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anonymous

Can't play, won't play | Hide&Seek - Inventing new kinds of play - 0 views

www.hideandseek.net/cant-play-wont-play

videogames ideas

shared by anonymous on 08 Nov 10 - Cached
  • Gamification, as it stands, should actually be called poinstification, and is a bad thing because it’s a misleading title for a misunderstood process, although pointsification, in and of itself, is a perfectly valid and valuable concept which nonetheless needs to be implemented carefully with due concern for appropriateness and for unintended consequences, just as actual gamification, namely the conversion of existing systems into functioning games, is also a valid and valuable process which carries its own concerns, but which now cannot with any clarity be referred to as gamification since that term is already widely associated with the process of what should more properly be called poinstification, and which we therefore propose be instead termed ‘luding’, mostly because it sounds a bit like ‘lewding’.
  • anonymous on 08 Nov 10
     
    "'Gamification', that said, can go take a long walk off a short pier. I'm heartened beyond measure to see that it's been deleted from Wikipedia. 'Gamification', the internet will tell you, is the future. It's coming soon to your bank, your gym, your job, your government and your gynaecologist. All human activity will be gamified, we are promised, because gamifying guarantees a whole bunch of other buzz-words like Immersion! and Emotional Engagement! and Socialised Monestisation! You'll be able to tell when something's been gamified because it will have points and badges. And this is the nub of the problem."
anonymous

Rand & Human Nature 1 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...rand-human-nature-1.html

objectivism criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 23 Jul 11 - Cached
  • An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man's reason and his emotions -- provided he observes their proper relationship.
  • Rand's contentions in this paragraph not only go against the vast experience of mankind, which has found inner conflicts to be rooted in the very warp and woof of human nature, but of scientific brain research as well. A growing body of evidence compiled by neuroscientists suggests that the brain is made up of competing subsystems
  • There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain; each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior. As a result, you can accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, and cajoling yourself to do something...
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • the two hemispheres have somewhat different personalities and skills -- this includes their abilities to think abstractly, create stories, draw inferences, determine the source of memory, and make good choices in a gambling game.
  • the conflicts that arise out of this arrangement are hard-wired into the brain: they can't be reprogrammed by changing or "correcting" basic premises
  • In alien hand syndrome, which can result from the split-brain surgeries we discussed a few pages ago, the two hands express conflicted desires. A patient's "alien" hand might pick up a cookie to put it in his mouth, while the normally behaving hand will grab it at the wrist to stop it. A struggle ensues.
  • anonymous on 23 Jul 11
     
    "Internal Conflicts Ineradicable. Rand's vision of the rational man contained a rather odd feature: he experienced no internal conflicts."
anonymous

The Mind-Reading Salmon: The True Meaning of Statistical Significance - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

criticalthinking layscience

shared by anonymous on 15 Aug 11 - Cached
  • The p-value is an all-purpose measure that scientists often use to determine whether or not an experimental result is “statistically significant.”
  • The p-value puts a number on the effects of randomness. It is the probability of seeing a positive experimental outcome even if your hypothesis is wrong.
  • Many scientific papers make 20 or 40 or even hundreds of comparisons. In such cases, researchers who do not adjust the standard p-value threshold of 0.05 are virtually guaranteed to find statistical significance in results that are meaningless statistical flukes.
  • anonymous on 15 Aug 11
     
    "If you want to convince the world that a fish can sense your emotions, only one statistical measure will suffice: the p-value."
anonymous

The Tactical Irrelevance of Osama bin Laden's Death - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...levance-osama-bin-ladens-death

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 02 May 11 - Cached
  • bin Laden’s elimination will have very little effect on al Qaeda as a whole and the wider jihadist movement.
  • Because of bin Laden’s aforementioned communications limitations, since October 2001 when he fled Tora Bora after the U. S. invasion of Afghanistan, he has been relegated to a largely symbolic and ideological role in al Qaeda.
  • anonymous on 02 May 11
     
    "The killing of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden represents possibly the biggest clandestine operations success for the United States since the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2003. The confirmation of his death is an emotional victory for the United States and could have wider effects on the geopolitics of the region, but bin Laden's death is irrelevant for al Qaeda and the wider jihadist movement from an operational perspective."
anonymous

Relax! You'll Be More Productive - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-youll-be-more-productive.html

shared by anonymous on 04 Mar 13 - Cached
  • More and more of us find ourselves unable to juggle overwhelming demands and maintain a seemingly unsustainable pace.
  • Paradoxically, the best way to get more done may be to spend more time doing less. A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health.
  • Taking more time off is counterintuitive for most of us. The idea is also at odds with the prevailing work ethic in most companies, where downtime is typically viewed as time wasted. More than one-third of employees, for example, eat lunch at their desks on a regular basis. More than 50 percent assume they’ll work during their vacations.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • In a study of nearly 400 employees, published last year, researchers found that sleeping too little — defined as less than six hours each night — was one of the best predictors of on-the-job burn-out. A recent Harvard study estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity.
  • Daytime naps have a similar effect on performance. When night shift air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap — and slept an average of 19 minutes — they performed much better on tests that measured vigilance and reaction time.
  • Longer naps have an even more profound impact than shorter ones. Sara C. Mednick, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Riverside, found that a 60- to 90-minute nap improved memory test results as fully as did eight hours of sleep.
  • The importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology. Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we’re meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.
  • we sleep in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, moving from light to deep sleep and back out again. They named this pattern the Basic-Rest Activity Cycle or BRAC. A decade later, Professor Kleitman discovered that this cycle recapitulates itself during our waking lives.
  • The difference is that during the day we move from a state of alertness progressively into physiological fatigue approximately every 90 minutes.
  • Our bodies regularly tell us to take a break, but we often override these signals and instead stoke ourselves up with caffeine, sugar and our own emergency reserves — the stress hormones adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol.
  • Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity. Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied elite performers, including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes.
  • Along the way, I learned that it’s not how long, but how well, you renew that matters most in terms of performance. Even renewal requires practice. The more rapidly and deeply I learned to quiet my mind and relax my body, the more restored I felt afterward. For one of the breaks, I ran. This generated mental and emotional renewal, but also turned out to be a time in which some of my best ideas came to me, unbidden. Writing just four and half hours a day, I completed both books in less than six months and spent my afternoons on less demanding work.
  • Our basic idea is that the energy employees bring to their jobs is far more important in terms of the value of their work than is the number of hours they work. By managing energy more skillfully, it’s possible to get more done, in less time, more sustainably. In a decade, no one has ever chosen to leave the company. Our secret is simple — and generally applicable. When we’re renewing, we’re truly renewing, so when we’re working, we can really work.
  • anonymous on 04 Mar 13
     
    "THINK for a moment about your typical workday. Do you wake up tired? Check your e-mail before you get out of bed? Skip breakfast or grab something on the run that's not particularly nutritious? Rarely get away from your desk for lunch? Run from meeting to meeting with no time in between? Find it nearly impossible to keep up with the volume of e-mail you receive? Leave work later than you'd like, and still feel compelled to check e-mail in the evenings?"
anonymous

What Isn't for Sale? - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...8902

shared by anonymous on 21 Mar 12 - Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • Why worry that we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale?
  • For two reasons. One is about inequality, the other about corruption
  • Paying kids to read books might get them to read more, but might also teach them to regard reading as a chore rather than a source of intrinsic satisfaction.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • These examples illustrate a broader point: some of the good things in life are degraded if turned into commodities. So to decide where the market belongs, and where it should be kept at a distance, we have to decide how to value the goods in question—health, education, family life, nature, art, civic duties, and so on. These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. To resolve them, we have to debate, case by case, the moral meaning of these goods, and the proper way of valuing them.
  • The difference is this: A market economy is a tool—a valuable and effective tool—for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.
  • The great missing debate in contemporary politics is about the role and reach of markets. Do we want a market economy, or a market society? What role should markets play in public life and personal relations? How can we decide which goods should be bought and sold, and which should be governed by nonmarket values? Where should money’s writ not run?
  • This nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of market reasoning, and explains much of its appeal. But our reluctance to engage in moral and spiritual argument, together with our embrace of markets, has exacted a heavy price: it has drained public discourse of moral and civic energy, and contributed to the technocratic, managerial politics afflicting many societies today.
  • anonymous on 21 Mar 12
     
    WE LIVE IN A TIME when almost everything can be bought and sold. Over the past three decades, markets-and market values-have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us.
  • Erik Hanson on 26 Mar 12
     
    One particular issue is that we even have a system for some of this commodification in the courts. All sorts of things, from "pain and suffering" to "intentional infliction of emotional distress" get converted into cash values for the sake of assigning damage awards.
anonymous

'The Righteous Mind,' by Jonathan Haidt - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-mind-by-jonathan-haidt.html

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 12 - Cached
  • That’s what makes “The Righteous Mind” well worth reading. Politics isn’t just about ­manipulating people who disagree with you. It’s about learning from them.
  • David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who notoriously said reason was fit only to be “the slave of the passions,” was largely correct. E. O. Wilson, the ecologist who was branded a fascist for stressing the biological origins of human behavior, has been vindicated by the study of moral emotions.
  • To the question many people ask about politics — Why doesn’t the other side listen to reason? — Haidt replies: We were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others.
  • Haidt’s account of reason is a bit too simple — his whole book, after all, is a deployment of reason to advance learning — and his advice sounds cynical. But set aside those objections for now, and go with him. If you follow Haidt through the tunnel of cynicism, you’ll find that what he’s really after is enlightenment. He wants to open your mind to the moral intuitions of other people.
  • The worldviews Haidt discusses may differ from yours. They don’t start with the individual. They start with the group or the cosmic order. They exalt families, armies and communities. They assume that people should be treated differently according to social role or status — elders should be honored, subordinates should be protected. They suppress forms of self-expression that might weaken the social fabric. They assume interdependence, not autonomy. They prize order, not equality.
  • These moral systems aren’t ignorant or backward. Haidt argues that they’re common in history and across the globe because they fit human nature. He compares them to cuisines. We acquire morality the same way we acquire food preferences: we start with what we’re given. If it tastes good, we stick with it. If it doesn’t, we reject it.
  • This is Haidt’s startling message to the left: When it comes to morality, conservatives are more broad-minded than liberals. They serve a more varied diet.
  • Haidt treats electoral success as a kind of evolutionary fitness test. He figures that if voters like Republican messages, there’s something in Republican messages worth liking. He chides psychologists who try to “explain away” conservatism, treating it as a pathology. Conservatism thrives because it fits how people think, and that’s what validates it. Workers who vote Republican aren’t fools. In Haidt’s words, they’re “voting for their moral interests.”
  • Saving Darfur, submitting to the United Nations and paying taxes to educate children in another state may be noble, but they aren’t natural. What’s natural is giving to your church, helping your P.T.A. and rallying together as Americans against a foreign threat.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 27 Mar 12
       
      From Chris Blattman: Haidt's previous book, The Happiness Hypothesis, was a fantastic introduction to the psychology of behavior and morality. And I think the basic message of the new book rings true. So I am inclined to recommend it. My impression from the last book: Haidt has a very slight tendency to hyperbole, and it's a shame he doesn't distinguish between the weak and strong evidence. He's a skilful writer and his own research looks clever, and so I think he could fix this without making his books boring. I'm curious, though. Readers who actually know something about cognitive psychology: what's Haidt's street cred? http://chrisblattman.com/2012/03/27/the-tyrany-of-moral-intuition/
  • anonymous on 27 Mar 12
     
    You're smart. You're liberal. You're well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can't understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they're being duped. You're wrong. This isn't an accusation from the right. It's a friendly warning from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal. 
anonymous

War and Bluff: Iran, Israel and the United States - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...-iran-israel-and-united-states

geopolitics iran israel united states

shared by anonymous on 12 Sep 12 - Cached
  • The Israeli and American positions are intimately connected, but the precise nature of the connection is less clear. Israel publicly casts itself as eager to strike Iran but restrained by the United States, though unable to guarantee it will respect American wishes if Israel sees an existential threat emanating from Iran. The United States publicly decries Iran as a threat to Israel and to other countries in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia, but expresses reservations about military action out of fears that Iran would respond to a strike by destabilizing the region and because it does not believe the Iranian nuclear program is as advanced as the Israelis say it is.
  • The Israelis have less tolerance for risk than the Americans, who have less tolerance for the global consequences of an attack.
  • From the Iranian point of view, a nuclear program has been extremely valuable. Having one has brought Iran prestige in the Islamic world and has given it a level of useful global political credibility.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Having countries like Russia and China unwilling to see Iran crushed has helped. Iran can survive sanctions.
  • A failed military action would benefit Iran, proving its power. By contrast, a successful attack that dramatically delayed or destroyed Iran's nuclear capability would be a serious reversal.
  • Although the United States hailed Stuxnet as a major success, it hardly stopped the Iranian program, if the Israelis are to be believed. In that sense, it was a failure.
  • The principle of mutual assured destruction, which stabilized the U.S.-Soviet balance in the Cold War, would govern Iran's use of nuclear weapons. If Iran struck Israel, the damage would be massive, forcing the Iranians to assume that the Israelis and their allies (specifically, the United States) would launch a massive counterattack on Iran, annihilating large parts of Iran's population.
  • It is here that we get to the heart of the issue. While from a rational perspective the Iranians would be fools to launch such an attack, the Israeli position is that the Iranians are not rational actors and that their religious fanaticism makes any attempt to predict their actions pointless. Thus, the Iranians might well accept the annihilation of their country in order to destroy Israel in a sort of megasuicide bombing. The Israelis point to the Iranians' rhetoric as evidence of their fanaticism. Yet, as we know, political rhetoric is not always politically predictive. In addition, rhetoric aside, Iran has pursued a cautious foreign policy, pursuing its ends with covert rather than overt means. It has rarely taken reckless action, engaging instead in reckless rhetoric.
  • Herein lies the root of the great Israeli debate that pits the Netanyahu government, which appears to regard Iran as irrational, against significant segments of the Israeli military and intelligence communities, which regard Iran as rational.
  • Assuming the Iranians are rational actors, their optimal strategy lies not in acquiring nuclear weapons and certainly not in using them, but instead in having a credible weapons development program that permits them to be seen as significant international actors.
  • Up to this point, the Iranians have not even fielded a device for testing, let alone a deliverable weapon.
  • For all their activity, either their technical limitations or a political decision has kept them from actually crossing the obvious redlines and left Israel trying to define some developmental redline.
  • Both want to appear more fearsome than either is actually willing to act.
  • The Iranian strategy has been to maintain ambiguity on the status of its program, while making it appear that the program is capable of sudden success -- without ever achieving that success. The Israeli strategy has been to appear constantly on the verge of attack without ever attacking and to use the United States as its reason for withholding attacks, along with the studied ambiguity of the Iranian program.
  • If a country can develop nuclear weapons, there is no reason it can't develop hardened and dispersed sites and create enough ambiguity to deprive Israeli and U.S. intelligence of confidence in their ability to determine what is where.
  • I am reminded of the raid on Son Tay during the Vietnam War. The United States mounted an effort to rescue U.S. prisoners of war in North Vietnam only to discover that its intelligence on where the POWs were located was completely wrong. Any politician deciding whether to attack Iran would have Son Tay and a hundred other intelligence failures chasing around their brains, especially since a failed attack on Iran would be far worse than no attack.
  • Dispersed sites reduce Israel's ability to strike hard at a target and to acquire a battle damage assessment that would tell Israel three things:
  • first, whether the target had been destroyed when it was buried under rock and concrete; second, whether the target contained what Israel thought it contained; and third, whether the strike had missed a backup site that replicated the one it destroyed.
  • if the Israelis had an ultrasecret miracle weapon, postponing its use might compromise its secrecy. I suspect that if they had such a weapon, they would have used it by now.
  • The Americans emphasize these points, but they are happy to use the Israeli threats to build pressure on the Iranians. The United States wants to undermine Iranian credibility in the region by making Iran seem vulnerable. The twin forces of Israeli rhetoric and sanctions help make Iran look embattled. The reversal in Syria enhances this sense. Naval maneuvers in the Strait of Hormuz add to the sense that the United States is prepared to neutralize Iranian counters to an Israeli airstrike, making the threat Israel poses and the weakness of Iran appear larger.
  • When we step back and view the picture as a whole, we see Iran using its nuclear program for political reasons but being meticulous not to make itself appear unambiguously close to success.
  • We see the Israelis talking as if they were threatened but acting as if they were in no rush to address the supposed threat.
  • And we see the Americans acting as if they are restraining Israel, paradoxically appearing to be Iran's protector even though they are using the Israeli threat to increase Iranian insecurity.
  • It is the U.S.-Israeli byplay that is most fascinating. On the surface, Israel is driving U.S. policy. On closer examination, the reverse is true. Israel has bluffed an attack for years and never acted. Perhaps now it will act, but the risks of failure are substantial. If Israel really wants to act, this is not obvious.
  • Speeches by politicians do not constitute clear guidelines.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 12 Sep 12
       
      No kidding.
  • Rather than seeing Netanyahu as trying to force the United States into an attack, it is more useful to see Netanyahu's rhetoric as valuable to U.S. strategy. Israel and the United States remain geopolitically aligned. Israel's bellicosity is not meant to signal an imminent attack, but to support the U.S. agenda of isolating and maintaining pressure on Iran. That would indicate more speeches from Netanyahu and greater fear of war. But speeches and emotions aside, intensifying psychological pressure on Iran is more likely than war.
  • anonymous on 12 Sep 12
     
    "For the past several months, the Israelis have been threatening to attack Iranian nuclear sites as the United States has pursued a complex policy of avoiding complete opposition to such strikes while making clear it doesn't feel such strikes are necessary. At the same time, the United States has carried out maneuvers meant to demonstrate its ability to prevent the Iranian counter to an attack -- namely blocking the Strait of Hormuz. While these maneuvers were under way, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said no "redline" exists that once crossed by Iran would compel an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. The Israeli government has long contended that Tehran eventually will reach the point where it will be too costly for outsiders to stop the Iranian nuclear program."
anonymous

If Alcohol Were Discovered Today, Would it be Legal? - 0 views

www.alternet.org/overed-today-would-it-be-legal

shared by anonymous on 17 Sep 12 - Cached
  • This false distinction is a large part of the communication problem I encounter whenever I try to emphasise how harmful alcohol is. It has a separate language – you get “high” on drugs, but “drunk” on alcohol, drug addicts need a “fix” but alcoholics need a “drink.”
  • We are currently facing a public-health crisis of immense proportions. The increase in harms caused by alcohol over the last 50 years in the UK is comparable to the Gin Craze in the early 18th century, when the urban poor of London were consuming a pint of gin a day per head on average.
  • It’s certainly true that most societies throughout history have brewed some sort of alcoholic drink, and that this has been part of the human diet for so long that many of us are genetically adapted to consume alcohol.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • So, drinking alcohol is “normal,” in a sense – people who possess the high-activity variant of the ALDH2 enzyme, come from a long line of people whose bodies adapted to consuming and breaking down alcohol. Indeed, until the 1850s weak beer was often “healthy”: it was the safest thing to drink, because most water was contaminated with viruses or bacteria. However, in the past most of what was drunk was mostly relatively low strength beer and wine, and its consumption was surrounded by custom and ritual to mitigate its social harms.
  • We’re at a similar point now in the UK: the access people have to cheap, high-strength alcohol is almost unprecedented, and binge drinking of the sort we see today is something our ancestors would rarely have been able to indulge in even if they’d wanted to.
  • The drug does have some positive psychological effects, and it can be calming for some people with anxiety disorders (see Case Study 1 below) although with heavy use the effects of withdrawal will start to make them even more anxious when they’re sober.
  • Physiologically, alcohol’s benefits have never been proven, but the idea that low levels of drinking are protective is a pervasive myth – and a very useful one for the industry.
  • However, this may be because this group has more healthy lifestyles, or because of the “sick teetotaller effect” – where many people give up alcohol because they are ill (perhaps from some other disease); their worse health outcomes may have nothing to do with whether or not they drink, but do make the health statistics of non-drinkers appear worse.
  • There is no such thing as a safe level of alcohol consumption. Alcohol is a toxin that kill cells and organisms, which is why we use it to preserve food and sterilize needles.
  • Alcohol is a depressant (similar to GHB, and benzodiazepines like Valium) which, if taken at high enough doses, will produce amnesia, sedation and eventually death.
  • Alcohol also indirectly stimulates the noradrenaline circuit, producing some stimulating effects. This is what creates the noisy energy we associate with drunkenness, even though the drug is a depressant.
  • Some interesting recent research showed that alcohol interferes with our ability to recognize emotions in facial expressions, which may be part of the reason drunk people are so quick to take offense and start fights.
  • Millions of people, not a tiny minority, suffer harm from their own alcohol consumption, or cause harm to others.
  • These are all perfectly valid choices, yet non-drinkers are often heavily pressured to consume alcohol in order to fit in with others. This message is constantly reinforced in the press, on TV, and in alcohol advertising.
  • Far from being safe, there is no other drug which is so damaging to so many different organ systems in the body. Figure 6.2 illustrates how alcohol can harm almost every part of the body through its toxicity alone.
  • But there is a fundamental conflict of interest: however much the industry wants to pretend otherwise, you can’t reduce harm without reducing the amount people drink, whereas companies looking to maximize profits need to sell as much alcohol as possible.
  • anonymous on 17 Sep 12
     
    "A terrifying new "legal high" has hit our streets. Methyl-carbonol, known by the street name "wiz," is a clear liquid that causes cancers, liver problems, and brain disease, and is more toxic than ecstasy and cocaine. Addiction can occur after just one drink, and addicts will go to any lengths to get their next fix - even letting their kids go hungry or beating up their partners to obtain money. Casual users can go into blind rages when they're high, and police have reported a huge increase in crime where the drug is being used. Worst of all, drinks companies are adding "wiz" to fizzy drinks and advertising them to kids like they're plain Coca-Cola. Two or three teenagers die from it every week overdosing on a binge, and another 10 from having accidents caused by reckless driving. "Wiz" is a public menace - when will the Home Secretary think of the children and make this dangerous substance Class A?"
anonymous

Rand & Human Nature 20 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...rand-human-nature-20.html

shared by anonymous on 09 Mar 12 - Cached
  • Empirical studies have shown, however, that human beings do not "follow" reason, but rather tend to use their reasoning skills to justify whatever conclusions they reach via emotion, desire, sentiment, and/or intuition.
  • To a certain extent, Rand was aware of this: it is a theme of much exasperation in her writings. But rather than assuming that the non-rational was a built-in feature (or bug) of human nature, Rand hunted for an explanation for why so many human beings refused to "follow" reason.
  • She found her answer in a contrived and implausible theory of history, where she placed the failure of human rationality squarely on the shoulders of modern philosophers, particularly Kant.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • It was by framing the issue is such extravagently anti-empirical terms that Rand was able to avoid the more obvious conclusion: namely, that human beings don't follow reason because, as Hume explained, reason as at best a method, not an aim or desire; and, morever, that attempt to reason from "is" premises to an "ought" conclusion is invalid.
  • In other words, it turns out that truth is, in many circumstances, a "collective" endeavor: it is a product of individual minds within group dynamics. This is especially the case whenever truth is in the least controversial. Individuals can find truth on their own when that truth is mundane and doesn't violate special agendas or trample upon rooted convictions. But whenever we are confronted with a truth-claim that is controversial, then an individual's judgment is not enough. Open debate involving empirical testing becomes necessary. Where this is impossible truth becomes difficult and consensus impossible.
  • That reasoning power may be effective when attacking rival truth claims, but it does not perform well in establishing it's own claims concerning matters of fact.
  • Although she strongly urged others to "check" their "premises," this was not advice that she herself ever followed.
  • On the contrary, she often responded with intense hostility to criticism. Typical in this respect was her response to Sidney Hook's review of To the New Intellectual. Instead of responding to Hook's criticisms point by point, Rand insisted that Hook should be publicly condemned. Because Leonard Peikoff and Barabara Branden were students of Hook, they were were given a pass; but everyone else, including even Rand's friend John Hospers, were expected to take part in the public condemnation.
  • she had very little conception of the manners and morals of professional academicians: they can get along well and even be friends, while disagreeing strongly with one another on rather fundamental issues.
  • But for Ayn this was a betrayal. It almost cost us our friendship. In the end she attributed my attitude to the misfortune of having been brainwashed by the academic establishment, at least with regard to their code of etiquette.
  • What Rand failed to appreciate is that the "code of ettiquette" that Hospers writes about is the glue which holds together communities of truth-seeking intellectuals. If everyone began publicly condemning those they disagreed with, that community would break down and all that remain would be a loose assemblages of ideological factions crying anathema against each other.
  • Rand and her disciples can wax eloquent about "reason" all they like, but at the end of the day they know very little about truth seeking within the limits of human nature. There is a price for denying human nature, and not understanding how truth emerges as the property of a social system is one of them.
  • anonymous on 09 Mar 12
     
    Rand regarded "reason" as the supreme virtue: "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism," she wrote; "and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows."
anonymous

China's Geopolitical Fallout - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...chinas-geopolitical-fallout

shared by anonymous on 24 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • China's leaders will likely survive this trial. But what if they don't? What if China faces a severe socio-economic crisis and attendant political one of an unforeseen magnitude? What would be the second-order geopolitical effects? If Syria explodes, it does so regionally. If China explodes, it does so globally.
  • Such a crisis could lead to an upsurge in nationalism, an emotion that can be easily dialed upwards by Communist party leaders as a means of clinging to power.
  • China's defense budget has already increased eight-fold since 2001, and might continue to do so under a more nationalist-style regime (even amid slowing growth), enabling China to further implement an anti-access area-denial strategy in the East and South China seas, emphasizing submarine, ballistic missile, and cyber warfare capabilities.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • The aim would not be to go to war with the U.S. Navy and Air Force (quite the opposite, in fact), but to establish a force ratio more favorable to the continued, perceived growth of Chinese maritime power. But none of this would alter the current state of play in the Indian and Western Pacific oceans -- defined by a slowly diminishing unipolar American air and naval environment.
  • But what if the opposite occurred? What if an economic and political crisis ignited a downward trend in Chinese military procurements, or at least a less steep growth curve?
  • This is also quite possible: to assuage public anger at poverty and lack of jobs, China's leaders might, for political reasons, ask the military to make sacrifices of its own. After all, a Chinese Spring might be all about demanding more freedom and not about nationalism. Over time, this could affect the foundations of the Eurasian maritime order, albeit to a lesser extent than the collapse of the Berlin Wall shook the foundations of the European continental order.
  • Stalled Chinese defense budgets would reinvigorate a Pax Americana from the Sea of Japan to the Persian Gulf, despite the debacles of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and despite the U.S. military budget crunch.
  • Remember that Japan occupied Korea from 1910 to 1945, and the hostility between Japan and Korea is thus much greater than the hostility between Korea and China.
  • With more than 1,500 ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan from the mainland and 270 commercial flights per week between the two Chinas, U.S. military aid to Taipei is designed to defend Taiwan against a sudden Chinese attack, but not necessarily to postpone an inevitable unification of sorts.
  • India, like Vietnam and Taiwan, gains most from a profound economic and political crisis inside China. Suddenly China would be more vulnerable to ethnic unrest on the Tibetan plateau abutting the Indian subcontinent.
  • This would not necessarily alleviate the Chinese threat on India's northern borderlands (given the possibility of heightened ethnic unrest inside an economically weakened China), but it would give India greater diplomatic leverage in its bilateral relations with Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar, all of which have been venues for the quiet great game India has been playing with China.
  • If India were among the biggest winners in the event of severe Chinese internal turmoil, Pakistan would be the biggest loser. China has been Pakistan's greatest and surest patron in recent decades, and has given Pakistan stores of infrastructure aid -- highways in the north and a port in the south -- without lectures about human rights and terrorism, or threats about withdrawing aid.
  • Such a bleak scenario for China overall would leave the United States and its allies -- both de facto like India and Vietnam, and de jure like Japan and Australia -- in a commanding position around Eurasia's navigable southern rimland.
  • But such a scenario is unlikely, even if the Chinese economy significantly slows and domestic unrest follows. More likely will be a tumultuous period of consolidation and readjustment within China, with China's strategic and military planners able to weather the storm with adjustments of their own for the long term.
  • But there is a larger point: geopolitics, while ostensibly about the geographically-constrained interactions of states, rests also on the internal conditions of states themselves, in which the actions of individuals are crucial and so much hangs on a thread.
  • While both the United States and China face epochal budgetary and economic crises -- which in both countries bleed over into the political realm -- the crisis in China is far more profound than in the United States. After all, the system of governance in Washington simply enjoys so much more legitimacy than the one in Beijing, with the American public institutionally better equipped to vent its frustrations than the Chinese one. Such internal realities will remain the overriding geopolitical facts in Asia.
  • anonymous on 24 Jul 13
     
    "The biggest question in international affairs has nothing to do with Syria or Iran going nuclear. It is has to do with the state of the Chinese economy, and the ability of China's one-party system to navigate through an economic slowdown to a different growth model."
anonymous

5 Things My Gen X Manager Taught Me About Millennials - 0 views

www.policymic.com/...er-taught-me-about-millennials

shared by anonymous on 06 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • 1. Despite what you’ve heard, millennials and Gen X are natural allies.
  • Gen X was actually the first generation to have less affluence than the Boomers, to understand the joke that is social security, and to begin incorporating daily technology use into their careers.
  • 2. Millennials are not going to leapfrog over Generation X.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Many of us aren't accustomed to the same kind of work that Gen X has been doing for years. Over half of millennials would like to start their own business, and many have relied heavily on freelancing
  • Gen X can provide millennials with insights and cautionary tales in ways that our Boomer counterparts cannot.
  • Millennials like me will be better recieved in the workplace when we respect its processes, when we acknowledge that every generation has paid its dues — maybe not the same dues, maybe not as hefty a price, but dues nonetheless. 
  • 3. Technology has changed the game for millennials, for better or worse.
  • The downside of our generation's widespread use of technology is how easy it's been for us to forget the value of in-person interactions. In the workplace, that means millennials can unconsciously neglect what our Gen X counterparts consider the common staples of communication
  • 4. Yes, millennials are screwed, but the next generation will have it even worse.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 06 Dec 13
       
      I *really* hope this is more debatable. Only because I'm crossing my fingers for the economic reconfiguration that doesn't look due for another 10+ years.
  • Gen X has less affluence than the Boomers, millennials even less than Gen X — what exactly will be left for Gen Z?
  • If current trends continue, the competition we face now will only get more intense, in part because Boomers and Gen X have had to delay retirement and are staying longer in positions.
  • 5. Mentorships are best when they form naturally.
  • While a networking event can introduce us to executives in our field, the perfect mentor on paper may have absolutely zero emotional connection to us.
  • anonymous on 06 Dec 13
     
    Largely fluffy in that way-broad brush, but still contains some nuggets to keep in mind on our journey to oversimplify generational changes. :) I will note, though, that the most important bit (to me) was the idea that Gen X'ers are more relatable than Boomers. This simplification is largely true, in my experience. This isn't because of any innate goodness, just economic realities. My boomer dad-in-law is super nervous about having [extremely low amounts] of medical debt: for him it's a *very* new phenomenon. For his kids, it's far huger debt and quite regular and we simply accept it. See also: Old Economy Steve. "Concern over our careers (or lack thereof) continues unabated for all of us 20-somethings entering the job market full speed ahead. While plenty of people have proffered advice to the newly minted generation of workers who do manage to get a job, and plenty of managers have offered advice to other managers on how to hire millennials, there's a distinct lack of genuine dialogue between millennials and Gen X-ers in the workplace- a shame, because our generational differences are largely superficial. "
anonymous

What Do We Mean By "Rationality"? - 0 views

lesswrong.com/...what_do_we_mean_by_rationality

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 02 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Epistemic rationality: believing, and updating on evidence, so as to systematically improve the correspondence between your map and the territory.  The art of obtaining beliefs that correspond to reality as closely as possible.  This correspondence is commonly termed "truth" or "accuracy", and we're happy to call it that.
  • First, the Bayesian formalisms in their full form are computationally intractable on most real-world problems.  No one can actually calculate and obey the math, any more than you can predict the stock market by calculating the movements of quarks.
  • we have to learn our own flaws, overcome our biases, prevent ourselves from self-deceiving, get ourselves into good emotional shape to confront the truth and do what needs doing, etcetera etcetera and so on
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Second, sometimes the meaning of the math itself is called into question.  The exact rules of probability theory are called into question by e.g. anthropic problems in which the number of observers is uncertain. 
  • We aren't interested in probability theory because it is the holy word handed down from Laplace.  We're interested in Bayesian-style belief-updating (with Occam priors) because we expect that this style of thinking gets us systematically closer to, you know, accuracy, the map that reflects the territory.
  • How can you improve your conception of rationality?  Not by saying to yourself, “It is my duty to be rational.”  By this you only enshrine your mistaken conception.  Perhaps your conception of rationality is that it is rational to believe the words of the Great Teacher, and the Great Teacher says, “The sky is green,” and you look up at the sky and see blue.  If you think:  “It may look like the sky is blue, but rationality is to believe the words of the Great Teacher,” you lose a chance to discover your mistake.
  • You cannot change reality, or prove the thought, by manipulating which meanings go with which words.
  • Instrumental rationality: achieving your values.  Not necessarily "your values" in the sense of being selfish values or unshared values: "your values" means anything you care about.  The art of choosing actions that steer the future toward outcomes ranked higher in your preferences.  On LW we sometimes refer to this as "winning".
  • anonymous on 02 Jul 10
     
    By Eliezer Yudkowsky at Less Wrong on March 16, 2009.
anonymous

War Games: Civil-Military Relations, c. 2030 - 0 views

www.worldaffairsjournal.org/...full-Cohen-MA-2010.html

predictions military generations

shared by anonymous on 04 Aug 10 - Cached
  • four leaders—two military, two civilian—sit around a table at the White House or the Pentagon
  • One is an Army general
  • The second is an Air Force general
  • ...41 more annotations...
  • The third is a Foreign Service officer
  • The fourth is a more traditional political appointee
  • The participants in this hypothetical meeting exemplify four very different types of leaders, who, if current trends continue, will all be coming to prominence and power by 2030.
  • Part of the baggage they will bring to this meeting is a complex history of civil-military relations during the post–September 11 era.
  • When they reached general officer rank, the Vietnam-era officers then found themselves sitting across the table from civilians who probably had avoided the draft, if not actively protested the war.
  • The emotional scars of a conflict that had taken place decades earlier, therefore, were part of their relationship.
  • Today’s member of the ground forces will spend, if current trends hold true, an even greater percentage of his time in combat than did officers of the Vietnam generation.
  • unlike his predecessors, he will not be sitting opposite a civilian who actively opposed his war. The challenge of this hypothetical meeting will be based not necessarily on inherent hostility between the warrior and civilian, but rather on whether the warrior and the civilian can comprehend each other.
  • With the growing presence of civilians on battlefields, there will be significant numbers of “civilian-warriors,” some with as much time in combat zones as their military counterparts.
  • It is conceivable, then, that a situation may arise in which an Army officer of 2030 might have more shared experience with a Foreign Service officer than with his Air Force or Navy counterpart.
  • As a result, the traditional competition of “civilian versus warrior” will be replaced by a series of new relationships and alliances.
  • What will be the profile of general officers in 2030?
  • they will have grown up in services at war.
  • They will be battle-hardened and somewhat removed from society, having spent six, seven, maybe eight years in combat and the intervening years recovering from one engagement and preparing for the next.
  • At the same time, there will be a second class of flag officers.
  • Ultimately, they have a very different exposure to irregular warfare than their ground counterparts, if for no other reason than that there are far fewer two-way air or naval engagements in asymmetrical conflict.
  • And what about the civilians these military elites will face across the table in 2030?
  • They likely will have gone to elite universities for undergraduate and professional degrees. Neither they nor any member of their immediate family will have served in the military.
  • They will look on the generals across the table from them in 2030 with a degree of puzzlement, if not actual mistrust, as inhabitants of a world they really do not know. 
  • There also, however, will be “civilian-warriors.”
  • this group is the most inscrutable but also the most interesting to study
  • retired soldier turned statesman
  • A second class of civilian-warriors will come from the ranks of other government agencies
  • Still a third group will come from entities outside of government
  • growing core of professional civilian advisers to military commands
  • this latter category may serve as the natural bridge between the political and military worlds. Ultimately, civilian-warriors may spend as much—if not more—time at war than some of their uniformed counterparts.
  • The gap between the military and the socially elite classes will have grown even greater than it is today.
  • what will the four talk about
  • Perhaps more importantly, unlike in previous eras, our Army general of 2030 will be as much at home discussing governance as weapons systems, having wrestled with the issues since his days as a junior officer coaching some small village in Afghanistan or supervising a district meeting in Iraq.
  • No matter the topic, our civilians and flag officers will approach the issues with certain biases.
  • the ground force general will be “conventionally unconventional,”
  • He will be accustomed to manipulating foreign media to serve his tactical ends, but not used to being criticized. Above all, he will be used to getting his way.
  • traditional political appointee has the weakest hand to play
  • there will be a tremendous temptation for our civilian to kowtow to the man in uniform.
  • This Air Force general, or perhaps Navy admiral, will be as conservative and as conventional, if not more so, as the Army general.
  • Enter our civilian-warrior. Sharing many of the traits and the experiences of our ground forces general, he may in some ways be his natural ally. It is not inconceivable that their careers paths may have crossed on some remote battlefield.
  • Ultimately, there are any number of alternative ways the balance of power between these four actors might play out. The military duo may unite behind the common fraternity of officers; the military may join with the civilian-warrior against the politico; the civilian-warrior may join with the Air Force or Navy officer in order to balance the natural clout of those fighting the ground war; one actor might dominate the rest simply by force of personality. Or they all might agree.   
  • Should the United States have to assist a counterinsurgency effort in a small, landlocked country in central Asia, for example, our ground forces general and our civilian warrior may take the lead.
  • Conversely, in a conventional conflict dominated by air and naval power—perhaps with China over Taiwan—our Air Force or Navy flag officer, now in his element, may take center stage.
  • Perhaps the more interesting case is a hybrid of the two—a mixture of low- and high-intensity conflict, particularly if it occurs outside the traditional turf of the current war on terror and, consequently, outside the realm of expertise of any single member of the quartet.
  • No one view is correct per se: each member of our quartet is merely viewing the scenario through the lens of his own experience.
  • anonymous on 04 Aug 10
     
    "The year is 2030 and four leaders-two military, two civilian-sit around a table at the White House or the Pentagon, perhaps, or at a military headquarters or embassy halfway around the world." By Raphael Cohen at World Affairs Journal on March/April 2010.
anonymous

Psychological Reactance and Bioware Games - 0 views

www.psychologyofgames.com/...al-reactance-and-bioware-games

gaming psychology

shared by anonymous on 23 Jul 10 - Cached
  • So why is this? Why do I invest so much mental and emotional energy into this pointless choice between make-believe people in a video game and why am I so reluctant to commit?
  • Well, part of the reason is that humans hate to lose choices. Or, more to the point, we hate to lose options.
  • Behavioral economist Dan Ariely provided a neat example of psychological reactance in his book, Predictably Irrational, and I think it’s directly relevant to my inability to let go of romance options in Dragon Age.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Even after discovering which room yielded the highest payout –in real money– they STILL tended to go back and waste clicks on lower paying doors just to keep those options open even thought they didn’t intend to actually exercise them. This was totally irrational, but psychological reactance made them reluctant to lose those options.
  • anonymous on 23 Jul 10
     
    "Bioware has been presenting me with this same basic choice since Baldur's Gate and I always end up doing the same thing: I string everyone along as far as I can until I'm absolutely forced to make a choice. So why is this?" By Jamie Madigan at The Psychology of Video Games on July 22, 2010.
anonymous

BBC News - Falling in love costs you friends - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...science-environment-11321282

social

shared by anonymous on 27 Sep 10 - Cached
  • The results confirmed the widely held view that love can lead to a smaller support network, with typically one family member and one friend being pushed out to accommodate the new lover.
  • "The intimacy of a relationship - your emotional engagement with it - correlates very tightly with the frequency of your interactions with those individuals," observed Professor Dunbar.
  • anonymous on 27 Sep 10
     
    "Falling in love comes at the cost of losing two close friends, a study says." By Jonathan Amos at BBC Science & Environment on September 15, 2010.
anonymous

Intellectual Sources of the Latest Objectischism 2 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...tual-sources-of-latest_22.html

criticalthinking objectivism

shared by anonymous on 22 Nov 10 - Cached
  • Rand never considered the implications of this principle in other venues, such as a voluntary organization such as ARI.
  • The fact that such a conflict exists at all indicates that one (if not both) of the parties are "irrational."
  • Indeed, the fact that conflicts exist within orthodox Objectivism -- conflicts so intense and irresolvable that they can only be ended by one of the parties exiting the scene -- suggests something profoundly amiss.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • I have suggested in previous posts on this blog that "reason" is a mythical faculty. None of its champions have ever provided empirical evidence demonstrating it's reported efficacy. It's merely a term used by those seeking to justify contentions based on insufficient evidence.
  • Seeking justification for a theory in "reason" is merely an invitation for rationalization, which is the bane of rational inquiry.
  • Nothing could be more to the purpose along these lines then an empirical examination of how reason works to solve disputes within an organization run by leading Objectivists.
  • Differences of opinion can be settled by "reasoned" discussion.
  • Peikoff admits, for example, that "Ultimately, someone has to decide who is qualified to hold such positions [on the ARI board] and where the line is to be drawn."
  • Someone has to decide? Shouldn't "reason" decide? Since reality is objective and "reason" the only "valid" means of knowing reality, what need is there for an individual to decide these things at all?
  • Within the Objectivist ideology, the idea of context is used as a kind of conceptual escape hatch to explain, for instance, why a moral absolute may not apply in all instances (because moral absolutes are "contextual") or why an individual may be certain yet wrong (because certainty is "contextual").
  • Those with a wider context of knowledge will (presumably) achieve a higher level of "certainty." They will know more and will hence be in a better position to make rational decisions.
  • If differing contexts of knowledge cause rational men to arrive at different conclusions, then Rand's contention about "no conflicts of interest" among rational men must be dropped.
  • Different contexts lead to different assessments of interests, even among rational men; and differing assessment of interests will inevitably lead to conflicts.
  • Neither Rand nor any of her disciples have ever provided us with a detailed description of how to distinguish a rational interest from a non-rational interest. If we go by Objectivist writings, a "rational" interest is merely any interest that Rand and her disciples approve of, while a non-rational (or "irrational") interest is an any interest they disapprove of.
  • Conflict of interests are therefore a built-in feature of the human condition. To deny this is to live in fairy-tale world.
  • Objectivists are not supposed to be concerned with status. It is a product of that horror or horrors, social metaphysics. It reeks of authoritarianism and the appeal to faith. Yet status can no more be exorcised from man's "emotional mechanism" than sex or hunger can.
  • The "formal" meaning is the literal, conscious meaning; it's the rationalized meaning, meant to persuade and deceive both the rationalizer and his audience. The "real" meaning accords with the unconscious motives that are prompting the whole business.
  • It's not enough to conceal one's motives; one must also believe in the "truth" of one's deception. In short, one must accept one's own lies and become, if you will, a sincere hypocrit.
  • Hence their inability to engage in reasoned discourse with those who disagree with them. Hence their inability to even understand, let alone refute, their critics. Hence their inability to use "reason" to resolve differences among themselves.
  • When people are forced to repress and conceal their true motives under a veneer of logic, rationalization becomes the order of the day.
  • Rand actually never bothers to explain, in a clear, detailed, empirically testable fashion, how one goes about using "reason." About as detailed as she gets is the following:
  • Rand's inclusion of concept-formation in her conception of reason is deeply problematical.
  • Concept-formation is an extremely complex process involving unconscious process that cannot be directed by the conscious mind.
  • without an articulable, formalized technique, reason cannot be "followed."
  • Rand's "reason" is therefore mythical. No such technique exists or is possible. What is possible, instead, is rational and empirical criticism.
  • If Leonard Peikoff did not exist, Objectivists would be forced to invent him. Without a central authority, Objectivism would splinter into hundreds of fragments, each claiming to follow "reason" and crying anathema on all other fragments. The Objectivist movement, precisely because it follows "reason," which is entirely mythical faculty, must be authoritarian at its core. It cannot exist on any other basis.
  • anonymous on 22 Nov 10
     
    "According to Rand, the Objectivist Ethics "holds that the rational interests of men do not clash-that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value." Now it seems likely that this principle was devised primarily (and perhaps solely) to convince herself and her followers that it is never in an individual's rational self-interest to violate the rights of another person. Rand never considered the implications of this principle in other venues, such as a voluntary organization such as ARI." By Greg Nyquist at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature on November 22, 2010.
anonymous

The Real New Deal - 0 views

www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm

money

shared by anonymous on 11 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Money, an item not necessarily intrinsically desirable or usable but serving as a stand-in for the complex wants and valuations of untold individuals, is an unnatural idea that required centuries to take hold.
  • Endism, especially when attached to the sort of nouns we were once prone to capitalize, can become a bad habit when used as anything more than a literary device to call attention to events worthy of it. The Great Depression was certainly worthy of its capital letters; even if nothing exactly ended, plenty changed. But what? And with what, if any relevance for present circumstances?
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Mar 10
       
      Hat Tip to Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias for pointing me toward this article. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/great-depression.html
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      And this 'endism' is quite present in the current anger over health-care reform. It's not merely a loss, it is elevated to historical travesty.
  • Whether we realize it or not, we are still reacting to those portrayals more than we are to the actions themselves. What really changed was the way the world’s elite thought of themselves and their institutions.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      This falls under the category of "lies we tell ourselves." Of course, less cynically, we can call it the standard act of national mythmaking. It's akin to the fact that humans remember what they *need* to remember, not what was.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • In crude political form, this Whiggish inclination toward progress was encapsulated in the functionalist view retailed by Norman Angell around the turn of the last century, which held that countries that traded with each other would develop economic self-interests too intertwined to justify war.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Mar 10
       
      This strikes me as something generally true, but not necessarily a truism. Libertarians will often postulate the "trade kills war" argument, without appreciating that it's not an iron-clad law or even - necessarily - the most likely outcome. It strikes me as more a naive, though admirable, conceit of what they *wish* as opposed to what IS.
  • If markets had come to play a more prominent part in the industrial West, it was not because markets had just been invented. It was because social and political systems had evolved in which powerful elites were willing to tolerate institutions that diffused economic power and weakened the state at the expense of private enterprise. This was the core meaning of liberalism in its original formulation.
  • The Crash of 1929, the subsequent economic slump and, particularly, the duration of the Depression took most contemporaries completely by surprise. Indeed, the uniquely severe catastrophe of the 1930s is so unusual that modern analysts should be cautious in drawing lessons from it.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      One way in which we fundamentally misunderstand a time period is in projecting our current political definitions on a period in gross violation of the political norms of the time.
  • Conventional wisdom tends to treat President Hoover as a clueless advocate of laissez faire who refused to stimulate the economy in the dramatic downturn. Franklin Roosevelt, on the other hand, was the heroic leader who both saved the day and transformed the American economy through his promotion of the New Deal. Conventional wisdom is still very much with us.
  • Hoover did not advocate “do-nothing” policies.
  • Roosevelt’s interventions were neither as thorough nor as systematically revolutionary as they have often been portrayed.
  • Above all, FDR’s worst policies were animated by a desire to repress business, by distrust of competition and a general disdain for the market. Those were, of course, precisely the qualities that made his policies extremely popular. FDR’s economic policies scored mixed successes at best, but his political strategy succeeded by any measure long before U.S. entry into World War II, and subsequent generations have not ceased to conflate the former with the latter.
  • So thoroughly has the West taken for granted the triumph of the more abstract liberal nation-state that its denizens must remind themselves how fragile its origins were and how little emotional loyalty it has commanded.
  • Even in America, where visceral support for individualism and self-reliance remains strong, this has always been so. In good times, economic systems are supported by inertia and utilitarian compromise that appeal to the broad center. In hard times abstract convictions tend to melt away. The American preference for the free market is neither as common nor as “American” as many suppose.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      But our identities are inventions and are mostly divorced from a close reading of history. As America nears a genuine crisis point, the current phenomenon of the "Tea Party" is going to be less relevant. It will eventually become "quaint" and irrelevant. At least, that is my hope (and current Generational prediction).
  • Seen as a reversion to older habits, the odd mix of regulation, make-work, intervention, protectionism, nationalism and (as in Germany and elsewhere) anti-Semitism that characterized the Western policy response to the Depression suddenly seems less like an incoherent flaying in all directions and more like elements of a uniform retrenchment in social relations.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      Which is why the narratives don't stick on a closer read.
  • It seems odd that humans in their day-to-day interactions think of buying or selling as the most natural of activities, recreating markets unprompted in the most dismal of circumstances. Yet there is something about the ideology of a market system, or of any generally decentralized order, that seems inconceivable to most people.
  • Economists have a hard time dealing with nationalism.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      Again: Nationalism - in its current form - is a modern social invention.
  • A severe economic crisis implicates the entire system of political economy, regardless of how narrow the source of that crisis may be. Thus those with long-simmering fears and resentments—as well as those with more venal or ideological motives—see crisis as an opportunity to strike out at the system.
  • Anti-market movements, whether pushed by Populists or Progressives in the United States or the various forms of socialism in Europe, took for granted that vigorous political action was the only way to impose order and bring social harmony to an unfettered market economy. But the specific remedies and the zeal with which reformers sought to repudiate the past belie ideological origins more than technocratic ones.
  • He had mastered the politics of trust.
  • Roosevelt deserves credit for largely resisting these ideological enthusiasms. On balance, he dealt with the crisis pragmatically and forthrightly.
  • If FDR had left out the high-flying rhetoric and only pursued an attenuated New Deal—namely the financial policies that economists now agree truly helped us out of the Depression—would he be as celebrated a figure as he is today? Not likely.
  • The end of World War II furnishes still more evidence that political images leave a wider trace in historical memory than actual policies.
  • Thanks to Truman we were once again moving in the direction of a competitive, open-access market economy. Had there been a lingering recession and a continuation of older, harmful regulations into the 1946–48 period, Truman, not his predecessor, would have been blamed. Yet Truman’s stellar reputation today owes nothing to his economic achievements, which most of those who today praise his foreign policy acumen know nothing about.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      I'll raise my hand on this one. Even with my better-than-nothing knowledge of US history, I knew nothing about this.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      They weren't in the stories I learned about.
  • In any event, we would do well to bear in mind how important, yet also how unnatural, the modern system of impersonal finance and trade really is. If we would preserve that system as a basis for our prosperity, we must recognize that many of the regulatory solutions we apply to our current crisis may themselves induce responses that can generate new crises. History suggests, too, that fears of the market and the political pressures it generates will wax and wane as crises deepen or ease. Patience and prudence are, therefore, the best watchwords for government amid the many trials and errors we will surely endure in the months, and perhaps years, ahead.
  • Indeed, many of his interventions—for example, his attempts to balance the budget by raising taxes in 1932, and strengthening support for the gold standard—worsened the economy for reasons orthodox theory would have predicted. On the other hand, Hoover initiated the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to support failed banks, to fund public works, subsidize state relief and otherwise engage in policies that presaged the widely praised interventions of the Roosevelt era.
  • Economic historians stress that it was in the realm of monetary and not fiscal policy that FDR had the most success.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      I can't even tell you the difference between those two things. I would venture to guess that a *lot* of people with strong convictions about government intrusion can't either.
  • What is one to make of the widespread popularity of protectionism and high tariffs throughout the Western world? Nationalist policies of every stripe, whether in the form of cartelization of industry in the United States or of more widespread regulation and control in Europe, especially in Germany, were not natural accompaniments to any neutral, technocratic view of recovery.
  • large-scale systems based on anonymous exchange were a recent phenomenon.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 26 Mar 10
       
      We have a stubborn inability to understand that businesses are technologies like anything else we create. A chief conceit of neocons is the idea that our current economic system is somehow closer to a blank slate than those with more government power. Since it is our corporate system that is the "newish" thing, it puts supporters on the right in the uncomfortable position of being Progressives of at least one stripe.
  • The current Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, Christina Romer, wrote in her widely cited article, “What Ended the Great Depression?” (1992), that “unusual fiscal policy contributed almost nothing to the recovery from the Great Depression.” The consensus view is that FDR’s policy success was the abandonment of the gold standard in 1933.
  • Harry Truman left office in 1953 a very unpopular man. Almost no one at the time gave him credit for overseeing a period of rapid recovery that was much broader and more impressive than anything that happened under Roosevelt’s tenure—and this at a time when most economists predicted a deep postwar recession.
anonymous

Right Mind - 0 views

www.tnr.com/...right-mind

culture politics partisan criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 18 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Fox News is awash in experts like Ablow: retired judges, generals, or CIA agents willing to serve as well-credentialed sidekicks for the network’s roster of demagogues. But what makes Ablow so valuable to the network are those two little letters after his name, M.D. He can stamp his medical imprimatur--he’s “America’s psychiatrist,” according to himself--on just about any right-wing political narrative.
  • “If I seem to say things with certainty, it comes from being able to register underlying truths that I feel very clearly about,” he says. “I don’t accept that these ideas have to be relegated to analysts’ couches or therapists’ basement offices. That’s the stuff of stigma.”
  • “I learned a long time ago that to talk about things four years from now was folly.” He’s right, of course, but, when the time comes to make up his mind, Ablow probably won’t keep his audience waiting long for an answer.
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  • Glenn Beck’s show, despite its apocalyptic trappings, is as touchy-feely a show as there is. Nobody on cable news cries as much, emotes as extravagantly, or leans as heavily on the vocabulary of personal betterment. In fact, it’s hard to imagine another talk-show host more in need of a resident mental-health professional.
  • anonymous on 18 Mar 10
     
    "Meet Glenn Beck's shrink" and groan beneath your breath...
anonymous

Death of the American Century | Lifecourse Blog - 0 views

blog.lifecourse.com/...death-of-the-american-century

generations silent genx

shared by anonymous on 30 Apr 10 - Cached
  • This view that Allen describes, of America as history’s existential good guy, is very linked to the psyche of his  Silent (born 1925-1942).
  • In any event,  Generation X (born 1961-1981) seems entirely unmoved by the emotional tensions and turmoil that Allen describes.
  • It’s fascinating, in retrospect, that the Silent interpreted the warmth with which a war-devastated world regarded Goliath America just after WWII as genuine affection, as opposed to transient gratitude triggered by necessity. 
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  • Back in the 1990s, Allen interviewed me at length about a feature story he was doing (it was later published in the WP) on how people of different ages react to that old Warner Brothers cartoon about Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote.  In a talk he was giving at a local college, he discovered by accident that all of the (Xer) students sympathized with the coyote, not the roadrunner.  He was flabbergasted, because for as long as he could remember, he and his peers had always rooted for the roadrunner.
  • anonymous on 30 Apr 10
     
    By Neil Howe at Lifecourse on April 30, 2010. A generational look at the changing assumptions of America's ascendancy.
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