Just a short bit before the year changes, here is the link to the Istanbul Technical University Symposium I participated in last November. My contribution is included in the second session, but I would definitely recommend that you watched the third and final part of the symposium, our discussion. Thanks again to the organizers (ITU Circularity in Built Environment Research Group) and all the people present for the very inspiring and fruitful exchange.
From left to right: Mark Postel (FAIRM), Conny Bakker (Professor IDE), Tillmann Klein (Professor AE+T & Moderator), me, Paul de Ruiter (Architect) and Ellis ten Dam (Royal HaskoningDHV)
It was a great pleasure for me to present our circular plans for BK education yesterday and a great honor to be amongst the people of this panel. For those of you who weren’t with us last night, here is a link to our BK Talks video:
I am thinking of establishing a new thread in this blog starting from a woman who is apparently not related to my field, however, as I read has left the world with a huge legacy in rethinking gene regulation. The theory she developed in early 1950’s described that mobile elements regulated the genes by inhibiting or modulating their action (what is currently known as transposons). Despite her colleagues opposition and doubt she continued to gather evidence for her claims and had to wait for about 30 years before her contribution was finally acknowledged ending up with McClintock getting a Nobel prize for her discoveries. For more on McClintock visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_McClintock
Cognitive Dissonance – Definition: The concept was developed in the 1950s by American psychologist Leon Festinger. It is the mental conflict that occurs when beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information. The unease or tension that the conflict arouses in people is relieved by one of several defensive maneuvers: they reject, explain away, or avoid the new information; persuade themselves that no conflict really exists; reconcile the differences; or resort to any other defensive means of preserving stability or order in their conceptions of the world and of themselves. People need to maintain consistency between thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Simply put, once we form an opinion on a particular topic, we refuse to believe anything contrary to our beliefs; even going as far as to reject factual information to rationalize our own opinion (Medium).
Experiment No 1- Mrs. Keech’s flying saucer: Festinger posed as believer to a group of followers to a Mrs Keech who thought extraterrestrial beings would rescue true believers. He wanted to see how the group would react in case her prophecy didn’t materialize; in fact, the more committed members started to proselytize through newspapers ” as enlisting social support for their belief to lessen the pain of its disconfirmation.”
Experiment No 2 – The forced-compliance paradigm: participating subjects performed a series of repetitive and boring mental tasks and then were asked to lie to the “next subject” (actually an experimental accomplice) and say that the tasks were interesting and enjoyable. Some subjects were paid $1 for lying, while others were paid $20 (…) the subjects who were paid $1 for lying later evaluated the tasks as more enjoyable than those who were paid $20. The subjects who were paid $20 should not have experienced dissonance, because they were well rewarded and had ample justification for lying, whereas those paid $1 had little justification for lying and should have experienced cognitive dissonance. To reduce the dissonance, they reevaluated the boring task as interesting and enjoyable.
Experiment No3 – Pigeons: Festinger used cages where various obstacles hid the watering tubes or their feed troughs. While some pigeons were disoriented, others became more alert; when confronted with dissonant circumstances, the birds had developed a capacity to focus on the dissonance itself. Festinger believed that humans, like other animals, become more cognitively alert by struggling with complicated realities, rather than walking away from them* (R. Sennett: Building and Dwelling, Penguin Books, 2019, pp. 157)
*Remember Neuroplasticity and the comparison between taxi and bus drivers
I bumped into this story just today. A fourteen year old boy from Mali drowned somewhere outside the Italian coast last April. His body and face were deformed. The coroner that examined his body found a piece of paper with his school grades sewn inside his jacket. Makkox, the Italian comic designer drew this picture to honor him. The boy is shown at the bottom of the sea where all kinds of fish praise his achievements.
connecting data to information to knowledge 
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