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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.
  • 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 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?
  • 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 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.
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Book Club: A Guide To Living « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...book-club-a-guide-to-living Montaigne philosophers skepticism conservatism
shared by Javier E on 23 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • He proves nothing that he doesn’t simultaneously subvert a little; he makes no over-arching argument about the way humans must live; he has no logician’s architecture or religious doctrine. He slips past all those familiar means of telling other people what’s good for them, and simply explains what has worked for him and others and leaves the reader empowered to forge her own future
  • You can see its eccentric power by considering the alternative ways of doing what Montaigne was doing. Think of contemporary self-help books – and all the fake certainty and rigid formulae they contain. Or think of a hideous idea like “the purpose-driven life” in which everything must be forced into the box of divine guidance in order to really live at all. Think of the stringency of Christian disciplines – say, the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola – and marvel at how Montaigne offers an entirely different and less compelling way to live. Think of the rigidity of Muslim practice and notice how much lee-way Montaigne gives to sin
  • This is a non-philosophical philosophy. It is a theory of practical life as told through one man’s random and yet not-so-random reflections on his time on earth. And it is shot through with doubt. Even the maxims that Montaigne embraces for living are edged with those critical elements of Montaigne’s thought that say “as far as I know”
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  • Is this enough? Or is it rather a capitulation to relativism, a manifesto for political quietism, a worldview that treats injustice as something to be abhorred but not constantly fought against? This might be seen as the core progressive objection to the way of Montaigne. Or is his sensibility in an age of religious terror and violence and fanaticism the only ultimate solution we have?
  • here’s what we do know. We are fallible beings; we have nothing but provisional knowledge; and we will die. And this is enough. This does not mean we should give up inquiring or seeking to understand. Skepticism is not nihilism. It doesn’t posit that there is no truth; it merely notes that if truth exists, it is inherently beyond our ultimate grasp. And accepting those limits is the first step toward sanity, toward getting on with life. This is what I mean by conservatism.
  • you can find in philosophy any number of clues about how to live; you can even construct them into an ideology that explains all of human life and society – like Marxism or free market fundamentalism or a Nietzschean will to power. But as each totalist system broke down upon my further inspection, I found myself returning to Montaigne and the tradition of skepticism he represents
  • If I were to single out one theme of Montaigne’s work that has stuck with me, it would be this staring of death in the face, early and often, and never flinching. It is what our culture refuses to do much of the time, thereby disempowering us in the face of our human challenges.
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Read this if you want to be happy in 2014 - The Washington Post - 2 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...3-9389-09ef9944065e_story.html diet exercise happiness health freedom knowledge willpower system goal
shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • people usually experience the sensation of happiness whenever they have both health and freedom. It’s a simple formula: Happiness = Health + Freedom
  • I’m talking about the everyday freedom of being able to do what you want when you want to do it, at work and elsewhere. For happiness, timing is as important as the thing you’re doing
  • Matching your mood to your activity is a baseline requirement for happiness
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  • The good news is that timing is relatively controllable, especially in the long run.
  • If you’re just starting out in your career, it won’t be easy to find a job that gives you a flexible schedule. The best approach is a strategy of moving toward more flexibility over the course of your life.
  • There isn’t one formula for finding schedule flexibility. Just make sure all of your important decisions are consistent with an end game of a more flexible schedule. Otherwise you are shutting yourself off from the most accessible lever for happiness — timing.
  • if you knew that pasta is far lower on the glycemic index than a white potato, you would make a far healthier choice that requires no willpower at all. All it took was knowledge.
  • The most important thing to know about staying fit is this: If it takes willpower, you’re doing it wrong. Anything that requires willpower is unsustainable in the long run.
  • studies show that using willpower in one area diminishes how much willpower you have in reserve for other areas. You need to get willpower out of the system
  • My observation is that you can usually replace willpower with knowledge.
  • the trick for avoiding unhealthy foods is to make sure you always have access to healthy options that you enjoy eating. Your knowledge of this trick, assuming you use it, makes willpower far less necessary.
  • don’t give up too much income potential just to get a flexible schedule. There’s no point in having a flexible schedule if you can’t afford to do anything.
  • the fittest people have systems, not goals, unless they are training for something specific. A sensible system is to continuously learn more about the science of diet and the methods for making healthy food taste great. With that system, weight management will feel automatic. Goals aren’t needed.
  • Did you know that sleepiness causes you to feel hungry?
  • Did you know that eating peanuts is a great way to suppress appetite?
  • Did you know that eating mostly protein instead of simple carbs for lunch will help you avoid the afternoon energy slump?
  • Did you know that eating simple carbs can make you hungrier?
  • Did you know that exercise has only a small impact on your weight?
  • after I started noticing how drained and useless I felt after eating simple carbs, french fries became easy to resist.
  • I also learned that I can remove problem foods from my diet if I target them for extinction one at a time. It was easy to stop eating three large Snickers every day (which I was doing) when I realized I could eat anything else I wanted whenever I wanted
  • If you’re on a diet, you’re probably trying to avoid certain types of food, but you’re also trying to limit your portions. Instead of waging war on two fronts, try allowing yourself to eat as much as you want of anything that is healthy.
  • healthier food is almost self-regulating in the sense that you don’t have an insatiable desire to keep eating it the way you might with junk food. With healthy food, you tend to stop when you feel full
  • One of the biggest obstacles to healthy eating is the impression that healthy food generally tastes like cardboard. So consider making it a lifelong system to learn how to season and prepare healthy foods
  • Cheese adds calories, but the fat content will help suppress your appetite, so you probably come out ahead. If you didn’t already know that, you might end up using willpower to avoid cheese at dinner and willpower again later that night to resist snacking. A little knowledge replaces a lot of willpower.
  • ’m limiting my portion size. You only need to do that if you are eating the wrong foods. Eating half of your cake still keeps you addicted to cake. And portion control takes a lot of willpower. You’ll find that healthy food satisfies you sooner, so you don’t crave large portions.
  • No one can exercise enough to overcome a bad diet. Diet is the right button to push for losing weight, so long as you are active. People who eat right and stay active usually have no problems with weight.
  • I’m about to share with you the simplest and potentially most effective exercise plan in the world. Here it is: Be active every day.
  • When you’re active, and you don’t overdo it, you’ll find yourself in a good mood afterward. That reward becomes addictive over time.
  • After a few months of being moderately active every day, you’ll discover that it is harder to sit and do nothing than it is to get up and do something. That’s the frame of mind you want. You want exercise to become a habit with a reward so it evolves into a useful addiction
  • the intensity of your workout has a surprisingly small impact on your weight unless you’re running half-marathons every week. If your diet is right, moderate exercise is all you need.
  • When your body is feeling good, and you have some flexibility in your schedule, you’ll find that the petty annoyances that plague your life become nothing but background noise. And that’s a great launch pad for happiness.
  • As you find yourself getting healthier and happier, the people in your life will view you differently too. Healthy-looking people generally earn more money, get more offers and enjoy a better social life. All of that will help your happiness.
  • Keep in mind that happiness is a directional phenomenon. We feel happy when things are moving in the right direction no matter where we are at the moment.
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The Dangers of Pseudoscience - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-dangers-of-pseudoscience pseudoscience science research
shared by Ellie McGinnis on 24 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • “demarcation problem,” the issue of what separates good science from bad science and pseudoscience
  • Demarcation is crucial to our pursuit of knowledge; its issues go to the core of debates on epistemology and of the nature of truth and discovery
  • our society spends billions of tax dollars on scientific research, so it is important that we also have a good grasp of what constitutes money well spent in this regard
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  • pseudoscience is not — contrary to popular belief — merely a harmless pastime of the gullible; it often threatens people’s welfare, sometimes fatally so
  • in the area of medical treatments that the science-pseudoscience divide is most critical, and where the role of philosophers in clarifying things may be most relevant
  • What makes the use of aspirin “scientific,” however, is that we have validated its effectiveness through properly controlled trials, isolated the active ingredient, and understood the biochemical pathways through which it has its effects
  • Popper’s basic insight: the bad habit of creative fudging and finagling with empirical data ultimately makes a theory impervious to refutation. And all pseudoscientists do it, from parapsychologists to creationists and 9/11 Truthers.
  • Philosophers of science have long recognized that there is nothing wrong with positing unobservable entities per se, it’s a question of what work such entities actually do within a given theoretical-empirical framework.
  • we are attempting to provide explanations for why some things work and others don’t. If these explanations are wrong, or unfounded as in the case of vacuous concepts like Qi, then we ought to correct or abandon them.
  • no sharp line dividing sense from nonsense, and moreover that doctrines starting out in one camp may over time evolve into the other.
  • inaccessibility of the famous Higgs boson, a sub-atomic particle postulated by physicists to play a crucial role in literally holding the universe together (it provides mass to all other particles)
  • The open-ended nature of science means that there is nothing sacrosanct in either its results or its methods.
  • The borderlines between genuine science and pseudoscience may be fuzzy, but this should be even more of a call for careful distinctions, based on systematic facts and sound reasoning
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When You Think Your Brain Is Doing Nothing, It's Really Getting You Ready To Socialize ... - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...getting-you-ready-to-socialize brain social science biology
shared by charlottedonoho on 31 May 15 - No Cached
  • Your brain is always doing something. Even when you think it’s “offline” because you aren’t actively engaging a task or problem, your brain is busy reducing activity in some of its areas and increasing it in others.
  • A new study offers an answer that makes Facebook browsing suddenly seem more meaningful. The researchers believe that when the brain isn’t actively engaging a task, it drops into a mode that prepares it to be social with other brains.
  • We’ve discovered, however, that daydreaming is important default-mode time for the brain where different, less directly-active processing happens. This study suggests that part of this default-mode processing helps the brain prepare for social interaction with other brains.
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  • According to Lieberman, “The brain has a major system that seems predisposed to get us ready to be social in our spare moments. The social nature of our brains is biologically based.”
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Edward Snowden: The World Says No to Surveillance - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-says-no-to-surveillance.html
shared by sgardner35 on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • MOSCOW — TWO years ago today, three journalists and I worked nervously in a Hong Kong hotel room, waiting to see how the world would react to the revelation that the National Security Agency had been making records of nearly every phone call in the United States. In the days that followed, those journalists and others published documents revealing that democratic governments had been monitoring the private activities of ordinary citizens who had done nothing wrong.
  • Privately, there were moments when I worried that we might have put our privileged lives at risk for nothing — that the public would react with indifference, or practiced cynicism, to the revelations.
  • Since 2013, institutions across Europe have ruled similar laws and operations illegal and imposed new restrictions on future activities. The United Nations declared mass surveillance an unambiguous violation of human rights. In Latin America, the efforts of citizens in Brazil led to the Marco Civil, an Internet Bill of Rights. Recognizing the critical role of informed citizens in correcting the excesses of government, the Council of Europe called for new laws to protect whistle-blowers.
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  • are now enabled by default in the products of pioneering companies like Apple, ensuring that even if your phone is stolen, your private life remains private. Such structural technological changes can ensure access to basic privacies beyond borders, insulating ordinary citizens from the arbitrary passage of anti-privacy laws, such as those now descending upon Russia.
  • Spymasters in Australia, Canada and France have exploited recent tragedies to seek intrusive new powers despite evidence such programs would not have prevented attacks. Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain recently mused, “Do we want to allow a means of communication between people which we cannot read?” He soon found his answer, proclaiming that “for too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: As long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.”
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Sartre & Peanuts | Issue 44 | Philosophy Now - 0 views

philosophynow.org/...Sartre_and_Peanuts Satre Peanuts philosophy
shared by Emilio Ergueta on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Nathan Radke claims that Charlie Brown is an existentialist.
  • Our anti-hero sits, despondent. He is alone, both physically and emotionally. He is alienated from his peers. He is fearfully awaiting a punishment for his actions. In desperation, he looks to God for comfort and hope. Instead, his angst overwhelms him, and manifests itself as physical pain. There is no comfort to be found.
  • When we are exposed to something every day we can eventually lose sight of its brilliance. Newspaper readers have been exposed to Charles Schulz’s comic strip ‘Peanuts’ for over half a century. Even now, a few years after Schulz died, many newspapers continue to carry reruns of his strips, and bookstores offer Peanuts collections
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  • Charlie Brown was no comic strip missionary, blandly spreading the word of organized religion. Upon reflection, the trials and tribulations of the little round-headed kid provide deep and moving illustrations of existentialism.
  • Like the existential human in a world of silent or absent deities, Schulz’s characters exist in a world of silent or absent adult authority. In fact, the way the strip is drawn (with the child characters taking up most of each frame) actually prevents the presence of any adults.
  • Sartre did not deny the existence of God triumphantly. Instead, he considered it “... extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven.”. Without God, everything we do as humans is absurd, and without meaning
  • we are created by our actions. We are responsible for our actions. Therefore, we are responsible for our creation. What we are is the sum total of what we have done, nothing more and nothing less
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Stephen Hawking on God, Science and the Origins of the Universe - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4206804575467921609024244.html God universe anthropic principle multiverse cosmology
shared by Javier E on 06 Sep 10 - Cached
  • As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology. If it is true it reduces the strong anthropic principle to the weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is just one of many. Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation.
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Watson Still Can't Think - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...watson-still-cant-think technology social consciousness cognitive computers intelligence artificial
shared by Javier E on 01 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Fish argued that Watson “does not come within a million miles of replicating the achievements of everyday human action and thought.” In defending this claim, Fish invoked arguments that one of us (Dreyfus) articulated almost 40 years ago in “What Computers Can’t Do,” a criticism of 1960s and 1970s style artificial intelligence.
  • At the dawn of the AI era the dominant approach to creating intelligent systems was based on finding the right rules for the computer to follow.
  • GOFAI, for Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence.
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  • For constrained domains the GOFAI approach is a winning strategy.
  • there is nothing intelligent or even interesting about the brute force approach.
  • the dominant paradigm in AI research has largely “moved on from GOFAI to embodied, distributed intelligence.” And Faustus from Cincinnati insists that as a result “machines with bodies that experience the world and act on it” will be “able to achieve intelligence.”
  • The new, embodied paradigm in AI, deriving primarily from the work of roboticist Rodney Brooks, insists that the body is required for intelligence. Indeed, Brooks’s classic 1990 paper, “Elephants Don’t Play Chess,” rejected the very symbolic computation paradigm against which Dreyfus had railed, favoring instead a range of biologically inspired robots that could solve apparently simple, but actually quite complicated, problems like locomotion, grasping, navigation through physical environments and so on. To solve these problems, Brooks discovered that it was actually a disadvantage for the system to represent the status of the environment and respond to it on the basis of pre-programmed rules about what to do, as the traditional GOFAI systems had. Instead, Brooks insisted, “It is better to use the world as its own model.”
  • although they respond to the physical world rather well, they tend to be oblivious to the global, social moods in which we find ourselves embedded essentially from birth, and in virtue of which things matter to us in the first place.
  • the embodied AI paradigm is irrelevant to Watson. After all, Watson has no useful bodily interaction with the world at all.
  • The statistical machine learning strategies that it uses are indeed a big advance over traditional GOFAI techniques. But they still fall far short of what human beings do.
  • “The illusion is that this computer is doing the same thing that a very good ‘Jeopardy!’ player would do. It’s not. It’s doing something sort of different that looks the same on the surface. And every so often you see the cracks.”
  • Watson doesn’t understand relevance at all. It only measures statistical frequencies. Because it is relatively common to find mismatches of this sort, Watson learns to weigh them as only mild evidence against the answer. But the human just doesn’t do it that way. The human being sees immediately that the mismatch is irrelevant for the Erie Canal but essential for Toronto. Past frequency is simply no guide to relevance.
  • The fact is, things are relevant for human beings because at root we are beings for whom things matter. Relevance and mattering are two sides of the same coin. As Haugeland said, “The problem with computers is that they just don’t give a damn.” It is easy to pretend that computers can care about something if we focus on relatively narrow domains — like trivia games or chess — where by definition winning the game is the only thing that could matter, and the computer is programmed to win. But precisely because the criteria for success are so narrowly defined in these cases, they have nothing to do with what human beings are when they are at their best.
  • Far from being the paradigm of intelligence, therefore, mere matching with no sense of mattering or relevance is barely any kind of intelligence at all. As beings for whom the world already matters, our central human ability is to be able to see what matters when.
  • But, as we show in our recent book, this is an existential achievement orders of magnitude more amazing and wonderful than any statistical treatment of bare facts could ever be. The greatest danger of Watson’s victory is not that it proves machines could be better versions of us, but that it tempts us to misunderstand ourselves as poorer versions of them.
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A 'Philosophy' of Plastic Surgery in Brazil - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...a-necessary-vanity beauty aesthetics art rights self-image surgery power
shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Is beauty a right, which, like education or health care, should be realized with the help of public institutions and expertise?
  • For years he has performed charity surgeries for the poor. More radically, some of his students offer free cosmetic operations in the nation’s public health system.
  • I asked her why she wanted to have the surgery.  “I didn’t put in an implant to exhibit myself, but to feel better. It wasn’t a simple vanity, but a  . . . necessary vanity.  Surgery improves a woman’s auto-estima.”
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  • He argues that the real object of healing is not the body, but the mind.  A plastic surgeon is a “psychologist with a scalpel in his hand.” This idea led Pitanguy to argue for the “union” of cosmetic and reconstructive procedures.  In both types of surgery beauty and mental healing subtly mingle, he claims, and both benefit health.
  • “What is the difference between a plastic surgeon and a psychoanalyst?  The psychoanalyst knows everything but changes nothing.  The plastic surgeon knows nothing but changes everything.”
  • Plastic surgery gained legitimacy in the early 20th century by limiting itself to reconstructive operations.  The “beauty doctor” was a term of derision.  But as techniques improved they were used for cosmetic improvements.  Missing, however, was a valid diagnosis. Concepts like psychoanalyst Alfred Adler’s inferiority complex — and later low self-esteem — provided a missing link.
  • Victorians saw a cleft palate as a defect that built character. For us it hinders self-realization and merits corrective surgery.  This shift reflects a new attitude towards appearance and mental health: the notion that at least some defects cause unfair suffering and social stigma is now widely accepted. But Brazilian surgeons take this reasoning a step further.  Cosmetic surgery is a consumer service in most of the world.  In Brazil it is becoming, as Ester put it, a “necessary vanity.”
  • Pitanguy, whose patients often have mixed African, indigenous and European ancestry, stresses that aesthetic ideals vary by epoch and ethnicity.  What matters are not objective notions of beauty, but how the patient feels.  As his colleague says, the job of the plastic surgeon is to simply “follow desires.”
  • Patients are on average younger than they were 20 years ago.  They often request minor changes to become, as one surgeon said, “more perfect.”
  • The growth of plastic surgery thus reflects a new way of working not only on the suffering mind, but also on the erotic body.  Unlike fashion’s embrace of playful dissimulation and seduction, this beauty practice instead insists on correcting precisely measured flaws.  Plastic surgery may contribute to a biologized view of sex where pleasure and fantasy matter less than the anatomical “truth” of the bare body.
  • It is not coincidental that Brazil has not only high rates of plastic surgery, but also Cesarean sections (70 percent of deliveries in some private hospitals), tubal ligations,  and other surgeries for women. Some women see elective surgeries as part of a modern standard of care, more or less routine for the middle class, but only sporadically available to the poor.
  • When a good life is defined through the ability to buy goods then rights may be reinterpreted to mean not equality before the law, but equality in the market. 
  • Beauty is unfair: the attractive enjoy privileges and powers gained without merit.  As such it can offend egalitarian values.  Yet while attractiveness is a quality “awarded” to those who don’t morally deserve it, it can also grant power to those excluded from other systems of privilege.  It is a kind of “double negative”: a form of power that is unfairly distributed but which can disturb other unfair hierarchies.  For this reason it may have democratic appeal.  In poor urban areas beauty often has a similar importance for girls as soccer (or basketball) does for boys: it promises an almost magical attainment of recognition, wealth or power.
  • For many consumers attractiveness is essential to economic and sexual competition, social visibility, and mental well being.  This “value” of appearance may be especially clear for those excluded from other means of social ascent.  For the poor beauty is often a form of capital that can be exchanged for other benefits, however small, transient, or unconducive to collective change.
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Reasons for Reason - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...reasons-for-reason epistemic principles rationality belief arbitrary science naturalism
shared by Javier E on 03 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Rick Perry’s recent vocal dismissals of evolution, and his confident assertion that “God is how we got here” reflect an obvious divide in our culture.
  • underneath this divide is a deeper one. Really divisive disagreements are typically not just over the facts. They are also about the best way to support our views of the facts. Call this a disagreement in epistemic principle. Our epistemic principles tell us what is rational to believe, what sources of information to trust.
  • I suspect that for most people, scientific evidence (or its lack) has nothing to do with it. Their belief in creationism is instead a reflection of a deeply held epistemic principle: that, at least on some topics, scripture is a more reliable source of information than science.  For others, including myself, this is never the case.
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  • appealing to another method won’t help either — for unless that method can be shown to be reliable, using it to determine the reliability of the first method answers nothing.
  • Every one of our beliefs is produced by some method or source, be it humble (like memory) or complex (like technologically assisted science). But why think our methods, whatever they are, are trustworthy or reliable for getting at the truth? If I challenge one of your methods, you can’t just appeal to the same method to show that it is reliable. That would be circular
  • How do we rationally defend our most fundamental epistemic principles? Like many of the best philosophical mysteries, this a problem that can seem both unanswerable and yet extremely important to solve.
  • it seems to suggest that in the end, all “rational” explanations end up grounding out on something arbitrary. It all just comes down to what you happen to believe, what you feel in your gut, your faith.  Human beings have historically found this to be a very seductive idea,
  • this is precisely the situation we seem to be headed towards in the United States. We live isolated in our separate bubbles of information culled from sources that only reinforce our prejudices and never challenge our basic assumptions. No wonder that — as in the debates over evolution, or what to include in textbooks illustrate — we so often fail to reach agreement over the history and physical structure of the world itself. No wonder joint action grinds to a halt. When you can’t agree on your principles of evidence and rationality, you can’t agree on the facts. And if you can’t agree on the facts, you can hardly agree on what to do in the face of the facts.
  • We can’t decide on what counts as a legitimate reason to doubt my epistemic principles unless we’ve already settled on our principles—and that is the very issue in question.
  • The problem that skepticism about reason raises is not about whether I have good evidence by my principles for my principles. Presumably I do.[1] The problem is whether I can give a more objective defense of them. That is, whether I can give reasons for them that can be appreciated from what Hume called a “common point of view” — reasons that can “move some universal principle of the human frame, and touch a string, to which all mankind have an accord and symphony.”[2]
  • Any way you go, it seems you must admit you can give no reason for trusting your methods, and hence can give no reason to defend your most fundamental epistemic principles.
  • So one reason we should take the project of defending our epistemic principles seriously is that the ideal of civility demands it.
  • there is also another, even deeper, reason. We need to justify our epistemic principles from a common point of view because we need shared epistemic principles in order to even have a common point of view. Without a common background of standards against which we measure what counts as a reliable source of information, or a reliable method of inquiry, and what doesn’t, we won’t be able to agree on the facts, let alone values.
  • democracies aren’t simply organizing a struggle for power between competing interests; democratic politics isn’t war by other means. Democracies are, or should be, spaces of reasons.
  • we need an epistemic common currency because we often have to decide, jointly, what to do in the face of disagreement.
  • Sometimes we can accomplish this, in a democratic society, by voting. But we can’t decide every issue that way
  • We need some forms of common currency before we get to the voting booth.
  • Even if, as the skeptic says, we can’t defend the truth of our principles without circularity, we might still be able to show that some are better than others. Observation and experiment, for example, aren’t just good because they are reliable means to the truth. They are valuable because almost everyone can appeal to them. They have roots in our natural instincts, as Hume might have said.
  • that is one reason we need to resist skepticism about reason: we need to be able to give reasons for why some standards of reasons — some epistemic principles — should be part of that currency and some not.
  • Reasons for Reason By MICHAEL P. LYNCH
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Do People Only Use 10% of Their Brains? | Mental Floss - 1 views

mentalfloss.com/...eople-only-use-10-their-brains
shared by Adam Clark on 11 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Adam Clark on 11 Jul 14
     
    "A 2013 poll surveying over 2000 Americans found that 65 percent thought that this statement is true. And yet, the simple and unequivocal answer is: No. Despite a myth so prevalent that it is easily accepted as a pivotal plot point in movies or a motivational tactic or even justification for psychic claims, everyone uses 100 percent of their brain. There are a number of logical refutations of this myth-why would big brains evolve if they're nothing but dead weight?-but outright proving its fallacy is relatively easy with modern technology. PET and fMRI scans show that even when we're sleeping, our entire brain is active on some level."
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The Wisdom Deficit in Schools - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...384713 wisdom literature classics English teaching learning Common Core skills
shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • When I was in high school, I chose to major in English in college because I wanted to be wiser. That’s the word I used. If I ended up making lots of money or writing a book, great; but really, I liked the prospect of being exposed to great thoughts and deep advice, and the opportunity to apply them to my own life in my own clumsy way. I wanted to live more thoughtfully and purposefully
  • Now I’m a veteran English teacher, reflecting on what’s slowly changed at the typical American public high school—and the word wisdom keeps haunting me. I don’t teach it as much anymore, and I wonder who is.
  • how teachers are now being informed by the Common Core State Standards—the controversial math and English benchmarks that have been adopted in most states—and the writers and thought leaders who shape the assessments matched to those standards. It all amounts to an alphabet soup of bureaucratic expectations and what can feel like soul-less instruction. The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium—referred to in education circles simply as "SBAC"—is the association that writes a Common Core-aligned assessment used in 25 states
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The Common Core promotes 10 so-called "College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards" for reading that emphasize technical skills like analyzing, integrating, and delineating a text. But these expectations deal very little with ensuring students are actually appreciating the literature at hand—and say nothing about the personal engagement and life lessons to which my principal was referring
  • Kate Kinsella, an influential author who consults school districts across the country and is considered "a guiding force on the National Advisory Board for the Consortium on Reading Excellence," recently told me to "ditch literature" since "literary fiction is not critical to college success." Kinsella continued, "What’s represented by the standards is the need to analyze texts rather than respond to literature.
  • As a teacher working within this regimented environment, my classroom objectives have had to shift. I used to feel deeply satisfied facilitating a rich classroom discussion on a Shakespearean play; now, I feel proud when my students explicitly acknowledge the aforementioned "anchor standards" and take the initiative to learn these technical skills.
  • But as a man who used to be a high school student interested in pursuing wisdom, I’m almost startled to find myself up late at night, literally studying these anchor standards instead of Hamlet itself.
  • It just feels like a very slow, gradual cultural shift that I don’t even notice except for sudden moments of nostalgia, like remembering a dream out of nowhere
  • I get it: My job is to teach communication, not values, and maybe that’s reasonable. After all, I’m not sure I would want my daughter gaining her wisdom from a randomly selected high-school teacher just because he passed a few writing and literature courses at a state university (which is what I did). My job description has evolved, and I’m fine with that
  • This arrangement, in theory, allows students to read the literature on their own, when they get their own time—and I’m fine with that. But then, where are they getting the time and space to appreciate the deeper lessons of classic literature, to evaluate its truth and appropriately apply it to their own lives?
  • research suggests that a significant majority of teens do not attend church, and youth church attendance has been decreasing over the past few decades. This is fine with me. But then again, where are they getting their wisdom?
  • I’m not talking about my child, or your child. I’m absolutely positive that my daughter will know the difference between Darcy and Wickham before she’s in eighth grade; and it's likely that people who would gravitate toward this story would appreciate this kind of thinking
  • I’m talking about American children in general—kids whose parents work all day, whose fathers left them or whose mothers died
  • even for the parents who do prioritize the humanities in their households, I’m not sure that one generation is actually sharing culturally relevant wisdom with the next one—not if the general community doesn’t even talk about what that wisdom specifically means. Each family can be responsible for teaching wisdom in their own way, and I’m fine with that. But then, does the idea of cultural wisdom get surrendered in the process?
  • Secular wisdom in the public schools seems like it should inherently spring from the literature that’s shaped American culture. And while the students focus on how Whitman’s "purpose shapes the content and style of his text," they’re obviously exposed to the words that describe his leaves of grass.
  • But there is a noticeable deprioritization of literature, and a crumbling consensus regarding the nation’s idea of classic literature. The Common Core requires only Shakespeare, which is puzzling if only for its singularity
  • The country’s disregard for the institutional transfer of cultural wisdom is evident with this single observation: None of the state assessments has a single question about the content of any classic literature. They only test on reading skills
  • But where are the students getting their wisdom?
  • Admittedly, nothing about the Common Core or any modern shifts in teaching philosophies is forbidding me from sharing deeper lessons found in Plato’s cave or Orwell’s Airstrip One. The fine print of the Common-Core guidelines even mentions a few possible titles. But this comes with constant and pervasive language that favors objective analysis over personal engagement.
  • Later, a kid who reminds me of the teenager I was in high school—a boy who is at different times depressed, excited, naive, and curious—asked me why I became an English teacher. I smiled in self-defense, but I was silent again, not knowing what to say anymore.
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How Reliable Are the Social Sciences? - NYTimes.com - 3 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...liable-are-the-social-sciences social science reliability confidence research
shared by Javier E on 18 May 12 - Cached
  • media reports often seem to assume that any result presented as “scientific” has a claim to our serious attention. But this is hardly a reasonable view.  There is considerable distance between, say, the confidence we should place in astronomers’ calculations of eclipses and a small marketing study suggesting that consumers prefer laundry soap in blue boxes
  • A rational assessment of a scientific result must first take account of the broader context of the particular science involved.  Where does the result lie on the continuum from preliminary studies, designed to suggest further directions of research, to maximally supported conclusions of the science?
  • Second, and even more important, there is our overall assessment of work in a given science in comparison with other sciences.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The core natural sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology) are so well established that we readily accept their best-supported conclusions as definitive.
  • Even the best-developed social sciences like economics have nothing like this status.
  • Is there any work on the effectiveness of teaching that is solidly enough established to support major policy decisions?
  • The case for a negative answer lies in the predictive power of the core natural sciences compared with even the most highly developed social sciences
  • when it comes to generating reliable scientific knowledge, there is nothing more important than frequent and detailed predictions of future events.  We may have a theory that explains all the known data, but that may be just the result of our having fitted the theory to that data.  The strongest support for a theory comes from its ability to correctly predict data that it was not designed to explain.
  • While the physical sciences produce many detailed and precise predictions, the social sciences do not. 
  • most social science research falls far short of the natural sciences’ standard of controlled experiments.
  • Without a strong track record of experiments leading to successful predictions, there is seldom a basis for taking social scientific results as definitive.
  • Because of the many interrelated causes at work in social systems, many questions are simply “impervious to experimentation.”
  • even when we can get reliable experimental results, the causal complexity restricts us to “extremely conditional, statistical statements,” which severely limit the range of cases to which the results apply.
  • above all, we need to develop a much better sense of the severely limited reliability of social scientific results.   Media reports of research should pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to emphasize what they don’t show as much as what they do.
  • Given the limited predictive success and the lack of consensus in social sciences, their conclusions can seldom be primary guides to setting policy.  At best, they can supplement the general knowledge, practical experience, good sense and critical intelligence that we can only hope our political leaders will have.
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Building a Nation of Know-Nothings - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ding-a-nation-of-know-nothings partisan misinformation truth knowledge ignorance US press
shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 10 - Cached
  • It’s not just that 47 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.
  • Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate. Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.
  • It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence? But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.
  • Javier E on 26 Aug 10
     
    A major part of the US population now accepts denies basic facts, influenced by a deliberate partisan misinformation campaign tolerated by the press.
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'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia | Technol... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...iction-silicon-valley-dystopia dystopia distraction attention fb google manipulation advertising addiction psychology technology social media brain science
shared by Javier E on 06 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.
  • “It is very common,” Rosenstein says, “for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.”
  • most concerned about the psychological effects on people who, research shows, touch, swipe or tap their phone 2,617 times a day.
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”
  • Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.
  • Without irony, Eyal finished his talk with some personal tips for resisting the lure of technology. He told his audience he uses a Chrome extension, called DF YouTube, “which scrubs out a lot of those external triggers” he writes about in his book, and recommended an app called Pocket Points that “rewards you for staying off your phone when you need to focus”.
  • “One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before,” Rosenstein says. It may or may not be relevant that Rosenstein, Pearlman and most of the tech insiders questioning today’s attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls.
  • One morning in April this year, designers, programmers and tech entrepreneurs from across the world gathered at a conference centre on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. They had each paid up to $1,700 to learn how to manipulate people into habitual use of their products, on a course curated by conference organiser Nir Eyal.
  • Eyal, 39, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, has spent several years consulting for the tech industry, teaching techniques he developed by closely studying how the Silicon Valley giants operate.
  • “The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions,” Eyal writes. “It’s the impulse to check a message notification. It’s the pull to visit YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter for just a few minutes, only to find yourself still tapping and scrolling an hour later.” None of this is an accident, he writes. It is all “just as their designers intended”
  • He explains the subtle psychological tricks that can be used to make people develop habits, such as varying the rewards people receive to create “a craving”, or exploiting negative emotions that can act as “triggers”. “Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation,” Eyal writes.
  • The most seductive design, Harris explains, exploits the same psychological susceptibility that makes gambling so compulsive: variable rewards. When we tap those apps with red icons, we don’t know whether we’ll discover an interesting email, an avalanche of “likes”, or nothing at all. It is the possibility of disappointment that makes it so compulsive.
  • Finally, Eyal confided the lengths he goes to protect his own family. He has installed in his house an outlet timer connected to a router that cuts off access to the internet at a set time every day. “The idea is to remember that we are not powerless,” he said. “We are in control.
  • But are we? If the people who built these technologies are taking such radical steps to wean themselves free, can the rest of us reasonably be expected to exercise our free will?
  • Not according to Tristan Harris, a 33-year-old former Google employee turned vocal critic of the tech industry. “All of us are jacked into this system,” he says. “All of our minds can be hijacked. Our choices are not as free as we think they are.”
  • Harris, who has been branded “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”, insists that billions of people have little choice over whether they use these now ubiquitous technologies, and are largely unaware of the invisible ways in which a small number of people in Silicon Valley are shaping their lives.
  • “I don’t know a more urgent problem than this,” Harris says. “It’s changing our democracy, and it’s changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships that we want with each other.” Harris went public – giving talks, writing papers, meeting lawmakers and campaigning for reform after three years struggling to effect change inside Google’s Mountain View headquarters.
  • He explored how LinkedIn exploits a need for social reciprocity to widen its network; how YouTube and Netflix autoplay videos and next episodes, depriving users of a choice about whether or not they want to keep watching; how Snapchat created its addictive Snapstreaks feature, encouraging near-constant communication between its mostly teenage users.
  • The techniques these companies use are not always generic: they can be algorithmically tailored to each person. An internal Facebook report leaked this year, for example, revealed that the company can identify when teens feel “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost”. Such granular information, Harris adds, is “a perfect model of what buttons you can push in a particular person”.
  • Tech companies can exploit such vulnerabilities to keep people hooked; manipulating, for example, when people receive “likes” for their posts, ensuring they arrive when an individual is likely to feel vulnerable, or in need of approval, or maybe just bored. And the very same techniques can be sold to the highest bidder. “There’s no ethics,” he says. A company paying Facebook to use its levers of persuasion could be a car business targeting tailored advertisements to different types of users who want a new vehicle. Or it could be a Moscow-based troll farm seeking to turn voters in a swing county in Wisconsin.
  • It was Rosenstein’s colleague, Leah Pearlman, then a product manager at Facebook and on the team that created the Facebook “like”, who announced the feature in a 2009 blogpost. Now 35 and an illustrator, Pearlman confirmed via email that she, too, has grown disaffected with Facebook “likes” and other addictive feedback loops. She has installed a web browser plug-in to eradicate her Facebook news feed, and hired a social media manager to monitor her Facebook page so that she doesn’t have to.
  • Harris believes that tech companies never deliberately set out to make their products addictive. They were responding to the incentives of an advertising economy, experimenting with techniques that might capture people’s attention, even stumbling across highly effective design by accident.
  • It’s this that explains how the pull-to-refresh mechanism, whereby users swipe down, pause and wait to see what content appears, rapidly became one of the most addictive and ubiquitous design features in modern technology. “Each time you’re swiping down, it’s like a slot machine,” Harris says. “You don’t know what’s coming next. Sometimes it’s a beautiful photo. Sometimes it’s just an ad.”
  • The reality TV star’s campaign, he said, had heralded a watershed in which “the new, digitally supercharged dynamics of the attention economy have finally crossed a threshold and become manifest in the political realm”.
  • “Smartphones are useful tools,” he says. “But they’re addictive. Pull-to-refresh is addictive. Twitter is addictive. These are not good things. When I was working on them, it was not something I was mature enough to think about. I’m not saying I’m mature now, but I’m a little bit more mature, and I regret the downsides.”
  • All of it, he says, is reward-based behaviour that activates the brain’s dopamine pathways. He sometimes finds himself clicking on the red icons beside his apps “to make them go away”, but is conflicted about the ethics of exploiting people’s psychological vulnerabilities. “It is not inherently evil to bring people back to your product,” he says. “It’s capitalism.”
  • He identifies the advent of the smartphone as a turning point, raising the stakes in an arms race for people’s attention. “Facebook and Google assert with merit that they are giving users what they want,” McNamee says. “The same can be said about tobacco companies and drug dealers.”
  • McNamee chooses his words carefully. “The people who run Facebook and Google are good people, whose well-intentioned strategies have led to horrific unintended consequences,” he says. “The problem is that there is nothing the companies can do to address the harm unless they abandon their current advertising models.”
  • But how can Google and Facebook be forced to abandon the business models that have transformed them into two of the most profitable companies on the planet?
  • McNamee believes the companies he invested in should be subjected to greater regulation, including new anti-monopoly rules. In Washington, there is growing appetite, on both sides of the political divide, to rein in Silicon Valley. But McNamee worries the behemoths he helped build may already be too big to curtail.
  • Rosenstein, the Facebook “like” co-creator, believes there may be a case for state regulation of “psychologically manipulative advertising”, saying the moral impetus is comparable to taking action against fossil fuel or tobacco companies. “If we only care about profit maximisation,” he says, “we will go rapidly into dystopia.”
  • James Williams does not believe talk of dystopia is far-fetched. The ex-Google strategist who built the metrics system for the company’s global search advertising business, he has had a front-row view of an industry he describes as the “largest, most standardised and most centralised form of attentional control in human history”.
  • It is a journey that has led him to question whether democracy can survive the new technological age.
  • He says his epiphany came a few years ago, when he noticed he was surrounded by technology that was inhibiting him from concentrating on the things he wanted to focus on. “It was that kind of individual, existential realisation: what’s going on?” he says. “Isn’t technology supposed to be doing the complete opposite of this?
  • That discomfort was compounded during a moment at work, when he glanced at one of Google’s dashboards, a multicoloured display showing how much of people’s attention the company had commandeered for advertisers. “I realised: this is literally a million people that we’ve sort of nudged or persuaded to do this thing that they weren’t going to otherwise do,” he recalls.
  • Williams and Harris left Google around the same time, and co-founded an advocacy group, Time Well Spent, that seeks to build public momentum for a change in the way big tech companies think about design. Williams finds it hard to comprehend why this issue is not “on the front page of every newspaper every day.
  • “Eighty-seven percent of people wake up and go to sleep with their smartphones,” he says. The entire world now has a new prism through which to understand politics, and Williams worries the consequences are profound.
  • g. “The attention economy incentivises the design of technologies that grab our attention,” he says. “In so doing, it privileges our impulses over our intentions.”
  • That means privileging what is sensational over what is nuanced, appealing to emotion, anger and outrage. The news media is increasingly working in service to tech companies, Williams adds, and must play by the rules of the attention economy to “sensationalise, bait and entertain in order to survive”.
  • It is not just shady or bad actors who were exploiting the internet to change public opinion. The attention economy itself is set up to promote a phenomenon like Trump, who is masterly at grabbing and retaining the attention of supporters and critics alike, often by exploiting or creating outrage.
  • All of which has left Brichter, who has put his design work on the backburner while he focuses on building a house in New Jersey, questioning his legacy. “I’ve spent many hours and weeks and months and years thinking about whether anything I’ve done has made a net positive impact on society or humanity at all,” he says. He has blocked certain websites, turned off push notifications, restricted his use of the Telegram app to message only with his wife and two close friends, and tried to wean himself off Twitter. “I still waste time on it,” he confesses, “just reading stupid news I already know about.” He charges his phone in the kitchen, plugging it in at 7pm and not touching it until the next morning.
  • He stresses these dynamics are by no means isolated to the political right: they also play a role, he believes, in the unexpected popularity of leftwing politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, and the frequent outbreaks of internet outrage over issues that ignite fury among progressives.
  • All of which, Williams says, is not only distorting the way we view politics but, over time, may be changing the way we think, making us less rational and more impulsive. “We’ve habituated ourselves into a perpetual cognitive style of outrage, by internalising the dynamics of the medium,” he says.
  • It was another English science fiction writer, Aldous Huxley, who provided the more prescient observation when he warned that Orwellian-style coercion was less of a threat to democracy than the more subtle power of psychological manipulation, and “man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”.
  • If the attention economy erodes our ability to remember, to reason, to make decisions for ourselves – faculties that are essential to self-governance – what hope is there for democracy itself?
  • “The dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will,” he says. “If politics is an expression of our human will, on individual and collective levels, then the attention economy is directly undermining the assumptions that democracy rests on.”
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Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | New Republic - 1 views

www.thenewrepublic.com/...rated-send-your-kids-elsewhere inequality ivy league admissions university education elite success leadership class
shared by Javier E on 22 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • a blizzard of admissions jargon that I had to pick up on the fly. “Good rig”: the transcript exhibits a good degree of academic rigor. “Ed level 1”: parents have an educational level no higher than high school, indicating a genuine hardship case. “MUSD”: a musician in the highest category of promise. Kids who had five or six items on their list of extracurriculars—the “brag”—were already in trouble, because that wasn’t nearly enough.
  • With so many accomplished applicants to choose from, we were looking for kids with something special, “PQs”—personal qualities—that were often revealed by the letters or essays. Kids who only had the numbers and the résumé were usually rejected: “no spark,” “not a team-builder,” “this is pretty much in the middle of the fairway for us.” One young person, who had piled up a truly insane quantity of extracurriculars and who submitted nine letters of recommendation, was felt to be “too intense.”
  • On the other hand, the numbers and the résumé were clearly indispensable. I’d been told that successful applicants could either be “well-rounded” or “pointy”—outstanding in one particular way—but if they were pointy, they had to be really pointy: a musician whose audition tape had impressed the music department, a scientist who had won a national award.
  • ...52 more annotations...
  • When I speak of elite education, I mean prestigious institutions like Harvard or Stanford or Williams as well as the larger universe of second-tier selective schools, but I also mean everything that leads up to and away from them—the private and affluent public high schools; the ever-growing industry of tutors and consultants and test-prep courses; the admissions process itself, squatting like a dragon at the entrance to adulthood; the brand-name graduate schools and employment opportunities that come after the B.A.; and the parents and communities, largely upper-middle class, who push their children into the maw of this machine.
  • Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.
  • “Super People,” the writer James Atlas has called them—the stereotypical ultra-high-achieving elite college students of today. A double major, a sport, a musical instrument, a couple of foreign languages, service work in distant corners of the globe, a few hobbies thrown in for good measure: They have mastered them all, and with a serene self-assurance
  • Like so many kids today, I went off to college like a sleepwalker. You chose the most prestigious place that let you in; up ahead were vaguely understood objectives: status, wealth—“success.” What it meant to actually get an education and why you might want one—all this was off the table.
  • It was only after 24 years in the Ivy League—college and a Ph.D. at Columbia, ten years on the faculty at Yale—that I started to think about what this system does to kids and how they can escape from it, what it does to our society and how we can dismantle it.
  • I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy League—bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice.
  • Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history.
  • So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk.
  • There are exceptions, kids who insist, against all odds, on trying to get a real education. But their experience tends to make them feel like freaks. One student told me that a friend of hers had left Yale because she found the school “stifling to the parts of yourself that you’d call a soul.”
  • What no one seems to ask is what the “return” is supposed to be. Is it just about earning more money? Is the only purpose of an education to enable you to get a job? What, in short, is college for?
  • The first thing that college is for is to teach you to think.
  • College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance.
  • it is only through the act of establishing communication between the mind and the heart, the mind and experience, that you become an individual, a unique being—a soul. The job of college is to assist you to begin to do that. Books, ideas, works of art and thought, the pressure of the minds around you that are looking for their own answers in their own ways.
  • College is not the only chance to learn to think, but it is the best. One thing is certain: If you haven’t started by the time you finish your B.A., there’s little likelihood you’ll do it later. That is why an undergraduate experience devoted exclusively to career preparation is four years largely wasted.
  • Elite schools like to boast that they teach their students how to think, but all they mean is that they train them in the analytic and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions.
  • Everything is technocratic—the development of expertise—and everything is ultimately justified in technocratic terms.
  • Religious colleges—even obscure, regional schools that no one has ever heard of on the coasts—often do a much better job in that respect.
  • At least the classes at elite schools are academically rigorous, demanding on their own terms, no? Not necessarily. In the sciences, usually; in other disciplines, not so much
  • professors and students have largely entered into what one observer called a “nonaggression pact.”
  • higher marks for shoddier work.
  • today’s young people appear to be more socially engaged than kids have been for several decades and that they are more apt to harbor creative or entrepreneurial impulses
  • they tend to be played out within the same narrow conception of what constitutes a valid life: affluence, credentials, prestige.
  • Experience itself has been reduced to instrumental function, via the college essay. From learning to commodify your experiences for the application, the next step has been to seek out experiences in order to have them to commodify
  • there is now a thriving sector devoted to producing essay-ready summers
  • To be a high-achieving student is to constantly be urged to think of yourself as a future leader of society.
  • what these institutions mean by leadership is nothing more than getting to the top. Making partner at a major law firm or becoming a chief executive, climbing the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy you decide to attach yourself to. I don’t think it occurs to the people in charge of elite colleges that the concept of leadership ought to have a higher meaning, or, really, any meaning.
  • The irony is that elite students are told that they can be whatever they want, but most of them end up choosing to be one of a few very similar things
  • As of 2010, about a third of graduates went into financing or consulting at a number of top schools, including Harvard, Princeton, and Cornell.
  • Whole fields have disappeared from view: the clergy, the military, electoral politics, even academia itself, for the most part, including basic science
  • It’s considered glamorous to drop out of a selective college if you want to become the next Mark Zuckerberg, but ludicrous to stay in to become a social worker. “What Wall Street figured out,” as Ezra Klein has put it, “is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic and no idea what to do next.”
  • t almost feels ridiculous to have to insist that colleges like Harvard are bastions of privilege, where the rich send their children to learn to walk, talk, and think like the rich. Don’t we already know this? They aren’t called elite colleges for nothing. But apparently we like pretending otherwise. We live in a meritocracy, after all.
  • Visit any elite campus across our great nation, and you can thrill to the heart-warming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals
  • That doesn’t mean there aren’t a few exceptions, but that is all they are. In fact, the group that is most disadvantaged by our current admissions policies are working-class and rural whites, who are hardly present
  • The college admissions game is not primarily about the lower and middle classes seeking to rise, or even about the upper-middle class attempting to maintain its position. It is about determining the exact hierarchy of status within the upper-middle class itself.
  • This system is exacerbating inequality, retarding social mobility, perpetuating privilege, and creating an elite that is isolated from the society that it’s supposed to lead. The numbers are undeniable. In 1985, 46 percent of incoming freshmen at the 250 most selective colleges came from the top quarter of the income distribution. By 2000, it was 55 percent
  • The major reason for the trend is clear. Not increasing tuition, though that is a factor, but the ever-growing cost of manufacturing children who are fit to compete in the college admissions game
  • Wealthy families start buying their children’s way into elite colleges almost from the moment they are born: music lessons, sports equipment, foreign travel (“enrichment” programs, to use the all-too-perfect term)—most important, of course, private-school tuition or the costs of living in a place with top-tier public schools.
  • s there anything that I can do, a lot of young people have written to ask me, to avoid becoming an out-of-touch, entitled little shit? I don’t have a satisfying answer, short of telling them to transfer to a public university. You cannot cogitate your way to sympathy with people of different backgrounds, still less to knowledge of them. You need to interact with them directly, and it has to be on an equal footing
  • Elite private colleges will never allow their students’ economic profile to mirror that of society as a whole. They can’t afford to—they need a critical mass of full payers and they need to tend to their donor base—and it’s not even clear that they’d want to.
  • Elite colleges are not just powerless to reverse the movement toward a more unequal society; their policies actively promote it.
  • The SAT is supposed to measure aptitude, but what it actually measures is parental income, which it tracks quite closely
  • U.S. News and World Report supplies the percentage of freshmen at each college who finished in the highest 10 percent of their high school class. Among the top 20 universities, the number is usually above 90 percent. I’d be wary of attending schools like that. Students determine the level of classroom discussion; they shape your values and expectations, for good and ill. It’s partly because of the students that I’d warn kids away from the Ivies and their ilk. Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, and far less entitled and competitive.
  • The best option of all may be the second-tier—not second-rate—colleges, like Reed, Kenyon, Wesleyan, Sewanee, Mount Holyoke, and others. Instead of trying to compete with Harvard and Yale, these schools have retained their allegiance to real educational values.
  • Not being an entitled little shit is an admirable goal. But in the end, the deeper issue is the situation that makes it so hard to be anything else. The time has come, not simply to reform that system top to bottom, but to plot our exit to another kind of society altogether.
  • The education system has to act to mitigate the class system, not reproduce it. Affirmative action should be based on class instead of race, a change that many have been advocating for years. Preferences for legacies and athletes ought to be discarded. SAT scores should be weighted to account for socioeconomic factors. Colleges should put an end to résumé-stuffing by imposing a limit on the number of extracurriculars that kids can list on their applications. They ought to place more value on the kind of service jobs that lower-income students often take in high school and that high achievers almost never do. They should refuse to be impressed by any opportunity that was enabled by parental wealth
  • More broadly, they need to rethink their conception of merit. If schools are going to train a better class of leaders than the ones we have today, they’re going to have to ask themselves what kinds of qualities they need to promote. Selecting students by GPA or the number of extracurriculars more often benefits the faithful drudge than the original mind.
  • reforming the admissions process. That might address the problem of mediocrity, but it won’t address the greater one of inequality
  • The problem is the Ivy League itself. We have contracted the training of our leadership class to a set of private institutions. However much they claim to act for the common good, they will always place their interests first.
  • I’ve come to see that what we really need is to create one where you don’t have to go to the Ivy League, or any private college, to get a first-rate education.
  • High-quality public education, financed with public money, for the benefit of all
  • Everybody gets an equal chance to go as far as their hard work and talent will take them—you know, the American dream. Everyone who wants it gets to have the kind of mind-expanding, soul-enriching experience that a liberal arts education provides.
  • We recognize that free, quality K–12 education is a right of citizenship. We also need to recognize—as we once did and as many countries still do—that the same is true of higher education. We have tried aristocracy. We have tried meritocracy. Now it’s time to try democracy.
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Opinion | The Zombie Style in American Politics - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...republican-party-ideas.html bad faith climate change inequality Russia logic
shared by Javier E on 05 May 19 - No Cached
  • This was an awkward observation for a party that, then as now, wanted to slash taxes for the rich and dismantle the social safety net. How would conservatives respond?
  • The answer was multilayered denial. Inequality wasn’t rising. O.K., it was rising, but that wasn’t a problem. O.K., rising inequality was unfortunate, but there was nothing that could be done about it without crippling economic growth.
  • You might think that the right would have to choose one of those positions, or at least that once you’d managed to refute one layer of the argument, say by showing that inequality was indeed rising, you could put that argument behind you and move on to the next one. But no: Old arguments, like the wights in “Game of Thrones,” would just keep rising up after you thought you had killed them.
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  • You see the same thing on climate change. Global warming is a myth — a hoax concocted by a vast conspiracy of scientists around the world. O.K., the climate is changing, but it’s a natural phenomenon that has nothing to do with human activity. O.K., man-made climate change is real, but we can’t do anything about it without destroying the economy.
  • What the right’s positioning on inequality, climate and now Russian election interference have in common is that in each case the people pretending to be making a serious argument are actually apparatchiks operating in bad faith.
  • in each case those making denialist arguments, while they may invoke evidence, don’t actually care what the evidence says; at a fundamental level, they aren’t interested in the truth. Their goal, instead, is to serve a predetermined agenda.
  • eporting about these debates typically frames them as disputes about the facts and what they mean, when the reality is that one side isn’t interested in the facts.
  • the pressures that often lead to false equivalence. Calling out dishonesty and bad faith can seem like partisan bias when, to put it bluntly, one side of the political spectrum lies all the time, while the other side doesn’t.
  • pretending that good faith exists when it doesn’t is unfair to readers. The public deserves to know that the big debates in modern U.S. politics aren’t a conventional clash of rival ideas.
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Is our world a simulation? Why some scientists say it's more likely than not | Technolo... - 3 views

www.theguardian.com/...ted-world-elon-musk-the-matrix simulation reality computer technology universe
shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Musk is just one of the people in Silicon Valley to take a keen interest in the “simulation hypothesis”, which argues that what we experience as reality is actually a giant computer simulation created by a more sophisticated intelligence
  • Oxford University’s Nick Bostrom in 2003 (although the idea dates back as far as the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes). In a paper titled “Are You Living In a Simulation?”, Bostrom suggested that members of an advanced “posthuman” civilization with vast computing power might choose to run simulations of their ancestors in the universe.
  • If we believe that there is nothing supernatural about what causes consciousness and it’s merely the product of a very complex architecture in the human brain, we’ll be able to reproduce it. “Soon there will be nothing technical standing in the way to making machines that have their own consciousness,
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  • At the same time, videogames are becoming more and more sophisticated and in the future we’ll be able to have simulations of conscious entities inside them.
  • “Forty years ago we had Pong – two rectangles and a dot. That’s where we were. Now 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, we’ll have augmented reality,” said Musk. “If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality.”
  • “If one progresses at the current rate of technology a few decades into the future, very quickly we will be a society where there are artificial entities living in simulations that are much more abundant than human beings.
  • If there are many more simulated minds than organic ones, then the chances of us being among the real minds starts to look more and more unlikely. As Terrile puts it: “If in the future there are more digital people living in simulated environments than there are today, then what is to say we are not part of that already?”
  • Reasons to believe that the universe is a simulation include the fact that it behaves mathematically and is broken up into pieces (subatomic particles) like a pixelated video game. “Even things that we think of as continuous – time, energy, space, volume – all have a finite limit to their size. If that’s the case, then our universe is both computable and finite. Those properties allow the universe to be simulated,” Terrile said
  • “Is it logically possible that we are in a simulation? Yes. Are we probably in a simulation? I would say no,” said Max Tegmark, a professor of physics at MIT.
  • “In order to make the argument in the first place, we need to know what the fundamental laws of physics are where the simulations are being made. And if we are in a simulation then we have no clue what the laws of physics are. What I teach at MIT would be the simulated laws of physics,”
  • Terrile believes that recognizing that we are probably living in a simulation is as game-changing as Copernicus realizing that the Earth was not the center of the universe. “It was such a profound idea that it wasn’t even thought of as an assumption,”
  • That we might be in a simulation is, Terrile argues, a simpler explanation for our existence than the idea that we are the first generation to rise up from primordial ooze and evolve into molecules, biology and eventually intelligence and self-awareness. The simulation hypothesis also accounts for peculiarities in quantum mechanics, particularly the measurement problem, whereby things only become defined when they are observed.
  • “For decades it’s been a problem. Scientists have bent over backwards to eliminate the idea that we need a conscious observer. Maybe the real solution is you do need a conscious entity like a conscious player of a video game,
  • How can the hypothesis be put to the test
  • scientists can look for hallmarks of simulation. “Suppose someone is simulating our universe – it would be very tempting to cut corners in ways that makes the simulation cheaper to run. You could look for evidence of that in an experiment,” said Tegmark
  • First, it provides a scientific basis for some kind of afterlife or larger domain of reality above our world. “You don’t need a miracle, faith or anything special to believe it. It comes naturally out of the laws of physics,”
  • it means we will soon have the same ability to create our own simulations. “We will have the power of mind and matter to be able to create whatever we want and occupy those worlds.”
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