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Javier E

The French Do Buy Books. Real Books. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...h-do-buy-books-real-books.html

france book reading publishing amazon

shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • For a few bucks off and the pleasure of shopping from bed, have we handed over a precious natural resource — our nation’s books — to an ambitious billionaire with an engineering degree?
  • France, meanwhile, has just unanimously passed a so-called anti-Amazon law, which says online sellers can’t offer free shipping on discounted books. (“It will be either cheese or dessert, not both at once,” a French commentator explained.)
  • Amazon has a 10 or 12 percent share of new book sales in France. Amazon reportedly handles 70 percent of the country’s online book sales, but just 18 percent of books are sold online.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • no seller can offer more than 5 percent off the cover price of new books. That means a book costs more or less the same wherever you buy it in France, even online. The Lang law was designed to make sure France continues to have lots of different books, publishers and booksellers.
  • Readers say they trust books far more than any other medium, including newspapers and TV.
  • Six of the world’s 10 biggest book-selling countries — Germany, Japan, France, Italy, Spain and South Korea — have versions of fixed book prices.
  • What underlies France’s book laws isn’t just an economic position — it’s also a worldview. Quite simply, the French treat books as special. Some 70 percent of French people said they read at least one book last year; the average among French readers was 15 books.
  • In Britain, which abandoned its own fixed-price system in the 1990s, there are fewer than 1,000 independent bookstores left. A third closed in the past nine years, as supermarkets and Amazon discounted some books by more than 50 percent.
  • The French government classifies books as an “essential good,” along with electricity, bread and water.
  • None of this is taken for granted. People here have thought for centuries about what makes a book industry vibrant, and are watching developments in Britain and America as cautionary tales. “We don’t sell potatoes,” says Mr. Moni. “There are also ideas in books. That’s what’s dangerous. Because the day that you have a large seller that sells 80 percent of books, he’s the one who will decide what’s published, or what won’t be published.
  • “When your computer dies, you throw it away,” says Mr. Montagne of the publishers’ association. “But you’ll remember a book 20 years later. You’ve deeply entered into a story that’s not your own. It’s forged who you are. You’ll only see later how much it has affected you. You don’t keep all books, but it’s not a market like others. The contents of a bookcase can define who you are.”
julia rhodes

Top 10 Evolutionary Mismatches | Psychology Today - 1 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...top-10-evolutionary-mismatches

evolution irony research knowledge bias technology education

shared by julia rhodes on 20 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • this idea critically relates to the nature of being human in modern times. If you live in a modern, Westernized part of the world (as is almost necessarily true if you’re reading this on the web – or reading this at all right now …), then you are, in many ways (metaphorically), living in a cage in a zoo.
  • From the evolutionary perspective, understanding the topic of evolutionary mismatch is essential in allowing us to understand so much of what it means to be human.
  • 10. You are surrounded in your day-to-day life by a higher proportion of strangers than would have ever been true of our pre-agrarian hominid ancestors.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • 9. You run into a higher total number of people than would have ever been true of our pre-agrarian hominid ancestors.
  • . You have the option of spending 90% of your waking hours sitting at a desk – and you often exercise this option.
  • 3. You were raised in some variant of a nuclear family – with less assistance from aunts, uncles, older cousins, and grandparents, than would have been typical of our nomadic ancestors.2. You spend a great deal of time interacting with “screens” and “devices” – having the evolutionarily unprecedented possibility of almost never having to be bored at all. 1. You can eat an entire diet of processed foods – and you live in a world where processed foods (think McDonald’s …) are cheaper and more accessible than natural foods.
anonymous

Neuroscience For Kids - stroop effect - 0 views

faculty.washington.edu/...words.html

brain science TOK colours

shared by anonymous on 09 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The famous "Stroop Effect" is named after J. Ridley Stroop who discovered this strange phenomenon in the 1930s.
  • TRY IT!
  • The words themselves have a strong influence over your ability to say the color. The interference between the different information (what the words say and the color of the words) your brain receives causes a problem.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • There are two theories that may explain the Stroop effect: Speed of Processing Theory: the interference occurs because words are read faster than colors are named. Selective Attention Theory: the interference occurs because naming colors requires more attention than reading words.
jlessner

Straight Talk for White Men - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...raight-talk-for-white-men.html

science Research bias

shared by jlessner on 22 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • SUPERMARKET shoppers are more likely to buy French wine when French music is playing, and to buy German wine when they hear German music. That’s true even though only 14 percent of shoppers say they noticed the music, a study finds.
  • Researchers discovered that candidates for medical school interviewed on sunny days received much higher ratings than those interviewed on rainy days. Being interviewed on a rainy day was a setback equivalent to having an MCAT score 10 percent lower, according to a new book called “Everyday Bias,” by Howard J. Ross.
  • Those studies are a reminder that we humans are perhaps less rational than we would like to think, and more prone to the buffeting of unconscious influences. That’s something for those of us who are white men to reflect on when we’re accused of “privilege.”
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  • When I wrote a series last year, “When Whites Just Don’t Get It,” the reaction from white men was often indignant: It’s an equal playing field now! Get off our case!
  • Yet the evidence is overwhelming that unconscious bias remains widespread in ways that systematically benefit both whites and men. So white men get a double dividend, a payoff from both racial and gender biases.
  • male professors are disproportionately likely to be described as a “star” or “genius.” Female professors are disproportionately described as “nasty,” “ugly,” “bossy” or “disorganized.”
  • When students were taking the class from someone they believed to be male, they rated the teacher more highly. The very same teacher, when believed to be female, was rated significantly lower.
  • The study found that a résumé with a name like Emily or Greg received 50 percent more callbacks than the same résumé with a name like Lakisha or Jamal. Having a white-sounding name was as beneficial as eight years’ work experience.
  • Then there was the study in which researchers asked professors to evaluate the summary of a supposed applicant for a post as laboratory manager, but, in some cases, the applicant was named John and in others Jennifer. Everything else was the same.“John” was rated an average of 4.0 on a 7-point scale for competence, “Jennifer” a 3.3. When asked to propose an annual starting salary for the applicant, the professors suggested on average a salary for “John” almost $4,000 higher than for “Jennifer.”Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
  • While we don’t notice systematic unfairness, we do observe specific efforts to redress it — such as affirmative action, which often strikes white men as profoundly unjust. Thus a majority of white Americans surveyed in a 2011 study said that there is now more racism against whites than against blacks.
Javier E

In Defense of Naïve Reading - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...in-defense-of-naive-reading

literature education knowledge science naive theory

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Clearly, poems and novels and paintings were not produced as objects for future academic study; there is no a priori reason to think that they could be suitable objects of  “research.” By and large they were produced for the pleasure and enlightenment of those who enjoyed them.
  • But just as clearly, the teaching of literature in universities ─ especially after the 19th-century research model of Humboldt University of Berlin was widely copied ─ needed a justification consistent with the aims of that academic setting
  • The main aim was research: the creating and accumulation and transmission of knowledge. And the main model was the natural science model of collaborative research: define problems, break them down into manageable parts, create sub-disciplines and sub-sub-disciplines for the study of these, train students for such research specialties and share everything. With that model, what literature and all the arts needed was something like a general “science of meaning” that could eventually fit that sort of aspiration. Texts or art works could be analyzed as exemplifying and so helping establish such a science. Results could be published in scholarly journals, disputed by others, consensus would eventually emerge and so on.
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  • literature study in a university education requires some method of evaluation of whether the student has done well or poorly. Students’ papers must be graded and no faculty member wants to face the inevitable “that’s just your opinion” unarmed, as it were. Learning how to use a research methodology, providing evidence that one has understood and can apply such a method, is understandably an appealing pedagogy
  • Literature and the arts have a dimension unique in the academy, not shared by the objects studied, or “researched” by our scientific brethren. They invite or invoke, at a kind of “first level,” an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language. This response can certainly be enriched by knowledge of context and history, but the objects express a first-person or subjective view of human concerns that is falsified if wholly transposed to a more “sideways on” or third person view.
  • such works also can directly deliver a  kind of practical knowledge and self-understanding not available from a third person or more general formulation of such knowledge. There is no reason to think that such knowledge — exemplified in what Aristotle said about the practically wise man (the phronimos)or in what Pascal meant by the difference between l’esprit géometrique and l’esprit de finesse — is any less knowledge because it cannot be so formalized or even taught as such.
paisleyd

Four-day school week can improve academic performance, study finds -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...150827154409.htm

research knowledge education

shared by paisleyd on 26 Oct 15 - No Cached
    • paisleyd
      paisleyd on 26 Oct 15
       
      Could this have something to do with sleep and how it helps one retain information that they have learned
  • comparing fourth-grade reading and fifth-grade math test scores from the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) for students who participated in a four-day school week, versus those who attended a traditional five-day school week
  • The researchers found a four-day school week had a statistically significant impact on math scores for fifth-grade students, while reading scores were not affected
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  • little evidence that moving to a four-day week compromises student academic achievement
  • We thought that especially for the younger, elementary school kids, longer days on a shorter school week would hurt their academic performance because their attention spans are shorter. Also, a longer weekend would give them more opportunity to forget what they had learned
  • did not have negative effects
  • The four-day school week requires school districts to lengthen the school day
  • My own personal hypothesis is teachers liked it so much--they were so enthusiastic about the four-day week--they did a better job. There's some evidence in other labor studies that four-day work weeks enhance productivity
  • Walker notes the results are only applicable to smaller and more rural school districts
Javier E

The National Book Awards Haul Translators Out of Obscurity - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...575482

language literature translation reading

shared by Javier E on 12 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • In 2018, American literature no longer means literature written by Americans, for Americans, about America. It means literature that, wherever it comes from, whatever nation it describes, American readers recognize as relevant to them, as familiar. Foreign is no longer foreign
  • the question of how “foreign” a translation should “feel” provokes fierce disagreement. When you open a translated novel from overseas, do you want to sense its author’s French, German, Swedish, Spanish or Italian sensibility, even if that breaks the spell of your reading experience? Or do you want to feel as if the book had magically converted itself into flawless, easeful English, attuned to your own idiom? (This is called the “foreignization vs. domestication” debate.)
  • And should a translation hew closely to the language and structure of the original, or should it recraft the language to appeal to the target audience? (This is the “faithfulness” question.) Hardly anyone agrees—not editors, not scholars, not translators, and not readers.
Javier E

Jonathan Franzen Is Fine With All of It - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...en-is-fine-with-all-of-it.html

privacy writer silence

shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • If you’re in a state of perpetual fear of losing market share for you as a person, it’s just the wrong mind-set to move through the world with.” Meaning that if your goal is to get liked and retweeted, then you are perhaps molding yourself into the kind of person you believe will get those things, whether or not that person resembles the actual you. The writer’s job is to say things that are uncomfortable and hard to reduce. Why would a writer mold himself into a product?
  • And why couldn’t people hear him about the social effects this would have? “The internet is all about destroying the elite, destroying the gatekeepers,” he said. “The people know best. You take that to its conclusion, and you get Donald Trump. What do those Washington insiders know? What does the elite know?
  • So he decided to withdraw from it all. After publicity for “The Corrections” ended, he decided he would no longer read about himself — not reviews, not think pieces, not stories, and then, as they came, not status updates and not tweets. He didn’t want to hear reaction to his work. He didn’t want to see the myriad ways he was being misunderstood. He didn’t want to know what the hashtags were.
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  • I stopped reading reviews because I noticed all I remember is the negatives. Whatever fleeting pleasure you have in someone applying a laudatory adjective to your book is totally washed away by the unpleasantness of remembering the negative things for the rest of your life verbatim.
  • Franzen thinks that there’s no way for a writer to do good work — to write something that can be called “consuming and extraordinarily moving” — without putting a fence around yourself so that you can control the input you encounter. So that you could have a thought that isn’t subject to pushback all the time from anyone who has ever met you or heard of you or expressed interest in hearing from you. Without allowing yourself to think for a minute.
  • It’s not just writers. It’s everyone. The writer is just an extreme case of something everyone struggles with. “On the one hand, to function well, you have to believe in yourself and your abilities and summon enormous confidence from somewhere. On the other hand, to write well, or just to be a good person, you need to be able to doubt yourself — to entertain the possibility that you’re wrong about everything, that you don’t know everything, and to have sympathy with people whose lives and beliefs and perspectives are very different from yours.”
  • “This balancing act” — the confidence that you know everything plus the ability to believe that you don’t — “only works, or works best, if you reserve a private space for it.”
  • Can you write clearly about something that you don’t yourself swim in? Don’t you have to endure it and hate it most of the time like the rest of us?
  • his answer was no. No. No, you absolutely don’t. You can miss a meme, and nothing really changes. You can be called fragile, and you will live. “I’m pretty much the opposite of fragile. I don’t need internet engagement to make me vulnerable. Real writing makes me — makes anyone doing it — vulnerable.”
  • Has anyone considered that the interaction is the fragility? Has anyone considered that letting other people define how you fill your day and what they fill your head with — a passive, postmodern stream of other people’s thoughts — is the fragility?
sissij

Books are getting shorter; here's why - 0 views

www.consumeraffairs.com/...-shorter-heres-why-042613.html

social media bias technology

shared by sissij on 27 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • "A leading brain scientist in England points out that texting actually decreases the ability to think in complex ways because it eliminates complexity in sentence structure. Put it all together and it seems that no one has patience to sit quietly and read a book, as we might have a generation or even ten years ago."
  • "People are publishing books that are radically shorter than in the past," he says.
  • But books aren't just getting shorter, says Levin. What the reader wants from the author is changing too.
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  • "But it's also a little bit of intellectual laziness," he adds. "That's what happens in an era when people are famous for being famous instead of famous for having accomplished something distinctive. If you and the media say you're special, you probably are."
  • "It's a paradox," he says. "We distrust authority if it's in the form of a major institution, like government, business or Wall Street. But if an individual claims authority in a given field, we assume the person must be telling the truth about his or her credentials. It's the natural trust we extend others -- we typically assume that people are who they say they are."
  • He says readers no longer want an author to prove his or her assertions. They just want to know the author is giving legitimate answers to their questions.
  • With a printed book people feel more committed to reading the entire thing, but with a digital book not so much, which is another reason a lot of today's books are shorter.
  • sissij on 27 Oct 17
     
    Interesting analysis on how social media affect human behavior. Intellectual laziness and our desire for simplicity leads us in the path of logical fallacies.
Javier E

"In Action How Like an Angel, in Apprehension How Like a God!" Ada Palmer's Too Like Th... - 0 views

www.tor.com/...palmers-too-like-the-lightning

science fiction speculative fiction philosophy theology review

shared by Javier E on 31 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • Homer and de Sade, Voltaire and Samuel Delany, Diderot and Alfred Bester: Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning wears more than two thousand years of influences on its sleeve. It wears them lightly. From the author of Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance comes a devastatingly accomplished speculative fiction debut, an arch and playful narrative that combines the conscious irreverence of the best of 18th-century philosophy with the high-octane heat of an epic science fiction thriller.
  • it’s self-aware, wickedly elegant, and intoxicatingly intelligent.
  • But what, you might ask me, upon hearing this superlative praise, is Too Like The Lightning actually about? People, politics, society, philosophy, theology, and what you’ll destroy to save your world—or a better one.
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  • So many excellently well-drawn characters. Such a sly and clever sideways interrogation of our categories of gender. Such an elegantly blasphemous—though one might say iconoclastic and be just as accurate—approach to religion and society. Too Like The Lightning isn’t a didactic novel. Instead, it presents certain things—certain themes—and invites engagement. Invites argument, without being argumentative. Let me argue with your philosophy and philosophers, your histories, your world!
  • It’s resolutely its own thing: one part theology to nine parts political and personal thriller.
  • Liz Bourke describes herself as a cranky person who reads books. She holds a doctorate in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin.
Javier E

How Tech Can Turn Doctors Into Clerical Workers - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...with-data-driven-medicine.html

medicine health care doctor

shared by Javier E on 18 May 18 - No Cached
  • what I see in my colleague is disillusionment, and it has come too early, and I am seeing too much of it.
  • In America today, the patient in the hospital bed is just the icon, a place holder for the real patient who is not in the bed but in the computer. That virtual entity gets all our attention. Old-fashioned “bedside” rounds conducted by the attending physician too often take place nowhere near the bed but have become “card flip” rounds
  • My young colleague slumping in the chair in my office survived the student years, then three years of internship and residency and is now a full-time practitioner and teacher. The despair I hear comes from being the highest-paid clerical worker in the hospital: For every one hour we spend cumulatively with patients, studies have shown, we spend nearly two hours on our primitive Electronic Health Records, or “E.H.R.s,” and another hour or two during sacred personal time.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • The living, breathing source of the data and images we juggle, meanwhile, is in the bed and left wondering: Where is everyone? What are they doing? Hello! It’s my body, you know
  • Our $3.4 trillion health care system is responsible for more than a quarter of a million deaths per year because of medical error, the rough equivalent of, say, a jumbo jet’s crashing every day.
  • I can get cash and account details all over America and beyond. Yet I can’t reliably get a patient record from across town, let alone from a hospital in the same state, even if both places use the same brand of E.H.R
  • the leading E.H.R.s were never built with any understanding of the rituals of care or the user experience of physicians or nurses. A clinician will make roughly 4,000 keyboard clicks during a busy 10-hour emergency-room shift
  • In the process, our daily progress notes have become bloated cut-and-paste monsters that are inaccurate and hard to wade through. A half-page, handwritten progress note of the paper era might in a few lines tell you what a physician really thought
  • so much of the E.H.R., but particularly the physical exam it encodes, is a marvel of fiction, because we humans don’t want to leave a check box empty or leave gaps in a template.
  • For a study, my colleagues and I at Stanford solicited anecdotes from physicians nationwide about patients for whom an oversight in the exam (a “miss”) had resulted in real consequences, like diagnostic delay, radiation exposure, therapeutic or surgical misadventure, even death. They were the sorts of things that would leave no trace in the E.H.R. because the recorded exam always seems complete — and yet the omission would be glaring and memorable to other physicians involved in the subsequent care. We got more than 200 such anecdotes.
  • The reason for these errors? Most of them resulted from exams that simply weren’t done as claimed. “Food poisoning” was diagnosed because the strangulated hernia in the groin was overlooked, or patients were sent to the catheterization lab for chest pain because no one saw the shingles rash on the left chest.
  • I worry that such mistakes come because we’ve gotten trapped in the bunker of machine medicine. It is a preventable kind of failure
  • How we salivated at the idea of searchable records, of being able to graph fever trends, or white blood counts, or share records at a keystroke with another institution — “interoperability”
  • The seriously ill patient has entered another kingdom, an alternate universe, a place and a process that is frightening, infantilizing; that patient’s greatest need is both scientific state-of-the-art knowledge and genuine caring from another human being. Caring is expressed in listening, in the time-honored ritual of the skilled bedside exam — reading the body — in touching and looking at where it hurts and ultimately in localizing the disease for patients not on a screen, not on an image, not on a biopsy report, but on their bodies.
  • What if the computer gave the nurse the big picture of who he was both medically and as a person?
  • a professor at M.I.T. whose current interest in biomedical engineering is “bedside informatics,” marvels at the fact that in an I.C.U., a blizzard of monitors from disparate manufacturers display EKG, heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, blood pressure, temperature and more, and yet none of this is pulled together, summarized and synthesized anywhere for the clinical staff to use
  • What these monitors do exceedingly well is sound alarms, an average of one alarm every eight minutes, or more than 180 per patient per day. What is our most common response to an alarm? We look for the button to silence the nuisance because, unlike those in a Boeing cockpit, say, our alarms are rarely diagnosing genuine danger.
  • By some estimates, more than 50 percent of physicians in the United States have at least one symptom of burnout, defined as a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, cynicism and decreased efficacy at work
  • It is on the increase, up by 9 percent from 2011 to 2014 in one national study. This is clearly not an individual problem but a systemic one, a 4,000-key-clicks-a-day problem.
  • The E.H.R. is only part of the issue: Other factors include rapid patient turnover, decreased autonomy, merging hospital systems, an aging population, the increasing medical complexity of patients. Even if the E.H.R. is not the sole cause of what ails us, believe me, it has become the symbol of burnou
  • burnout is one of the largest predictors of physician attrition from the work force. The total cost of recruiting a physician can be nearly $90,000, but the lost revenue per physician who leaves is between $500,000 and $1 million, even more in high-paying specialties.
  • I hold out hope that artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms will transform our experience, particularly if natural-language processing and video technology allow us to capture what is actually said and done in the exam room.
  • as with any lab test, what A.I. will provide is at best a recommendation that a physician using clinical judgment must decide how to apply.
  • True clinical judgment is more than addressing the avalanche of blood work, imaging and lab tests; it is about using human skills to understand where the patient is in the trajectory of a life and the disease, what the nature of the patient’s family and social circumstances is and how much they want done.
  • Much of that is a result of poorly coordinated care, poor communication, patients falling through the cracks, knowledge not being transferred and so on, but some part of it is surely from failing to listen to the story and diminishing skill in reading the body as a text.
  • As he was nearing death, Avedis Donabedian, a guru of health care metrics, was asked by an interviewer about the commercialization of health care. “The secret of quality,” he replied, “is love.”/•/
Javier E

Skeptics read Jordan Peterson's '12 Rules for Life' - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-conversation-between-skeptics

manliness plan rules life

shared by Javier E on 09 May 18 - No Cached
  • I do think that women tend to spend more time thinking about their lives, planning for the future, sort of sorting themselves out — and know how to do so. So they don’t need Peterson’s basic life advice as much as men do.
  • Emba: These days, young men seem far more lost than young women. And we’re seeing the results of that all over the place — men disappearing into video games, or pornography, or dropping out of the workforce, or succumbing to depression and despair. So maybe they need this more.
  • Rubin made it sound as though Peterson held some *hidden knowledge,* but there’s no secret to “stand up straight and make sure the people you keep around you pull you up rather than drag you down.”
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • I actually think Peterson was right to observe that it’s remarkable how many students at the universities where they tested some of his theories hadn’t been told these things. Though I thought it was interesting that he seemed to think that teaching this kind of thing was a job for the educational system rather than the parents
  • I think perhaps we’re both lucky in that though our backgrounds are different, we both come from relatively stable families with parents and surrounding adults who inculcated these “rules” intrinsically, from our youth on. So the Peterson gospel doesn’t feel new to us.
  • The fact that there are whole swaths of our generation who are advantaged by already knowing this information about how to make your life better, and another whole swath who is being left behind, character and life-formation wise, because they don’t. And they are left to rely on Jordan Peterson.
  • He is convinced of the importance and significance of these stories, these words — and religion, and its significance. At one point he stated that he didn’t have a materialist view of the world, but actually a “deeply religious” one.
  • One thing that’s definitely central to the book is telling people (particularly men) that life is hard, and you need to get it together.
  • largely the message you come away with is that if you don’t like the way things are going, it’s your fault and your fault alone. And that’s an easier message to believe when you’re a white male and systemic obstacles aren’t really a thing you run into.
  • Jordan Peterson professes not to be religious, but he is. His book is built on what he describes as archetypal myths from different cultures, but leans *very* heavily on Judeo-Christian ones especially — Cain and Abel and the stories of Jesus’s life, from his temptation in the desert to his death and resurrection.
  • This tendency was even more pronounced in his live lecture. Basically every line, every piece of advice he gave, was supported by a Bible verse. At one point, he quoted the gospel of Matthew: “Knock and the door will be opened to you” — and said, “This is how life works, ACTUALLY” — basically glaring at the crowd and daring them to disagree.
  • Just in the week or so I was reading “12 Rules,” I had several men my age come up to me on buses or in coffee shops and strike up conversations with me about Peterson — the one thing they all talked about right away was how the book had a lot of “hard truths” that they needed to hear
  • He’s not keeping great company. But I think his personal work and statements are generally benign, in many cases actually helpful, in that they urge young people to seek out a better-structured and more meaningful life.
  • I agree it’s inaccurate to label him as alt-right, though that is a low bar to clear. Frankly I see him more as a mainstream conservative. I think part of the reason people get this wrong is that there’s a big gap between what boosted his fame and what the central thrust of his book is
  • I think “traditionalist” is probably the best label for him — both because his views are traditionalist and because his worldview is so dependent on traditions (or at least what he sees as traditions.)
Javier E

Why Trump's 'animals' remark should make everyone angry - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-a4a4-c070ef53f315_story.html

trump dehumanization psychology bias

shared by Javier E on 24 May 18 - No Cached
  • why did so many people get so angry when President Trump said “These are animals” in response to a remark about a gang called MS-13?
  • Obviously, because he wasn’t just stating a simple fact; he was using those words to demote those people from the human race.
  • And by the transitive property, to demote immigrants from the empathy and consideration that decent people extend to other human beings.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • there is a plausible reading of Trump’s words that refers to the gang, or similar criminals, not to immigrants in general. But in light of Trump’s history, that surface reading isn’t enough.
  • the “animals” controversy illustrates a broader truth: It’s a common human failing to characterize outgroups by the worst examples we can find while dismissing our own bad apples as isolated minorities who have nothing to do with the rest of us.
  • It’s instructive to compare Trump’s harsh language about immigrant “animals” with his response to a direct question about a different group of people behaving badly. After white nationalists staged marches in Charlottesville, culminating in a death, Trump was at pains to distinguish the Nazis from the “people in that group that were there to innocently protest.”
  • He’s less careful when immigrants are involved. Immigrants actually have a lower crime rate than native-born Americans , yet Trump sure seems to spend an awful lot of time talking about the small fraction who are criminals.
  • in the succeeding days, he has seemed obsessed with repeating the word “animals” every time the social media storm threatened to die down.
  • Consider how conservatives feel, for example, when the left focuses disproportionate energy on the tiny portion of the population that belongs to the alt-right or to white-nationalist groups.
  • Or consider the lingering indignation over Barack Obama’s suggestion that in some small towns in the Midwest and Pennsylvania, where the economy has been devastated by de-industrialization, some people “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”
  • Obama wasn’t making an abstract observation about human psychology; he was implying that while Democrats come to their views through thoughtful reflection, the Republican rubes simply react to environmental stimulus, like amoebas.
Javier E

Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...liu-cixins-war-of-the-worlds

china science fiction realpolitik psychology science

shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • he briskly dismissed the idea that fiction could serve as commentary on history or on current affairs. “The whole point is to escape the real world!” he said.
  • Chinese tech entrepreneurs discuss the Hobbesian vision of the trilogy as a metaphor for cutthroat competition in the corporate world; other fans include Barack Obama, who met Liu in Beijing two years ago, and Mark Zuckerberg. Liu’s international career has become a source of national pride. In 2015, China’s then Vice-President, Li Yuanchao, invited Liu to Zhongnanhai—an off-limits complex of government accommodation sometimes compared to the Kremlin—to discuss the books and showed Liu his own copies, which were dense with highlights and annotations.
  • In China, one of his stories has been a set text in the gao kao—the notoriously competitive college-entrance exams that determine the fate of ten million pupils annually; another has appeared in the national seventh-grade-curriculum textbook. When a reporter recently challenged Liu to answer the middle-school questions about the “meaning” and the “central themes” of his story, he didn’t get a single one right. “I’m a writer,” he told me, with a shrug.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Liu’s tomes—they tend to be tomes—have been translated into more than twenty languages, and the trilogy has sold some eight million copies worldwide. He has won China’s highest honor for science-fiction writing, the Galaxy Award, nine times, and in 2015 he became the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award, the most prestigious international science-fiction prize
  • “The Three-Body Problem” takes its title from an analytical problem in orbital mechanics which has to do with the unpredictable motion of three bodies under mutual gravitational pull. Reading an article about the problem, Liu thought, What if the three bodies were three suns? How would intelligent life on a planet in such a solar system develop? From there, a structure gradually took shape that almost resembles a planetary system, with characters orbiting the central conceit like moons. For better or worse, the characters exist to support the framework of the story rather than to live as individuals on the page.
  • Concepts that seemed abstract to others took on, for him, concrete forms; they were like things he could touch, inducing a “druglike euphoria.” Compared with ordinary literature, he came to feel, “the stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional
  • Pragmatic choices like this one, or like the decision his grandparents made when their sons were conscripted, recur in his fiction—situations that present equally unconscionable choices on either side of a moral fulcrum
  • The great flourishing of science fiction in the West at the end of the nineteenth century occurred alongside unprecedented technological progress and the proliferation of the popular press—transformations that were fundamental to the development of the genre
  • Joel Martinsen, the translator of the second volume of Liu’s trilogy, sees the series as a continuation of this tradition. “It’s not hard to read parallels between the Trisolarans and imperialist designs on China, driven by hunger for resources and fear of being wiped out,” he told me. Even Liu, unwilling as he is to endorse comparisons between the plot and China’s current face-off with the U.S., did at one point let slip that “the relationship between politics and science fiction cannot be underestimated.”
  • Speculative fiction is the art of imagining alternative worlds, and the same political establishment that permits it to be used as propaganda for the existing regime is also likely to recognize its capacity to interrogate the legitimacy of the status quo.
  • Liu has been criticized for peopling his books with characters who seem like cardboard cutouts installed in magnificent dioramas. Liu readily admits to the charge. “I did not begin writing for love of literature,” he told me. “I did so for love of science.”
  • Liu believes that this trend signals a deeper shift in the Chinese mind-set—that technological advances have spurred a new excitement about the possibilities of cosmic exploration.
  • Liu’s imagination is dauntingly capacious, his narratives conceived on a scale that feels, at times, almost hallucinogenic. The time line of the trilogy spans 18,906,450 years, encompassing ancient Egypt, the Qin dynasty, the Byzantine Empire, the Cultural Revolution, the present, and a time eighteen million years in the future
  • The first book is set on Earth, though some of its scenes take place in virtual reality; by the end of the third book, the scope of the action is interstellar and annihilation unfolds across several dimensions. The London Review of Books has called the trilogy “one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written.”
  • Although physics furnishes the novels’ premises, it is politics that drives the plots. At every turn, the characters are forced to make brutal calculations in which moral absolutism is pitted against the greater good
  • In Liu’s fictional universe, idealism is fatal and kindness an exorbitant luxury. As one general says in the trilogy, “In a time of war, we can’t afford to be too scrupulous.” Indeed, it is usually when people do not play by the rules of Realpolitik that the most lives are lost.
  • “I know what you are thinking,” he told me with weary clarity. “What about individual liberty and freedom of governance?” He sighed, as if exhausted by a debate going on in his head. “But that’s not what Chinese people care about. For ordinary folks, it’s the cost of health care, real-estate prices, their children’s education. Not democracy.”
  • Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.”
  • Liu explained to me, the existing regime made the most sense for today’s China, because to change it would be to invite chaos. “If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth,”
  • It was an opinion entirely consistent with his systems-level view of human societies, just as mine reflected a belief in democracy and individualism as principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes
  • “I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.
  • Chinese people of his generation were lucky, he said. The changes they had seen were so huge that they now inhabited a world entirely different from that of their childhood. “China is a futuristic country,” he said. “I realized that the world around me became more and more like science fiction, and this process is speeding up.”
  • “We have statues of a few martyrs, but we never—We don’t memorialize those, the individuals.” He took off his glasses and blinked, peering into the wide expanse of green and concrete. “This is how we Chinese have always been,” he said. “When something happens, it passes, and time buries the stories.”
douglasn89

The Simple Economics of Machine Intelligence - 0 views

hbr.org/...nomics-of-machine-intelligence

shared by douglasn89 on 06 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • The year 1995 was heralded as the beginning of the “New Economy.” Digital communication was set to upend markets and change everything. But economists by and large didn’t buy into the hype.
  • Today we are seeing similar hype about machine intelligence. But once again, as economists, we believe some simple rules apply. Technological revolutions tend to involve some important activity becoming cheap, like the cost of communication or finding information. Machine intelligence is, in its essence, a prediction technology, so the economic shift will center around a drop in the cost of prediction.
  • The first effect of machine intelligence will be to lower the cost of goods and services that rely on prediction. This matters because prediction is an input to a host of activities including transportation, agriculture, healthcare, energy manufacturing, and retail.
    • douglasn89
      douglasn89 on 06 Mar 17
       
      This emphasis on prediction ties into the previous discussion and reading we had which included the idea that humans by nature are poor predictors, so because of that, they have begun to design machines to predict.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • As machine intelligence lowers the cost of prediction, we will begin to use it as an input for things for which we never previously did. As a historical example, consider semiconductors, an area of technological advance that caused a significant drop in the cost of a different input: arithmetic. With semiconductors we could calculate cheaply, so activities for which arithmetic was a key input, such as data analysis and accounting, became much cheaper.
  • As machine intelligence improves, the value of human prediction skills will decrease because machine prediction will provide a cheaper and better substitute for human prediction, just as machines did for arithmetic.
  • Using the language of economics, judgment is a complement to prediction and therefore when the cost of prediction falls demand for judgment rises. We’ll want more human judgment.
  • But it yields two key implications: 1) an expanded role of prediction as an input to more goods and services, and 2) a change in the value of other inputs, driven by the extent to which they are complements to or substitutes for prediction. These changes are coming.
    • douglasn89
      douglasn89 on 06 Mar 17
       
      This article agrees with the readings from Unit 5 Lesson 6 in its prediction of changes.
sissij

The Choose-Your-Own-News Adventure - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...news-choice-jim-rutenberg.html

new york times bias social media technology

shared by sissij on 14 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • some new twist on the modern media sphere’s rush to give you exactly what you want when you want it.
  • No matter how far the experiment goes, Netflix is again in step with the national zeitgeist. After all, there are algorithms for streaming music services like Spotify, for Facebook’s news feed and for Netflix’s own program menu, working to deliver just what you like while filtering out whatever might turn you off and send you away — the sorts of data-driven honey traps that are all the talk at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival going on here through this week.
  • “You used to be a consumer of reality, and now you’re a designer of reality.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • It started with President Trump’s Twitter posts accusing former President Barack Obama of having wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower.
  • The proof, you would have heard him say, was already out there in the mainstream media — what with a report on the website Heat Street saying that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had secured a warrant to investigate ties between people in Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia, and articles in The New York Times, in The Washington Post and elsewhere about intelligence linking people in Mr. Trump’s campaign to Russia, some of it from wiretaps.
  • You could throw on the goggles, become a bird and fly around. If virtual reality can allow a human to become a bird, why couldn’t it allow you to live more fully in your own political reality — don the goggles and go live full time in the adventure of your choosing: A, B or C.
  • Just watch out for that wall you’re about to walk into IRL (in real life). Or, hey, don’t — knock yourself out.
  • sissij on 14 Mar 17
     
    This new design reminds me of how the internet is limiting us in our comfort zone. Although in theory, there is almost infinite amount of information on the internet, we can only get a very small proportion of it. And people tends to read the information that support their idea or fit their interests. So the news servers start to design system that only provide readers with what they want to see or like to see. It does not do good to diversify people's mind as what internet should be doing. In the quote, Dan Wagner said: "you're a designer of reality", but I interpret this as we are the designer of our own reality. This will only isolate people from each other. Without living in the same reality, people won't have real communication, so I think this new design does have cons. --Sissi (3/14/2017)
sissij

FaceApp apologises for 'racist' filter that lightens users' skintone | Technology | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-which-lightens-users-skintone

the guardian technology bias social media

shared by sissij on 26 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • its “hot” filter automatically lightened people’s skin.
  • “It is an unfortunate side-effect of the underlying neural network caused by the training set bias, not intended behaviour.”
  • which he said was a side-effect of the “neural network”.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • But users noticed one of the options, initially labelled as “hot” made people look whiter.
  • which usually adds filters, because it uses deep learning technology to alter the photo itself.
  • This is by no means the first time an app which changes people’s faces have been criticised for racial insensitivity.
  • sissij on 26 Apr 17
     
    This article reminds me of an article I read days ago about AI chatting program that picked up racial expression when it is learning in chatting people a lot of people. The faceApp obviously adapt a similar learning program that's similar to that of the AI robot. I think it can partly reflect what the mainstream society is thinking. It unveil this preference of whiter skin tone people have intentionally or subconsciously. This is the mainstream esthetic in the society now. --Sissi (4/26/2017)
sissij

Researchers Analyze 1,280 Suicide Notes to Devise a Better Prevention Strategy | Big Think - 1 views

bigthink.com/...hts-into-the-heartbreaking-act

suicide research science brain science

shared by sissij on 06 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • That’s why the results of a 2015 report were so shocking. For the first time in generations, middle-aged white people saw their death rate increase.
  • Approximately 40,000 people take their own lives each year in the US.
  • They wanted to obtain a holistic view using psychology, history, and the social sciences to tackle suicide.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Last words such as these are only found in 14% of cases. The authors began to notice differences between note leavers and non-leavers in their research, as well as people who attempt suicide and those who complete the act.
  • Many notes were addressed to one person. Others were to no one in particular.
  • Nowadays, being a white male is the single biggest risk factor. Why is that? According to Case and Deaton, drastic changes in the labor market is the most significant factor.
  • “Hegemonic masculinity,” or a perception that heightened masculinity must be portrayed at all times, a goal that no male can live up to.
  • Another 23% of note writers ended it all due to unrequited love or love lost. 22% said they themselves created the problem which led to their decision.
  • Meyer and colleagues also propose a national prevention plan, to foster a sense of community and social support.
  • If you feel suicidal, or are concerned for a friend, don't wait: talk to someone, or learn about suicide prevention here.
  • sissij on 06 Apr 17
     
    Suicide is a very interesting and big subject in studies of human social activities. From the point of view of evolution, it is a very inefficient act as one kills oneself. This action should be banned from our genes. Gender pressure, as stated in the reading, is probably a factor of suicide. Since the society expect too much on male and some of them are not able to fulfill the expectation, they choose to suicide. It also reminds me of a movie I watched when I was little and left a big impression, called The Happening. In that movie, the plants would release a certain hormone and lead people to suicide one by one. So is it possible that hormone can be a factor of making the decision to suicide? --Sissi (4/6/2017)
Javier E

The Human Library Organisation replaces pages with people - Human resources - 0 views

www.economist.com/...human-resources

library books reading education brain science empathy human

shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Reading a work of fiction is therefore like getting to know a person. The more you learn about their stories, the less you “judge them by their cover”. 
  • Launched in Denmark 17 years ago, the project hosts events in libraries where users can “check out” a human for half an hour to hear their stories. “Readers” may ask whatever questions they like, and “renew” their loan if they have more.
  • The “books” are selected from a catalogue of marginalised individuals: refugees, ex-strippers, single mothers, Muslim converts, homeless people, those affected by autism and so on.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It has held more than 600 events in over 80 countries, and has established semi-permanent libraries in various locations. 
  • Javier E on 04 Nov 17
     
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