Rachel Wrangham
Dr Rachel Wrangham has taught and written distance learning materials for many years. She currently works for the Open University on the MSc in Global Development.
Location London
Activity
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Rachel Wrangham made a comment
Read this one in the PDF form - the webpage is horrible! much too dense. Interesting content though!
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Rachel Wrangham made a comment
Hello: I'm hoping this course will improve my own teaching of critical thinking (I've never really worked out what it is...)
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Rachel Wrangham made a comment
I have really appreciated the way in which Peter Stockwell has involved himself in this course, via the comments, and by tinkering with aspects of the course as we've gone along. We've learned from him, and I hope he's learned (a little bit!) from us, and from the MOOC experience!
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Well, I think that the fact that you say that the second will be more affecting definitely makes a difference! I expected to be even MORE moved, and wasn't, and perhaps as a result didn't calibrate my response to the second one right?
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Rachel Wrangham made a comment
So the argument here is that we frequently and entirely unconsciously mis-remember things, so that the world seems more predictable than it is, and we seem better at predicting it than we are.
I can believe that!
Haven't worked through what the consequences of it are, though...
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Rachel Wrangham replied to Claire Smyth
I think this is the point of this course!
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Rachel Wrangham replied to Ruth Mackay
Indeed - isn't the point of the experiments to show that we have no knowledge that this is something we do? That we would (as we are all doing here!) vehemently deny doing it?
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Elizabeth - I agree with you: experience must be a big part of this.
But I don't see how this squares with the argument Nick Chater is putting across here, which is that there are no 'depths' to minds, that there's little below the surface, and that we perceive and understand much less than we think we do. -
Chris - well, is it? Has it always been? Aren't there different kinds of politics?
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yes, good point, there is that - but leaving that one variable aside, what else is there to 'choose' between??
There is an extraordinary decentralisation of effort and time expended, that results from all these 'choices' -
Rachel Wrangham made a comment
Interesting! I found the ones that flickered slowly the hardest - I'd looked on before the change happened, so never 'saw' it. And it was funny how some of the changes 'crept up on me' - I found I knew where to look before I knew what I was looking at/for.
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Rachel Wrangham made a comment
Oh, I feel I don't have any opinions about anything any more! I'm not sure that this means I'm (even) more sheep-like than I used to be - I certainly feel as if I spend my life sitting on the fence.
Value only exists relationally, doesn't it? Does anything have intrinsic value? So where can we look for value but outwards?
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Rachel Wrangham made a comment
So what's this about?
If we REALLY want to know what's going on, then I'm not sure that participant observation and ethnography have ever been bettered. Very time-consuming, very intense, very small-scale - but revealing in a way no other method seems to be.
But of course, this isn't about research, is it - this is about finding out how to get people to...
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I often find myself fantasising about a REDUCTION in choice!
What good does it do me to be able to 'choose' between 25 different electricity suppliers? Takes me ages to work out which one is cheapest - and it's all the same electricity in the end.
What good does it do me to have many different kinds of train ticket to choose between? I'll sit in exactly... -
Rachel Wrangham made a comment
"You could say that there are two ways to do something remarkable in
business, to do something significant, one of which is to find out what people
already want, and work at a clever way to make it. Another way is to work out
what you’re good at making, and find out a way to make people want it."There's a political parallel here -
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Rachel Wrangham made a comment
“[the mind is] not actually looking inside itself, there is no hidden mental depth where all the answers live”
Yes yes, I’m very happy with that point. We know lots less than we THINK we do. But (metaphorically), WHERE do the tools lie that allow us to answer the question at all? (And we don’t all have access to the same tools – though we can add to them...
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Rachel Wrangham made a comment
Goodness me, I wish that some of this WAS true!
God forbid I ask my (still small) children some pointless question (eg do you want strawberry or plain yoghurt - they like both) and then give them the *wrong* one!
Family life would be somewhat calmer if it really was this easy to get people to swap preferences!
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Rachel Wrangham made a comment
Is there a typo in this para (between the asterisks?
I'm trying to understand if you're implying that there's a difference between the changes seen in left-leaning vs right-leaning people
(sorry am looking at the transcripts, not the videos - I can't watch the videos where I am now)"But here’s the real shocker: You then ask people what they’re ...
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Rachel Wrangham made a comment
So, what seems interesting to me at the moment is what it is that allows us to fill in all the blanks. We can't, physically, see much - we infer it. We feel flustered, but we've been told that might happen - we're not bothered by it (we make sense of it).
What, then, is this sense-making? How does it happen? When does it happen? How are these different...
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Anecdote alert!
This year I bought my uncle a book for Christmas. I was casting about, looking for something he'd like, saw it on Amazon and bought it - great reviews, I thought he'd really like it.
When it arrived, I flicked through it and was rather disappointed. So in the accompanying card (written early in Dec) I wrote something saying 'I bought this... -
Rachel Wrangham made a comment
OK, so we're dealing in metaphors here - the mind *IS* neither flat, nor does it have depths. So I mustn't get too caught up in semantics.
BUT BUT BUT
I think I must be missing something major here.
Let's say I accept the idea that the mind is flat, that there are no hidden depths, that we just improvise and get by.
Where does the 'desire to stay in... -
But isn't that what they are? Always and inevitably?
If I do a piece of research, then my own background, the times in which I live, and the assumptions people make about me will fundamentally colour my findings, and the way I interpret and present my findings.
This is one of the reasons why historians are never out of business - what happened in Tudor...
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Can any abstract thought/concept be either true or real?
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Rachel Wrangham replied to Ambrose Partington
I'm not convinced by the argument Nick Chater is making (no evidence yet!), but as I see it, he is saying that we have a belief that there is something 'underneath' observable behaviour, that, if we work hard enough, we should be able to understand/discern.
However, here he is arguing that this isn't at all the case - all there is is behaviour - all there... -
We 'did' the Heaney and the Jonson poems at school. I remember writing an essay about the poppy bruise.
Now, with my own four year olds, and my own fears about them running into roads, I can hardly bear to read it - it speaks so directly to my terrors. -
Rachel Wrangham replied to Ann Rawson
Me too. To me the first feels more immediate, and the device of the clothes makes me feel drawn in closer, not pushed further away. Everything conjures his little girl.
In the second, the end is touching - but it comes after such a stolid listing of virtues...
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Rachel Wrangham replied to Rachel Wrangham
Hello!
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Rachel Wrangham made a comment
"Drawing on your own example of an impersonated or portable character from Week 1, do you think you could identify the textual patterns that raise the character to person-ness?"
No! I can't! It isn't only that I don't have the skills to do this - I don't even know where to start!
I think this is an incredibly hard exercise to do in the abstract - I...
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Rachel Wrangham made a comment
"To start with, every character is you, until the text directs you into describing how they are different."
I guess this is probably right - though I'd not thought about it before. And I'd also say that even when the text DOES give specific directions, sometimes (this reader!) ignores them.
For example, Tolkien is quite clear that hobbits are not much... -
Mmm, what do you mean? Do you mean that if you were presented with the identical text, and in one case you were told it was written by a woman, and in another you were told it was written by a man, you'd 'clothe' the characters differently?
Or is it that men and women just write characters differently?Not exactly the same point, but in Vikram Seth's...
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Curiosity seems to me a good enough reason!
And it is such a mystery, isn't it. Lots of people here have written about how they read, how they conjure up characters and places and voices - what reading does to them. Who couldn't be fascinated by HOW that happens? -
Judy - I know what you mean. I feel as if over the years my mind has become more and more clogged with stuff, and it's rare that I can immerse myself in a book in the way I used to.
And interestingly, I'm not sure I want to get 'lost' in that same way any longer - I have to feel as if I can trust the author before I'm willing to get so involved. I find... -
Rachel Wrangham made a comment
I'm fascinated by the idea of a 'tradition' of MRI scans and looking at online reviews, blogs etc.
All this is so recent - what happened before these things became available?
How did academics try to make sense of readers' minds before we had so much computing power? -
Rachel Wrangham made a comment
I've only now managed to watch the video (read the transcript earlier).
It's EXCELLENT - a great way of getting these ideas across vividly and simply. -
Rachel Wrangham replied to Rachel Wrangham
Louise:
I'm sure you're right about this; after all, Palmer is at pains to say that he DOESN'T mean this in the weaker sense, he does mean it 'actually and literally'.
And your question goes to the very heart of my worry - there are LOTS of examples of lazy personification of groups/organisations/concepts.
Some of my favourites:
'The media feel... -
Rachel Wrangham made a comment
Oh, so nice to see a discussion of Rumer Godden! She's such an unusual writer - she has her very own way with direct speech.
When did we learn about prototypicality? I missed that bit!
And I'd really like another 'bonus' article about the relationship between portability and impersonation - it feels to me that's a missing link in the chain. -
Rachel Wrangham made a comment
Interestingly, I think many of us feel that - unlike the earlier segments of the course so far - this section LACKS something solid to get our teeth into.
Portability, shmortability - why should we be interested in it?
We'll all have examples of characters that we think are 'portable' (that we have imPERSONated) - - but isn't it most interesting to try to... -
Rachel Wrangham made a comment
Good stuff. Palmer can write!
It mostly seemed very plausible to me, to the extent that I wondered whether this was an example of an academic taking a long time to say something that's fairly commonsensical. But I don't think that's the case here - he constructs his article well - it's 'discursive', in the sense he uses in 4.6 and 4.12 - apparently... -
Rachel Wrangham replied to Anastasia Kogka
Oh, how interesting - this was a book I HATED! I found both Alan himself, and the world he inhabited, so wooden. Now I'm going to have to go back and try to work out why I had this reaction - why is Alan so real (so imPERSONated) for you, and so unbelievable for me?
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Rachel Wrangham replied to Jonathan Wainwright
On autobiographies:
- they're a fascinating genre. 'Creative non-fiction' - that was a new idea for me. But it's exactly right - much creativity goes into creating a 'believable' character.
- what is the point of the autobiography? Why has the person written it? What story are they telling, and is it mostly in the past?
- It's not that one author is... -
Rachel Wrangham replied to Jonathan Wainwright
Like Lin above, celebrity culture leaves me cold. Maybe it's because it's such an instrumental culture - we are not (meant to) merely observe, empathise. Rather, we're invited to become fans, acolytes - to idolise. Celebrities rarely are 'good examples of a person' because they *are* 'flat' - perhaps intentionally so.
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Rachel Wrangham made a comment
There's one me who is sighing about the idea of 'alternativities', which I fear is not a typo...
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Rachel Wrangham made a comment
Interesting. I think this is put in a slightly funny way - why has this anything to do with scale? That seems to me to suggest size, or distance.
'Think about how you scale your sense of people'.
I don't think I know how to do that.
What I can do, though, is think about the 'person-ish-ness' of people - how well do I empathise with them? How real are... -
Rachel Wrangham made a comment
OK, so I have now read (most of) the article.
I appreciate that it's hard to find an introductory article, and who knows, maybe this is the best one? But if you are going to start the course off with something as heavy as this, it's very important to give students some questions to 'think with'.
And actually, looking at the summary above, this is...
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Rachel Wrangham replied to Joan Baxter
PDFs can be a bit tricky on an ipad, though if you can work out how to download them to ibooks, then they're fine there.
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Rachel Wrangham made a comment
20 minutes? For a WHOLE academic article in a new field??
Course managers - this is NONSENSE! (and I bet you know it!) Don't do this to people - it's really off-putting to give SUCH an unrealistic time estimate. It makes people feel slow and stupid when they can't do it. 60 minutes is much more reasonable (unless you expect us to skim-read it - in which...
