Week 4: The Statue That Don’t Look Right

Dr. Peih-ying Lu

Mar. 25, 2010

A kouros is a statue of a standing nude youth that

did not represent any one individual youth but

the idea of youth.

Carved in from four sides, the statue

retained the general shape of the marble

block.

Background

This kouros was purchased by the Getty Museum in 1985 and its authenticity has been questioned ever since. The statue's label in the gallery reads "Greek, about 530 B.C., or modern forgery." The provenance, or paper trail of the statue's ownership history, is also suspect and there are no reliable facts about the statue's history before 1983. Nobody has been able to determine where or how it was originally discovered.

Pre-reading Questions

1. What is intuition?

2. Have you ever been misled by your intuition?

3. How do you think we can train our intuition?

4. Is it always good to follow your heart? Do you have any good or bad experiences about it?

Pre-reading Questions

5. What do we have to do before we are able to have a correct intuition?

6. How can training and practice affect our ability to make the right decision?

Fast and Frugal?

The Internal Computer?

A Different and Better World?

Do We pay too much attention to those grand themes and too little to the particulars of those fleeting moments?

In-class Discussion

1. The author claims that “In other words, spontaneous decisions are often as good as - or even better than – carefully planned and considered ones.”, does it mean we can value without proof that something is better than something else?

In-class Discussion

2. What techniques can be used to effectively use rapid cognition to its advantage?

3. Do you think the meaning of instinct is the same meaning as a trained mind reacting quickly?

In-class Discussion

4. Please define the term “thin-slicing”.

5. What do you think about the common ways that we adopt when we make decisions every day? Are most of them conscious or sub-conscious? Why?

In-class Discussion

6. Some people would simply say “with experience comes intuition.” An abundance of stories is presented to support all the points in the book, but most adults will have already come across all the issues through lifelong experience. How can we try not to learn from failure but succeed more?