[Work: The Art of Risk, Kayt Sukel, 2016]
Risk Defended:

On the Focused Insights and Leisurely Presentation of Kayt Sukel’s The Art of Risk

 

Introduction:

Joueurs de Cartes by Theodoor Rombouts - The Art of Risk - Kayt Sukel - method, style, review

Joueurs de Cartes by Theodoor Rombouts

The hours of work I spend on relatively tedious tasks, such as the manual optimization of image dimensions on this site, are often lightened by listening to free online courses on various topics. This past week, I have been retreading the basics of personal finance in this course by Andrew Hingston. How poetic, then, that I should have stumbled across and begun listening to a course which often speaks of risk management and risk minimization, when I was already in the midst of reading a defense of our risky behaviors: The Art of Risk: The New Science of Courage, Caution, and Chance by psychologist Kayt Sukel.

Both individuals are students, to some degree, of behavioral economics—as formulated by, among others, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. But their application and incorporation of such insights into their own worldviews are divergent. Whereas in his course Hingston shifts his perspective toward financial priorities so that one can analytically control one’s emotional experiences, Sukel accepts research on risk-taking as an opportunity to offer a naturalistic—even rational—account of risky decision-making. So now, setting other scholars aside, I would like to evaluate Sukel’s book, first for its method and then for its style.

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[Work: The Art of Risk, Kayt Sukel, 2016]
Risk Defended:

On the Focused Insights and Leisurely Presentation of Kayt Sukel’s The Art of Risk

was last modified: February 26th, 2021 by Daniel Podgorski

[Topics: Genetics, Literary Theory, Philosophy of Language]
The Discourse of the Scientific Humans:

Exploring an Analogy Between Genetics and Language via Jacques Derrida’s Deconstruction

 

Jacques Derrida - genetics - deconstruction - critical theory - literary theory

Introduction:

Perhaps only with the recent theoretical developments in such fields as ecocriticism, the digital humanities, posthumanism, and elsewhere has literary theory attained the content or the form of scientific autonomy as desired by the Russian Formalists. This is not a particularly surprising development, however, as the European theoretical schools which followed the period of Russian Formalism, as well as Russian Formalism itself, drew heavily from the highly technical social sciences of linguistics and, later, anthropology.

Yet even the New Criticism, with its avowed (partially cultural) distaste for the distinctly denotative and ‘un-poetic’ nature of scientific discourse, clearly borrowed in its scrutiny—and in its testing of theoretical modes—from post-Enlightenment scientific methodologies. In fact, one may contend that scientific endeavors and theoretical philosophies share far more than either discipline readily admits, not only in methodologies but in the implications and applications of theoretical knowledge (where ‘theoretical’ here refers to the sense of the term in both the sciences and the humanities).

Taking up just one salient, demonstrative analogy, there is a curious parallel between the implications of much of the scientific understanding of genetics and those of the theoretical underpinnings of deconstruction as formulated by Jacques Derrida. Indeed, one may find that, using either Derridian deconstructive theory or genetics[1] as a starting point, one is led down the familiar roads toward poststructural theory and cultural criticism (broadly construed).

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[Topics: Genetics, Literary Theory, Philosophy of Language]
The Discourse of the Scientific Humans:

Exploring an Analogy Between Genetics and Language via Jacques Derrida’s Deconstruction

was last modified: February 24th, 2021 by Daniel Podgorski