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Javier E

The Joy of Psyching Myself Out­ - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oy-of-psyching-myself-out.html

science psychology language writing objectivity

shared by Javier E on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • that neat separation is not just unwarranted; it’s destructive
  • Although it’s often presented as a dichotomy (the apparent subjectivity of the writer versus the seeming objectivity of the psychologist), it need not be.
  • IS it possible to think scientifically and creatively at once? Can you be both a psychologist and a writer?
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  • “A writer must be as objective as a chemist,” Anton Chekhov wrote in 1887. “He must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dung heaps play a very reasonable part in a landscape.”
  • At the turn of the century, psychology was a field quite unlike what it is now. The theoretical musings of William James were the norm (a wry commenter once noted that William James was the writer, and his brother Henry, the psychologist)
  • Freud was a breed of psychologist that hardly exists anymore: someone who saw the world as both writer and psychologist, and for whom there was no conflict between the two. That boundary melding allowed him to posit the existence of cognitive mechanisms that wouldn’t be empirically proved for decades,
  • Freud got it brilliantly right and brilliantly wrong. The rightness is as good a justification as any of the benefits, the necessity even, of knowing how to look through the eyes of a writer. The wrongness is part of the reason that the distinction between writing and experimental psychology has grown far more rigid than it was a century ago.
  • the signs people associate with liars often have little empirical evidence to support them. Therein lies the psychologist’s distinct role and her necessity. As a writer, you look in order to describe, but you remain free to use that description however you see fit. As a psychologist, you look to describe, yes, but also to verify.
  • Without verification, we can’t always trust what we see — or rather, what we think we see.
  • The desire for the world to be what it ought to be and not what it is permeates experimental psychology as much as writing, though. There’s experimental bias and the problem known in the field as “demand characteristics” — when researchers end up finding what they want to find by cuing participants to act a certain way.
  • IN 1932, when he was in his 70s, Freud gave a series of lectures on psychoanalysis. In his final talk, “A Philosophy of Life,” he focused on clarifying an important caveat to his research: His followers should not be confused by the seemingly internal, and thus possibly subjective, nature of his work. “There is no other source of knowledge of the universe but the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations,” he said.
  • That is what both the psychologist and the writer should strive for: a self-knowledge that allows you to look in order to discover, without agenda, without preconception, without knowing or caring if what you’re seeing is wrong or right in your scheme of the world. It’s harder than it sounds. For one thing, you have to possess the self-knowledge that will allow you to admit when you’re wrong.
  • Even with the best intentions, objectivity can prove a difficult companion. I left psychology behind because I found its structural demands overly hampering. I couldn’t just pursue interesting lines of inquiry; I had to devise a set of experiments, see how feasible they were, both technically and financially, consider how they would reflect on my career. That meant that most new inquiries never happened — in a sense, it meant that objectivity was more an ideal than a reality. Each study was selected for a reason other than intrinsic interest.
Javier E

Opinion | What Do We Actually Know About the Economy? (Wonkish) - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...about-the-economy-wonkish.html

economics history crisis great recession theory

shared by Javier E on 17 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Among economists more generally, a lot of the criticism seems to amount to the view that macroeconomics is bunk, and that we should stick to microeconomics, which is the real, solid stuff. As I’ll explain in a moment, that’s all wrong
  • in an important sense the past decade has been a huge validation for textbook macroeconomics; meanwhile, the exaltation of micro as the only “real” economics both gives microeconomics too much credit and is largely responsible for the ways macroeconomic theory has gone wrong.
  • Finally, many outsiders and some insiders have concluded from the crisis that economic theory in general is bunk, that we should take guidance from people immersed in the real world – say, business leaders — and/or concentrate on empirical results and skip the models
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  • And while empirical evidence is important and we need more of it, the data almost never speak for themselves – a point amply illustrated by recent monetary events.
  • chwinger, as I remember the story, was never seen to use a Feynman diagram. But he had a locked room in his house, and the rumor was that that room was where he kept the Feynman diagrams he used in secret.
  • What’s the equivalent of Feynman diagrams? Something like IS-LM, which is the simplest model you can write down of how interest rates and output are jointly determined, and is how most practicing macroeconomists actually think about short-run economic fluctuations. It’s also how they talk about macroeconomics to each other. But it’s not what they put in their papers, because the journals demand that your model have “microfoundations.”
  • The Bernanke Fed massively expanded the monetary base, by a factor of almost five. There were dire warnings that this would cause inflation and “debase the dollar.” But prices went nowhere, and not much happened to broader monetary aggregates (a result that, weirdly, some economists seemed to find deeply puzzling even though it was exactly what should have been expected.)
  • What about fiscal policy? Traditional macro said that at the zero lower bound there would be no crowding out – that deficits wouldn’t drive up interest rates, and that fiscal multipliers would be larger than under normal conditions. The first of these predictions was obviously borne out, as rates stayed low even when deficits were very large. The second prediction is a bit harder to test, for reasons I’ll get into when I talk about the limits of empiricism. But the evidence does indeed suggest large positive multipliers.
  • The overall story, then, is one of overwhelming predictive success. Basic, old-fashioned macroeconomics didn’t fail in the crisis – it worked extremely well
  • In fact, it’s hard to think of any other example of economic models working this well – making predictions that most non-economists (and some economists) refused to believe, indeed found implausible, but which came true. Where, for example, can you find any comparable successes in microeconomics?
  • Meanwhile, the demand that macro become ever more rigorous in the narrow, misguided sense that it look like micro led to useful approaches being locked up in Schwinger’s back room, and in all too many cases forgotten. When the crisis struck, it was amazing how many successful academics turned out not to know things every economist would have known in 1970, and indeed resurrected 1930-vintage fallacies in the belief that they were profound insights.
  • mainly I think it reflected the general unwillingness of human beings (a category that includes many though not necessarily all economists) to believe that so many people can be so wrong about something so big.
  • . To normal human beings the study of international trade and that of international macroeconomics might sound like pretty much the same thing. In reality, however, the two fields used very different models, had very different intellectual cultures, and tended to look down on each other. Trade people tended to consider international macro people semi-charlatans, doing ad hoc stuff devoid of rigor. International macro people considered trade people boring, obsessed with proving theorems and offering little of real-world use.
  • does microeconomics really deserve its reputation of moral and intellectual superiority? No
  • Even before the rise of behavioral economics, any halfway self-aware economist realized that utility maximization – indeed, the very concept of utility — wasn’t a fact about the world; it was more of a thought experiment, whose conclusions should always have been stated in the subjunctive.
  • But, you say, we didn’t see the Great Recession coming. Well, what do you mean “we,” white man? OK, what’s true is that few economists realized that there was a huge housing bubble
  • True, a model doesn’t have to be perfect to provide hugely important insights. But here’s my question: where are the examples of microeconomic theory providing strong, counterintuitive, successful predictions on the same order as the success of IS-LM macroeconomics after 2008? Maybe there are some, but I can’t come up with any.
  • The point is not that micro theory is useless and we should stop doing it. But it doesn’t deserve to be seen as superior to macro modeling.
  • And the effort to make macro more and more like micro – to ground everything in rational behavior – has to be seen now as destructive. True, that effort did lead to some strong predictions: e.g., only unanticipated money should affect real output, transitory income changes shouldn’t affect consumer spending, government spending should crowd out private demand, etc. But all of those predictions have turned out to be wrong.
  • Kahneman and Tversky and Thaler and so on deserved all the honors they received for helping to document the specific ways in which utility maximization falls short, but even before their work we should never have expected perfect maximization to be a good description of reality.
  • But data never speak for themselves, for a couple of reasons. One, which is familiar, is that economists don’t get to do many experiments, and natural experiments are rare
  • The other problem is that even when we do get something like natural experiments, they often took place under economic regimes that aren’t relevant to current problems.
  • Both of these problems were extremely relevant in the years following the 2008 crisis.
  • you might be tempted to conclude that the empirical evidence is that monetary expansion is inflationary, indeed roughly one-for-one.
  • But the question, as the Fed embarked on quantitative easing, was what effect this would have on an economy at the zero lower bound. And while there were many historical examples of big monetary expansion, examples at the ZLB were much rarer – in fact, basically two: the U.S. in the 1930s and Japan in the early 2000
  • These examples told a very different story: that expansion would not, in fact, be inflationary, that it would work out the way it did.
  • The point is that empirical evidence can only do certain things. It can certainly prove that your theory is wrong! And it can also make a theory much more persuasive in those cases where the theory makes surprising predictions, which the data bear out. But the data can never absolve you from the necessity of having theories.
  • Over this past decade, I’ve watched a number of economists try to argue from authority: I am a famous professor, therefore you should believe what I say. This never ends well. I’ve also seen a lot of nihilism: economists don’t know anything, and we should tear the field down and start over.
  • Obviously I differ with both views. Economists haven’t earned the right to be snooty and superior, especially if their reputation comes from the ability to do hard math: hard math has been remarkably little help lately, if ever.
  • On the other hand, economists do turn out to know quite a lot: they do have some extremely useful models, usually pretty simple ones, that have stood up well in the face of evidence and events. And they definitely shouldn’t defer to important and/or rich people on polic
  • : compare Janet Yellen’s macroeconomic track record with that of the multiple billionaires who warned that Bernanke would debase the dollar. Or take my favorite Business Week headline from 2010: “Krugman or [John] Paulson: Who You Gonna Bet On?” Um.The important thing is to be aware of what we do know, and why.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
Javier E

The Facebook Fallacy: Privacy Is Up to You - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...facebook-privacy.html

facebook privacy disclosure psychology rational choice social media brain science

shared by Javier E on 25 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • As Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive parried questions from members of Congress about how the social network would protect its users’ privacy, he returned time and again to what probably sounded like an unimpeachable proposition.
  • By providing its users with greater and more transparent controls over the personal data they share and how it is used for targeted advertising, he insisted, Facebook could empower them to make their own call and decide how much privacy they were willing to put on the block.
  • providing a greater sense of control over their personal data won’t make Facebook users more cautious. It will instead encourage them to share more.
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  • “Disingenuous is the adjective I had in my mind,”
  • “Fifteen years ago it would have been legitimate to propose this argument,” he added. “But it is no longer legitimate to ignore the behavioral problems and propose simply more transparency and controls.”
  • Professor Acquisti and two colleagues, Laura Brandimarte and the behavioral economist George Loewenstein, published research on this behavior nearly six years ago. “Providing users of modern information-sharing technologies with more granular privacy controls may lead them to share more sensitive information with larger, and possibly riskier, audiences,” they concluded.
  • the critical question is whether, given the tools, we can be trusted to manage the experience. The increasing body of research into how we behave online suggests not.
  • “Privacy control settings give people more rope to hang themselves,” Professor Loewenstein told me. “Facebook has figured this out, so they give you incredibly granular controls.”
  • This paradox is hardly the only psychological quirk for the social network to exploit. Consider default settings. Tons of research in behavioral economics has found that people tend to stick to the default setting of whatever is offered to them, even when they could change it easily.
  • “Facebook is acutely aware of this,” Professor Loewenstein told me. In 2005, its default settings shared most profile fields with, at most, friends of friends. Nothing was shared by default with the full internet.
  • By 2010, however, likes, name, gender, picture and a lot of other things were shared with everybody online. “Facebook changed the defaults because it appreciated their power,” Professor Loewenstein added.
  • The phenomenon even has a name: the “control paradox.”
  • people who profess concern about privacy will provide the emails of their friends in exchange for some pizza.
  • They also found that providing consumers reassuring though irrelevant information about their ability to protect their privacy will make them less likely to avoid surveillance.
  • Another experiment revealed that people are more willing to come clean about their engagement in illicit or questionable behavior when they believe others have done so, too
  • Those in the industry often argue that people don’t really care about their privacy — that they may seem concerned when they answer surveys, but still routinely accept cookies and consent to have their data harvested in exchange for cool online experiences
  • Professor Acquisti thinks this is a fallacy. The cognitive hurdles to manage our privacy online are simply too steep.
  • While we are good at handling our privacy in the offline world, lowering our voices or closing the curtains as the occasion may warrant, there are no cues online to alert us to a potential privacy invasion
  • Even if we were to know precisely what information companies like Facebook have about us and how it will be used, which we don’t, it would be hard for us to assess potential harms
  • Members of Congress have mostly let market forces prevail online, unfettered by government meddling. Privacy protection in the internet economy has relied on the belief that consumers will make rational choices
  • Europe’s stringent new privacy protection law, which Facebook has promised to apply in the United States, may do better than the American system of disclosure and consen
  • the European system also relies mostly on faith that consumers will make rational choices.
  • The more that psychologists and behavioral economists study psychological biases and quirks, the clearer it seems that rational choices alone won’t work. “I don’t think any kind of disclosure or opt in or opt out is going to protect us from our worst instincts,”
  • What to do? Professor Acquisti suggests flipping the burden of proof. The case for privacy regulation rests on consumers’ proving that data collection is harmful. Why not ask the big online platforms like Facebook to prove they can’t work without it? If reducing data collection imposes a cost, we could figure out who bears it — whether consumers, advertisers or Facebook’s bottom line.
Javier E

The trouble with atheists: a defence of faith | Books | The Guardian - 1 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...with-athiests-defence-of-faith

religion faith defense Christianity emotions mercy apologetics

shared by Javier E on 10 Sep 12 - Cached
  • My daughter has just turned six. Some time over the next year or so, she will discover that her parents are weird. We're weird because we go to church.
  • This means as she gets older there'll be voices telling her what it means, getting louder and louder until by the time she's a teenager they'll be shouting right in her ear. It means that we believe in a load of bronze-age absurdities. That we fetishise pain and suffering. That we advocate wishy-washy niceness. That we're too stupid to understand the irrationality of our creeds. That we build absurdly complex intellectual structures on the marshmallow foundations of a fantasy. That we're savagely judgmental.
  • that's not the bad news. Those are the objections of people who care enough about religion to object to it. Or to rent a set of recreational objections from Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. As accusations, they may be a hodge-podge, but at least they assume there's a thing called religion which looms with enough definition and significance to be detested.
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  • the really painful message our daughter will receive is that we're embarrassing. For most people who aren't New Atheists, or old atheists, and have no passion invested in the subject, either negative or positive, believers aren't weird because we're wicked. We're weird because we're inexplicable; because, when there's no necessity for it that anyone sensible can see, we've committed ourselves to a set of awkward and absurd attitudes that obtrude, that stick out against the background of modern life, and not in some important or respectworthy or principled way, either.
  • Believers are people who try to insert Jee-zus into conversations at parties; who put themselves down, with writhings of unease, for perfectly normal human behaviour; who are constantly trying to create a solemn hush that invites a fart, a hiccup, a bit of subversion. Believers are people who, on the rare occasions when you have to listen to them, like at a funeral or a wedding, seize the opportunity to pour the liquidised content of a primary-school nativity play into your earhole, apparently not noticing that childhood is over.
  • What goes on inside believers is mysterious. So far as it can be guessed at it appears to be a kind of anxious pretending, a kind of continual, nervous resistance to reality.
  • to me, it's belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are capable. Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending – pretending that might as well be systematic, it's so thoroughly incentivised by our culture.
  • The atheist bus says: "There's probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life."
  • the word that offends against realism here is "enjoy". I'm sorry – enjoy your life?
  • If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you'd think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking single person between 20 and 35, with excellent muscle-definition and/or an excellent figure, and a large disposable income. And you'd think the same thing if you got your information exclusively from the atheist bus
  • The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren't being "worried" by us believers and our hellfire preaching. Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure
  • What's so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks? Well, in the first place, that it buys a bill of goods, sight unseen, from modern marketing. Given that human life isn't and can't be made up of enjoyment, it is in effect accepting a picture of human life in which those pieces of living where easy enjoyment is more likely become the only pieces that are visible.
  • But then, like every human being, I am not in the habit of entertaining only those emotions I can prove. I'd be an unrecognisable oddity if I did. Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue. Yet emotions are also our indispensable tool for navigating, for feeling our way through, the much larger domain of stuff that isn't susceptible to proof or disproof, that isn't checkable against the physical universe. We dream, hope, wonder, sorrow, rage, grieve, delight, surmise, joke, detest; we form such unprovable conjectures as novels or clarinet concertos; we imagine. And religion is just a part of that, in one sense. It's just one form of imagining, absolutely functional, absolutely human-normal. It would seem perverse, on the face of it, to propose that this one particular manifestation of imagining should be treated as outrageous, should be excised if (which is doubtful) we can manage it.
  • suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, you are povertystricken, or desperate for a job, or a drug addict, or social services have just taken away your child. The bus tells you that there's probably no God so you should stop worrying and enjoy your life, and now the slogan is not just bitterly inappropriate in mood. What it means, if it's true, is that anyone who isn't enjoying themselves is entirely on their own. What the bus says is: there's no help coming.
  • Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion. To say that life is to be enjoyed (just enjoyed) is like saying that mountains should only have summits, or that all colours should be purple, or that all plays should be by Shakespeare. This really is a bizarre category error.
  • A consolation you could believe in would be one that wasn't in danger of popping like a soap bubble on contact with the ordinary truths about us. A consolation you could trust would be one that acknowledged the difficult stuff rather than being in flight from it, and then found you grounds for hope in spite of it, or even because of it
  • The novelist Richard Powers has written that the Clarinet Concerto sounds the way mercy would sound, and that's exactly how I experienced it in 1997. Mercy, though, is one of those words that now requires definition. It does not only mean some tyrant's capacity to suspend a punishment he has himself inflicted. It can mean – and does mean in this case – getting something kind instead of the sensible consequences of an action, or as well as the sensible consequences of an action.
  • from outside, belief looks like a series of ideas about the nature of the universe for which a truth-claim is being made, a set of propositions that you sign up to; and when actual believers don't talk about their belief in this way, it looks like slipperiness, like a maddening evasion of the issue.
  • I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don't have the feelings because I've assented to the ideas.
  • what I felt listening to Mozart in 1997 is not some wishy-washy metaphor for an idea I believe in, and it's not a front behind which the real business of belief is going on: it's the thing itself. My belief is made of, built up from, sustained by, emotions like that. That's what makes it real.
  • I think that Mozart, two centuries earlier, had succeeded in creating a beautiful and accurate report of an aspect of reality. I think that the reason reality is that way – that it is in some ultimate sense merciful as well as being a set of physical processes all running along on their own without hope of appeal, all the way up from quantum mechanics to the relative velocity of galaxies by way of "blundering, low and horridly cruel" biology (Darwin) – is that the universe is sustained by a continual and infinitely patient act of love. I think that love keeps it in being.
  • That's what I think. But it's all secondary. It all comes limping along behind my emotional assurance that there was mercy, and I felt it. And so the argument about whether the ideas are true or not, which is the argument that people mostly expect to have about religion, is also secondary for me.
  • No, I can't prove it. I don't know that any of it is true. I don't know if there's a God. (And neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins, and neither does anybody. It isn't the kind of thing you can know. It isn't a knowable item.)
  • let's be clear about the emotional logic of the bus's message. It amounts to a denial of hope or consolation on any but the most chirpy, squeaky, bubble-gummy reading of the human situation
  • It's got itself established in our culture, relatively recently, that the emotions involved in religious belief must be different from the ones involved in all the other kinds of continuous imagining, hoping, dreaming, and so on, that humans do. These emotions must be alien, freakish, sad, embarrassing, humiliating, immature, pathetic. These emotions must be quite separate from commonsensical us. But they aren't
  • The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.
  • It's just that the emotions in question are rarely talked about apart from their rationalisation into ideas. This is what I have tried to do in my new book, Unapologetic.
  • You can easily look up what Christians believe in. You can read any number of defences of Christian ideas. This, however, is a defence of Christian emotions – of their intelligibility, of their grown-up dignity.
Javier E

'Scorn for Tribalism Is an American Tradition' - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...544616

tribal tribe tradition language psychology

shared by Javier E on 03 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Wittgenstein, of course, tried to prove that individual words had atomic absolute meanings. Immediately after claiming to prove that, however, he realized that they don't.  A few years ago a team at MIT looked at the matter from a technical measurable sense. The summary is that the most efficient and powerful language possible is one in which all of the words are ambiguous, and the meaning is only in the context.
  • Briefly, instead of having a separate word for every possible present and future meaning, you use combinations of words to define any given meaning.  (The same thing is done with letters to make words.) That is basically what Wittgenstein came to understand, but the new point being that that is not just some inherent defect of language, but a hallmark of an efficient and powerful language.  As the study said:
  • "Basically, if you have any human language in your input or output, you are stuck with needing context to disambiguate.”
Javier E

There's No Such Thing As 'Sound Science' | FiveThirtyEight - 1 views

fivethirtyeight.com/...d-science-demand-sound-science

science method research trade-off values fact objectivity

shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • cience is being turned against itself. For decades, its twin ideals of transparency and rigor have been weaponized by those who disagree with results produced by the scientific method. Under the Trump administration, that fight has ramped up again.
  • The same entreaties crop up again and again: We need to root out conflicts. We need more precise evidence. What makes these arguments so powerful is that they sound quite similar to the points raised by proponents of a very different call for change that’s coming from within science.
  • Despite having dissimilar goals, the two forces espouse principles that look surprisingly alike: Science needs to be transparent. Results and methods should be openly shared so that outside researchers can independently reproduce and validate them. The methods used to collect and analyze data should be rigorous and clear, and conclusions must be supported by evidence.
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  • they’re also used as talking points by politicians who are working to make it more difficult for the EPA and other federal agencies to use science in their regulatory decision-making, under the guise of basing policy on “sound science.” Science’s virtues are being wielded against it.
  • What distinguishes the two calls for transparency is intent: Whereas the “open science” movement aims to make science more reliable, reproducible and robust, proponents of “sound science” have historically worked to amplify uncertainty, create doubt and undermine scientific discoveries that threaten their interests.
  • “Our criticisms are founded in a confidence in science,” said Steven Goodman, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford and a proponent of open science. “That’s a fundamental difference — we’re critiquing science to make it better. Others are critiquing it to devalue the approach itself.”
  • alls to base public policy on “sound science” seem unassailable if you don’t know the term’s history. The phrase was adopted by the tobacco industry in the 1990s to counteract mounting evidence linking secondhand smoke to cancer.
  • The sound science tactic exploits a fundamental feature of the scientific process: Science does not produce absolute certainty. Contrary to how it’s sometimes represented to the public, science is not a magic wand that turns everything it touches to truth. Instead, it’s a process of uncertainty reduction, much like a game of 20 Questions.
  • Any given study can rarely answer more than one question at a time, and each study usually raises a bunch of new questions in the process of answering old ones. “Science is a process rather than an answer,” said psychologist Alison Ledgerwood of the University of California, Davis. Every answer is provisional and subject to change in the face of new evidence. It’s not entirely correct to say that “this study proves this fact,” Ledgerwood said. “We should be talking instead about how science increases or decreases our confidence in something.”
  • While insisting that they merely wanted to ensure that public policy was based on sound science, tobacco companies defined the term in a way that ensured that no science could ever be sound enough. The only sound science was certain science, which is an impossible standard to achieve.
  • “Doubt is our product,” wrote one employee of the Brown & Williamson tobacco company in a 1969 internal memo. The note went on to say that doubt “is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’” and “establishing a controversy.” These strategies for undermining inconvenient science were so effective that they’ve served as a sort of playbook for industry interests ever since
  • Doubt merchants aren’t pushing for knowledge, they’re practicing what Proctor has dubbed “agnogenesis” — the intentional manufacture of ignorance. This ignorance isn’t simply the absence of knowing something; it’s a lack of comprehension deliberately created by agents who don’t want you to know,
  • In the hands of doubt-makers, transparency becomes a rhetorical move. “It’s really difficult as a scientist or policy maker to make a stand against transparency and openness, because well, who would be against it?
  • But at the same time, “you can couch everything in the language of transparency and it becomes a powerful weapon.” For instance, when the EPA was preparing to set new limits on particulate pollution in the 1990s, industry groups pushed back against the research and demanded access to primary data (including records that researchers had promised participants would remain confidential) and a reanalysis of the evidence. Their calls succeeded and a new analysis was performed. The reanalysis essentially confirmed the original conclusions, but the process of conducting it delayed the implementation of regulations and cost researchers time and money.
  • Delay is a time-tested strategy. “Gridlock is the greatest friend a global warming skeptic has,” said Marc Morano, a prominent critic of global warming research
  • which has received funding from the oil and gas industry. “We’re the negative force. We’re just trying to stop stuff.”
  • these ploys are getting a fresh boost from Congress. The Data Quality Act (also known as the Information Quality Act) was reportedly written by an industry lobbyist and quietly passed as part of an appropriations bill in 2000. The rule mandates that federal agencies ensure the “quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” that they disseminate, though it does little to define what these terms mean. The law also provides a mechanism for citizens and groups to challenge information that they deem inaccurate, including science that they disagree with. “It was passed in this very quiet way with no explicit debate about it — that should tell you a lot about the real goals,” Levy said.
  • in the 20 months following its implementation, the act was repeatedly used by industry groups to push back against proposed regulations and bog down the decision-making process. Instead of deploying transparency as a fundamental principle that applies to all science, these interests have used transparency as a weapon to attack very particular findings that they would like to eradicate.
  • Now Congress is considering another way to legislate how science is used. The Honest Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas,3The bill has been passed by the House but still awaits a vote in the Senate. is another example of what Levy calls a “Trojan horse” law that uses the language of transparency as a cover to achieve other political goals. Smith’s legislation would severely limit the kind of evidence the EPA could use for decision-making. Only studies whose raw data and computer codes were publicly available would be allowed for consideration.
  • It might seem like an easy task to sort good science from bad, but in reality it’s not so simple. “There’s a misplaced idea that we can definitively distinguish the good from the not-good science, but it’s all a matter of degree,” said Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science. “There is no perfect study.” Requiring regulators to wait until they have (nonexistent) perfect evidence is essentially “a way of saying, ‘We don’t want to use evidence for our decision-making,’
  • ost scientific controversies aren’t about science at all, and once the sides are drawn, more data is unlikely to bring opponents into agreement.
  • objective knowledge is not enough to resolve environmental controversies. “While these controversies may appear on the surface to rest on disputed questions of fact, beneath often reside differing positions of value; values that can give shape to differing understandings of what ‘the facts’ are.” What’s needed in these cases isn’t more or better science, but mechanisms to bring those hidden values to the forefront of the discussion so that they can be debated transparently. “As long as we continue down this unabashedly naive road about what science is, and what it is capable of doing, we will continue to fail to reach any sort of meaningful consensus on these matters,”
  • The dispute over tobacco was never about the science of cigarettes’ link to cancer. It was about whether companies have the right to sell dangerous products and, if so, what obligations they have to the consumers who purchased them.
  • Similarly, the debate over climate change isn’t about whether our planet is heating, but about how much responsibility each country and person bears for stopping it
  • While researching her book “Merchants of Doubt,” science historian Naomi Oreskes found that some of the same people who were defending the tobacco industry as scientific experts were also receiving industry money to deny the role of human activity in global warming. What these issues had in common, she realized, was that they all involved the need for government action. “None of this is about the science. All of this is a political debate about the role of government,”
  • These controversies are really about values, not scientific facts, and acknowledging that would allow us to have more truthful and productive debates. What would that look like in practice? Instead of cherry-picking evidence to support a particular view (and insisting that the science points to a desired action), the various sides could lay out the values they are using to assess the evidence.
  • For instance, in Europe, many decisions are guided by the precautionary principle — a system that values caution in the face of uncertainty and says that when the risks are unclear, it should be up to industries to show that their products and processes are not harmful, rather than requiring the government to prove that they are harmful before they can be regulated. By contrast, U.S. agencies tend to wait for strong evidence of harm before issuing regulations
  • the difference between them comes down to priorities: Is it better to exercise caution at the risk of burdening companies and perhaps the economy, or is it more important to avoid potential economic downsides even if it means that sometimes a harmful product or industrial process goes unregulated?
  • But science can’t tell us how risky is too risky to allow products like cigarettes or potentially harmful pesticides to be sold — those are value judgements that only humans can make.
Javier E

My Mom Believes In QAnon. I've Been Trying To Get Her Out. - 0 views

www.buzzfeednews.com/...on-parents-millennial-children

QAnon conspiracy theory language psychology

shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • An early adopter of the QAnon mass delusion, on board since 2018, she held firm to the claim that a Satan-worshipping cabal of child sex traffickers controlled the world and the only person standing in their way was Trump. She saw him not merely as a politician but a savior, and she expressed her devotion in stark terms.
  • “The prophets have said Trump is anointed,” she texted me once. “God is using him to finally end the evil doings of the cabal which has hurt humanity all these centuries… We are in a war between good & evil.”
  • By 2020, I’d pretty much given up on swaying my mom away from her preferred presidential candidate. We’d spent many hours arguing over basic facts I considered indisputable. Any information I cited to prove Trump’s cruelty, she cut down with a corresponding counterattack. My links to credible news sources disintegrated against a wall of outlets like One America News Network, Breitbart, and Before It’s News. Any cracks I could find in her positions were instantly undermined by the inconvenient fact that I was, in her words, a member of “the liberal media,” a brainwashed acolyte of the sprawling conspiracy trying to take down her heroic leader.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • The irony gnawed at me: My entire vocation as an investigative reporter was predicated on being able to reveal truths, and yet I could not even rustle up the evidence to convince my own mother that our 45th president was not, in fact, the hero she believed him to be. Or, for that matter, that John F. Kennedy Jr. was dead. Or that Tom Hanks had not been executed for drinking the blood of children.
  • The theories spun from Q’s messages seemed much easier to disprove. Oprah Winfrey couldn’t have been detained during a wave of deep state arrests because we could still see her conducting live interviews on television. Trump’s 4th of July speech at Mount Rushmore came to an end without John F. Kennedy Jr. revealing he was alive and stepping in as the president’s new running mate. The widespread blackouts that her Patriot friend’s “source from the Pentagon” had warned about failed to materialize. And I could testify firsthand that the CIA had no control over my newsroom’s editorial decisions.
  • “I believe the Holy Spirit led me to the QAnons to discover the truth which is being suppressed,” she texted me. “Otherwise, how would I be able to know the truth if the lamestream media suppresses the truth?”
  • Through the years, I’d battled against conspiracy theories my mom threw at me that were far more formidable than QAnon. I’d been stumped when she asked me to prove that Beyoncé wasn’t an Illuminati member, dumbfounded when research studies I sent her weren’t enough to reach an agreement on vaccine efficacy, and too worn down to say anything more than “that’s not true” when confronted with false allegations of murders committed by prominent politicians.
  • Eventually, I accepted the impasse. It didn’t seem healthy that every conversation we had would devolve into a circuitous debate about which one of us was on the side of the bad guys. So I tried to pick my battles.
  • But what I had dismissed as damaging inconsistencies turned out to be the core strength of the belief system: It was alive, flexible, sprouting more questions than answers, more clues to study, an investigation playing out in real time, with the fate of the world at stake.
  • With no overlap between our filters of reality, I was at a loss for any facts that would actually stick.
  • Meanwhile, she wondered where she’d gone wrong with me
  • She regretted not taking politics more seriously when I was younger. I’d grown up blinkered by American privilege, trained to ignore the dirty machinations securing my comforts. My mom had shed that luxury long ago.
  • The year my mom began falling down QAnon rabbit holes, I turned the age she was when she first arrived in the States. By then, I was no longer sure that America was worth the cost of her migration. When the real estate market collapsed under the weight of Wall Street speculation, she had to sell our house at a steep loss to avoid foreclosure and her budding career as a realtor evaporated. Her near–minimum wage jobs weren’t enough to cover her bills, so her credit card debts rose. She delayed retirement plans because she saw no path to breaking even anytime soon, though she was hopeful that a turnaround was on the horizon. Through the setbacks and detours, she drifted into the arms of the people and beliefs I held most responsible for her troubles.
  • With a fervor I knew was futile, I’d tell my mom she was missing the real conspiracy: The powerful people shaping policy to benefit their own interests, to maintain wealth and white predominance, through tax cuts and voter suppression, were commandeering her support solely by catering to her stance on the one issue she cared most about.
  • The voice my mom trusted most now was Trump’s. Our disagreements were no longer ideological to her but part of a celestial conflict.
  • “I love you but you have to be on the side of good,” she texted me. “Im sad cuz u have become part of the deep state. May God have mercy on you...I pray you will see the truth of the evil agenda and be on the side of Trump.”
  • She likened her fellow Patriots to the early Christians who spread the word of Jesus at the risk of persecution. She often sent me a meme with a caption about “ordinary people who spent countless hours researching, debating, meditating and praying” for the truth to be revealed to them. “Although they were mocked, dismissed and cast off, they knew their souls had agreed long ago to do this work.”
  • Last summer, as my mom marched in a pink MAGA hat amid maskless crowds, and armed extremists stalked racial justice protests, and a disputed election loomed like a time bomb, I entertained my darkest thoughts about the fate of our country. Was there any hope in a democracy without a shared set of basic facts? Had my elders fled one authoritarian regime only for their children to face another? Amid the gloom, I found only a single morsel of solace: My mom was as hopeful as she’d ever been.
  • I wish I could offer some evidence showing that the gulf between us might be narrowing, that my love, persistence, and collection of facts might be enough to draw her back into a reality we share, and that when our wager about the storm comes due in a few months, she’ll realize that the voices she trusts have been lying to her. But I don’t think that will happen
  • What can I do but try to limit the damage? Send my mom movie recommendations to occupy the free time she instead spends on conspiracy research. Shift our conversations to the common ground of cooking recipes and family gossip. Raise objections when her beliefs nudge her toward dangerous decisions.
  • I now understand our debates as marks of the very bond I thought was disintegrating. No matter how far she believes I’ve fallen into the deep state, how hard I fight for the forces of evil, how imminent the grand plan’s rapture, my mom will be there on the other side of the line putting in a good word for me with the angels and saints, trying to save me from damnation. And those are the two realities we live in. ●
  • understand
  • now understand our debates as marks of the very bond I thought was disintegrating. No matter how far she believes I’ve fallen into the deep state, how hard I fight for the forces of evil, how imminent the grand plan’s rapture, my mom will be there on the other side of the line putting in a good word for me with the angels and saints, trying to save me from damnation. And those are the two realities we live in. ●
adonahue011

How Joe Biden was Donald Trump's kryptonite - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

psychology brain science technology education bias social media research

shared by adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      This is very interesting to me because I think much of Donald Trumps campaigns have been about manipulation.
  • Some of the lowest points for Trump over the last two years revolved around Biden.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      Offending an ego, how that connects to our brain and us being sensitive beings.
  • Biden had merely announced he was running for president earlier that year.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • What perhaps Trump didn't realize was that he was playing right into Biden's hands. His efforts seem to prove an important point for Biden
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      Many times Trump did not even notice he was in many ways helping Biden, intuitively.
  • Democrats got the message Trump was sending and nominated Biden.
  • Trump was impeached a second time after an insurrection that he incited last week over outrage of the 2020 election results.
  • During the transition period, Biden has been actively planning his presidency and not spending too much time publicly worrying about Trump's false claims of voter fraud.
  • Trump it seems, couldn't stand not to be the center of attention, which is unusual for an outgoing president.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      What does this say about his mental state?
  • Trump got about 70% of the news mentions.
  • The end result of all of this is that Biden goes into his administration this week with the vast majority of voters approving of Biden's handling of the transition.
  • Trump's political career seemed to be impermeable. That was until Trump ran into President-elect Joe Biden.
  • Biden proved to be Trump's kryptonite and helped himself tremendously by doing something very simple: allowing Trump to be Trump.
johnsonel7

Human intelligence: have we reached the limit of knowledge? - 0 views

theconversation.com/-the-limit-of-knowledge-124819

knowledge human intelligence limit brain science

shared by johnsonel7 on 20 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Not only have scientists failed to find the Holy Grail of physics – unifying the very large (general relativity) with the very small (quantum mechanics) – they still don’t know what the vast majority of the universe is made up of. The sought after Theory of Everything continues to elude us.
  • Human brains are the product of blind and unguided evolution. They were designed to solve practical problems impinging on our survival and reproduction, not to unravel the fabric of the universe. This realisation has led some philosophers to embrace a curious form of pessimism, arguing there are bound to be things we will never understand.
  • the late philosopher Jerry Fodor claimed that there are bound to be “thoughts that we are unequipped to think”.
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  • McGinn suspects that the reason why philosophical conundrums such as the mind/body problem – how physical processes in our brain give rise to consciousness – prove to be intractable is that their true solutions are simply inaccessible to the human mind.
  • Is a question still a “mystery” if you have arrived at the correct answer, but you have no idea what it means or cannot wrap your head around it? Mysterians often conflate those two possibilities.
  • Most importantly, we can extend our own minds to those of our fellow human beings. What makes our species unique is that we are capable of culture, in particular cumulative cultural knowledge. A population of human brains is much smarter than any individual brain in isolation.
  • It is quite true that we can never rule out the possibility that there are such unknown unknowns, and that some of them will forever remain unknown, because for some (unknown) reason human intelligence is not up to the task. But the important thing to note about these unknown unknowns is that nothing can be said about them. To presume from the outset that some unknown unknowns will always remain unknown, as mysterians do, is not modesty – it’s arrogance.
tongoscar

What's at Stake for Women's Rights in 2020? by Françoise Girard - Project Syn... - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...ts-by-francoise-girard-2020-01

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • EW YORK – From US Republicans’ effort to get the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a woman’s right to an abortion, to Poland’s increased restrictions on access to emergency contraception, to Brazil’s clampdown on sexual health education, this is a difficult time for women. But if the global feminist movement has proved anything over the years, it is that it can overcome powerful resistance to defend the rights of marginalized groups. In 2020, it will do so again.
  • According to “strongman” leaders like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and India’s Narendra Modi, women are born to be wives and mothers; immigrants and racial, religious, and ethnic minorities are dangerous and inferior; and LGBTQI+ persons deserve ostracism, detention, or even death. These leaders have emboldened people who share their views to engage in discrimination and violent attacks against racial or other minorities, migrants, women, and other marginalized groups.
  • Achieving social change to protect marginalized groups is never an easy process. There are no quick victories over weak opposition. But, as feminists have proved time and again, with sustained commitment, changes that once seemed impossible can later seem inevitable.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Yet, as president of the International Women’s Health Coalition and a longtime women’s rights advocate, I have seen firsthand what the feminist movement can do. Consider Argentine feminists’ fight against highly restrictive abortion laws.
  • In the last year alone, there have been numerous examples of such changes. The Mexican state of Oaxaca and the Australian state of New South Wales decriminalized abortion, as did Northern Ireland, while others liberalized their laws, expanding the circumstances in which women can access safe, legal abortion services. In April, South Korea’s Supreme Court struck down the country’s abortion law as unconstitutional, setting the stage for decriminalization this year.
  • Particularly inspiring are the young female and non-binary activists who are leading movements for transformative change. For example, Emma González is demanding gun reform in the US; Bertha Zúñiga is defending the land rights of Honduras’ indigenous people; and Jamie Margolin and Greta Thunberg have emerged as leading climate activists.
  • Feminist activists will continue this work at the Beijing+25 Generation Equality Forum, convened by Mexico and France, in Mexico City in May and Paris in July. There, they will call for bold new commitments to address crosscutting challenges like climate change and the refugee crisis.
  • This broader perspective is vital. In fact, feminists must strengthen their alliances with other progressive movements, especially those fighting for environmental sustainability, racial justice, and LGBTQI+ rights. Only by mobilizing together and supporting one another’s agendas can we overcome white supremacist, heteronormative, patriarchal, and exploitative forces to build a more just, equitable, and sustainable world.
tongoscar

Talking racism in the UK | Europe | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...racism-uk-191225134048656.html

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • That is what it felt like this weekend, when on two separate instances celebrities called out racism in the United Kingdom. The reactions to their statements prove just how much we need to speak out on this topic in the first place.
  • In response to a question over whether the UK is still racist, he told Italian newspaper La Repubblica "definitely, 100 percent". This was swiftly and erroneously translated into headlines claiming Stormzy had said that the UK is 100 percent racist, followed by a social media troll-a-thon from people who think he is getting too big for his boots, citing a list of crimes against knowing your place. Highlights include accusations of ungratefulness and even calls for Stormzy to consider returning to his ethnic home of Ghana. Oh, the audacity.
  • It is a scary time to speak out against the racism and prejudice that permeates British society and its oldest institutions. It is a scary time to stand up for victims of racism whose plight is all too often rendered invisible by those who do not want to see the ugly truth. Those that do, be they sports commentators or chart-topping musicians, face being silenced or vilified with a swiftness that reminds us who is really in charge: people in power structures that will not be challenged.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But challenge them we must. Support for Stormzy and Neville in the wake of their comments proves that many of us are willing to force the agenda and seek change. The UK does have a problem with racism, that is a fact. And the problem will not go away until those who refuse to see give way to those who do.
manhefnawi

The Habits of Light: A Celebration of Pioneering Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, Whose Ca... - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...henrietta-leavitt-ann-hamilton

Evidence Proving Theory Expansion Universe Absolutes Relative

shared by manhefnawi on 14 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • “Nothing is fixed. All is in flux,” physicist Alan Lightman wrote in his soaring meditation on how to live with our longing for absolutes in a relative universe, reminding us that all the physical evidence gleaned through millennia of scientific inquiry indicates the inherent inconstancy of the cosmos.
  • This awareness, so unnerving against the backdrop of our irrepressible yearning for constancy and permanence, was first unlatched when the ancients began suspecting that the Earth, rather than being the static center of the heavens it was long thought to be, is in motion, right beneath our feet. But it took millennia for the most disorienting evidence of inconstancy to dawn — the discovery that the universe itself is in flux, constantly expanding, growing thinner and thinner as stars grow farther and farther apart.
  • If the universe is constantly expanding, to trace it backward along the arrow of time is to imagine it smaller and smaller, all the way down to the seeming nothingness that banged into the somethingness within which everything exists.
katherineharron

Supreme Court says states can bar insanity defenses - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The Supreme Court on Monday ruled against a Kansas man who argued his constitutional rights were violated when the state refused to allow him to bring an insanity defense.
  • Under the law in Kansas, a defendant can argue mental illness only to prove that he did not intend to commit the crime. Otherwise, mental illness cannot be used as a defense. Four other states have also abolished an insanity defense.
  • "Today's decision leaves much, if not most, of the scope of insanity defenses to individual states," said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • "Kansas is one of only five states that has all-but abolished the defense -- a step that the majority upheld today. But the most important implication of the decision may be in opening the door to additional states that want to follow suit," he said.
  • Kagan stressed that Kansas law allows a defendant to "present psychiatric and other evidence of mental illness" through testimony to prove that "he had no intent to kill" to defend himself against a criminal charge."The defendant can use that evidence to show that his illness left him without cognitive capacity to form the requisite intent," she said. And, she said, Kansas permits a defendant to offer whatever mental health evidence he "deems relevant at sentencing."
sanderk

How Important Is Listening, Really? - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...-important-is-listening-really

listening psychology interactions

shared by sanderk on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • I thought about the sales people I worked with, and the really good sales people I have known. The best are persistent, persuasive, strategic thinkers, energetic, able to offer compelling arguments to overcome resistance. Many, as you would expect, are really good talkers. But if I had to pick just one quality, that all of these individuals share, it would be this: The ability to listen.
  • Most of us don't really listen very well. Or if we do manage to listen, we are often just waiting until the other person finishes so that we can say what is on OUR mind. And that's not really listening.
  • Try really listening to a difficult business colleague or client. And when they finish, don't let your self-assertion jump in with "yes, but.....". Get rid of the word "but" altogether, it only serves to negate everything the person you are listening to has just said. Instead, if you do say anything, try asking "What else?"
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • When someone senses you are really listening to what they have to say amazing things can happen. Solutions can be found that were never imagined. Understanding can be reached that had seemed impossible. Old angers and resentments can be overcome. Frustrations can simply fall away. Everyone lightens up and feels much better.
  • And the true listener is much more believed, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and does more good.
  • sanderk on 21 Oct 19
     
    I am posting this article because I feel today no one really listens to anyone. As the article says people just try to contradict others and prove their opinion is right. From the TOK readings, we learned that an argument is not supposed to help a critical thinker win, but our default is to try to win at all costs. This really gets us nowhere. If we listened to others instead of arguing, such as in politics, we would be able to solve pressing issues such as global warming.
Javier E

Technopoly-Chs. 9,10--Scientism, the great symbol drain - 0 views

scientism science social science narrative objectivity advertising morality authority coherence Postman book notes

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • By Scientism, I mean three interrelated ideas that, taken together, stand as one of the pillars of Technopoly.
  • The first and indispensable idea is, as noted, that the methods of the natural sciences can be applied to the study of human behavior. This idea is the backbone of much of psychology and sociology as practiced at least in America, and largely accounts for the fact that social science, to quote F. A. Hayek, "has cont~ibuted scarcely anything to our understanding of social phenomena." 2
  • The second idea is, as also noted, that social science generates specific principles which can be used to organize society on a rational and humane basis. This implies that technical meansmostly "invisible technologies" supervised by experts-can be designed to control human behavior and set it on the proper course.
  • ...63 more annotations...
  • The third idea is that faith in science can serve as a comprehensive belief system that gives meaning to life, as well. as a sense of well-being, morality, and even immortality.
  • the spirit behind this scientific ideal inspired several men to believe that the reliable and predictable knowledge that could be obtained about stars and atoms could also be obtained about human behavior.
  • Among the best known of these early "social scientists" were Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, Prosper Enfantin, and, of course, Auguste Comte.
  • They held in common two beliefs to which T echnopoly is deeply indebted: that the natural sciences provide a method to unlock the secrets of both the human heart and the direction of social life; that society can be rationally and humanely reorganized according to principles that social science will uncover. It is with these men that the idea of "social engineering" begins and the seeds of Scientism are planted.
  • Information produced by counting may sometimes be valuable in helping a person get an idea, or, even more so, in providing support for an idea. But the mere activity of counting does not make science.
  • Nor does observing th_ings, though it is sometimes said that if one is empirical, one is scientific. To be empirical means to look at things before drawing conclusions. Everyone, therefore, is an empiricist, with the possible exception of paranoid schizophrenics.
  • What we may call science, then, is the quest to find the immutable and universal laws that govern processes, presuming that there are cause-and-effect relations among these processes. It follows that the quest to understand human behavior and feeling can in no sense except the most trivial be called science.
  • Scientists do strive to be empirical and where possible precise, but it is also basic to their enterprise that they maintain a high degree of objectivity, which means that they study things independently of what people think or do about them.
  • I do not say, incidentally, that the Oedipus complex and God do not exist. Nor do I say that to believe in them is harmful-far from it. I say only that, there being no tests that could, in principle, show them to be false, they fall outside the purview Scientism 151 of science, as do almost all theories that make up the content of "social science."
  • in the nineteenth centu~, novelists provided us with most of the powerful metaphors and images of our culture.
  • This fact relieves the scientist of inquiring into their values and motivations and for this reason alone separates science from what is called social science, consigning the methodology of the latter (to quote Gunnar Myrdal) to the status of the "metaphysical and pseudo-objective." 3
  • The status of social-science methods is further reduced by the fact that there are almost no experiments that will reveal a social-science theory to be false.
  • et us further suppose that Milgram had found that 100 percent of his 1 subjecl:s did what they were told, with or without Hannah Arendt. And now let us suppose that I tell you a story of a Scientism 153 group of people who in some real situation refused to comply with the orders of a legitimate authority-let us say, the Danes who in the face of Nazi occupation helped nine thousand Jews escape to Sweden. Would you say to me that this cannot be so because Milgram' s study proves otherwise? Or would you say that this overturns Milgram's work? Perhaps you would say that the Danish response is not relevant, since the Danes did not regard the Nazi occupation as constituting legitimate autho!ity. But then, how would we explain the cooperative response to Nazi authority of the French, the Poles, and the Lithuanians? I think you would say none of these things, because Milgram' s experiment qoes not confirm or falsify any theory that might be said to postulate a law of human nature. His study-which, incidentally, I find both fascinating and terrifying-is not science. It is something else entirely.
  • Freud, could not imagine how the book could be judged exemplary: it was science or it was nothing. Well, of course, Freud was wrong. His work is exemplary-indeed, monumental-but scarcely anyone believes today that Freud was doing science, any more than educated people believe that Marx was doing science, or Max Weber or Lewis Mumford or Bruno Bettelheim or Carl Jung or Margaret Mead or Arnold Toynbee. What these people were doing-and Stanley Milgram was doing-is documenting the behavior and feelings of people as they confront problems posed by their culture.
  • the stories of social r~searchers are much closer in structure and purpose to what is called imaginative literature; that is to say, both a social researcher and a novelist give unique interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations with examples in various forms. Their interpretations cannot be proved or disproved but will draw their appeal from the power of their language, the depth of their explanations, the relevance of their examples, and the credibility of their themes.
  • And all of this has, in both cases, an identifiable moral purpose.
  • The words "true" and "false" do not apply here in the sense that they are used in mathematics or science. For there is nothing universally and irrevocably true or false about these interpretations. There are no critical tests to confirm or falsify them. There are no natural laws from which they are derived. They are bound by time, by situation, and above all by the cultural prejudices of the researcher or writer.
  • Both the novelist and the social researcher construct their stories by the use of archetypes and metaphors.
  • Cervantes, for example, gave us the enduring archetype of the incurable dreamer and idealist in Don Quixote. The social historian Marx gave us the archetype of the ruthless and conspiring, though nameless, capitalist. Flaubert gave us the repressed b~urgeois romantic in Emma Bovary. And Margaret Mead gave us the carefree, guiltless Samoan adolescent. Kafka gave us the alienated urbanite driven to self-loathing. And Max Weber gave us hardworking men driven by a mythology he called the Protestant Ethic. Dostoevsky gave us the egomaniac redeemed by love and religious fervor. And B. F. Skinner gave us the automaton redeemed by a benign technology.
  • Why do such social researchers tell their stories? Essentially for didactic and moralistic purposes. These men and women tell their stories for the same reason the Buddha, Confucius, Hillel, and Jesus told their stories (and for the same reason D. H. Lawrence told his).
  • Moreover, in their quest for objectivity, scientists proceed on the assumption that the objects they study are indifferent to the fact that they are being studied.
  • If, indeed, the price of civilization is repressed sexuality, it was not Sigmund Freud who discovered it. If the consciousness of people is formed by their material circumstances, it was not Marx who discovered it. If the medium is the message, it was not McLuhan who discovered it. They have merely retold ancient stories in a modem style.
  • Unlike science, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again.
  • Only in knowing ~omething of the reasons why they advocated education can we make sense of the means they suggest. But to understand their reas.ons we must also understand the narratives that governed their view of the world. By narrative, I mean a story of human history that gives meaning to the past, explains the present, and provides guidance for the future.
  • In Technopoly, it is not Scientism 159 enough to say, it is immoral and degrading to allow people to be homeless. You cannot get anywhere by asking a judge, a politician, or a bureaucrat to r~ad Les Miserables or Nana or, indeed, the New Testament. Y 01.i must show that statistics have produced data revealing the homeless to be unhappy and to be a drain on the economy. Neither Dostoevsky nor Freud, Dickens nor Weber, Twain nor Marx, is now a dispenser of legitimate knowledge. They are interesting; they are ''.worth reading"; they are artifacts of our past. But as for "truth," we must tum to "science."
  • In Technopoly, it is not enough for social research to rediscover ancient truths or to comment on and criticize the moral behavior of people. In T echnopoly, it is an insult to call someone a "moralizer." Nor is it sufficient for social research to put forward metaphors, images, and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding and dignity.
  • Such a program lacks the aura of certain knowledge that only science can provide. It becomes necessary, then, to transform psychology, sociology, and anthropology into "sciences," in which humanity itself becomes an object, much like plants, planets, or ice cubes.
  • That is why the commonplaces that people fear death and that children who come from stable families valuing scholarship will do well in school must be announced as "discoveries" of scientific enterprise. In this way, social resear~hers can see themselves, and can be seen, as scientists, researchers without bias or values, unburdened by mere opinion. In this way, social policies can be claimed to rest on objectively determined facts.
  • given the psychological, social, and material benefits that attach to the label "scientist," it is not hard to see why social researchers should find it hard to give it up.
  • Our social "s'cientists" have from the beginning been less tender of conscience, or less rigorous in their views of science, or perhaps just more confused about the questions their procedures can answer and those they cannot. In any case, they have not been squeamish about imputing to their "discoveries" and the rigor of their procedures the power to direct us in how we ought rightly to behave.
  • It is less easy to see why the rest of us have so willingly, even eagerly, cooperated in perpetuating the same illusion.
  • When the new technologies and techniques and spirit of men like Galileo, Newton, and Bacon laid the foundations of natural science, they also discredited the authority of earlier accounts of the physical world, as found, for example, in the great tale of Genesis. By calling into question the truth of such accounts in one realm, science undermined the whole edifice of belief in sacred stories and ultimately swept away with it the source to which most humans had looked for moral authority. It is not too much to say, I think, that the desacralized world has been searching for an alternative source of moral authority ever since.
  • We welcome them gladly, and the claim explicitly made or implied, because we need so desperately to find some source outside the frail and shaky judgments of mortals like ourselves to authorize our moral decisions and behavior. And outside of the authority of brute force, which can scarcely be called moral, we seem to have little left but the authority of procedures.
  • It is not merely the misapplication of techniques such as quantification to questions where numbers have nothing to say; not merely the confusion of the material and social realms of human experience; not merely the claim of social researchers to be applying the aims and procedures of natural scien\:e to the human world.
  • This, then, is what I mean by Scientism.
  • It is the desperate hope, and wish, and ultimately the illusory belief that some standardized set of procedures called "science" can provide us with an unimpeachable source of moral authority, a suprahuman basis for answers to questions like "What is life, and when, and why?" "Why is death, and suffering?" 'What is right and wrong to do?" "What are good and evil ends?" "How ought we to think and feel and behave?
  • Science can tell us when a heart begins to beat, or movement begins, or what are the statistics on the survival of neonates of different gestational ages outside the womb. But science has no more authority than you do or I do to establish such criteria as the "true" definition of "life" or of human state or of personhood.
  • Social research can tell us how some people behave in the presence of what they believe to be legitimate authority. But it cannot tell us when authority is "legitimate" and when not, or how we must decide, or when it may be right or wrong to obey.
  • To ask of science, or expect of science, or accept unchallenged from science the answers to such questions is Scientism. And it is Technopoly's grand illusion.
  • In the institutional form it has taken in the United States, advertising is a symptom of a world-view 'that sees tradition as an obstacle to its claims. There can, of course, be no functioning sense of tradition without a measure of respect for symbols. Tradition is, in fact, nothing but the acknowledgment of the authority of symbols and the relevance of the narratives that gave birth to them. With the erosion of symbols there follows a loss of narrative, which is one of the most debilitating consequences of Technopoly' s power.
  • What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research, which meahs orienting business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable. The business of business becomes pseudo-therapy; the consumer, a patient reassl.,lred by psychodramas.
  • At the moment, 1t 1s considered necessary to introduce computers to the classroom, as it once was thought necessary to bring closed-circuit television and film to the classroom. To the question "Why should we do this?" the answer is: "To make learning more efficient and more interesting." Such an answer is considered entirely adequate, since in T ~chnopoly efficiency and interest need no justification. It is, therefore, usually not noticed that this answer does not address the question "What is learning for?"
  • What this means is that somewhere near the core of Technopoly is a vast industry with license to use all available symbols to further the interests of commerce, by devouring the psyches of consumers.
  • In the twentieth century, such metaphors and images have come largely from the pens of social historians and researchers. ·Think of John Dewey, William James, Erik Erikson, Alfred Kinsey, Thorstein Veblen, Margaret Mead, Lewis Mumford, B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Marshall McLuhan, Barbara Tuchman, Noam Chomsky, Robert Coles, even Stanley Milgram, and you must acknowledge that our ideas of what we are like and what kind of country we live in come from their stories to a far greater extent than from the stories of our most renowned novelists.
  • social idea that must be advanced through education.
  • Confucius advocated teaching "the Way" because in tradition he saw the best hope for social order. As our first systematic fascist, Plato wished education to produce philosopher kings. Cicero argued that education must free the student from the tyranny of the present. Jefferson thought the purpose of education is to teach the young how to protect their liberties. Rousseau wished education to free the young from the unnatural constraints of a wicked and arbitrary social order. And among John Dewey's aims was to help the student function without certainty in a world of constant change and puzzling· ambiguities.
  • The point is that cultures must have narratives and will find them where they will, even if they lead to catastrophe. The alternative is to live without meaning, the ultimate negation of life itself.
  • It is also to the point to say that each narrative is given its form and its emotional texture through a cluster of symbols that call for respect and allegiance, even devotion.
  • by definition, there can be no education philosophy that does not address what learning is for. Confucius, Plato, Quintilian, Cicero, Comenius, Erasmus, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Russell, Montessori, Whitehead, and Dewey--each believed that there was some transcendent political, spiritual, or
  • The importance of the American Constitution is largely in its function as a symbol of the story of our origins. It is our political equivalent of Genesis. To mock it, to• ignore it, to circwnvent it is to declare the irrelevance of the story of the United States as a moral light unto the world. In like fashion, the Statue of Liberty is the key symbol of the story of America as the natural home of the teeming masses, from anywhere, yearning to be free.
  • There are those who believe--as did the great historian Arnold Toynbee-that without a comprehensive religious narrative at its center a culture must decline. Perhaps. There are, after all, other sources-mythology, politics, philosophy, and science; for example--but it is certain that no culture can flourish without narratives of transcendent orjgin and power.
  • This does not mean that the mere existence of such a narrative ensures a culture's stability and strength. There are destructive narratives. A narrative provides meaning, not necessarily survival-as, for example, the story provided by Adolf Hitler to the German nation in t:he 1930s.
  • What story does American education wish to tell now? In a growing Technopoly, what do we believe education is for?
  • The answers are discouraging, and one of. them can be inferred from any television commercial urging the young to stay in school. The commercial will either imply or state explicitly that education will help the persevering student to get a ·good job. And that's it. Well, not quite. There is also the idea that we educate ourselves to compete with the Japanese or the Germans in an economic struggle to be number one.
  • Young men, for example, will learn how to make lay-up shots when they play basketball. To be able to make them is part of the The Great Symbol Drain 177 definition of what good players are. But they do not play basketball for that purpose. There is usually a broader, deeper, and more meaningful reason for wanting to play-to assert their manhood, to please their fathers, to be acceptable to their peers, even for the sheer aesthetic pleasure of the game itself. What you have to do to be a success must be addressed only after you have found a reason to be successful.
  • Bloom's solution is that we go back to the basics of Western thought.
  • He wants us to teach our students what Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Saint Augustine, and other luminaries have had to say on the great ethical and epistemological questions. He believes that by acquainting themselves with great books our students will acquire a moral and intellectual foundation that will give meaning and texture to their lives.
  • Hirsch's encyclopedic list is not a solution but a description of the problem of information glut. It is therefore essentially incoherent. But it also confuses a consequence of education with a purpose. Hirsch attempted to answer the question "What is an educated person?" He left unanswered the question "What is an education for?"
  • Those who reject Bloom's idea have offered several arguments against it. The first is that such a purpose for education is elitist: the mass of students would not find the great story of
  • Western civilization inspiring, are too deeply alienated from the past to find it so, and would therefore have difficulty connecting the "best that has been thought and said" to their own struggles to find q1eaning in their lives.
  • A second argument, coming from what is called a "leftist" perspective, is even more discouraging. In a sense, it offers a definition of what is meant by elitism. It asserts that the "story of Western civilization" is a partial, biased, and even oppressive one. It is not the story of blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, women, homosexuals-of any people who are not white heterosexual males of Judea-Christian heritage. This claim denies that there is or can be a national culture, a narrative of organizing power and inspiring symbols which all citizens can identify with and draw sustenance from. If this is true, it means nothing less than that our national symbols have been drained of their power to unite, and that education must become a tribal affair; that is, each subculture must find its own story and symbols, and use them as the moral basis of education.
  • nto this void comes the Technopoly story, with its emphasis on progress without limits, rights without responsibilities, and technology without cost. The T echnopoly story is without a moral center. It puts in its place efficiency, interest, and economic advance. It promises heaven on earth through the conveniences of technological progress. It casts aside all traditional narratives and symbols that· suggest stability and orderliness, and tells, instead, of a life of skills, technical expertise, and the ecstasy of consumption. Its purpose is to produce functionaries for an ongoing Technopoly.
  • It answers Bloom by saying that the story of Western civilization is irrelevant; it answers the political left by saying there is indeed a common culture whose name is T echnopoly and whose key symbol is now the computer, toward which there must be neither irreverence nor blasphemy. It even answers Hirsch by saying that there are items on his list that, if thought about too deeply and taken too seriously, will interfere with the progress of technology.
Javier E

Lawsuit Against Fox Is Shaping Up to Be a Major First Amendment Case - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-lawsuit-first-amendment.html

fox lawsuit freedom truth legal history

shared by Javier E on 15 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • The case threatens a huge financial and reputational blow to Fox, by far the most powerful conservative media company in the country. But legal scholars say it also has the potential to deliver a powerful verdict on the kind of pervasive and pernicious falsehoods — and the people who spread them — that are undermining the country’s faith in democracy.
  • “We’re litigating history in a way: What is historical truth?” said Lee Levine, a noted First Amendment lawyer
  • “Here you’re taking very recent current events and going through a process which, at the end, is potentially going to declare what the correct version of history is.”
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The case has caused palpable unease at the Fox News Channel, said several people there,
  • Dominion is trying to build a case that aims straight at the top of the Fox media empire and the Murdochs. In court filings and depositions, Dominion lawyers have laid out how they plan to show that senior Fox executives hatched a plan after the election to lure back viewers who had switched to rival hard-right networks, which were initially more sympathetic than Fox was to Mr. Trump’s voter-fraud claims.
  • Libel law doesn’t protect lies. But it does leave room for the media to cover newsworthy figures who tell them. And Fox is arguing, in part, that’s what shields it from liability.
  • A spokesman for Dominion declined to comment. In its initial complaint, the company’s lawyers wrote that “The truth matters,” adding, “Lies have consequences.”
  • For Dominion to convince a jury that Fox should be held liable for defamation and pay damages, it has to clear an extremely high legal bar known as the “actual malice” standard. Dominion must show either that people inside Fox knew what hosts and guests were saying about the election technology company was false, or that they effectively ignored information proving that the statements in question were wrong — which is known in legal terms as displaying a reckless disregard for the truth.
  • Dominion’s lawyers have focused some of their questioning in depositions on the decision-making hierarchy at Fox News, according to one person with direct knowledge of the case, showing a particular interest in what happened on election night inside the network in the hours after it projected Mr. Trump would lose Arizona.
  • Fox has also been searching for evidence that could, in effect, prove the Dominion conspiracy theories weren’t really conspiracy theories. Behind the scenes, Fox’s lawyers have pursued documents that would support numerous unfounded claims about Dominion, including its supposed connections to Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan dictator who died in 2013, and software features that were ostensibly designed to make vote manipulation easier.
  • In one interview, Mr. Giuliani falsely claimed that Dominion was owned by a Venezuelan company with close ties to Mr. Chavez, and that it was formed “to fix elections.” (Dominion was founded in Canada in 2002 by a man who wanted to make it easier for blind people to vote.)
  • “The harm to Dominion from the lies told by Fox is unprecedented and irreparable because of how fervently millions of people believed them — and continue to believe them,”
  • he hurdle Dominion must clear is whether it can persuade a jury to believe that people at Fox knew they were spreading lies.“Disseminating ‘The Big Lie’ isn’t enough,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor and First Amendment scholar at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law. “It has to be a knowing lie.”
Javier E

Can Political Theology Save Secularism? | Religion & Politics - 0 views

religionandpolitics.org/...tical-theology-save-secularism

religion capitalism liberalism god secularism politics theology

shared by Javier E on 23 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Osama bin Laden had forced us to admit that, while the U.S. may legally separate church and state, it cannot do so intellectually. Beneath even the most ostensibly faithless of our institutions and our polemicists lie crouching religious lions, ready to devour the infidels who set themselves in opposition to the theology of the free market and the messianic march of democracy
  • As our political system depends on a shaky separation between religion and politics that has become increasingly unstable, scholars are sensing the deep disillusionment afoot and trying to chart a way out.
  • At its best, Religion for Atheists is a chronicle of the smoldering heap that liberal capitalism has made of the social rhythms that used to serve as a buffer between humans and the random cruelty of the universe. Christian and Jewish traditions, Botton argues, reinforced the ideas that people are morally deficient, that disappointment and suffering are normative, and that death is inevitable. The abandonment of those realities for the delusions of the self-made individual, the fantasy superman who can bend reality to his will if he works hard enough and is positive enough, leaves little mystery to why we are perpetually stressed out, overworked, and unsatisfied.
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  • Botton’s central obsession is the insane ways bourgeois postmoderns try to live, namely in a perpetual upward swing of ambition and achievement, where failure indicates character deficiency despite an almost total lack of social infrastructure to help us navigate careers, relationships, parenting, and death. But he seems uninterested in how those structures were destroyed or what it might take to rebuild them
  • Botton wants to keep bourgeois secularism and add a few new quasi-religious social routines. Quasi-religious social routines may indeed be a part of the solution, as we shall see, but they cannot be simply flung atop a regime as indifferent to human values as liberal capitalism.
  • Citizens see the structure behind the façade and lose faith in the myth of the state as a dispassionate, egalitarian arbiter of conflict. Once theological passions can no longer be sublimated in material affluence and the fiction of representative democracy, it is little surprise to see them break out in movements that are, on both the left and the right, explicitly hostile to the liberal state.
  • Western politics have an auto-immune disorder: they are structured to pretend that their notions of reason, right, and sovereignty are detached from a deeply theological heritage. When pressed by war and economic dysfunction, liberal ideas prove as compatible with zealotry and domination as any others.
  • Secularism is not strictly speaking a religion, but it represents an orientation toward religion that serves the theological purpose of establishing a hierarchy of legitimate social values. Religion must be “privatized” in liberal societies to keep it out of the way of economic functioning. In this view, legitimate politics is about making the trains run on time and reducing the federal deficit; everything else is radicalism. A surprising number of American intellectuals are able to persuade themselves that this vision of politics is sufficient, even though the train tracks are crumbling, the deficit continues to gain on the GDP, and millions of citizens are sinking into the dark mire of debt and permanent unemployment.
  • Critchley has made a career forging a philosophical account of human ethical responsibility and political motivation. His question is: after the rational hopes of the Enlightenment corroded into nihilism, how do humans write a believable story about what their existence means in the world? After the death of God, how do we account for our feelings of moral responsibility, and how might that account motivate us to resist the deadening political system we face?
  • The question is what to do in the face of the unmistakable religious and political nihilism currently besetting Western democracies.
  • both Botton and Critchley believe the solution involves what Derrida called a “religion without religion”—for Critchley a “faith of the faithless,” for Botton a “religion for atheists.”
  • a new political becoming will require a complete break with the status quo, a new political sphere that we understand as our own deliberate creation, uncoupled from the theological fictions of natural law or God-given rights
  • Critchley proposes as the foundation of politics “the poetic construction of a supreme fiction … a fiction that we know to be a fiction and yet in which we believe nonetheless.” Following the French philosopher Alain Badiou and the Apostle Paul, Critchley conceives political “truth” as something like fidelity: a radical loyalty to the historical moment where true politics came to life.
  • But unlike an evangelist, Critchley understands that attempting to fill the void with traditional religion is to slip back into a slumber that reinforces institutions desperate to maintain the political and economic status quo. Only in our condition of brokenness and finitude, uncomforted by promises of divine salvation, can we be open to a connection with others that might mark the birth of political resistance
  • This is the crux of the difference between Critchley’s radical faithless faith and Botton’s bourgeois secularism. Botton has imagined religion as little more than a coping mechanism for the “terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability,” seemingly unaware that the pain and vulnerability may intensify many times over. It won’t be enough to simply to sublimate our terror in confessional restaurants and atheist temples. The recognition of finitude, the weight of our nothingness, can hollow us into a different kind of self: one without illusions or reputations or private property, one with nothing but radical openness to others. Only then can there be the possibility of meaning, of politics, of hope.
Javier E

Stone Links: Nagel Agonistes - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...stone-links-nagel-agonistes

science reductionism teleology explanation prediction knowledge

shared by Javier E on 24 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • The distinguished philosopher Thomas Nagel has spent much of his career defending an antireductionist view of mind. His new book, “Mind and Cosmos,” extends this skepticism to much of contemporary scientific inquiry, including evolutionary biology, and calls for a new scientific revolution based on teleological principles. It’s a proposal that has, unsurprisingly, been quite controversial
  • , they think Nagel’s insistence “that explanation and prediction are symmetrical” is an outdated one, and that his description of what a new, teleologically-oriented science would look like is insufficiently clear.
  • As for teleology, Sober has no problem understanding certain phenomena this way, as long as there are “causal underpinnings” for a given teleological statement. But Nagel’s position, as Sober understands it, entails “teleological explanations that are both true and causally inexplicable,” a class for which neither Sober, nor Nagel, apparently, can offer any examples. (In a strangely concessive coda, Sober does admit that his “reactions may be mired in presuppositions,” and that history may prove Nagel to be “a prophet whom naysayers such as me were unable to recognize.”)
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