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anonymous

Why Mass Effect is the Most Important Science Fiction Universe of Our Generation - 3 views

io9.com/...ion-universe-of-our-generation

shared by anonymous on 21 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Think of the Big Issues in your favorite series. Whether it is realistic science explaining humanoid life throughout the galaxy, or dealing with FTL travel, or the ethical ambiguity of progress, or even the very purpose of the human race in our universe, Mass Effect has got it. By virtue of three simple traits – its medium, its message, and its philosophy – Mass Effect eclipses and engulfs all of science fiction's greatest universes. Let me show you how.
  • As a vessel for an epic science fiction narrative, the medium of action-adventure game affords three immediate advantages – setting, casting, and emotional involvement.
  • The first advantage, setting, involves the portrayal of alien species and alien worlds with ease.
  • ...41 more annotations...
  • Because they are filmed with human actors, series like Star Trek and Star Wars leverage mostly human and very humanoid (vulcan, bajoran, betazoid) characters. Even though we are told humans are only one race among many, we somehow always end up running the galaxy and living everywhere. All the important characters who get the most screen time are human beings.
  • Run around the Citadel and you'll be damned if you find more than two or three humans out of hundreds of citizens milling about, shopkeepers hocking their wares, and government officials eyeing you suspiciously. The entire government of the galaxy, known as the Council, is run by non-humans. The majority of characters on screen at any given time are alien.  Being able to render any race with equal ease means that as a human, you truly feel like the minority species we are.
  • Second, the ability to customize the cast of Mass Effect is only possible with a video game.
  • I can't very well rewatch all of Star Trek: The Next Generation with a female Picard of Middle Eastern descent who grew up on a space station. Mass Effect gives me that option with Shepard.
  • Third, and for the sake of narrative, perhaps the most intriguing, is the player involvement in ethical decision making.
  • The critical difference is the duration and scale of the consequences of the decisions made in Mass Effect.
  • First, decisions are not a function of gameplay but of narrative.
  • Second, decisions are persistent through each installment in the series.
  • Further, each decision is clouded by an insufficient amount of information. Players often act in the dark, evaluating and analyzing the he-said-she-said of characters whose motivations are rarely selfless or noble.
  • A prime example is that even during rousing speeches, the player is able to make on-the-fly decisions that alter the pathos of Shepard's rhetoric.
  • During an interview I had with Daniel Erickson, lead writer for Star Wars: The Old Republic, he revealed two key elements of BioWare's process that makes their games ideal for ethical exploration.
  • The first is that quality voice acting triggers complex emotional responses in players. The second is that allowing players to choose their next line in conversation based on emotion, not the precise words written down, creates a huge level of investment by the player in the main character.
  • Other media ask you to evaluate and observe the decisions of the main character. Mass Effect enables you to believe the world in which the story is told, to cast the major characters and to participate in the decisions and face the consequences of character choices. In short, one cannot help but become deeply invested in the universe and narrative Mass Effect builds.
  • Mass Effect has a simple message: human beings are delusional about their importance in the grand scheme of things.
  • Mass Effect starts with humanity in the galaxy where it should have been in the United Federation of Planets: unnoticed among the other minor species struggling to prove to the Council why they add anything of value to the civilization that is Citadel Space.
  • Star Wars and Star Trek start with the assumption that humans will be important in galactic civilization. Why? In part because the medium forced that decision, but more so because both universes assume that human beings add meaning to the universe. Mass Effect doesn't make such an assumption. Mass Effect never lets you forget that we might not add one jot of meaning or benefit to intelligent life beyond our solar system.
  • Humanity's minority and irrelevant status is underlined by the fact that on the Citadel we are not only new, but one among many second class species.
  • Mass Effect is colored by this message in three distinct ways.
  • First, the actions of many major human characters almost always have a subtle undercurrent of petulance or entitlement.
  • Mass Effect portrays our species from the perspective of the established species in the universe: we are fumbling neophytes with FTL drives.
  • Second, the lowering of human status diffuses any xenophobic urges a player might have.
  • The constant presence of other species on the Normandy, a human Alliance/Cerberus ship, is a perpetual reminder that we are out of our depth in the universe. No problem, no matter how much the player may want it to be, will be solved unilaterally by human gumption and know-how.
  • Ok, now imaging playing that character within a context whatever the player's gender, race, or orientation, that the simple humanity of the player is subjected to believable and, within the Mass Effect universe, true prejudice, insults, and scrutiny. The impact of the message on the player's interactions with other species is that, after facing what feels like unwarranted treatment, the player is forced to recognize the perspective of any species one might encounter along the way. Mass Effect makes you view the reflection of humanity in a mirror darkly.
  • Third, by undermining the player's sense of pride in being human, Mass Effect also opens doors to what would likely be highly controversial discussions were humanity "in charge."
  • In Star Trek (TOS, TNG, & DS9), those who are genetically engineered are seen as myopic elitists and supremacists, convinced of their own vaunted status, not wishing to allow their world to be "tainted" by those who are impure. In Mass Effect, Miranda and Grunt are rich and rounded characters who are genuinely superior in some aspects due to their modifications, but also reflect the increased self-awareness and contemplativeness we would hope to see in a superior being.
  • In Star Trek cyborgs (Borg) and androids (Data) are one of two things: a threat to humanity or desperate to emulate it. In Mass Effect, Shepard's resurrection leaves her largely cybernetic while EDI, the ship AI, and Legion, an autonomous mobile geth platform, are more interested in helping and understanding humans than they are attempting to become or obliterate human beings.
  • Shepard's constant discussions with, dependance upon, and similarities to her non-organic crew members is made more accessible to the player due to Mass Effect's questioning of human exceptionalism.
  • Mass Effect's message is designed to open up narrative complexity by destabilizing the player's sense of confidence in his or her own skin. By undermining the value of being human, threatening and novel lifeforms become relatable, minority aliens become allies, and human intentions become questionable.
  • In nearly great popular science fiction universe, there is a flaw. Born of systemic bias, the flaw is one that fundamentally undermines the narrative that carves its way through the characters, species, technologies and worlds that populate any given sci-fi story. Our greatest stories set in space often reference the flaw with oblique references to a long forgotten species, cataclysmic events, or godlike entities. Something is wrong with the universe, but we cannot place it.
  • The flaw in every science fiction series is that they shy from the deep horror of the existence of intelligent life in infinite spacetime – save for two: the one that brought first brought it to our attention and the one that sees this horror as the framework for reality.
  • The flaw is a simple one: the assumption that life has meaning, that intelligent life has a purpose, and that humanity contributes anything to the universe.
  • There is no recognizable divine presence, such as a god, in the universe, and humans are particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence, and perhaps are just a small species projecting their own mental idolatries onto the vast cosmos, ever susceptible to being wiped from existence at any moment. This also suggests that the majority of undiscerning humanity are creatures with the same significance as insects in a much greater struggle between greater forces which, due to humanity's small, visionless and unimportant nature, it does not recognize.
  • Cosmicism is not merely the idea that there is no meaning in the universe. It's far worse. Instead, the argument is that there is meaning, but it is so far above and beyond human understanding that we can never attain meaningful existence.
  • Mass Effect forces the observant player to ask, "Why fight for survival in a meaningless universe?" From the answer stems a story that demands the player confront the purpose of human beings in the galaxy at every level. To play Mass Effect is to consider the value of the lives of other species, the meaning of life on a cosmic scale, and the importance of individual relationships in the face of cataclysm.
  • First, one must accept the premise that the technology to explore the universe is a trap and a structure that forces galactic civilization to follow an invariable path. Like Descartes' mischievous demon or Hume's apathetic creator, the universe is indeed the product of an intelligence, but a negligent one at best, a malicious one at worst.
  • Cosmicism underpins Mass Effect's ability to show the permutations of how the Drake Equation imagined intergalactic civilizations: warts and all.
  • Citadel Space is dominated by the same law as Dune's planetary empire: a ban on artificial intelligence.
  • The Reapers are biomechanical equivalents of the Elder Gods of H.P. Lovecraft. If the xenomorphs in Alien had a deity, it would be a Reaper. Inconceivable, immortal, uninvolved super-beings that are not divinities per se, but so far beyond our realm of existence as to drive insane those who encounter and worship them.
  • Mass Effect is the first blockbuster franchise in the postmodern era to directly confront a godless, meaningless universe indifferent to humanity. Amid the entertaining game play, the interspecies romance, and entertaining characters, cosmological questions about the value of existence influence every decision.
  • Therein the triple layered question – What value does galactic civilization bring to the universe; What value does humanity bring to galactic civilization, and What value do I bring to humanity – forces the player to recontextualize his or her participation in the experiment of existence.
  • The value of Mass Effect as a science fiction universe is that it is a critical starting point for discussion about the purpose of humanity in a materialistic universe. Without an answer to that question, there is no real reason for Ender to defeat the Buggers, or for humanity to seek out new life and new civilizations, or for us to not let non-organic life be the torch bearer for intelligence in the universe.
  • anonymous on 21 Feb 12
     
    "Mass Effect is the first blockbuster franchise in the postmodern era to directly confront a godless, meaningless universe indifferent to humanity. Amid the entertaining game play, the interspecies romance, and entertaining characters, cosmological questions about the value of existence influence every decision. The game is about justifying survival, not of mere intelligent life in the universe, the Reapers are that, but of a kind of intelligence. Therein the triple layered question - What value does galactic civilization bring to the universe; What value does humanity bring to galactic civilization, and What value do I bring to humanity - forces the player to recontextualize his or her participation in the experiment of existence."
  • Erik Hanson on 24 Feb 12
     
    Man, I would have liked to run this on GWJ.
  • anonymous on 24 Feb 12
     
    Yeah, it's very well written. I'm not in a position to, like, critique it or anything, but it's SO much fun to read. :)
anonymous

If the Earth Stood Still - What Would Happen if the Earth Stopped Spinning? - 0 views

www.esri.com/...nospin.html

shared by anonymous on 25 Sep 12 - Cached
  • Typically, we do not pay much attention to the delineation of the sea because it seems so obvious and constant that we do not realize it is a foundation of geography and the basis for our perception of the physical world.
  • Why is the sea level where we currently observe it? What controls the sea level? How stable are the forces that determine the sea level? This article does not refer to the climate change and the potential increase of the water level in the global ocean but rather to the geometry of the globe and the powerful geophysical energies that determine where oceans lie.
  • Sea level is—and has always been—in equilibrium with the planet's gravity, which pulls the water toward the earth's center of mass, and the outward centrifugal force, which results from the earth's rotation. After a few billion years of spinning, the earth has taken on the shape of an ellipsoid (which can be thought of as a flattened sphere). Consequently, the distance to the earth's center of mass is the longest around the equator and shortest beyond the polar circles.
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  • What would happen if the earth's rotation slowed down and finally stopped spinning over a period of a few decades? ArcGIS lets us model the effects of this scenario, performing calculations and estimations and creating a series of maps showing the effects the absence of centrifugal force would have on sea level.
  • The lack of the centrifugal effect would result in the gravity of the earth being the only significant force controlling the extent of the oceans. Prominent celestial bodies such as the moon and sun would also play a role, but because of their distance from the earth, their impact on the extent of global oceans would be negligible.
  • If the earth's gravity alone was responsible for creating a new geography, the huge bulge of oceanic water—which is now about 8 km high at the equator—would migrate to where a stationary earth's gravity would be the strongest.
  • anonymous on 25 Sep 12
     
    "The following is not a futuristic scenario. It is not science fiction. It is a demonstration of the capabilities of GIS to model the results of an extremely unlikely, yet intellectually fascinating query: What would happen if the earth stopped spinning? ArcGIS was used to perform complex raster analysis and volumetric computations and generate maps that visualize these results."
anonymous

Visualization and Time Travel - 0 views

jackmoreland.wordpress.com/...visualization-and-time-travel

shared by anonymous on 05 Apr 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 05 Apr 13
     
    "My master's thesis was on time perception in virtual environments, looking at elements that make time seem to pass more quickly/slowly. This being the case, I'm also interested in how time is described and perceived in various works of fiction."
anonymous

Misinformation and Its Correction - 1 views

psi.sagepub.com/...106.full

shared by anonymous on 17 Oct 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 17 Oct 12
     
    "Abstract The widespread prevalence and persistence of misinformation in contemporary societies, such as the false belief that there is a link between childhood vaccinations and autism, is a matter of public concern. For example, the myths surrounding vaccinations, which prompted some parents to withhold immunization from their children, have led to a marked increase in vaccine-preventable disease, as well as unnecessary public expenditure on research and public-information campaigns aimed at rectifying the situation. We first examine the mechanisms by which such misinformation is disseminated in society, both inadvertently and purposely. Misinformation can originate from rumors but also from works of fiction, governments and politicians, and vested interests. Moreover, changes in the media landscape, including the arrival of the Internet, have fundamentally influenced the ways in which information is communicated and misinformation is spread. We next move to misinformation at the level of the individual, and review the cognitive factors that often render misinformation resistant to correction. We consider how people assess the truth of statements and what makes people believe certain things but not others. We look at people's memory for misinformation and answer the questions of why retractions of misinformation are so ineffective in memory updating and why efforts to retract misinformation can even backfire and, ironically, increase misbelief. Though ideology and personal worldviews can be major obstacles for debiasing, there nonetheless are a number of effective techniques for reducing the impact of misinformation, and we pay special attention to these factors that aid in debiasing. We conclude by providing specific recommendations for the debunking of misinformation. These recommendations pertain to the ways in which corrections should be designed, structured, and applied in order to maximize their impact. Grounded in cognitive psychological theory, these rec
anonymous

More Vacation is the Secret Sauce - 0 views

blogs.hbr.org/...vacation-is-the-secret-sa.html

shared by anonymous on 06 Sep 12 - Cached
  • These books, along with a couple of others, shifted my mind into high gear at a time when I was unburdened and undistracted by the preoccupations of everyday work. In short, I had time to truly reflect and think strategically rather than tactically.
  • I also learned about the importance of vacations from observing others on our team. The intensity of demand had begun to wear them down, too, and it showed up in a collective tendency to be more emotionally reactive — shorter and sharper — and more willing to settle for an easy solution rather than do the hard work necessary to get the best result.
  • I encouraged people to take longer vacations
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  • At a broader level, the famed Framingham Heart Study followed 750 women with no previous heart disease over 20 years. Those who took the fewest vacations proved to be twice as likely to get a heart attack as those who took the most. A 2005 study of 15,000 women found that the risk of depression diminished dramatically as they took more vacation.
  • anonymous on 06 Sep 12
     
    "In the third and final vacation week, something changed. I felt drawn back to reading non-fiction, specifically to books related to my work. I reread Tribal Leadership, which makes a compelling case that the vast majority of leaders operate at sub-optimal levels of personal development, and that the higher the level they reach, the more successful their organizations become. I also read The Fear of Insignificance, an extraordinary book by the Israeli psychiatrist Carlo Strenger about how our behaviors are powerfully, unconsciously and often pathologically influenced by our deep need to feel we matter."
anonymous

The Technium: Undetectable Technology - 0 views

www.kk.org/...undetectable_te.php

technology

shared by anonymous on 24 Jan 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 24 Jan 12
     
    Karl Schroeder, science fiction author of the novel Permanence, writes about the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox says that if there is an infinite universe there must be an infinite number of civilizations at advance stages that would emit evidence of their presence, but as far as we see in any direction, there are none. The skies should be full of aliens, but are not. Why not?
anonymous

2010 Isn't What Many Futurists Of The Past Imagined - 0 views

www.npr.org/...story.php

futurism retro technology

shared by anonymous on 25 Oct 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 25 Oct 10
     
    "The late visionary Arthur C. Clarke was a master of predictive fiction. In Clarke's 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey - which he co-wrote with director Stanley Kubrick - we get a taste of the vast influence that computers will have in our lives over the coming decades. The 1984 movie sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, was about - among other things - humans making contact with alien life. The year he chose for this breakthrough: 2010. Well, here we are. It's 2010 and no word from a Jovian moon yet. But it's only October." By Linton Weeks at NPR on October 18, 2010.
anonymous

Maps from 1942 of the never-was Nazi invasion of North America - 0 views

io9.com/...nazi-invasion-of-north-america

counterfactuals history geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 16 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 16 Nov 10
     
    "These diagrams from the March 2, 1942 issue of Life detailed the Nazi invasion of America shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Check out such alternate reality battles like the bombing of Detroit and invasion of Norfolk, Virginia. These maps were created as a follow-up to an article about an American defeat in WWII by pioneering science fiction author Philip Wylie, who wrote the proto-superhero novel Gladiator. These maps were made in the early days of US involvement in World War II, so there was a sense that this invasion was a real possibility. You can read more about these maps at Ptak Science Books."
anonymous

Ellis Weiner: What I Learned from Parodying Atlas Shrugged - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...arned-from-parod_b_852205.html

humor whimsy objectivism

shared by anonymous on 16 May 11 - Cached
  • Yeah, it's cheap fun, and I expected it going in. But what took me by surprise, and what still amazes me to this very day, is this: The novel's antagonists -- the bad guys, their pernicious "values," the ideas against which Rand's demi-god heroes and heroines do verbose, tedious battle -- they do not exist in real life. Of course, neither do Sauron or Voldemort. But Atlas Shrugged is a 1,000-page, 643,000-(I counted them)-word diatribe against an imaginary enemy that, unlike Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter books, insists it's about "reality."
  • the geo-political world in which Rand wants us to admire her heroes is not our own, or even (like that of 1984) a plausible, allegorical variant of our own, but a third-rate science fiction dystopian future, complete with imaginary technology, which, by definition, makes comparison to today's world impossible.
  • The U.S. of Atlas Shrugged is about as real and realistic as Narnia, and capitalism is to Atlas Shrugged what Quidditch is to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: a fictional construct, vaguely similar to something we have in real life, used for purposes of drama and entertainment.
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  • Even Trekkies (do they still call themselves that?) who go to conventions in costume and speak fucking Klingon know that it's make believe.
  • So I wrote the parody. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, yes. But somebody has to shoot them.
  • anonymous on 16 May 11
     
    "In any case, it took me a while to realize what should have been perfectly obvious: that Atlas Shrugged (about which I've written several times in these "pages") was and is so ripe for parody, it's not even funny. It's not even necessary, either, in some ways, since, like all truly horrible books, it parodies itself, brimming and fit to bust as it is with excellent, excellent examples of awful, awful writing. "
anonymous

Ten Reasons We Are Seeing An Excess of Lists of Ten Things We Should Know - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...s-of-ten-things-we-should-know

shared by anonymous on 17 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Lately I’ve noticed lots of articles with titles that are variations of “Ten Things You Should Know About X.”
  • 1. We don’t have time to read anymore.
  • 2. Ten is close to the approximate size of our working memory.
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  • 3. Since writers can’t make a living any more, we are sliding into an era of bullet point-ism.
  • 4. In many cases, there’s more than ten things that you should know, or fewer than ten things that you should know.
  • 5. It’s a way for pentadactyl animals to feel superior to unidactyl animals.
  • 6. At this point in the list, with four more to go, we enter the fat and boring midsection of the list of top ten things you should know about lists of ten things. It’s basically not remembered, so there’s really no point in putting anything here. Ditto for 7, and 8.
  • 9. Because of the well documented recency effect, it’s time to start having content in our list of ten things again.
  • 10. If we’ve maintained our concentration to this point in the list, we will be rewarded with a bit of humorous fluff that helps bind some of our anxiety about the essential meaninglessness of our lives, and — especially — our time spent on reading yet another list of ten things we should know.
  • anonymous on 17 Jun 11
     
    Basically, we like numbers and bloggers have been told for years to create titles like that to generate hits. But, there's more. By Malcolm MacIver (at Science Not Fiction) in Discover Magazine.
anonymous

Magritte's Smile - 0 views

boympartners.blogspot.com/...magrittes-smile.html

blog longnow art

shared by anonymous on 02 Aug 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 02 Aug 11
     
    "In our design field we often talk about the future, about the world in 2030 or 2050. Some really far-fetching future experts can venture into the year 2100 or maybe even 2500. I think, only once I read some science fiction, which took place around the Year 7000. It was pretty weird stuff already.  But 192370?" From Oh Boym!
anonymous

How your immune system fires off electrons to repair DNA damage - 0 views

io9.com/...electrons-to-repair-dna-damage

layscience

shared by anonymous on 29 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • One regular offender is the cyclobutane pyrimidine dimer. It's a bulbous ring attached to the elegant double helix of the DNA strand. It latches on to the damaged parts of DNA and is replicated along with them, causing widespread damage. Once it gets started, it can grow until it takes over the system.
  • Fortunately, help is on the way, in the form of an enzyme called photolyase.
  • Photolyase floats around the body, looking for encroachment from the dark side. This enzyme powers itself up using blue light, and then shoots out an electron.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Homegrown resistance speeds it along its way. A molecule in the ring allows the electron to move faster along the ring than it could by hoping through the gap in the middle.
  • The whole process takes less than a hundred trillionths of a second, and when the photolyase hits all the right spots with its electron, the ring is blasted away and the DNA repairs itself to form a perfect strand.
  • Photolyase runs through fish and reptilian systems, but is unknown in mammals. Scientists are now trying to find a way to synthesize and mass-produce this enzyme, so that one day we might be able to repair our DNA with a simple lotion.
  • anonymous on 29 Jul 11
     
    Scientists have found out how a famous sunburn-healing enzyme works. The way it zaps DNA damage sounds so science fictional that it seems like something that happened a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
anonymous

Joshua Foer: John Quijada and Ithkuil, the Language He Invented : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...121224fa_fact_foer

shared by anonymous on 21 Jan 13 - Cached
  • Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like “knight.” No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.
  • Written like a linguistics textbook, the fourteen-page Web site ran to almost a hundred and sixty thousand words. It documented the grammar, syntax, and lexicon of a language that Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be.
  • In his preface, Quijada wrote that his “greater goal” was “to attempt the creation of what human beings, left to their own devices, would never create naturally, but rather only by conscious intellectual effort: an idealized language whose aim is the highest possible degree of logic, efficiency, detail, and accuracy in cognitive expression via spoken human language, while minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Ithkuil has two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise, capable of capturing nearly every thought that a human being could have while doing so in as few sounds as possible.
  • Ithkuil’s first piece of press was a brief mention in 2004 in a Russian popular-science magazine called Computerra. An article titled “The Speed of Thought” noted remarkable similarities between Ithkuil and an imaginary language cooked up by the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein for his novella “Gulf,” from 1949.
  • At first, Quijada was bewildered by the interest emanating from Russia. “I was a third humbled, a third flattered, and a third intrigued,” he told me. “Beyond that, I just wanted to know: who are these people?”
  • Ithkuil did not emerge from nowhere. Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles
  • anonymous on 21 Jan 13
     
    "Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like "knight." No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today."
anonymous

Ayn Rand is for children - 1 views

www.salon.com/...ayn_rand_is_for_children

shared by anonymous on 20 Jan 13 - Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • Since I first met Objectivists (read: libertarians) in college, my Unified Theory of Rand Groupies posited that they all probably fit into at least one of three groups: those who 1) never grew out of the usual “the world is persecuting me and doesn’t see my true genius” phase that momentarily afflicts the typical high schooler 2) think saying “Ayn Rand” in any context makes them sound intelligent, even though they’ve never actually read her work or 3) have read Rand’s work, don’t genuinely believe in her ideology as evidenced by their lifestyle/politics, but still say they love her because it serves to make them feel good about their own avarice.
  • Typically, they are more than happy to (among other things) drive on taxpayer funded roads; to have their assets defended by government agents (aka police and firefighters); to have their property rights protected by a law enforcement collective known as the judiciary; and to pocket their share of handouts. Some alleged Randian individualists are even willing to decry the social safety net for others but not for themselves, and still others are happy to to vote in Congress for the epitome of what Randianism stands against.
  • Nonetheless, after my three-week voyage to the poorest province in China in 2009 (which you can read about here), I can say with confidence that if you have been to the non-Tom-Friedman developing world – aka the actual developing world – you don’t need Saunders’ MacArthur Genius-worthy intellect to arrive at his very same conclusion.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Simply put, once you actually see laissez faire capitalism and greed-is-good extremism at work, it doesn’t look as nice as it sounds in Rand’s works. On the contrary, as Saunders implies, it makes “Fountainhead Shrugged” look less like serious treatise than bad young adult fiction, with all the corresponding misguided parables and oversimplified conclusions.
  • To be a Rand groupie is to flaunt your immaturity, your ignorance, your desperation to justify greed or your lack of international travel. It is, in other words, to admit your blindness to how so much of the world already lives, and to ignore what America would look like if “Fountainhead Shrugged” was seen as a public policy manual rather than what it really is: a dangerous farce.
  • anonymous on 20 Jan 13
     
    "With this week's news that Glenn Beck and others are preparing to build libertarian communes and "Going Galt," I figure now is the time to finally refine my theory about those who claim to be Ayn Rand acolytes or who brag that their favorite book is "Fountainhead Shrugged" (they are the same book written twice in order to double Rand's profit, so for brevity, let's just use one name)."
anonymous

Time and the End of History Illusion - 0 views

blog.longnow.org/...nd-the-end-of-history-illusion

shared by anonymous on 23 Jan 13 - Cached
  • “Middle-aged people – like me – often look back on our teenage selves with some mixture of amusement and chagrin,” said one of the authors, Daniel T. Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard. “What we never seem to realize is that our future selves will look back and think the very same thing about us. At every age we think we’re having the last laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.”
  • There are several ways to explain these findings. It’s more difficult to predict the future than to recall the past; perhaps participants simply weren’t willing to speculate on something they felt uncertain about. It’s also possible that study participants overestimated how much they had changed in the past, making it seem as though they were underestimating their change in the future. However, the psychologists suggest that the end of history illusion is most probably explained by the fact that it just makes us feel better about ourselves:
  • On the other hand, French postmodern philosopher Jean Beaudrillard contends that Fukuyama’s modernist theory is no more than an illusion caused by our particular relationship with time. He writes that contemporary civilization has simply “lost” its sense of history:
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • … one might suppose that the acceleration of modernity, of technology, events and media, of all exchanges – economic, political, and sexual – has propelled us to ‘escape velocity’, with the result that we have flown free of the referential sphere of the real and of history. … A degree of slowness (that is, a certain speed, but not too much), a degree of distance, but not too much, and a degree of liberation (an energy for rupture and change), but not too much, are needed to bring about the kind of condensation or significant crystallization of events we call history, the kind of coherent unfolding of causes and effects we call reality.
  • Once beyond this gravitational effect, which keeps bodies in orbit, all the atoms of meaning get lost in space. Each atom pursues its own trajectory to infinity and is lost in space. This is precisely what we are seeing in our present-day societies, intent as they are on accelerating all bodies, messages and processes in all directions and which, with modern media, have created for every event, story and image a simulation of an infinite trajectory.
  • Every political, historical and cultural fact possesses a kinetic energy which wrenches it from its own space and propels it into a hyperspace where, since it will never return, it loses all meaning. No need for science fiction here: already, here and now – in the shape of our computers, circuits and networks – we have the particle accelerator which has smashed the referential orbit of things once and for all.
  • Illusion or not, the Harvard study shows that a sense of being at the end of history has real-world consequences: underestimating how differently we’ll feel about things in the future, we sometimes make decisions we later come to regret.
  • In other words, the end of history illusion could be thought of as a lack of long-term thinking.
  • anonymous on 23 Jan 13
     
    "In a paper published last week in Science, these researchers report on a study that asked participants to estimate how much their personality, tastes, and values had changed over the last decade, and how much they expected they would change in the next. Statistical analysis reveals what these psychologists call an "End of History Illusion": while we remember our past selves to be quite different from who we are today, we nevertheless believe that we won't change much at all in the future. The New York Times quotes:"
anonymous

Americans Want to Live in a Much More Equal Country (They Just Don't Realize It) - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...260639

shared by anonymous on 12 Sep 12 - Cached
  • The inequality of wealth and income in the U.S. has become an increasingly prevalent issue in recent years. One reason for this is that the visibility of this inequality has been increasing gradually for a long time--as society has become less segregated, people can now see more clearly how much other people make and consume.
  • imagine that we took all Americans and sorted them by wealth along a line with the poorest on the left and continuing as wealth increases until on the right we have the richest. Now, imagine that we divide them into five buckets with an equal number of citizens in each. The first bucket contains the poorest 20% of the population, the next contains the second wealthiest tier, and so on down to the wealthiest 20% (see Figure 1).
  • With this in mind, from the total pie of wealth (100%) what percent do you think the bottom 40% (that is, the first two buckets together) of Americans possess? And what about the top 20%? If you guessed around 9% for the bottom and 59% for the top, you're pretty much in line with the average response we got when we asked this question of thousands of Americans.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • The reality is quite different. Based on Wolff (2010), the bottom 40% of the population combined has only 0.3% of wealth while the top 20% possesses 84% (see Figure 2). These differences between levels of wealth in society comprise what's called the Gini coefficient, which is one way to quantify inequality.
  • When economists consider the desirable level of inequality, they usually define the ideal inequality from the perspective of economic efficiency: What level of inequality will motivate people to be the most productive and move up the wealth ladder? What level of inequality will allow those at the top to lift up society as a whole (say, by having the resources to invent new technologies)? What level of wealth will keep salaries low and competition high?
  • inequality is not just about economic efficiency. It's also about our day-to-day experience as citizens, the influence of envy, our social mobility, the importance of equal opportunity, our mutual dependency on each other, etc.
  • We took a step back and examined social inequality based on the definition that the philosopher John Rawls gave in his book A Theory of Justice. In Rawls' terms, a society is just if a person understands all the conditions within that society and is willing to enter it in a random place (in terms of socio-economic status, gender, race, and so on).
  • They could be among the poorest or the richest, or anywhere in between. Rawls called this idea the "veil of ignorance" because the decision of whether to enter a particular society is disconnected from the particular knowledge that the individual has about the level of wealth that he or she will have after making the decision.
  • we did two things.
  • First, we asked 5,522 people to create a distribution of wealth among the five buckets such that they themselves would be willing to enter that society at a random place.
  • What was particularly surprising about the results was that when we examined the ideal distributions for Republicans and Democrats, we found them to be quite similar (see Figure 4).
  • When we examined the results by other variables, including income and gender, we again found no appreciable differences. It seems that Americans -- regardless of political affiliation, income, and gender -- want the kind of wealth distribution shown in Figure 3, which is very different from what we have and from what we think we have (see Figure 2).
  • in another task, we made things simpler (see Figure 5) and asked people to choose between two unidentified distributions (again under the veil of ignorance). The first option, unbeknownst to participants, reflected the distribution of wealth in America. For the second option we modified the distribution found in Sweden, making it substantially more equal (we referred to this fictional nation as "Equalden").
  • We discovered that 92% of Americans preferred the distribution of "Equalden" to America's. And if one were to assume that the 8% who preferred America's distribution was made up of wealthy Republican men, he or she would be mistaken. The preference for "Equalden" was slightly different for Republicans and Democrats, and in the expected direction, but the magnitude was very small: 93.5% of Democrats and 90.2% of Republicans preferred the more equal distribution.
  • similarity across the political spectrum is far more substantial than the differences.
  • There are a few lessons that we can learn from this.
  • The first is that we vastly underestimate the level of inequality that we have in America.
  • Second, we want much more equality than both what we have and what we think we have.
  • when asked in a way that avoids hot-button terms, misconceptions, and the level of wealth people currently possess, Americans are actually in agreement about wanting a more equal distribution of wealth.
  • In fact, the vast majority of Americans prefer a distribution of wealth more equal than what exists in Sweden, which is often placed rhetorically at the extreme far left in terms of political ideology
  • A third lesson concerns the political gap between Democrats and Republicans
  • how is it possible that we found so little difference between them in our study?
  • One reason for this could be our inability to separate our ideology from our current state of wealth.
  • Another reason could be politicians, who, in order to rally people to their side, try to generate feelings of greater difference and opposition--and therefore conflict--than actually exist.
  • The veil of ignorance accomplishes something similar to blind taste testing.
  • when we express opinions about politics and life in general, we can't help but be influenced by our own varying degrees wealth and ignorance of others' lives. The veil of ignorance works to separate our core beliefs from the biases and prejudices we develop over time and through the subjective experience of being part of a certain class and demographic.
  • It is one thing to get people to tell us what kind of society the would want to join, and another to get them part with their money in order to create that society.
  • Social justice and optimal wealth distribution are highly complex topics, and it's hard to imagine that any study could dramatically change opinions about education, welfare, or tax reform. But consider this. When we ran the same basic experiment in Australia, we found Australians did not differ much from Americans in their views of the ideal distribution. When we ran another version of it with NPR listeners, and then readers of Forbes Magazine, the results were still basically the same. And most likely, if you participated in one of our tests, your response too would have fallen in line with these findings.
  • anonymous on 12 Sep 12
     
    "We asked thousands of people to describe their ideal distribution of wealth, from top to bottom. The vast majority -- rich, poor, GOP and Democrat -- imagined a far more equal nation. Here's why it matters."
anonymous

Recognizing the End of the Chinese Economic Miracle - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...g-end-chinese-economic-miracle

shared by anonymous on 23 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • A crisis can exist before it is recognized.
  • The admission that a crisis exists is a critical moment, because this is when most others start to change their behavior in reaction to the crisis.
  • First, The New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-recipient Paul Krugman penned a piece titled "Hitting China's Wall." He wrote, "The signs are now unmistakable: China is in big trouble.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • Later in the week, Ben Levisohn authored a column in Barron's called "Smoke Signals from China." He wrote, "In the classic disaster flick 'The Towering Inferno' partygoers ignored a fire in a storage room because they assumed it has been contained. Are investors making the same mistake with China?"
  • Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs -- where in November 2001 Jim O'Neil coined the term BRICs and forecast that China might surpass the United States economically by 2028 -- cut its forecast of Chinese growth to 7.4 percent. 
  • The New York Times, Barron's and Goldman Sachs are all both a seismograph of the conventional wisdom and the creators of the conventional wisdom. Therefore, when all three announce within a few weeks that China's economic condition ranges from disappointing to verging on a crash, it transforms the way people think of China.
  • Now the conversation is moving from forecasts of how quickly China will overtake the United States to considerations of what the consequences of a Chinese crash would be. 
  • Suddenly finding Stratfor amid the conventional wisdom regarding China does feel odd, I must admit. Having first noted the underlying contradictions in China's economic growth years ago, when most viewed China as the miracle Japan wasn't, and having been scorned for not understanding the shift in global power underway, it is gratifying to now have a lot of company.
  • One of the things masking China's weakening has been Chinese statistics, which Krugman referred to as "even more fictional than most."
  • China is a vast country in territory and population. Gathering information on how it is doing would be a daunting task, even were China inclined to do so. Instead, China understands that in the West, there is an assumption that government statistics bear at least a limited relationship to truth. Beijing accordingly uses its numbers to shape perceptions inside and outside China of how it is doing.
  • The Chinese release their annual gross domestic product numbers in the third week of January (and only revise them the following year). They can't possibly know how they did that fast, and they don't. But they do know what they want the world to believe about their growth, and the world has believed them -- hence, the fantastic tales of economic growth. 
  • China in fact has had an extraordinary period of growth. The last 30 years have been remarkable, marred only by the fact that the Chinese started at such a low point due to the policies of the Maoist period.
  • Growth at first was relatively easy; it was hard for China to do worse. But make no mistake: China surged. Still, basing economic performance on consumption, Krugman notes that China is barely larger economically than Japan. Given the compounding effects of China's guesses at GDP, we would guess it remains behind Japan, but how can you tell? We can say without a doubt that China's economy has grown dramatically in the past 30 years but that it is no longer growing nearly as quickly as it once did.
  • China's growth surge was built on a very unglamorous fact: Chinese wages were far below Western wages, and therefore the Chinese were able to produce a certain class of products at lower cost than possible in the West.
  • China had another essential policy: Beijing was terrified of unemployment and the social consequences that flow from it. This was a rational fear, but one that contradicted China's main strength, its wage advantage.
  • Growing the economy is possible, but not growing profitability. Eventually, the economy will be dragged down by its inefficiency. 
  • As businesses become inefficient, production costs rise. And that leads to inflation. As money is lent to keep inefficient businesses going, inflation increases even more markedly. The increase in inefficiency is compounded by the growth of the money supply prompted by aggressive lending to keep the economy going. As this persisted over many years, the inefficiencies built into the Chinese economy have become staggering. 
  • The second thing to bear in mind is the overwhelming poverty of China, where 900 million people have an annual per capita income around the same level as Guatemala, Georgia, Indonesia or Mongolia ($3,000-$3,500 a year), while around 500 million of those have an annual per capita income around the same level as India, Nicaragua, Ghana, Uzbekistan or Nigeria ($1,500-$1,700).
  • China's overall per capita GDP is around the same level as the Dominican Republic, Serbia, Thailand or Jamaica.
  • Stimulating an economy where more than a billion people live in deep poverty is impossible. Economic stimulus makes sense when products can be sold to the public.
  • The Chinese have maintained a strategy of depending on exports without taking into account the operation of the business cycle in the West, which means that periodic and substantial contractions of demand will occur. China's industrial plant is geared to Western demand. When Western demand contracted, the result was the mess you see now.
  • The Chinese can prevent the kind of crash that struck East Asia in 1997. Their currency isn't convertible, so there can't be a run on it. They continue to have a command economy; they are still communist, after all. But they cannot avoid the consequences of their economic reality, and the longer they put off the day of reckoning, the harder it will become to recover from it.
  • The Chinese are not going to completely collapse economically any more than the Japanese or South Koreans did. What will happen is that China will behave differently than before. With no choices that don't frighten them, the Chinese will focus on containing the social and political fallout, both by trying to target benefits to politically sensitive groups and by using their excellent security apparatus to suppress and deter unrest.
  • The Chinese economic performance will degrade, but crisis will be avoided and political interests protected. Since much of China never benefited from the boom, there is a massive force that has felt marginalized and victimized by coastal elites. That is not a bad foundation for the Communist Party to rely on.
  • The Chinese are, of course, keeping a great deal of money in U.S. government instruments and other markets. Contrary to fears, that money will not be withdrawn. The Chinese problem isn't a lack of capital, and repatriating that money would simply increase inflation.
  • Had the Chinese been able to put that money to good use, it would have never been invested in the United States in the first place.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jul 13
       
      I'm having a hard time following all the econ stuff, but I understand this to mean that the U.S. is 'old reliable': Not an investment of last resort, but an investment to run to when you don't have a sure thing.
  • Rather than the feared repatriation of funds, the United States will continue to be the target of major Chinese cash inflows.
  • In a world where Europe is still reeling, only the United States is both secure and large enough to contain Chinese appetites for safety. Just as Japanese investment in the 1990s represented capital flight rather than a healthy investment appetite, so the behavior we have seen from Chinese investors in recent years is capital flight:
  • money searching for secure havens regardless of return. This money has underpinned American markets; it is not going away, and in fact more is on the way. 
  • The major shift in the international order will be the decline of China's role in the region. China's ability to project military power in Asia has been substantially overestimated.
  • Its naval capacity is still limited compared with the United States. The idea that it will compensate for internal economic problems by genuine (as opposed to rhetorical) military action is therefore unlikely.
  • In our view, the most important shift will be the re-emergence of Japan as the dominant economic and political power in East Asia in a slow process neither will really want.
  • China will continue to be a major power, and it will continue to matter a great deal economically. Being troubled is not the same as ceasing to exist. China will always exist. It will, however, no longer be the low-wage, high-growth center of the world. Like Japan before it, it will play a different role.
  • anonymous on 23 Jul 13
     
    "Major shifts underway in the Chinese economy that Stratfor has forecast and discussed for years have now drawn the attention of the mainstream media. Many have asked when China would find itself in an economic crisis, to which we have answered that China has been there for awhile -- something not widely recognized outside China, and particularly not in the United States."
anonymous

The Very Angry Tea Party - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-very-angry-tea-party

criticalthinking media politics

shared by anonymous on 14 Jun 10 - Cached
  • The seething anger that seems to be an indigenous aspect of the Tea Party movement arises, I think, at the very place where politics and metaphysics meet, where metaphysical sentiment becomes political belief.
  • When it comes to the Tea Party’s concrete policy proposals, things get fuzzier and more contradictory: keep the government out of health care, but leave Medicare alone; balance the budget, but don’t raise taxes; let individuals take care of themselves, but leave Social Security alone; and, of course, the paradoxical demand not to support Wall Street, to let the hard-working producers of wealth get on with it without regulation and government stimulus, but also to make sure the banks can lend to small businesses and responsible homeowners in a stable but growing economy. 
  • Mark Lilla argued that the hodge-podge list of animosities Tea party supporters mention fail to cohere into a body of political grievances in the conventional sense: they lack the connecting thread of achieving political power. 
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • What Lilla cannot account for, and what no other commentator I have read can explain, is the passionate anger of the Tea Party movement, or, the flip-side of that anger, the ease with which it succumbs to the most egregious of fear-mongering falsehoods. 
  • My hypothesis is that what all the events precipitating the Tea Party movement share is that they demonstrated, emphatically and unconditionally, the depths of the absolute dependence of us all on government action, and in so doing they undermined the deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency that are intrinsic parts of Americans’ collective self-understanding. 
  • they would be politically acceptable only to the degree to which they remained invisible
  • Tea Party anger is, at bottom, metaphysical, not political: what has been undone by the economic crisis is the belief that each individual is metaphysically self-sufficient, that  one’s very standing and being as a rational agent owes nothing to other individuals or institutions. 
  • Each of these social arrangements articulate and express the value and the authority of the individual; they give to the individual a standing she would not have without them.
  • If stated in enough detail, all these institutions and practices should be seen as together manufacturing, and even inventing, the idea of a sovereign individual who becomes, through them and by virtue of them, the ultimate source of authority. 
  • is individual autonomy an irreducible metaphysical given  or a social creation?
  • It is by recognizing one another as autonomous subjects through the institutions of family, civil society and the state that we become such subjects
  • Hegel’s thesis is that all social life is structurally akin to the conditions of love and friendship; we are all bound to one another as firmly as lovers are, with the terrible reminder that the ways of love are harsh, unpredictable and changeable. 
  • because you are the source of my being, when our love goes bad I am suddenly, absolutely dependent on someone for whom I no longer count and who I no longer know how to count; I am exposed, vulnerable, needy, unanchored and without resource. 
  • This is the rage and anger I hear in the Tea Party movement; it is the sound of jilted lovers furious that the other — the anonymous blob called simply “government” — has suddenly let them down, suddenly made clear that they are dependent and limited beings, suddenly revealed them as vulnerable.
  • All the rhetoric of self-sufficiency, all the grand talk of wanting to be left alone is just the hollow insistence of the bereft lover that she can and will survive without her beloved
  • About this imaginary, Mark Lilla was right: it corresponds to no political vision, no political reality.  The great and inspiring metaphysical fantasy of independence and freedom is simply a fantasy of destruction. 
  • In truth, there is nothing that the Tea Party movement wants; terrifyingly, it wants nothing.  Lilla calls the Tea Party “Jacobins”; I would urge that they are nihilists. 
  • anonymous on 14 Jun 10
     
    By J.M. Bernstein (Opinionator Blog) at NYTimes.com on June 13, 2010.
anonymous

The Feeling Of Power (by Isaac Asimov) - 0 views

downlode.org/power.html

technology mathematics fiction scifi

shared by anonymous on 31 Aug 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 31 Aug 10
     
    "Aub said, "Three plus two makes five, you see, so the twenty- one becomes a fifty-one. Now you let that go for a while and start fresh. You multiply seven and two, that's fourteen, and one and two, that's two. Put them down like this and it adds up to thirty-four. Now if you put the thirty-four under the fifty-one this way and add them, you get three hundred and ninety-one, and that's the answer." There was an instant's silence and then General Weider said, "I don't believe it. He goes through this rigmarole and makes up numbers and multiplies and adds them this way and that, but I don't believe it. It's too complicated to be anything but horn-swoggling." "
anonymous

How Max Headroom predicted my job, 20 years before it existed - 0 views

io9.com/...job-20-years-before-it-existed

predictions fiction media

shared by anonymous on 11 Aug 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 11 Aug 10
     
    "The entire 80s cyberpunk Max Headroom TV series is available today on DVD, and one of the pleasures of rewatching the series is discovering how many things it got right about the future." By By Annalee Newitz at io9 on August 10, 2010.
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