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aqconces

BBC - Future - Cancer: The mysterious miracle cases inspiring doctors - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...he-mystery-of-vanishing-cancer

Cancer cure Science

shared by aqconces on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • “We watched for a period of a few months and the tumours just disappeared,”
  • “There had been no doubt about her diagnosis,” he says. “But now there was nothing in the biopsies, or the scans.”
  • After 20 weeks, the patient was cancer-free.
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  • our immune system should hunt out and destroy mutated cells before they ever develop into cancer. Occasionally, however, these cells manage to sneak under the radar, reproducing until they grow into a full-blown tumour.
haubertbr

FDA cracks down on 'illegal' cancer treatments - 1 views

www.cnn.com/...egal-fraudulent-misleading-fda

shared by haubertbr on 26 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • haubertbr on 26 Apr 17
     
    On Tuesday, the agency responsible for policing the American food and drug market issued warning letters to 14 companies that it says are "illegally selling more than 65 products that fraudulently claim to prevent, diagnose, treat or cure cancer." "There's a couple of issues here," Jason Humbert, a regulatory operations officer in the FDA's Office of Regulatory Affairs, told CNN.
katherineharron

Mindfulness: How it could help you be happier, healthier and more successful - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • "Change in humanity must start from individuals," the Dalai Lama told the mayors. "We created this violence, so we can reduce this violence."
  • Paying attention to the matters at hand may sound simple, but most Americans aren't doing it, studies show. Though the experts say there's a lot more research to be done, the number of scientific studies has grown exponentially over the past decade. They show that mindfulness is more than a passing fad; there's early evidence it can help your health.
  • n their 2010 study, they created a computer program that sent questions at random moments to people by iPhone. The program asked, "How are you feeling right now?" "What are you doing right now?" and "Are you thinking about something other than what you're currently doing?"
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  • Of the 2,250 adults who answered the pings, 46.9% were not thinking about the task they were doing at the moment. This was the case for 30% of their activities, with one exception: during sex. That, apparently, had
  • their full attention.
  • To remain mindful, the Dalai Lama said, he sleeps a lot: about nine hours a night. He also gets up at 3 a.m. to meditate. He has another session in the afternoon and one more right before bed.
  • Scientists had Buddhist monks meditate while being scanned by an MRI machine. While strapped to a board and put in the huge, noisy machine, the monks calmed their minds, reduced distractions and paid attention to life moment-by-moment.
  • The participants were then subjected to a stressful day-long training exercise. Both groups had similar spikes in blood pressure and breathing rates during the test, but when it was over, the mindfully trained Marines' heart rate and breathing recovered much faster, as did their nervous systems.
  • The data on stress reduction is pretty good," said Richard J. Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published hundreds of scientific papers about the impact of emotion on the brain and did some of the first MRIs of meditating Buddhist monks.
  • Several workplace studies found that employees who get mindfulness training become more productive and stable. They demonstrate more self-control and efficiency. Employees with mindfulness training also seem to pick up on things faster and can read group dynamics better.
  • Davidson suggests that the data are "much weaker and less convincing" as mindfulness relates to curing a specific disease.It can't cure cancer or chronic pain, but the practice can help manage some of the symptoms. For instance, if you have chronic lower back pain, mindfulness may be as helpful as medication at easing that pain.
Javier E

The Politics Of Science, Ctd - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 0 views

andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/...politics-of-science-ctd-1.html

science conservatism liberalism tension environmentalism

shared by Javier E on 31 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • This won't do. The "anti-science" charge has little to with morality. When someone like Rick Perry - an avowed anthropogenic climate change and evolution denialist - is accused of rejecting science, it's an attack on Perry's epistemological beliefs rather than moral values. Even though the scientific consensus is clear on both questions, Perry refuses to accept both. By rejecting well-supported scientific truths on, say, theological grounds, he is implicitly denying that the scientific method (rather than, say, theological reasoning) is the best way to determine truths about the natural world. That's what being "anti-science" is.
  • Being pro-science may mean being committed to the idea that advancing scientific knowledge is good for the world, sure, but that scientific knowledge doesn't always say we should try to control the natural world. Science is at its core is a reasoning process - we arrive at certain conclusions through experiments, peer evaluation, etc. So if the best scientific evidence suggests "humans do bad things when they mess with the natural world in fashion X" then the science is telling us not to mess with the natural world in fashion X! Indeed, scientific findings often serve as evidence in debates over the environmental impact of new technology, oftentimes on both sides. There's nothing intrinsic to scientific epistemology or practice that implies a moral commitment to increasing human control over the natural world or to widespread commercial use of the new technologies its discoveries enable
  • Another way to put it is that scientists have a goal of advancing human knowledge. They often do that with particular ends in mind (e.g., cancer scientists want to cure cancer), but there's no reason to believe that end is always increasing human control. It could be that a scientist might want to demonstrate the dangers of certain technologies or the limits of human ability to successfully interfere with the workings of the natural world. 
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  • ultimately, it's not whether Levin's broader argument that's really important in this specific case. It's that he's is using obscure conceptual arguments to shield genuinely ignorant people like Perry from criticism. Even if every one of the above arguments is wrong, there's a huge difference between some subtle ethical conflicts and flat-0ut denying the theory of evolution or anthropogenic climate change.
Javier E

Opinion | Republican Science Denial Has Nasty Real-World Consequences - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...epublicans-science-denial.html

science denial GOP history consequences NYT universities bias

shared by Javier E on 11 Sep 24 - No Cached
  • In April 2020, 14 percent reported to Pew Research that they had little or no faith that scientists would “act in the best interest of the public.” By October 2023, that figure had risen to 38 percent.
  • Over the same period, the share of Democrats who voiced little or no confidence rose much less and from a smaller base line — to 13 percent from 9 percent.
  • A paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association on July 31, “Trust in Physicians and Hospitals During the Covid-19 Pandemic in a 50-State Survey of U.S. Adults,” by doctors and health specialists
  • ...49 more annotations...
  • “Empirical data do not support the conclusion of a crisis of public trust in science,” Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science at Harvard and Caltech, write in their 2022 article “From Anti-Government to Anti-Science: Why Conservatives Have Turned Against Science.” But the data “do support the conclusion of a crisis of conservative trust in science.”
  • Between 2018 and 2021, the General Social Survey found that the spread between the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who said they have “a great deal of confidence in the scientific community” rose to 33 points (65-32) from 13 points (54-41).
  • “During the Covid-19 pandemic,” the authors write,medicine and public health more broadly became politicized, with the internet amplifying public figures and even physicians encouraging individuals not to trust the advice of public health experts and scientists. As such, the pandemic may have represented a turning point in trust, with a profession previously seen as trustworthy increasingly subject to doubt.
  • Consider in 2000, 46 percent of Democrats and, almost equivalently, 47 percent of Republicans expressed a great deal of confidence in scientists. In 2022, these respective percentages were 53 percent and 28 percent. In twenty years, a partisan chasm in trust (a 25-percentage point gap) emerged.
  • Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, wrote
  • Distrust of science is arguably the greatest hindrance to societal action to stem numerous threats to the lives of Americans and people worldwide
  • Some people suffer from poor dental health in part because their parents distrusted fluoridation of drinking water. The national failure to invest until recently in combating climate change has raised the odds of pandemics, made diseases more rampant, destabilized entire regions, and spurred a growing crisis of migration and refugees that has helped popularize far-right nativism in many Western democracies.
  • Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, Dallek argued,turbocharged anti-science conspiracy theories and attitudes on the American right, vaulting them to an even more influential place in American politics. Bogus notions — vaccines may cause autism, hydroxychloroquine may cure Covid, climate change isn’t real — have become linchpins of MAGA-era conservatism.
  • People look to their political leaders to provide them with information (“cues” or “heuristics”) about how they ought to think about complex science-related issues.
  • The direction of the partisan response, Bardon wrote, is driven by “who the facts are favoring, and science currently favors bad news for the industrial status quo.
  • The roots of the divergence, however, go back at least 50 years with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970, along with the enactment that same year of the Clean Air Act and two years later of the Clean Water Act.
  • These pillars of the regulatory state were, and still are, deeply dependent on scientific research to set rules and guidelines. All would soon be seen as adversaries of the sections of the business community that are closely allied with the Republican Party
  • These agencies and laws fostered the emergence of what Gordon Gauchat, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, calls “regulatory science.” This relatively new role thrust science into the center of political debates with the result that federal agencies like the E.P.A. and OSHA “are considered adversarial to corporate interests. Regulatory science directly connects to policy management and, therefore, has become entangled in policy debates that are unavoidably ideological.”
  • In their 2022 article, Oreskes and Conway, write that conservatives’ hostility to sciencetook strong hold during the Reagan administration, largely in response to scientific evidence of environmental crises that invited governmental response. Thus, science — particularly environmental and public health science — became the target of conservative anti-regulatory attitudes.
  • “in every sociodemographic group in this survey study among 443, 2f455 unique respondents aged 18 years or older residing in the U.S., trust in physicians and hospitals decreased substantially over the course of the pandemic, from 71.5 percent in April 2020 to 40.1 percent in January 2024.”
  • religious and political skepticism of science have become mutually constitutive and self-reinforcing.
  • and thus secular science, concentrate in the Democratic Party. The process of party-sorting along religious lines has helped turn an ideological divide over science into a partisan one.
  • As partisan elites have staked out increasingly clear positions on issues related to climate change, vaccine hesitancy, and other science-related policy issues, the public has polarized in response.
  • Oreskes and Conway argue that the strength of the anti-science movement was driven by the alliance in the Reagan years between corporate interests and the ascendant religious right, which became an arm of the Republican Party as it supported creationism
  • This creates a feedback cycle, whereby — once public opinion polarizes about science-related issues — political elites have an electoral incentive to appeal to that polarization, both in the anti-science rhetoric they espouse and in expressing opposition to evidence-based policies.
  • In a demographically representative survey of 1,959 U.S. adults, I tracked how intentions to receive preventative cancer vaccines (currently undergoing clinical trials) vary by partisan identity. I find that cancer vaccines are already politically polarizing, such that Republicans are less likely than Democrats to intend to vaccinate.
  • Another key factor driving a wedge between the two parties over the trustworthiness of science is the striking partisan difference over risk tolerance and risk aversion.
  • Their conclusion: “We find, on average, that women are more risk averse than men.”
  • white males were more sympathetic with hierarchical, individualistic, and anti-egalitarian views, more trusting of technology managers, less trusting of government, and less sensitive to potential stigmatization of communities from hazards
  • The group with the consistently lowest risk perceptions across a range of hazards was white males.
  • Furthermore, we found sizable differences between white males and other groups in sociopolitical attitudes.
  • When asked whether “electrons are smaller than atoms” and “what gas makes up most of the earth’s atmosphere: hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide or oxygen,” almost identical shares of religious and nonreligious men and women who scored high on measures of scientific knowledge gave correct answers to the questions.
  • These positions suggest greater confidence in experts and less confidence in public-dominated social processes.
  • In other words, white men — the dominant constituency of the Republican Party, in what is known in the academic literature as “the white male effect” — are relatively risk tolerant and thus more resistant (or less committed) to science-based efforts to reduce the likelihood of harm to people or to the environment
  • major Democratic constituencies are more risk averse and supportive of harm-reducing policies.
  • Insofar as people tend to accept scientific findings that align with their political beliefs and disregard those that contradict them, political views carry more weight than knowledge of science.
  • comparing the answers to scientific questions among religious and nonreligious respondents revealed significant insight into differing views of what is true and what is not.
  • Our survey revealed that men rate a wide range of hazards as lower in risk than do women. Our survey also revealed that whites rate risks lower than do nonwhites
  • However, when asked “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals, true or false,” the religious students high in scientific literacy scored far below their nonreligious counterparts.
  • the evolution question did not measure scientific knowledge but instead was a gauge of “something else: a form of cultural identity.”
  • Kahan then cites a survey that asked “how much risk do you believe climate change poses to human health, safety or prosperity?” The survey demonstrated a striking correlation between political identity and the level of perceived risk: Strong Democrats saw severe risk potential; strong Republicans close to none.
  • the different responses offered by religious and nonreligious respondents to the evolution question were similar to the climate change responses in that they were determined by “cultural identity” — in this case, political identity.
  • Indeed, the inference can be made even stronger by substituting for, or fortifying political outlooks with, even more discerning cultural identity indicators, such as cultural worldviews and their interaction with demographic characteristics such as race and gender. In sum, whether people “believe in” climate change, like whether they “believe in” evolution, expresses who they are.
  • 2023 PNAS paper, “Prosocial Motives Underlie Scientific Censorship by Scientists,” Cory J. Clark, Steven Pinker, David Buss, Philip Tetlock, David Geary and 34 others make the case that the scientific community at times censors itself
  • “Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups.”
  • Clark and her co-authors argue that
  • Prosocial motives for censorship may explain four observations: 1) widespread public availability of scholarship coupled with expanding definitions of harm has coincided with growing academic censorship; 2) women, who are more harm-averse and more protective of the vulnerable than men, are more censorious; 3) although progressives are often less censorious than conservatives, egalitarian progressives are more censorious of information perceived to threaten historically marginalized groups; and 4) academics in the social sciences and humanities (disciplines especially relevant to humans and social policy) are more censorious and more censored than those in STEM.
  • The explicit politicization of academic institutions, including science journals, academic professional societies, universities, and university departments, is likely one causal factor that explains reduced trust in science.
  • Dietram A. Scheufele, who is a professor in science communication at the University of Wisconsin, was sharply critical of what he calls the scientific community’s “self-inflicted wounds”:
  • One is the sometimes gratuitous tendency among scientists to mock groups in society whose values we see as misaligned with our own. This has included prominent climate scientists tweeting that no Republicans are safe to have in Congress, popularizers like Neil deGrasse Tyson trolling Christians on Twitter on Christmas Day.
  • Scheufele warned againstDemocrats’ tendency to align science with other (probably very worthwhile) social causes, including the various yard signs that equate science to B.L.M., gender equality, immigration, etc. The tricky part is that most of these causes are seen as Democratic-leaning policy issues
  • Science is not that. It’s society’s best way of creating and curating knowledge, regardless of what that science will mean for politics, belief systems, or personal preferences.
  • For many on the left, Scheufele wrote,Science has become a signaling device for liberals to distinguish themselves from what they see as “anti-science” Republicans. That spells trouble
  • Science relies on the public perception that it creates knowledge objectively and in a politically neutral way. The moment we lose that aspect of trust, we just become one of the many institutions, including Congress, that have suffered from rapidly eroding levels of public trust.
Javier E

Rush Limbaugh Knows Nothing About Christianity « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...ows-nothing-about-christianity

Christianity capitalism materialism market Pope Francis

shared by Javier E on 04 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Limbaugh is onto something. The Pope of the Catholic Church really is offering a rebuttal to the Pope of the Republican party, which is what Limbaugh has largely become. In daily encyclicals, Rush is infallible in doctrine and not to be questioned in public. When he speaks on the airwaves, it is always ex cathedra. Callers can get an audience from him, but rarely a hearing. Dissent from his eternal doctrines means excommunication from the GOP and the designation of heretic. His is always the last word.
  • the Church in no way disputes the fact that market capitalism is by far the least worst means of raising standards of living and ending poverty and generating wealth that can be used to cure disease, feed the hungry, and protect the vulnerable. What the Church is disputing is that, beyond our daily bread, material well-being is a proper criterion for judging human morality or happiness. On a personal level, the Church teaches, as Jesus unambiguously did, that material goods beyond a certain point are actually pernicious and destructive of human flourishing.
  • The church has long opposed market capitalism as the core measure of human well-being. Aquinas even taught that interest-bearing loans were inherently unjust in the most influential theological document in church history. The fundamental reason is that market capitalism measures human life by a materialist rubric. And Jesus radically taught us to give up all our possessions, to renounce everything except our “daily bread”, to spend our lives serving the poverty-stricken takers rather than aspiring to be the wealthy and powerful makers. He told the Mark Zuckerberg of his day to give everything away to the poor, if he really wanted to be happy.
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  • there is a risk that a radical capitalistic ideology could spread which refuses even to consider these problems, in the a priori belief that any attempt to solve them is doomed to failure and which blindly entrusts their solution to the free development of market forces.
  • Could anyone have offered a more potent critique of current Republican ideology than John Paul II? Could anything better illustrate John Paul II’s critique of radical capitalist ideology than the GOP’s refusal to be concerned in any way about a fundamental question like access to basic healthcare for millions of citizens in the richest country on earth?
  • And in the Church of Limbaugh, market capitalism is an unqualified, eternal good. It is the ever-lasting truth about human beings. It is inextricable from any concept of human freedom. The fewer restrictions on it, the better.
  • the Pope is not making an empirical observation. In so far as he is, he agrees with you. What he’s saying is that this passion for material things is not what makes us good or happy. That’s all
  • if the mania for more and more materialist thrills distracts us from, say, the plight of a working American facing bankruptcy because of cancer, or the child of an illegal immigrant with no secure home, then it is a deeply immoral distraction.
  • material goods are not self-evidently the purpose of life and are usually (and in Jesus’ stern teachings always) paths away from God and our own good and our own happiness.
  • Christianity is one of the most powerful critiques of radical market triumphalism.
Emily Freilich

All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines - Nicholas ... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...309516

automation knowledge technology psychology

shared by Emily Freilich on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • We rely on computers to fly our planes, find our cancers, design our buildings, audit our businesses. That's all well and good. But what happens when the computer fails?
  • On the evening of February 12, 2009, a Continental Connection commuter flight made its way through blustery weather between Newark, New Jersey, and Buffalo, New York.
  • The Q400 was well into its approach to the Buffalo airport, its landing gear down, its wing flaps out, when the pilot’s control yoke began to shudder noisily, a signal that the plane was losing lift and risked going into an aerodynamic stall. The autopilot disconnected, and the captain took over the controls. He reacted quickly, but he did precisely the wrong thing: he jerked back on the yoke, lifting the plane’s nose and reducing its airspeed, instead of pushing the yoke forward to gain velocity.
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  • The crash, which killed all 49 people on board as well as one person on the ground, should never have happened.
  • aptain’s response to the stall warning, the investigators reported, “should have been automatic, but his improper flight control inputs were inconsistent with his training” and instead revealed “startle and confusion.
  • Automation has become so sophisticated that on a typical passenger flight, a human pilot holds the controls for a grand total of just three minutes.
  • We humans have been handing off chores, both physical and mental, to tools since the invention of the lever, the wheel, and the counting bead.
  • And that, many aviation and automation experts have concluded, is a problem. Overuse of automation erodes pilots’ expertise and dulls their reflexes,
  • No one doubts that autopilot has contributed to improvements in flight safety over the years. It reduces pilot fatigue and provides advance warnings of problems, and it can keep a plane airborne should the crew become disabled. But the steady overall decline in plane crashes masks the recent arrival of “a spectacularly new type of accident,”
  • “We’re forgetting how to fly.”
  • The experience of airlines should give us pause. It reveals that automation, for all its benefits, can take a toll on the performance and talents of those who rely on it. The implications go well beyond safety. Because automation alters how we act, how we learn, and what we know, it has an ethical dimension. The choices we make, or fail to make, about which tasks we hand off to machines shape our lives and the place we make for ourselves in the world.
  • What pilots spend a lot of time doing is monitoring screens and keying in data. They’ve become, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say, computer operators.
  • Automation is different now. Computers can be programmed to perform complex activities in which a succession of tightly coordinated tasks is carried out through an evaluation of many variables. Many software programs take on intellectual work—observing and sensing, analyzing and judging, even making decisions—that until recently was considered the preserve of humans.
  • That may leave the person operating the computer to play the role of a high-tech clerk—entering data, monitoring outputs, and watching for failures. Rather than opening new frontiers of thought and action, software ends up narrowing our focus.
  • A labor-saving device doesn’t just provide a substitute for some isolated component of a job or other activity. It alters the character of the entire task, including the roles, attitudes, and skills of the people taking part.
  • when we work with computers, we often fall victim to two cognitive ailments—complacency and bias—that can undercut our performance and lead to mistakes. Automation complacency occurs when a computer lulls us into a false sense of security. Confident that the machine will work flawlessly and handle any problem that crops up, we allow our attention to drift.
  • Automation bias occurs when we place too much faith in the accuracy of the information coming through our monitors. Our trust in the software becomes so strong that we ignore or discount other information sources, including our own eyes and ears
  • Examples of complacency and bias have been well documented in high-risk situations—on flight decks and battlefields, in factory control rooms—but recent studies suggest that the problems can bedevil anyone working with a computer
  • Automation turns us from actors into observers. Instead of manipulating the yoke, we watch the screen. That shift may make our lives easier, but it can also inhibit the development of expertise.
  • Since the late 1970s, psychologists have been documenting a phenomenon called the “generation effect.” It was first observed in studies of vocabulary, which revealed that people remember words much better when they actively call them to mind—when they generate them—than when they simply read them.
  • When you engage actively in a task, you set off intricate mental processes that allow you to retain more knowledge. You learn more and remember more. When you repeat the same task over a long period, your brain constructs specialized neural circuits dedicated to the activit
  • What looks like instinct is hard-won skill, skill that requires exactly the kind of struggle that modern software seeks to alleviate.
  • In many businesses, managers and other professionals have come to depend on decision-support systems to analyze information and suggest courses of action. Accountants, for example, use the systems in corporate audits. The applications speed the work, but some signs suggest that as the software becomes more capable, the accountants become less so.
  • What’s most astonishing, and unsettling, about computer automation is that it’s still in its early stages.
  • Experts used to assume that there were limits to the ability of programmers to automate complicated tasks, particularly those involving sensory perception, pattern recognition, and conceptual knowledge
  • Who needs humans, anyway? That question, in one rhetorical form or another, comes up frequently in discussions of automation. If computers’ abilities are expanding so quickly and if people, by comparison, seem slow, clumsy, and error-prone, why not build immaculately self-contained systems that perform flawlessly without any human oversight or intervention? Why not take the human factor out of the equation?
  • The cure for imperfect automation is total automation.
  • That idea is seductive, but no machine is infallible. Sooner or later, even the most advanced technology will break down, misfire, or, in the case of a computerized system, encounter circumstances that its designers never anticipated. As automation technologies become more complex, relying on interdependencies among algorithms, databases, sensors, and mechanical parts, the potential sources of failure multiply. They also become harder to detect.
  • conundrum of computer automation.
  • Because many system designers assume that human operators are “unreliable and inefficient,” at least when compared with a computer, they strive to give the operators as small a role as possible.
  • People end up functioning as mere monitors, passive watchers of screens. That’s a job that humans, with our notoriously wandering minds, are especially bad at
  • people have trouble maintaining their attention on a stable display of information for more than half an hour. “This means,” Bainbridge observed, “that it is humanly impossible to carry out the basic function of monitoring for unlikely abnormalities.”
  • a person’s skills “deteriorate when they are not used,” even an experienced operator will eventually begin to act like an inexperienced one if restricted to just watching.
  • You can program software to shift control back to human operators at frequent but irregular intervals; knowing that they may need to take command at any moment keeps people engaged, promoting situational awareness and learning.
  • You can put limits on the scope of automation, making sure that people working with computers perform challenging tasks rather than merely observing.
  • most software applications don’t foster learning and engagement. In fact, they have the opposite effect. That’s because taking the steps necessary to promote the development and maintenance of expertise almost always entails a sacrifice of speed and productivity.
  • Learning requires inefficiency. Businesses, which seek to maximize productivity and profit, would rarely accept such a trade-off. Individuals, too, almost always seek efficiency and convenience.
  • Abstract concerns about the fate of human talent can’t compete with the allure of saving time and money.
  • The small island of Igloolik, off the coast of the Melville Peninsula in the Nunavut territory of northern Canada, is a bewildering place in the winter.
  • , Inuit hunters have for some 4,000 years ventured out from their homes on the island and traveled across miles of ice and tundra to search for game. The hunters’ ability to navigate vast stretches of the barren Arctic terrain, where landmarks are few, snow formations are in constant flux, and trails disappear overnight, has amazed explorers and scientists for centuries. The Inuit’s extraordinary way-finding skills are born not of technological prowess—they long eschewed maps and compasses—but of a profound understanding of winds, snowdrift patterns, animal behavior, stars, and tides.
  • The Igloolik hunters have begun to rely on computer-generated maps to get around. Adoption of GPS technology has been particularly strong among younger Inuit, and it’s not hard to understand why.
  • But as GPS devices have proliferated on Igloolik, reports of serious accidents during hunts have spread. A hunter who hasn’t developed way-finding skills can easily become lost, particularly if his GPS receiver fails.
  • The routes so meticulously plotted on satellite maps can also give hunters tunnel vision, leading them onto thin ice or into other hazards a skilled navigator would avoid.
  • An Inuit on a GPS-equipped snowmobile is not so different from a suburban commuter in a GPS-equipped SUV: as he devotes his attention to the instructions coming from the computer, he loses sight of his surroundings. He travels “blindfolded,” as Aporta puts it
  • A unique talent that has distinguished a people for centuries may evaporate in a generation.
  • Computer automation severs the ends from the means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing. As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face an existential question: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want?
  • Emily Freilich on 01 Nov 13
     
    Automation increases efficiency and speed of tasks, but decreases the individual's knowledge of a task and decrease's a human's ability to learn. 
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