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Rich countries that let inequality run rampant make citizens unhappy, study finds | Ine... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-rampant-make-citizens-unhappy inequality study research psychology satisfaction happiness international longitudinal
shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • Countries that allow economic inequality to increase as they grow richer make their citizens less happy, a new study shows.
  • Until now, researchers have believed that inequality was largely irrelevant to levels of life satisfaction,
  • his study of 78 countries spanning four decades – the largest longitudinal research of its kind – punctures that myth
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  • “When inequality increases, people with high incomes don’t benefit much from their gains – many rich people are focused on those who have even more than they do, and they never feel they have enough,”
  • “But people who earn little really suffer from falling further behind – they feel excluded and frustrated by not being able to keep up even with people who receive average incomes.”
  • examined survey data of life satisfaction levels, where people rate their life satisfaction on a scale of one to 10, and linked it to Gini coefficient numbers – a measure of inequality – from 1981 to 2020.
  • In 1981, as the UK was gripped by a recession, life satisfaction stood at 7.7. But during the economic boom of the 1980s, inequality grew, and the research shows that the happiness figure dropped to 7.4 by 1999.
  • However, as measures to reduce inequality began to take effect, happiness slowly returned so that by 2018, life satisfaction stood at 7.8.
  • Any country that moved from the lowest quarter of countries in terms of inequality to the highest quarter saw a decrease in life satisfaction of about 0.4 on the 10-point scale, he found.
  • India’s life satisfaction declined from 6.7 in 1990 to 5.8 in 2006 as inequality rose. By 2012 it was still lower than in 1990, despite the country’s prolonged economic boom.
  • The US and Australia also both saw pronounced falls in life satisfaction, but those countries where inequality had fallen were generally happier, such as Poland, Peru, Mexico and Ukraine, before the Russian invasion.
  • “In some of the previous research, you see people saying ‘inequality isn’t that big a deal, so all efforts to address inequality are misguided because inequality is beneficial’.
  • “I think that’s misguided – inequality is generally damaging to people’s life satisfaction so we should pay attention to efforts to mitigate it,
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Debunking 3 Viral Rumors About the Texas Shooting - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-shooting-misinformation.html rumors shooting new york times
shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Here are three of the most prominent rumors that have spread on online platforms such as Twitter, Gab, 4chan and Reddit.
  • Among their unfounded claims were that the shooting had been orchestrated to draw local law enforcement away from the border, allowing criminals and drugs to cross into the United States, and that gun-control advocates had organized the tragedy to stoke public outrage.
  • he conspiracy theorist and broadcaster Alex Jones of Infowars has lied for years that the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was staged by the federal government, with people pretending to be survivors and victims’ parents. Last year, Mr. Jones lost four defamation lawsuits filed by victims’ families, many of whom have been harassed by his believers.
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  • Hours after the attack, a post on the fringe online message board 4chan circulated claiming that the gunman was transgender.
  • where people falsely claimed that the shooting was a result of hormone therapy undertaken by the gunman.
  • “There is an overwhelming number of individuals who are posting images of this person, who was the shooter, and information about the nature of them being transgender,”
  • On Tuesday, a transgender artist said on Reddit that people online “just took my photos and used it to spread misinformation.”
  • False claims that the gunman was born outside the United States began to circulate within hours of the shooting. Spread largely on white nationalist Telegram channels and Gab accounts, the claims alleged that he was an undocumented immigrant in the United States, even after authorities including Roland Gutierrez, a Texas state senator, confirmed that the gunman was born in North Dakota.
  • “Did he cross the border illegally?” Code of Vets, a veterans organization, posted on Twitter. “Our nation has a serious national security crisis evolving.”
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Data Sharing Knowledge Gaps Widespread Among Patients - 0 views

healthitanalytics.com/...gaps-widespread-among-patients data sharing knowledge
shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The Health Care Data Sharing Survey, commissioned and published by Chicago-based clinical data management company Q-Centrix, was conducted in December 2021 with a sample size of 1,191 people.
  • Fifty-three percent of respondents were female, and 47 percent were male. Respondents fell into four age groups: 18-29 (21 percent), 30-44 (27 percent), 45-60 (29 percent), and over 60 (23 percent). Respondents were also split based on household income: $49,999 or less (41 percent), $50,000-$99,999 (34 percent), and $100,000 or more (25 percent).
  • These patient concerns may translate to a hesitancy to share data for purposes other than improving their own healthcare. Some respondents said they were unsure about whether they’d be willing to share their de-identified healthcare data for clinical research (21 percent), to improve hospital services (22 percent), to improve other patients’ healthcare (22 percent), and to advance care equity and identify disparities (24 percent).
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  • Over half (51 percent) of respondents reported that they either didn’t believe or weren’t sure that the data recorded in their EMRs was accurate.
  • The healthcare industry’s growing reliance on clinical data and EHRs requires that patients are educated and empowered about data collection, sharing, and use, the report authors noted. Bridging knowledge gaps between health systems and patients has the potential to significantly improve care, medical research, and health equity.
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Narcissistic bosses stymie knowledge flow, cooperation inside organizations -- ScienceD... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...220601155508.htm knowledge cooperation
shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Narcissism is a prominent trait among top executives, and most people have seen the evidence in their workplaces.
  • These individuals believe they have superior confidence, intelligence and judgment, and will pursue any opportunity to reinforce those inflated self-views and gain admiration. According to new research from the University of Washington, narcissism can also cause knowledge barriers within organizations.
  • Narcissists hinder this knowledge transfer due to a sense of superiority that leads them to overestimate the value of internal knowledge and underestimate the value of external knowledge.
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  • Many big companies are what one would describe as multi-business firms, an organizational form where you have a corporate parent and subsidiary units," said co-author Abhinav Gupta
  • "Narcissism affects people's desire to be distinctive," Gupta said. "It's correlated by people wanting glory for themselves. We hypothesized that business-unit heads that have those traits would be the ones to say, 'We don't want to work with you. We have sufficient skills and knowledge and abilities that we will work independently.' That was very strongly borne out based on our research design."
  • The study found that unit-head narcissism can prevent knowledge sharing. That tendency diminished in fast-changing or complex environments because narcissists had an excuse to pursue external ideas. But when businesses have high inter-unit competition, narcissists are more tempted to distinguish themselves from other units.
  • "This research kind of goes against the grain of that. If you create the perception of competition inside an organization, then that will have some downstream effects. You will be essentially foregoing some essential knowledge-sharing activities."
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Why pilots are seeing UFOs | CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html ufos cnn
shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • For centuries, people have witnessed unexplained lights in the sky and thought that perhaps they might be ghosts or angels. However, it was in the summer of 1947 when a different explanation became popular. Following a widely reported incident over Mt. Rainier in Washington state, people began to believe that these unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are actually alien spacecraft prowling the Earth.
  • Over the past 70 years, more than ten thousand similar reports have been made.
  • The problem is that many people jump directly from the “unidentified” in “UFO” to “flying saucer.” And that’s just too large a jump to be reasonable. There is simply no credible evidence that the Earth is being visited by aliens. There are no artifacts, no clear photographs, no captured aliens, no alien bodies – nothing.
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  • In 2004, Navy fighter jet pilots operating from the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier reported seeing UFOs off the coast of San Diego. And, more recently, other military pilots flying with the USS Theodore Roosevelt in the Atlantic made similar claims. The news of those accounts became public knowledge from a story in the New York Times and a new miniseries on the History Channel.
  • Some accounts simply arose from nothing more than the fevered imaginations of UFO enthusiasts.
  • An eyewitness can be an unreliable source of information and, in the case of something as extraordinary as the observation of alien spacecraft, pedestrian evidence simply won’t do. As Carl Sagan often said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
  • Even though there were multiple observations of multiple phenomena, what is missing is multiple reports of the same phenomenon. It would be hasty to link these independent observations together.
  • But I’m going to need much better evidence than what we have so far. In the meantime, let’s keep an eye on these reports. You know… just in case.
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Trump aide Peter Navarro indicted for contempt of Jan. 6 Capitol probe - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...-6-capitol-probe-subpoena.html
shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Trump White House trade advisor Peter Navarro was arrested at an airport Friday on a federal indictment charging him with two counts of contempt of Congress for his refusal to comply with a subpoena issued by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
  • The House of Representatives in April voted to ask the U.S. Justice Department to criminally prosecute Navarro and Dan Scavino, another former Trump aide, for failing to comply with their subpoenas.
  • During the proceeding, he railed against prosecutors for alleging colluding with a “partisan Congress” and the White House of Democratic President Joe Biden.
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  • “Who are these people? This is not America,” Navarro said. “I was a distinguished public servant for four years.”
  • A Feb. 9 letter to Navarro from the House committee issued with the subpoena said the panel had reason to believe he had information relevant to the investigation in the riot and invasion of the Capitol, which disrupted for hours the certification by a joint session of Congress of the election of Biden.
  • Navarro called the circumstances of that arrest an example of “prosecutorial misconduct.”
  • Navarro argues in his suit that the committee was improperly created and that its subpoenas, as a result, are unenforceable.
  • Navarro is next due to appear in court on June 17.
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Craig Nason : I survived the Columbine school shooting - then watched Uvalde ... - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...e-repeat-cycle-death-rcna31338 school shooting
shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • In April 1999, I survived the Columbine shooting. At just 17 years old, I was forced to process the murder of my friends, the trauma of my community, and the unique attention the world paid to my experience. At the time, Columbine was considered a once-in-a-generation type of tragedy — one that few other people in our country would ever have to contend with. 
  • According to the organization Everytown for Gun Safety, the U.S. has experienced 274 mass shootings since 2009 alone. Thousands of survivors are now part of a club that nobody wants to join.
  • I think about how we vowed to “never forget” Columbine. How we would make sure the next generation would be safer. The opposite has happened.
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  • You likely have memories associated with some of these shootings. What you were doing when you heard. Who you were with. How it affected you. When the headlines break, I often hear from friends, family, and colleagues: “I’m so sorry you have to relive this again.” The truth is, we are all reliving it again on some level. The steady cadence of shock, grief and pain is our collective story.
  • So now that the “thoughts and prayers” have been shared, what can we do together? 
  • Politicians love to tell us not to “politicize these tragedies” following mass shootings.
  • Would you care if an earlier tragedy was politicized if it meant getting your son or daughter back? Of course not. Grief doesn’t have a political affiliation. 
  • Then, change the culture. It’s impossible to ignore the role white supremacy, misogyny and extremism plays in so many mass gun violence events. In many mass shootings, the shooter has exhibited dangerous warning signs before the shooting.
  • Because it’s about the guns. The United States has roughly 5 percent of the world’s population and over 30 percent of the world’s mass shootings.
  • And while politicians love to act like this is an impossibly polarizing issue, perhaps we’re not as divided as we think. The majority of Americans actually believe Congress should pass more extensive gun legislation. According to a 2015 Public Policy Polling survey, 83 percent of gun owners support expanded background checks.
  • A new generation has grown up since Columbine; 310,000 more students in the U.S. have experienced gun violence since that day in 1999 when I escaped with my life.
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'Quantum Internet' Inches Closer With Advance in Data Teleportation - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...um-internet-teleportation.html new york times internet
shared by peterconnelly on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • From Santa Barbara, Calif., to Hefei, China, scientists are developing a new kind of computer that will make today’s machines look like toys.
  • the technology will perform tasks in minutes that even supercomputers could not complete in thousands of years.
  • The new experiment indicates that scientists can stretch a quantum network across an increasingly large number of sites. “We are now building small quantum networks in the lab,” said Ronald Hanson
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  • Quantum teleportation — what he called “spooky action at a distance” — can transfer information between locations without actually moving the physical matter that holds it.
  • This technology could profoundly change the way data travels from place to place. It draws on more than a century of research involving quantum mechanics, a field of physics that governs the subatomic realm and behaves unlike anything we experience in our everyday lives. Quantum teleportation not only moves data between quantum computers, but it also does so in such a way that no one can intercept it.
  • These entangled systems could be electrons, particles of light or other objects. In the Netherlands, Dr. Hanson and his team used what is called a nitrogen vacancy center — a tiny empty space in a synthetic diamond in which electrons can be trapped.
  • Traditional computers perform calculations by processing “bits” of information, with each bit holding either a 1 or a 0. By harnessing the strange behavior of quantum mechanics, a quantum bit, or qubit, can store a combination of 1 and 0 — a little like how a spinning coin holds the tantalizing possibility that it will turn up either heads or tails when it finally falls flat on the table.
  • Researchers believe these devices could one day speed the creation of new medicines, power advances in artificial intelligence and summarily crack the encryption that protects computers vital to national security. Across the globe, governments, academic labs, start-ups and tech giants are spending billions of dollars exploring the technology.
  • Although it cannot move objects from place to place, it can move information by taking advantage of a quantum property called “entanglement”: A change in the state of one quantum system instantaneously affects the state of another, distant one.
  • “It does not work that way today. Google knows what you are running on its servers.”
  • The information also cannot be intercepted. A future quantum internet, powered by quantum teleportation, could provide a new kind of encryption that is theoretically unbreakable.
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THE BASES OF THE MIND:THE RELATIONSHIP OF LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT | by Koç Unive... - 0 views

medium.com/...guage-and-thought-a0bf30375528
shared by marvelgr on 13 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • We can talk about three different interactions when we investigate the complex relationships between language and thinking. First, the existence of language as a cognitive process affects the system of thinking. Second, thinking comes before language, and the learning of a language interacts with the conceptual process that is formed before language use. Third, each language spoken may affect the system of thinking. Here we will discuss these three interactions under these subsections: “thinking without language,” “thinking before language,” and “thinking with language.”
  • Babies can categorize objects and actions, understand the cause and effect relationship between events, and see the goals in a movement. Recent studies on action representation and spatial concepts have shown that babies’ universal and language-general action representation productively changes with the learning of the mother tongue. For example, languages use prepositions to express the relationship between objects, i.e., in, on, under. However, languages also vary how they use these relations. One of the most significant studies suggests that babies can differentiate between concepts expressed with prepositions such as containment (in) and support (on). The Korean language specifies the nature of these containment and support relationships using the tightness of the relationship between objects: tight or loose. For example, a pencil in a pencil-size box represents a tight relationship, while a pencil in a big basket represents a loose relationship.
  • In the late 1800s, anthropologist Franz Boas laid the foundations of cultural relativity. According to this point of view, individuals see and perceive the world within the boundaries of their cultures. The role of anthropology is to investigate how people are conditioned by their culture and how they interact with the world in different ways. To understand such mechanisms, it suggests, implications in culture and language should be studied. The reflection of this view in the relationship between language and thought is the linguistic determinism hypothesis advanced by Eric Safir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. This hypothesis suggests that thought emerges only with the effect of language and concepts that are believed to exist even in infancy fade away due to the language learned.
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  • In conclusion, there is a nested relationship between language and thought. In the interaction processes mentioned above, the role of language changes. Even though the limits of our language are different from the limits of our thinking, it is inevitable that people prioritize concepts in their languages. This, however, does not mean that they cannot comprehend or think about concepts that do not exist in their language.
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Writing History: An Introductory Guide to How History Is Produced | AHA - 0 views

www.historians.org/...ide-to-how-history-is-produced
shared by criscimagnael on 30 May 22 - No Cached
  • In fact, history is NOT a "collection of facts about the past." History consists of making arguments about what happened in the past on the basis of what people recorded (in written documents, cultural artifacts, or oral traditions) at the time.
  • The problem is complicated for major events that produce "winners" and "losers," since we are more likely to have sources written by the "winners," designed to show why they were heroic in their victories.
  • There is no interpretation. There is no explanation of why the Mexicas lost.
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  • Many individuals believe that history is about telling stories, but most historians also want answers to questions like why did the Mexicas lose?
  • Unfortunately, in the case of the conquest of Mexico, there is only one genuine primary source written from 1519-1521. This primary source consists of the letters Cortés wrote and sent to Spain.
  • Ideally, under each of these "thesis statements," that is, each of these arguments about why the Mexicas were defeated, the authors will give some examples of information that backs up their "thesis." To write effective history and history essays, in fact to write successfully in any area, you should begin your essay with the "thesis" or argument you want to prove with concrete examples that support your thesis.
  • To become a critical reader, to empower yourself to "own your own history," you should think carefully about whether the evidence the authors provide does in fact support their theses. 
  • Or, if your professor has said something in class that you are not sure about, find material to disprove it—the "trash the prof" approach (and, yes, it is really okay if you have the evidence).
  • If one analyzes omens in the conquest, will it change the theses or interpretations presented in the textbook?
  • One way to think about the primary sources is to ask the questions: (1) when was the source written, (2) who is the intended audience of the source, (3) what are the similarities between the accounts, (4) what are the differences between the accounts, (5) what pieces of information in the accounts will support your thesis, and (6) what information in the sources are totally irrelevant to the thesis or argument you want to make.
    • criscimagnael
      criscimagnael on 30 May 22
       
      OPCVL!
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Before Kyle Rittenhouse's Murder Trial, a Debate Over Terms Like 'Victim' - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rittenhouse-trial-victims.html law bias language
shared by kiraagne on 28 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • A judge’s decision that the word “victim” generally could not be used in court to refer to the people shot by Kyle Rittenhouse after protests in Kenosha, Wis., last year drew widespread attention and outrage this week.
  • Mr. Rittenhouse, who has been charged with six criminal counts, including first-degree reckless homicide, first-degree intentional homicide and attempted first-degree intentional homicide in the deaths of two men and the wounding of another, is expected to argue that he fired his gun because he feared for his life.
  • Prosecutors say he was a violent vigilante who illegally possessed the rifle and whose actions resulted in chaos and bloodshed.
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  • This week, as Judge Schroeder ruled on a motion by the prosecution, he also said that he would allow the terms “looters” and “rioters” to be used to refer to the men who were shot
  • The experts said the term “victim” can appear prejudicial in a court of law, heavily influencing a jury by presupposing which people have been wronged.
  • State law in Wisconsin allows a person to fire in self-defense if the shooter “reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself.”Editors’ PicksTo Save a Swirling Season, Atlanta Turned to Soft ServeThink You Know the 1960s? ‘The Shattering’ Asks You to Think Again.
  • “In a self-defense case, the people who were shot are to some extent on trial,
  • Prosecutors have repeatedly tried to introduce evidence of Mr. Rittenhouse’s associations with the far-right Proud Boys, as well as a cellphone video taken weeks before the shootings in Kenosha in which Mr. Rittenhouse suggested that he wished he had his rifle so he could shoot men leaving a pharmacy. The judge did not allow either as evidence for trial.
  • Thomas Binger, a prosecutor, argued that the judge was creating a “double standard” and said that the words he sought to have prohibited — relating to rioting and other damage — were “as loaded, if not more loaded, than the term ‘victim.’
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Opinion | We Have Two Visions of the Future, and Both Are Wrong - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...global-crisis-future.html crisis culture history possible transformation open worldview future
shared by Javier E on 25 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • these fears can no longer be confined to a fanatical fringe of gun-toting survivalists. The relentless onslaught of earthshaking crises, unfolding against the backdrop of flash floods and forest fires, has steadily pushed apocalyptic sentiment into the mainstream. When even the head of the United Nations warns that rising sea levels could unleash “a mass exodus on a biblical scale,” it is hard to remain sanguine about the state of the world. One survey found that over half of young adults now believe that “humanity is doomed” and “the future is frightening.”
  • At the same time, recent years have also seen the resurgence of a very different kind of narrative. Exemplified by a slew of best-selling books and viral TED talks, this view tends to downplay the challenges we face and instead insists on the inexorable march of human progress. If doomsday thinkers worry endlessly that things are about to get a lot worse, the prophets of progress maintain that things have only been getting better — and are likely to continue to do so in the future.
  • If things are really getting better, there is clearly no need for transformative change to confront the most pressing problems of our time. So long as we stick to the script and keep our faith in the redeeming qualities of human ingenuity and technological innovation, all our problems will eventually resolve themselves.
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  • It is easy to understand the appeal of such one-sided tales. As human beings, we seem to prefer to impose clear and linear narratives on a chaotic and unpredictable reality; ambiguity and contradiction are much harder to live with.
  • To truly grasp the complex nature of our current time, we need first of all to embrace its most terrifying aspect: its fundamental open-endedness. It is precisely this radical uncertainty — not knowing where we are and what lies ahead — that gives rise to such existential anxiety.
  • Anthropologists have a name for this disturbing type of experience: liminality
  • liminality originally referred to the sense of disorientation that arises during a rite of passage. In a traditional coming-of-age ritual, for instance, it marks the point at which the adolescent is no longer considered a child but is not yet recognized as an adult — betwixt and between
  • We are ourselves in the midst of a painful transition, a sort of interregnum, as the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci famously called it, between an old world that is dying and a new one that is struggling to be born. Such epochal shifts are inevitably fraught with danger
  • the great upheavals in world history can equally be seen “as genuine signs of vitality” that “clear the ground” of discredited ideas and decaying institutions. “The crisis,” he wrote, “is to be regarded as a new nexus of growth.”
  • Once we embrace this Janus-faced nature of our times, at once frightening yet generative, a very different vision of the future emerges.
  • we see phases of relative calm punctuated every so often by periods of great upheaval. These crises can be devastating, but they are also the drivers of history.
  • even the collapse of modern civilization — but it may also open up possibilities for transformative change
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You Have Permission to Be a Smartphone Skeptic - The Bulwark - 0 views

www.thebulwark.com/ion-to-be-a-smartphone-skeptic smartphone weaponisation tech psychology manipulation internet social media education
shared by Javier E on 28 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • the brief return of one of my favorite discursive topics—are the kids all right?—in one of my least-favorite variations: why shouldn’t each of them have a smartphone and tablet?
  • One camp says yes, the kids are fine
  • complaints about screen time merely conceal a desire to punish hard-working parents for marginally benefiting from climbing luxury standards, provide examples of the moral panic occasioned by all new technologies, or mistakenly blame screens for ill effects caused by the general political situation.
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  • No, says the other camp, led by Jonathan Haidt; the kids are not all right, their devices are partly to blame, and here are the studies showing why.
  • we should not wait for the replication crisis in the social sciences to resolve itself before we consider the question of whether the naysayers are on to something. And normal powers of observation and imagination should be sufficient to make us at least wary of smartphones.
  • These powerful instruments represent a technological advance on par with that of the power loom or the automobile
  • The achievement can be difficult to properly appreciate because instead of exerting power over physical processes and raw materials, they operate on social processes and the human psyche: They are designed to maximize attention, to make it as difficult as possible to look away.
  • they have transformed the qualitative experience of existing in the world. They give a person’s sociality the appearance and feeling of a theoretically endless open network, while in reality, algorithms quietly sort users into ideological, aesthetic, memetic cattle chutes of content.
  • Importantly, the process by which smartphones change us requires no agency or judgment on the part of a teen user, and yet that process is designed to provide what feels like a perfectly natural, inevitable, and complete experience of the world.
  • Smartphones offer a tactile portal to a novel digital environment, and this environment is not the kind of space you enter and leave
  • One reason commonly offered for maintaining our socio-technological status quo is that nothing really has changed with the advent of the internet, of Instagram, of Tiktok and Youtube and 4Chan
  • It is instead a complete shadow world of endless images; disembodied, manipulable personas; and the ever-present gaze of others. It lives in your pocket and in your mind.
  • The price you pay for its availability—and the engine of its functioning—is that you are always available to it, as well. Unless you have a strength of will that eludes most adults, its emissaries can find you at any hour and in any place to issue your summons to the grim pleasure palace.
  • the self-restraint and self-discipline required to use a smartphone well—that is, to treat it purely as an occasional tool rather than as a totalizing way of life—are unreasonable things to demand of teenagers
  • these are unreasonable things to demand of me, a fully adult woman
  • To enjoy the conveniences that a smartphone offers, I must struggle against the lure of the permanent scroll, the notification, the urge to fix my eyes on the circle of light and keep them fixed. I must resist the default pseudo-activity the smartphone always calls its user back to, if I want to have any hope of filling the moments of my day with the real activity I believe is actually valuable.
  • for a child or teen still learning the rudiments of self-control, still learning what is valuable and fulfilling, still learning how to prioritize what is good over the impulse of the moment, it is an absurd bar to be asked to clear
  • The expectation that children and adolescents will navigate new technologies with fully formed and muscular capacities for reason and responsibility often seems to go along with a larger abdication of responsibility on the part of the adults involved.
  • adults have frequently given in to a Faustian temptation: offering up their children’s generation to be used as guinea pigs in a mass longitudinal study in exchange for a bit more room to breathe in their own undeniably difficult roles as educators, caretakers, and parents.
  • It is not a particular activity that you start and stop and resume, and it is not a social scene that you might abandon when it suits you.
  • And this we must do without waiting for social science to hand us a comprehensive mandate it is fundamentally unable to provide; without cowering in panic over moral panics
  • The pre-internet advertising world was vicious, to be sure, but when the “pre-” came off, its vices were moved into a compound interest account. In the world of online advertising, at any moment, in any place, a user engaged in an infinite scroll might be presented with native content about how one Instagram model learned to accept her chunky (size 4) thighs, while in the next clip, another model relates how a local dermatologist saved her from becoming an unlovable crone at the age of 25
  • developing pathological interests and capacities used to take a lot more work than it does now
  • You had to seek it out, as you once had to seek out pornography and look someone in the eye while paying for it. You were not funneled into it by an omnipresent stream of algorithmically curated content—the ambience of digital life, so easily mistaken by the person experiencing it as fundamentally similar to the non-purposive ambience of the natural world.
  • And when interpersonal relations between teens become sour, nasty, or abusive, as they often do and always have, the unbalancing effects of transposing social life to the internet become quite clear
  • For both young men and young women, the pornographic scenario—dominance and degradation, exposure and monetization—creates an experiential framework for desires that they are barely experienced enough to understand.
  • This is not a world I want to live in. I think it hurts everyone; but I especially think it hurts those young enough to receive it as a natural state of affairs rather than as a profound innovation.
  • so I am baffled by the most routine objection to any blaming of smartphones for our society-wide implosion of teenagers’ mental health,
  • In short, and inevitably, today’s teenagers are suffering from capitalism—specifically “late capitalism,
  • what shocks me about this rhetorical approach is the rush to play defense for Apple and its peers, the impulse to wield the abstract concept of capitalism as a shield for actually existing, extremely powerful, demonstrably ruthless capitalist actors.
  • This motley alliance of left-coded theory about the evils of business and right-coded praxis in defense of a particular evil business can be explained, I think, by a deeper desire than overthrowing capitalism. It is the desire not to be a prude or hysteric of bumpkin
  • No one wants to come down on the side of tamping off pleasures and suppressing teen activity.
  • No one wants to be the shrill or leaden antagonist of a thousand beloved movies, inciting moral panics, scheming about how to stop the youths from dancing on Sunday.
  • But commercial pioneers are only just beginning to explore new frontiers in the profit-driven, smartphone-enabled weaponization of our own pleasures against us
  • To limit your moral imagination to the archetypes of the fun-loving rebel versus the stodgy enforcers in response to this emerging reality is to choose to navigate it with blinders on, to be a useful idiot for the robber barons of online life rather than a challenger to the corrupt order they maintain.
  • The very basic question that needs to be asked with every product rollout and implementation is what technologies enable a good human life?
  • this question is not, ultimately, the province of social scientists, notwithstanding how useful their work may be on the narrower questions involved. It is the free privilege, it is the heavy burden, for all of us, to think—to deliberate and make judgments about human good, about what kind of world we want to live in, and to take action according to that thought.
  • I am not sure how to build a world in which childrens and adolescents, at least, do not feel they need to live their whole lives online.
  • whatever particular solutions emerge from our negotiations with each other and our reckonings with the force of cultural momentum, they will remain unavailable until we give ourselves permission to set the terms of our common life.
  • But the environments in which humans find themselves vary significantly, and in ways that have equally significant downstream effects on the particular expression of human nature in that context.
  • most of all, without affording Apple, Facebook, Google, and their ilk the defensive allegiance we should reserve for each other.
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Germans Protect Memorials to Soviet Troops Who Defeated Nazis - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...many-soviet-war-monuments.html history remembrance monument germany wwII
shared by Javier E on 28 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • In interviews across three German states, historians, activists, officials and ordinary citizens explained their support for monuments glorifying a former enemy and occupier as a mixture of bureaucratic drift, aversion to change and a rock-solid commitment to honoring the victims of Nazi aggression that trumps any shifts in global affairs.
  • “We were taught to learn from pain,” said Teresa Schneidewind, 33, the head of Lützen’s museum. “We care for our memorials, because they allow us to learn from the mistakes of past generations.”
  • Germany’s top court ruled just last year against the removal of a medieval, antisemitic sculpture in the very church where Martin Luther had preached. Despite debates, some swastikas from the Third Reich have been left on church bells.
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  • Red Army memorials are just some of the divisive symbols that persist in Germany long after the political systems and social mores that sustained them have vanished, a reckoning with parallels in the United States and elsewhere.
  • Officials say their duty to care for such memorials dates to the so-called Good Neighbor agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1990. Under that measure, each nation committed itself to the upkeep of the other’s war graves on its territory.
  • This propensity for what Ms. Schneidewind calls “historical hoarding” means that many Soviet memorials in East Germany contain Stalin’s name nearly 70 years after the dictator was largely purged from public spaces in Russia itself.
  • Most of the Red Army monuments in Germany are believed to have been built above the graves of Soviet soldiers or prisoners of war. The Russian Embassy has used the pact to draw the German government’s attention to Soviet monuments, including the one in Lützen, that have been damaged or neglected.
  • “Instead of tearing them down, you should redefine these memorials,” Mr. Nagel said. “You need to explain why they are here, and why you have a different view of them now.”
  • In Lützen, local residents say they want to keep their Red Army memorial as it is, a tribute to the central place occupied by the pyramid in the town’s public life during Communist rule. Some remember playing around it while attending the nearby kindergarten, and they say they will fight plans to move it to accommodate a proposed new supermarket.
  • “This is our history, no matter what is going on in world politics,” said the town’s mayor, Uwe Weiss. “We have to take care of it, because it is part of us.”
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Rebecca F Kuang rejects idea authors should not write about other races | Publishing | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ld-not-write-about-other-races publishing identity writing culture appropriation
shared by Javier E on 28 May 23 - No Cached
  • The author of Babel and The Poppy War, Rebecca F Kuang, has said she finds the idea that authors should only write about characters of their own race “deeply frustrating and pretty illogical”.
  • the author, who was born in China but moved to the US when she was four, said that there is a “really weird kind of identity politics going on in American publishing”. She is “sympathetic” to an extent, as it is coming from “decades of frustration of seeing the same racist, uncritical, under-researched, shallow stereotypes”
  • The problem is, Kuang thinks, is that this has now “spiralled into this really strict and reductive understanding of race”. As a result, a movement that began as a call for more authentic stories about marginalised communities “gets flipped around and weaponised against the marginalised writers to pigeonhole them into telling only certain kinds of stories”.
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  • Kuang was critical of those who believe that “the only people getting book deals right now are BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and people of colour] writers”, including Joyce Carol Oates, who tweeted last year that editors do not want to look at debuts by white male writers. Oates “really just needs to get off Twitter”, Kuang joked, but also said “if you just walk into a bookstore you know that’s not true.”
  • “We also know from industry reports year after year that the number of BIPOC authors being published hasn’t really budged since the 70s”, she added. “In fact, you can historically trace the years in which the number of Black authors being published in the US spiked to the years in which Toni Morrison was an acquiring editor, which is very depressing.
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'The Power of One,' Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen's memoir - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...r-frances-haugen-memoir-review facebook whistleblower algorithm technology psychology
shared by Javier E on 08 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • When an internal group proposed the conditions under which Facebook should step in and take down speech from political actors, Zuckerberg discarded its work. He said he’d address the issue himself over a weekend. His “solution”? Facebook would not touch speech by any politician, under any circumstances — a fraught decision under the simplistic surface, as Haugen points out. After all, who gets to count as a politician? The municipal dogcatcher?
  • t was also Zuckerberg, she says, who refused to make a small change that would have made the content in people’s feeds less incendiary — possibly because doing so would have caused a key metric to decline.
  • When the Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Horwitz began to break the stories that Haugen helped him document, the most damning one concerned Facebook’s horrifyingly disingenuous response to a congressional inquiry asking if the company had any research showing that its products were dangerous to teens. Facebook said it wasn’t aware of any consensus indicating how much screen time was too much. What Facebook did have was a pile of research showing that kids were being harmed by its products. Allow a clever company a convenient deflection, and you get something awfully close to a lie.
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  • after the military in Myanmar used Facebook to stoke the murder of the Rohingya people, Haugen began to worry that this was a playbook that could be infinitely repeated — and only because Facebook chose not to invest in safety measures, such as detecting hate speech in poorer, more vulnerable places. “The scale of the problems was so vast,” she writes. “I believed people were going to die (in certain countries, at least) and for no reason other than higher profit margins.”
  • After a trip to Cambodia, where neighbors killed neighbors in the 1970s because of a “story that labeled people who had lived next to each other for generations as existential threats,” she’d started to wonder about what caused people to turn on one another to such a horr
  • ifying degree. “How quickly could a story become the truth people perceived?”
  • she points out is the false choice posited by most social media companies: free speech vs. censorship. She argues that lack of transparency is what contributed most to the problems at Facebook. No one on the outside can see inside the algorithms. Even many of those on the inside can’t. “You can’t take a single academic course, anywhere in the world, on the tradeoffs and choices that go into building a social media algorithm or, more importantly, the consequences of those choices,” she writes.
  • In that lack of accountability, social media is a very different ecosystem than the one that helped Ralph Nader take on the auto industry back in the 1960s. Then, there was a network of insurers and plaintiff’s lawyers who also wanted change — and the images of mangled bodies were a lot more visible than what happens inside the mind of a teenage girl. But what if the government forced companies to share their inner workings in the same way it mandates that food companies disclose the nutrition in what they make? What if the government forced social media companies to allow academics and other researchers access to the algorithms they use?
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Group-Chat Culture Is Out of Control - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...675473 culture social media chat psychology
shared by Javier E on 30 Sep 23 - No Cached
  • WhatsApp, the most popular messaging service worldwide, gained more than two and a half billion active users from 2012 to 2023, and is projected to grow 18 percent more by 2025
  • In a recent survey of roughly 1,000 Americans, 66 percent said they’ve felt overwhelmed by their group messages, and 42 percent said that group chats can feel like a part-time job.
  • with X (formerly known as Twitter) in a state of disarray, Facebook falling out of favor, and Instagram taken over by ads, social media is feeling less and less social.
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  • Jeffrey A. Hall, a communication professor at the University of Kansas who studies technology and relationships, calls this the “twilight of the social-media era,” in which “the distance between using it for talking to your friends and what we have now” is bigger than it’s ever been. He believes that although those sites aren’t fostering real connection—advice, inside jokes, updates, memes—nearly as much anymore, people might be reclaiming it with group chats.
  • To borrow from Dungeons & Dragons, the Age of the Group Chat seemed like it would be Chaotic Good—but it’s verging on Chaotic Evil.
  • group chats can create a “waterfall type of effect,” where messages keep flooding in and adding up. Eventually, you’re underwater
  • without a standard etiquette, people have very different ideas about what degree of responsiveness is required—which can cause real tension.
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Netanyahu's Dark Worldview - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...675406 netanyahu AI realism musk crisis
shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 23 - No Cached
  • as Netanyahu soon made clear, when it comes to AI, he believes that bad outcomes are the likely outcomes. The Israeli leader interrogated OpenAI’s Brockman about the impact of his company’s creations on the job market. By replacing more and more workers, Netanyahu argued, AI threatens to “cannibalize a lot more jobs than you create,” leaving many people adrift and unable to contribute to the economy. When Brockman suggested that AI could usher in a world where people would not have to work, Netanyahu countered that the benefits of the technology were unlikely to accrue to most people, because the data, computational power, and engineering talent required for AI are concentrated in a few countries.
  • “You have these trillion-dollar [AI] companies that are produced overnight, and they concentrate enormous wealth and power with a smaller and smaller number of people,” the Israeli leader said, noting that even a free-market evangelist like himself was unsettled by such monopolization. “That will create a bigger and bigger distance between the haves and the have-nots, and that’s another thing that causes tremendous instability in our world. And I don’t know if you have an idea of how you overcome that?”
  • The other panelists did not. Brockman briefly pivoted to talk about OpenAI’s Israeli employees before saying, “The world we should shoot for is one where all the boats are rising.” But other than mentioning the possibility of a universal basic income for people living in an AI-saturated society, Brockman agreed that “creative solutions” to this problem were needed—without providing any.
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  • The AI boosters emphasized the incredible potential of their innovation, and Netanyahu raised practical objections to their enthusiasm. They cited futurists such as Ray Kurzweil to paint a bright picture of a post-AI world; Netanyahu cited the Bible and the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides to caution against upending human institutions and subordinating our existence to machines.
  • Musk matter-of-factly explained that the “very positive scenario of AI” is “actually in a lot of ways a description of heaven,” where “you can have whatever you want, you don’t need to work, you have no obligations, any illness you have can be cured,” and death is “a choice.” Netanyahu incredulously retorted, “You want this world?”
  • By the time the panel began to wind down, the Israeli leader had seemingly made up his mind. “This is like having nuclear technology in the Stone Age,” he said. “The pace of development [is] outpacing what solutions we need to put in place to maximize the benefits and limit the risks.”
  • Netanyahu was a naysayer about the Arab Spring, unwilling to join the rapturous ranks of hopeful politicians, activists, and democracy advocates. But he was also right.
  • This was less because he is a prophet and more because he is a pessimist. When it comes to grandiose predictions about a better tomorrow—whether through peace with the Palestinians, a nuclear deal with Iran, or the advent of artificial intelligence—Netanyahu always bets against. Informed by a dark reading of Jewish history, he is a cynic about human nature and a skeptic of human progress.
  • fter all, no matter how far civilization has advanced, it has always found ways to persecute the powerless, most notably, in his mind, the Jews. For Netanyahu, the arc of history is long, and it bends toward whoever is bending it.
  • This is why the Israeli leader puts little stock in utopian promises, whether they are made by progressive internationalists or Silicon Valley futurists, and places his trust in hard power instead
  • “The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.”
  • To his many critics, myself included, Netanyahu’s refusal to envision a different future makes him a “creature of the bunker,” perpetually governed by fear. Although his pessimism may sometimes be vindicated, it also holds his country hostag
  • In other words, the same cynicism that drives Netanyahu’s reactionary politics is the thing that makes him an astute interrogator of AI and its promoters. Just as he doesn’t trust others not to use their power to endanger Jews, he doesn’t trust AI companies or AI itself to police its rapidly growing capabilities.
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Opinion | If You Want to Understand How Dangerous Elon Musk Is, Look Outside America - ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...twitter-free-speech-india.html social media india global impact influence government repression tool twitter
shared by Javier E on 15 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • Twitter was an intoxicating window into my fascinating new assignment. Long suppressed groups found their voices and social media-driven revolutions began to unfold. Movements against corruption gained steam and brought real change. Outrage over a horrific gang rape in Delhi built a movement to fight an epidemic of sexual violence.
  • “What we didn’t realize — because we took it for granted for so long — is that most people spoke with a great deal of freedom, and completely unconscious freedom,” said Nilanjana Roy, a writer who was part of my initial group of Twitter friends in India. “You could criticize the government, debate certain religious practices. It seems unreal now.”
  • Soon enough, other kinds of underrepresented voices also started to appear on — and then dominate — the platform. As women, Muslims and people from lower castes spoke out, the inevitable backlash came. Supporters of the conservative opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and their right-wing religious allies felt that they had long been ignored by the mainstream press. Now they had the chance to grab the mic.
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  • Viewed from the United States, these skirmishes over the unaccountable power of tech platforms seem like a central battleground of free speech. But the real threat in much of the world is not the policies of social media companies, but of governments.
  • The real question now is if Musk’s commitment to “free speech” extends beyond conservatives in America and to the billions of people in the Global South who rely on the internet for open communication.
  • ndia’s government had demanded that Twitter block tweets and accounts from a variety of journalists, activists and politicians. The company went to court, arguing that these demands went beyond the law and into censorship. Now Twitter’s potential new owner was casting doubt on whether the company should be defying government demands that muzzle freedom of expression.
  • The winning side will not be decided in Silicon Valley or Beijing, the two poles around which debate over free expression on the internet have largely orbited. It will be the actions of governments in capitals like Abuja, Jakarta, Ankara, Brasília and New Delhi.
  • while much of the focus has been on countries like China, which overtly restricts access to huge swaths of the internet, the real war over the future of internet freedom is being waged in what she called “swing states,” big, fragile democracies like India.
  • other governments are passing laws just to increase their power over speech online and to force companies to be an extension of state surveillance.” For example: requiring companies to house their servers locally rather than abroad, which can make them more vulnerable to government surveillance.
  • Across the world, countries are putting in place frameworks that on their face seem designed to combat online abuse and misinformation but are largely used to stifle dissent or enable abuse of the enemies of those in power.
  • it seems that this is actually what he believes. In April, he tweeted: “By ‘free speech’, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.”
  • Musk is either exceptionally naïve or willfully ignorant about the relationship between government power and free speech, especially in fragile democracies.
  • The combination of a rigid commitment to following national laws and a hands-off approach to content moderation is combustible and highly dangerous.
  • Independent journalism is increasingly under threat in India. Much of the mainstream press has been neutered by a mix of intimidation and conflicts of interests created by the sprawling conglomerates and powerful families that control much of Indian media
  • Twitter has historically fought against censorship. Whether that will continue under Musk seems very much a question. The Indian government has reasons to expect friendly treatment: Musk’s company Tesla has been trying to enter the Indian car market for some time, but in May it hit an impasse in negotiations with the government over tariffs and other issues
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