25 in her home south of Seoul.
TARGET OF ONLINE VITRIOL
The cause of death has not been officially announced but online forum have discussed the huge possibility of suicide as the cause and what this means.

It is no secret Sulli had suffered depression. For years, she had been a target of hateful vitriol online from netizens who disapprove of her public persona.

Perhaps most infamously, Sulli posted photos to her Instagram of herself wearing a shirt without a bra, with the faint outlines of her nipples visible, which generated a huge reaction.

Given the infinite number of graphic sexual images that anyone with an Internet connection can access nowadays, this must sound pretty tame.

But in South Korea, a country where assertive displays of female sexuality are uncommon, Sulli was attacked as reckless and undignified, damaging the moral fabric of the country and setting a poor example for the fans who looked up to her.

Sulli herself was young, and came of age in the public spotlight. She had been active as an entertainer since age 11, and like many child stars, found the transition into adulthood stressful with press outlets scrutinising her every move, notably her romantic relationship with a man 14 years her senior.

Amid the mourning online, and the fraught attempts to understand why someone so young, famous and talented would end her own life, the phrase "societal killing" has been employed to imply that South Korea, as a society, may be responsible for her death.

There is a growing realisation that toxic societal dynamics might have led her to take her own life, and that South Korean society is unfairly harsh on public figures and lacks support networks and legal recourse to help that acknowledges and tackles these concerns decisively.
ANTAGONISTIC FANDOM
The public awaits findings on whether it was indeed a case of suicide, but the shock of her sudden departure has prompted some soul-searching in South Korea.

It is of course not only in South Korea that some successful entertainers fall into depression and end their own lives, but Sulli's case sheds light on aspects of celebrity in this country that are somewhat unique.

Young, female entertainers occupy a peculiar space in South Korean society. In a country where appearance is highly prized, they are praised for their beauty, but harshly criticised for physical imperfections.

Young fans address them with an honorific that means "older sister", and entertainers are expected to act as role models for the nation's youth.

Yet fandom in South Korea has long been an antagonistic game, with fans identifying not just as supporters of artists they like, but as nasty detractors of public figures they find fault with.

And South Korea's media are today facing criticism for possibly having contributed to Sulli's distress.

This week, the Korea Press Foundation released the results of an analysis of press coverage related to Sulli, which concluded that media outlets sought cheap clicks by circulating speculative articles about Sulli's personal life without verifying their accuracy, thereby providing a space for hateful comments.
VICTIM BLAMING?
Sulli's life would have been less stressful if every one of her posts on Instagram or comments on television hadn't led to a froth of dozens of news articles.

Maladroit press coverage has continued after Sulli's death. One Korean media outlet took down an article that described Sulli as having been a "no bra advocate" after the word choice garnered criticism.

One report on her death that veered close to victim-blaming posited that Sulli had "courted controversy with statements that put her outside of some societal norms here".

Nearly all public figures face some kind of pushback online, and the hate Sulli faced consistently for years has been pointed to as a likely reason for Sulli's death.

Surely having her social media filled with vulgar insults - not just for a particular incident but with everything she posted - must have taken a psychological toll on her.

Her death has created momentum for efforts to stamp out online abuse. Petitions have gone up on the South Korean President Moon Jae-in's website calling for legislation to punish individuals who post hateful comments or media outlets that spread falsehoods online.

There are also calls for a system where all online comments would be left in the user's legal name, instead of allowing netizens to hide behind an online pseudonym.

It is likely that many commenters would be more polite, or choose to keep silent, if their personal or professional reputation was tied to what they were posting.

The day after Sulli's death, 70 per cent of respondents to a RealMeter opinion poll said that websites ought to require commenters to post under their real names.

Despite these well-intentioned efforts, it isn't possible to legislate compassion. Increased regulation could make the Internet a more pleasant place, but can't change the kind of prejudice an independent woman like Sulli faced.

At the root of Sulli's anguish is a society where so many refuse to tolerate people who behave in unique ways, particularly when such people are young and female.

It would be overly simplistic to say that Sulli died because of cyberbullying. By refusing to adhere to social norms, Sulli seemed to be telling her critics that they couldn't control her, that despite their disapproval she would keep doing her own thing.
Steven Borowiec is the politics editor of Korea Expose.

If there is one lesson to take from her death, it is that South Korean society should be willing to tolerate difference and behave compassionately towards people who make unconventional choices.

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Commentary: Who really killed South Korea celebrity Sulli?

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Is South Korea's caustic obsession with celebrity to blame for the early demise of another young starlet? Steven Borowiec discusses the soul-searching in the country after Sulli's death. (Updated: ) Share this content SEOUL: As a South Korean celebrity, Sulli stood out for her individuality.

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Attached in screenshot:
Topic: The increase in the number of hate groups as a result of increased polarisation in the United States' political climate.

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Bernardo Silva suspended and fined for alleged racism
1
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2862509-bernardo-silva-receives-1-match-ban-for-racist-tweet-at-team-mate-benjamin-mendy
2
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2855546-pep-guardiola-bernardo-silva-critics-are-completely-wrong-after-racist-tweet

KQ
To what extent is morality a by-product of imagination and emotion

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TOK presentation sample videos and how to fill your PPD

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New Zealand mosque attack
Orlando nightclub shooting
Area 51 raid

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https://www.hoddereducation.co.uk/media/Documents/magazine-extras/IB%20Review/IBReview4_1_poster.pdf?ext=.pdf

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- cyber security
- death penalty
- artificial intelligence
- vaccinations
- immigration
-Animal testing

- Cloning
- censorship
- Aadhar card invasion of privacy
- Eco-terrorism

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-injection safe-houses
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs26R56d3ww

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CRISPR
AOKs: Natural Sciences, Ethics
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00339-3
KQ: How does memory and intuition shape a person's ethical views?
KQ 2.0: To what extent are methods of exploration of knowledge limited by authority in natural sciences?

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Amogh - The 1000 game match between alphazero and stockfish 8.
Bharath - Ayodhya case: A brief history of India’s longest running property dispute.
-https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/the-big-story/story/20171218-ayodhya-dispute-babri-masjid-demolition-ram-janmbhoomi-ram-mandir-1102093-2017-12-09

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MS Dhoni’s gloves in the world cup

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China Is Detaining Muslims in Vast Numbers. The Goal: ‘Transformation.’

1) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/08/world/asia/china-uighur-muslim-detention-camp.html
2)
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50511063

KQ- to what extent do emotion and reason impact
ethical decision making

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The bench pronounced its verdict on 6 September 2018. Announcing the verdict, the court reversed its own 2013 judgement of restoring Section 377 by stating that using the section of the IPC to victimize homosexuals was unconstitutional, and henceforth, a criminal act.

1]human  sciences
2]religious knowledge
3]indigenous knowledge
4] ethics

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/cnn-new-york-times-other-media-barred-from-white-house-briefing/2017/02/24/4c22f542-fad5-11e6-be05-1a3817ac21a5_story.html

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-web-pages-erased-and-obscured-under-trump/

to what extent can the belief of an authority figure affect shared scientific knowledge

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RLS: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidvolodzko/2019/03/05/bangladesh-and-the-fire-next-time/#606633e72ca1

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The Rustom Case

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The internet services had previously been suspended by the authorities on Sunday as a precautionary measure to prevent any law and order situation keeping in view the death anniversary of Parliament attack convict Mohammad Afzal Guru. They were restored later in the day.

AREAS OF KNOWLEDGE:
Human Sciences
Religious Knowledge
Indigenous Knowldge
History
Ethics

WAYS OF KNOWLEDGE
Memory
Reason/Logic
Emotion
Faith

KQ
Under what circumstances do emotions affect logic?

https://www.livemint.com/news/india/internet-suspended-in-kashmir-today-11581399845950.html

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/limited-internet-restored-kashmir-access-social-media-200125132533497.html

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I CALL DIBS ON THE WHOLE INTERNET Area 51 RAID OK THANKS <3

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I CALL DIBS ON THE WHOLE INTERNET Area 51 RAID OK THANKS <3

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The reaction to article 377

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TOPIC: ANTI- GUN CONTROL
SCHOOL SHOOTING: Florida school shooting

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Regimented Love 💔

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RLS
1. Team Trees fundraiser
To what extent do sense perception/ faith/ emotion aid in justifying information?
2. Cultured Meat
To what extent  do sense perception

Diya
1. Genetically-modified-organisms/food
To what extent do the emotions & reasoning affect the acceptance of truth of a matter?

Atul

RLS - Donald Trump Impeachment Trial
AOK - Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Ethics
KQ -  To what extent do the common people really get represented in a large democracy?

Omsai

RLS - Australian Bush Fire
AOK - Human Sciences, Natural Science, Ethics,  Indigenous Knowledge Systems

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febe and rose 👊🏾

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https://juarezdp.weebly.com/uploads/5/9/3/5/59351771/_tok_presentation_rubric_1.pdf

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Group of Vishal, Snehal, Rohan, Hayeon and Praneet.
1) Obama/famous people are an Illuminati member?
AOKS: History/Politics
--Flat-earth theory?
2) Gay people are turning to Satan?
AOKS: Religious Knowledge Systems
--Geocentric model?
3) Corona virus can be cured be drinking alcohol/cow urine?
AOKS: Natural Sciences
--Moon landing was fake?
--Eating bananas is bad for cold?
--Lambs can grow out of the ground like weed and stuff?
4) The moon is made up of cheese?
AOKS: Indigenous Knowledge Systems

--The Titanic never sank?
5) The chemicals in the water are frogs gay?
AOKS: Human Sciences

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21. The government has ‘weather weapons’

Jones doesn’t just believe that secretive forces are at work to control people’s minds: He has also warned, for years, about government efforts to control the weather to wreak havoc on unsuspecting citizens.

In a 2013 broadcast, Jones warned that “of course there’s weather weapon stuff going on,” according to a transcript produced by Media Matters, a left-leaning watchdog organization. “We had floods in Texas like fifteen years ago, killed thirty-something people in one night. Turned out it was the Air Force.”
AOK : Human Sciences, Natural Sciences

2.
Israel animal spying

Conspiracy theories exist alleging that Israel uses animals to conduct espionage or to attack people. These are often associated with conspiracy theories about Zionism. Matters of interest to theorists include a series of shark attacks in Egypt in 2010, Hezbollah's accusations of the use of "spying" eagles,[73] and the 2011 capture of a griffon vulture carrying an Israeli-labeled satellite tracking device.[74]
AOK: Religious Knowledge Systems

3.
Illuminati

Conspiracy theories concerning the Illuminati, a short-lived 18th-century Enlightenment-era secret society, appear to have originated in the late 19th century, when some conservatives in Europe came to believe that the group had been responsible for the French Revolution of 1789–1799.[161] Hoaxes about the Illuminati were later spread in the 1960s by a group of American practical jokers known as the Discordians, who, for example, wrote a series of fake letters about the Illuminati to Playboy.[162].

AOK: Human Sciences

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- Denver International Airport stands above an underground city which serves as a headquarters of the New World Order.

- Chemicals in the water are turning frogs gay. (AOK: Natural Sciences)

- Hillary Clinton is running a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor. (AOK: Ethics)

- A wide range of musicians, including Beyoncé and Whitney Houston, have been associated with the New World Order.
-

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1. Hillary Clinton is an actual demon who smells of sulphur, hails from Hell itself and has “personally murdered and chopped up and raped” little children. (POLITICS/HISTORY)

2. The Russia investigation is a sham. It’s actually a cover story for special counsel Robert Mueller and Donald Trump working together to expose thousands of pedophiles hidden in plain sight — including Hillary Clinton (and Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama), who will soon be under arrest. (Or perhaps already have been and are on their way to Guantanamo Bay.) (POLITICS/HISTORY)

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By Diya, Ankur, Bharath, Atul, Aneesh, Austin, Omsai, Amogh

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By Diya, Ankur, Bharath, Atul, Aneesh, Austin, Omsai, Amogh

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- The Church of Flying Spaghetti Monster, Jediism
AOK: religious knowledge systems

- ‘The Flat Earth Theory’
AOK: Natural Sciences

- Fake Moon Landing
AOK: Natural Sciences, Ethics

- Vaccinations cause Autism
AOK: Natural Sciences

- 9/11 was an internal job
AOK: Human Sciences, Ethics

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1. Information theory: Claude Shannon, 1948

2.  Game theory: John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, 1944 (with important embellishments from John Nash in the 1950s)

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- Malthusian's theory (natural sciences)
-Earth is flat (Natural sciences)
-Multiverse theory (Natural sciences, math)
-Coronavirus was spread by Chinese officials on purpose (ethics, natural sciences, Natural sciences)
-Vaccination is dangerous. (Natural sciences, )

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the earth is flat
GOD

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Science has proven that medical illnesses can transfer between people by way of viruses. There's nothing mysterious about influenza and head colds spreading from close contact with sick people. Harder to explain, however, are incidents in which symptoms appear out of nowhere or seemingly impossible events are experienced by a large population. Such episodes fall under the blanket psychological term of "mass hysteria," and here are a handful of examples.

1. Salem Witch Trials (1692-93)

This is one of the best-known incidents of mass hysteria. It began when two young girls of the small town of Salem Village began to experience seizures that were not explained by contemporary medical science. After their seizures, the girls proclaimed that they were being assaulted by supernatural entities conjured up by local women.

Soon more girls were being afflicted and more townspeople (mostly females) were being accused. Trials were promptly enacted and those women who did not confess were sentenced to death. Ironically, those who falsely confessed did not face execution.

More than 20 people were executed and more than 100 were jailed before common sense was restored. The girls' seizures ended and the trials ceased. Later medical scientists would lay the blame on everything from stress caused by ongoing warfare with American Indians to fungus on bread products.

2. The Miracle of the Sun (Oct. 13, 1917)

Including this occurrence on the list of mass hysteria is controversial, as many people believe in its authenticity. But some researchers have concluded that this was indeed a case of mass hysteria, and for that reason, it's presented here.

In May 1917, in the environs of Fatima, Portugal, three young children claimed to have received an apparition by the Virgin Mary. There would be several subsequent supernatural visitations before a complex and hotly debated incident that took place on Oct. 13, 1917.

Mary had reportedly told the children that on that day she would appear to them for the last time and would create a miracle so astounding that everyone would believe in the authenticity of her appearances. What occurred is still up for dispute.

A crowd of thousands gathered to witness the promised miracle. The day featured a steady rain until the sun broke through the clouds. Many of the witnesses said that the sun's light appeared abnormal and that the sun changed colors and spun around in the sky. A Portuguese newspaper reported " ... the sun trembled, made sudden incredible movements outside all natural laws - and the sun 'danced.'" Others said the sun appeared to drop out of the sky and hurtle towards Earth.

Many people claimed to have witnessed these phenomena, but many other people said they only saw some of these unnatural events and some claimed not to have seen anything unusual at all. Because there were no reports of unanimous agreement as to the solar events of that day, later researchers have suggested mass hysteria or temporary eye abnormalities caused by looking directly at the sun as the cause of the episode.

3. Halifax Slasher (1938)

A more personal case of mass hysteria occurred in the town of Halifax, England, a town in West Yorkshire. Beginning in November 1938, reports were made to the police regarding a man attacking people, mostly women, with a mallet or knife. The number of alleged attacks grew to a size unmanageable by the local law authorities and Scotland Yard was called in to help the Halifax police.

Those police soon became suspicious of what looked like self-inflected wounds on the "victims." It didn't take long for several of those claiming to have been attacked to admit that they had, indeed, faked their encounters with the phantom perpetrator. In early December a local newspaper proclaimed: "The theory that a half-crazed, wild-eyed man has been wandering around, attacking helpless women in dark streets, is exploded ... There never was, nor is there likely to be, any real danger to the general public." The authorities concluded that all of the alleged victims had made up their claims in a bid to garner attention and pity - although they allowed that many of them may have believed they had been attacked.

4. Tanzania laughter epidemic (1962)

In late January of 1962, at an all-girls school in Kashasha, Tanzania, three girls began to laugh uncontrollably. They didn't stop, even when disciplined by their teachers. Bizarrely, the laughter spread until more than 90 students were laughing for no apparent reason. The laughing fits allegedly lasted anywhere from a few hours to more than 15 days. Officials tried to find a cause but were unsuccessful. The epidemic laughter led to the closure of schools as the laughing spread to other villages nearby. Its cause remains unknown. The laughter episodes continued on and off for about one year, and then mysteriously ceased.

5. Sri Lanka (2012)

A more recent example of mass hysteria also involved schools. In mid-November of 2012, strange flu-like symptoms struck a school in the country of Sri Lanka. In addition to intestinal problems and fits of coughing, some children (and a handful of teachers) experienced rashes and headaches. In the small town of Gampola alone, more than 1,000 people were admitted to local hospitals. The area experienced widespread panic as the mysterious illness seemed to spread to other schools and centers of population. No medical cause could be found and the "illness" vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Not finding any other explanation, medical professionals concluded that those afflicted had been the victims of some type of mass hysteria strong enough to produce observable physical symptoms.

There are numerous other examples of mass hysteria featuring everything from the dubious 1789 series of attacks in London by a man with knives on his knees to the 1983 multiple episodes of Palestinian girls and young women suddenly losing consciousness for no discernible reason.

The final analysis of these episodes seems to reinforce the medical belief that the mind is a complex and powerful thing that can be affected by outside forces - both real and imagined.

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Science has proven that medical illnesses can transfer between people by way of viruses. There's nothing mysterious about influenza and head colds spreading from close contact with sick people. Harder to explain, however, are incidents in which symptoms appear out of nowhere or seemingly impossible events are experienced by a large population.

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This song was essentially a collaboration between people who never met, facilitated by the internet.

The DJ who made the beat sampled part of it from another artist (originality)

The song made it onto the top of the country music charts but was then removed because it wasn’t “country” enough. (Definitions and categorization of art).

The artist wrote a “country” song about experiences he didn’t have and culture he wasn’t a part of. Is this an example of cultural appropriation? Does it matter whether the song is about authentic experiences?

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How Lil Nas X Took ‘Old Town Road’ From TikTok Meme to No. 1 | Diary of a Song

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Who decides what art means? - Hayley Levitt

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Surrealism, Emotions in the unconscious mind- Dali's Persistence of Memory

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Trauma and Art

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Emotions can be a barrier to knowledge because emotions come from our culture which can sway emotions and further us wanting to actually gain that knowledge.

In the poem "borders" frohman talks about how even though the girl's family has crossed the border, they are still stuck inside a border because of their culture. People at school make fun of the immigrant girl because she is an immigrant, and this shows that the boys who made fun of the girl had strong emotions that swayed them from gaining knowledge about her culture or getting to know her better before making fun of her.

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Alfred & Shadow - A short story about emotions (education psychology health animation)

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Emotions and Language as a source of knowledge

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJYvNDrbGBU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K3RPhENBYY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDoU6OijEVo

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How to create an A grade TOK Presentation in 5 hours

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Noam Chomsky - Empiricism and Rationalism

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Tripartite theory of knowledge

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Reason or Experience

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Tok Essay Markscheme

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Exemplar essays

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Theory of knowledge teacher support material

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How to write an Essay

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How to formulate a good Knowledge Question?
Step 1
Good questions start with:
To what extent...?
How far...?
How...?
What role does...?
Under what circumstances...?
How can we know...?

Why use TOK terms?
TOK terms are useful because they steer the investigation into clear knowledge areas. By unpacking those you acquire a deeper understanding.
Assessment
Knowledge Questions are at the heart of assessment in TOK but the essay and presentation take different approaches
Step 2
After the question starters use a combination of one or more TOK concepts. You can also add a reference to Ways of knowing and/or areas of knowledge
Examples
What role does
reason
and
emotions
play in the
justification
of scientific claims?

To what extent can
imagination
be considered a
valid
source of
knowledge
?

How far does
art
influence
beliefs
of individuals and groups?

Note!

The aim is NOT to use all the elements but to select a combination of those relevant to our Real Life Situation!

To sum up
How much

evidence
do
scientists
need before they
accept theory
as true?
good starter for an open-ended question
TOK term that refers to a TOK concept of certainty
reference to an AoK - natural or human sciences
central TOK concept of certainty
KQ
RLS
essay focus
presentation focus

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How to formulate a good Knowledge Question?

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How to formulate a good Knowledge Question? Step 1 Good questions start with:To what extent...?How far...?How...?What role does...?Under what circumstances...?How can we know...? Why use TOK terms?TOK terms are useful because they steer the investigation into clear knowledge areas.