User:Frenchie3/sandbox

Introduction
Anxiety is a very common feeling of everyday life and can affect everyone when they are in a situation of stress, whether it be before the deadline of an assignment or when practicing for the final of a sports tournament. It is positive and essential, giving you that extra boost of adrenaline and motivation to push you to study better or practice harder so you can succeed. But simple anxiety can become harmful to someone’s mental health when diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder (GAD), defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “a mental illness in which a person is so anxious that their normal life is affected”. Historically, the diagnosis of anxiety as a specific illness was very blurry because of the similarities it shares with other anomalies such as phobias, OCD (Obsessive-compulsive Disorder) or PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), often being considered a symptom of these disorders rather than a disease itself. The fact mental health issues remained taboo in many cultures until very recently also did not help for developing our knowledge and financing research on these disorders. Furthermore, the more scientific disciplines (psychiatry and neurobiology) tend to disagree with psychology and anthropology, the first focusing on genetics and biochemical abnormalities while the second puts an emphasis on the cultural environment, the feelings of the patient, and the reaction of the mind. This ambiguity creates issues of evidences between the disciplines resulting in conflicting definitions, diagnoses and treatments for GAD.

Introduction
Philosophy takes its origin from Ancient Greece and the word φιλοσοφία which translates to Philo+sophia, meaning the ‘love or desire for wisdom’. It is important to note the meaning of the words ‘desire' or ‘love’ for ancient greeks at the time were slightly different than our definitions today. According to them, ‘desire’, or ‘love’ in this case, were used to describe things that were unattainable. Philosophy was for them a state of great wisdom they would pursue to get as a close as possible but they would never be able to fully achieve it.

In that regard, philosophy tried to answer to the great questions of our world. From, what it means to be human, what is our world made of, the different elements, what is truth, reality and so on. While many of these questions can never truly be answered Philosophy teaches every single one of us to develop our thinking skills and to challenge what we know.

Early Days
Unlike many others fields of study where the discipline was practiced long before it actually became taught at school or on a university level, Philosophy has always been closely interlinked between practitioners and tutors. One of the first well known philosophers, Socrates is famous not only to be the father of western philosophy but also because of his status as a teacher of the discipline. Himself never actually wrote any text but focused on transmitting his knowledge, and teaching his disciples the fundamentals of philosophy. His student Plato expanded this idea of teaching the discipline by creating the Platonic Academy, where students could come study and think among other scholars and philosophers. This trend continued with Plato’s student, Aristotle opening his own school known as the Peripatetic School or sometimes Lyceum or even Epicure opening another school in his Garden, known as Epicure’s Garden. The same principle was true in the far east, where Confucian Schools were created in honor of Confucius to keep his teachings alive and reflect on his ideas.

Through the centuries until today
Philosophy as a discipline has changed very little ever since its birth around 600 B.C.E in Ancient Greece. Because of the nature of the subject many of the questions asked by Plato, Epicure, or Aristotle are very similar to questions faced by humans through the centuries and even today. As a result the way of teaching philosophy has remained more or less the same. While in Europe philosophical writings became less common after the fall of Greece’s influence due to a decline in literacy, greek philosophy continued to be studied in the islamic world and translated to arabic. Al-Kindi, a famous philosopher and mathematician is known to have translated and taught many philosophical writings in the Library of Baghdad known as the House of Wisdom around the 9th century AD. In Europe, the discipline continued to be practiced and taught but this time with a strong christian influence in the Italian Accademia Platonica and the resurgence of Plato’s ideas in 15th century Florence. In England the department of Philosophy made its debut in the University of Oxford at the start of the 1620’s and marks the resurgence of philosophy being taught at school. Ever since, the discipline has continuously expanded to most universities around the world and is greatly respected in the world of Academia. Today UCL hosts one of the biggest department of philosophy of all the UK.

What are the evidences in History?
History is a very broad field of study. Interdisciplinary in nature it englobes economics, international relations, historiography, gender studies, among many other disciplines. As a result historians get to use a more diverse set of evidences compared to other disiciplines. These evidences can be from primary sources or secondary sources. Primary sources give first hand accounts of certain historical events and are very concrete things. Like when archeologists find relishes (jars, coins, corpses) inside a tomb for example. Secondary evidences are made from the analysis of historians and represent our interpretation of how things could have been in the past. They are far more common than primary sources.

Primary versus Secondary evidences
Because primary sources have so much more value than secondary sources, historians continuously try to fund new excavation projects. Most recently, since 2018 archeologists have searched new quarters of the roman city of Pompeii. City which was destroyed at the beginning of the first millennia by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. These last two years have provided an unprecedented amount of artifacts which help us deepen our understanding of how the city was organized, both politically and in terms of architecture, arts etc. Writings on walls and clay tablets found very recentlyM have even provided evidence that the date of the actual disaster was not the one we originally thought of. Moving from August 24 79 to October 17 79. As we see, theses primary evidences give very precise information but are very limited in their quantity and therefore cannot be the only source of information. That is why secondary sources are essential. Secondary sources results from the collection, analysis, and interpretation of results by historians in order to recreate and share their knowledge with the average person as precisely as possible. While secondary evidences are usually more comprehensible they are often tainted by the lens through which the historian looks at the world. It is very difficult to always be completely objective and as a result people should always be cautious while looking at secondary sources. (Historical Methodology: Evidence and Interpretation)

How bias can influence evidences in History
Because History relies a lot on the personal feelings or ideas of the historian or even the person who made the historic artifact, bias and interpretation are common and can completely change the way an historical event is regarded. While we said that primary evidences were concrete in nature and therefore left little room for interpretation that does not mean that we should completely believe every primary sources we get. A famous adage says "History is written by the winners" and while the origin of the quote is blurry (maybe Chruchill, maybe Goring, maybe even before) it explains very well that throughout history most of the evidence left by the vanquished was destroyed while victors left their mark and influence. An example of that is the knowledge we have on pre-colonial cultures in America and especially Latin-America. Since very recently most of the information we had on the Incas, Aztecs or Mayas was from texts or objects left by the conquistadors and depicted these civilizations as illiterate precarious and anarchic savages. But because of new evidences we know for a fact these empires were a lot more developed than we thought. With complex political structures, advanced medicine and scientific knowledge, sometimes even more than the European invader.

Introduction
To understand how truth plays a role Economics, we first need to know what is this subject. As Alfred Marshall, a famous economist puts it, economics is “a study of man in the ordinary business of life. It enquires how he gets his income and how he uses it. Thus, it is on the one side, the study of wealth and on the other and more important side, a part of the study of man”. As a result, we understand most of the things surrounding us can be studied through economics. From our financial system, to world trade, but even the smaller things like everyday decisions when an individual chooses between to types of meat, or hesitates if taking the metro is worth it or walking is better.

How do we find the truth in economics?
Economics tries to study human conduct and preferences but we know how complex the human mind can be, changing behavior in a split second. Because of that, it can be difficult for economists and researchers to establish lasting truths. Especially if we try to predict the choice of one individual, it is impossible to take into consideration all the facts (personal experience, background, personality) that might influence his decisions. As a result economics focuses more on the population as a whole rather than on particular individuals. It has been shown that when studying large groups of people we can distinguish certain traits and behaviors in common between the majority that enable economists to make statistically probable predictions. An example of that can be seen in the Prisoner’s dilemma. Prisoner’s dilemma is an experiment which puts two individual in position of jeopardy to see if they will stay loyal or turn on each other. By conducting large experiments on a large number of people, economists have been able to say with some certainty that the large majority will turn on each other in positions of stress even if it is not the allocation that will give them the most benefits. This can be transposed on a larger economic scale showing how most people are self interested when talking about economic or social gains.

Introduction
As the Cambridge Dictionary puts it, “politics is the job of holding position of power in the government.”. These positions are in definition very few in numbers and are most of the time reserved to a socio-economic elite. As a result, a small number of people end up with the power to influence the government and the majority of the population. This power can take different forms but regarding to politics, two mains strains come out: Direct Coercion and Indirect Coercion.

Power as Direct Coercion
For many of us the first role of politics is to control a country. Let it be by creating rules, laws and institutions which maintain order, punish criminals, or protect and give some rights to the people. At the end, politicians decides for the population.This is known as direct and indirect coercion. The more explicit one is ‘direct coercion’ and reflects a situation where, as Dahl explains, “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do”. This can be seen in everyday life. Like the law that prohibited people from smoking inside in 2007 in the UK or more recently the law in France that forced people to park their electric scooters in designated parking places. In both cases, politics played a role in making the population change their habits that would not have occurred otherwise.

Power as Indirect Coercion
More implicitly is power as indirect or institutionalized coercion. Not when direct rules are put in place to target certain people but when, as Bachrach and Baratz say, “a mobilization of bias exists which allows a preferred population to benefit from advantages at the detriment of the rest.”. This type of power if abused is a lot more difficult to take down as it cannot be traced to one particular individual or law but rather exists in the mind of everyone. In America, the Jim Crow laws were direct coercion but even after the Civil Rights act of 1964, criticism of minorities and their exclusion from the white population took place under de facto segregation. Stereotypes like the fact black people were lazy, smelled bad, were ugly or were inferior continued to exist and spread for years on. The Clark Doll experiment showed that a majority of kids still considered whiteness as more beautiful in the 21st century providing evidence for this and showing how difficult it is for institutionalized power to change.