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Javier E

How to Accept the Things You Can't Change - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...620876

sadness depression victim feelings stoicism buddhism attitude

shared by Javier E on 04 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • Everyone—even the most privileged among us—has circumstances they would like to change in their life.
  • How might you improve the situation? Your answer might be, “I should move, get a new job, and meet new people.” In other words, you should change the outside world to make it better for you.
  • Between the conditions around you and your response to them is a space. In this space, you have freedom. You can choose to try remodeling the world, or you can start by changing your reaction to it.
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  • Sometimes, changing your circumstances is difficult but absolutely necessary, such as in cases of abuse or violence. And sometimes, changing your circumstances is fairly easy: If you are lethargic every morning, start going to bed earlier.
  • But in the gray areas in between, fighting against reality can be impossible, or incredibly inefficient. Maybe you have been diagnosed with a chronic illness for which there are no promising treatment options. Perhaps your romantic partner has left you against your wishes and cannot be persuaded otherwise.
  • In these sorts of situations, changing how you feel can actually be much easier than changing your physical reality, even if it seems unnatural.
  • No surprise, then, that chronic stress often leads to maladaptive coping mechanisms in modern life. These include the misuse of drugs and alcohol, rumination on the sources of stress, self-harm, and self-blaming
  • That can be blamed in part on biology. Negative emotions such as anger and fear activate the amygdala, which increases vigilance toward threats and improves your ability to detect and avoid danger.
  • In other words, stress makes you fight, flee, or freeze—not think, What would a prudent reaction be at this moment? Let’s consider the options.
  • But in the modern world, stress and anxiety are usually chronic, not episodic.
  • you no longer need your amygdala to help you outrun the tiger without asking your conscious brain’s permission. Instead, you use it to handle the nonlethal problems that pester you all day long. Even if you don’t have tigers to outrun, you can’t relax in your cave, because the emails are piling up.
  • Your emotions can seem out of your control at the best of times, and even more so during a crisis
  • Similarly, the Stoics believed that human reason, practiced studiously, could override knee-jerk emotions.
  • Buddhism posits that our minds are habitually unbalanced, but not intrinsically so; the key is to build new habits of thinking.
  • These ideas (especially the last) have inspired modern schools of psychotherapy, such as rational emotive behavior therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, which aim to create practical strategies for changing our reactions to negative situations in our life—and thus becoming happier.
  • 4. Give more.
  • you can follow four steps to arrive at a happier frame of mind:
  • 1. Notice your feelings.
  • Self-observation requires that you be mindful of what you are feeling in the moment and approach your emotions with detached curiosity.
  • Say you are sick of working from home all day, with endless Zoom meetings and no real human contact. Rather than fantasizing about quitting, spend some time dissecting your boredom and discomfort. At what time of day are they worst?
  • Following this procedure during the coronavirus pandemic shutdowns, I started taking virtual meetings while out for a walk. It made a big difference.
  • 2. Accept your feelings.
  • in much of life, negative feelings are part of a full human experience; erasing them would make life grayer. Furthermore, ample research shows that negative emotions and experiences help us find life’s meaning and purpose.
  • In the journal you started in Step 1 above, ponder the things that you can’t realistically alter and the emotions they spark in you. Ask what you are learning about yourself from each of these feelings, and how you might grow as a result.
  • 3. Lower your expectations.
  • Once, as a young man, I told my father over the phone that I planned to quit my job. “Why?” he asked. “Because it doesn’t make me happy,” I told him. He paused for a long time, and finally said, “What makes you so special?
  • My problem—and it’s a common one—was that I had set unreasonable expectations about how happy the world was supposed to make me.
  • Calmly ask yourself whether you’re asking the world for something it can’t or won’t give you. If you are, you might be looking in the wrong place for your bliss
  • you shouldn’t assume that all your happiness can come from any single romance, material object, or activity. You need a “portfolio” approach, balancing faith or philosophy, family, friendship, and work in which you earn your success and serve others.
  • Ancient thinkers recognized this difficulty but believed that we can manage our reactions effectively if we have the right tools.
  • Research from the INSEAD business school in France shows that people who consider themselves a victim of circumstances don’t feel like they have any responsibility for them. They are also likely to be victimizers themselves, hurting the people who try to help them.
  • One way to break this cycle is to help others voluntarily and charitably. Not only is serving others one of the most effective ways to raise one’s own happiness; maintaining the two opposing ideas that you are both a victim and a helper is very difficult.
Javier E

Pandemic-Era Politics Are Ruining Public Education - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...622824

learning teaching trends school history ideology books reading research social social media technology psychology

shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • You’re also the nonvoting, perhaps unwitting, subject of adults’ latest pedagogical experiments: either relentless test prep or test abolition; quasi-religious instruction in identity-based virtue and sin; a flood of state laws to keep various books out of your hands and ideas out of your head.
  • Your parents, looking over your shoulder at your education and not liking what they see, have started showing up at school-board meetings in a mortifying state of rage. If you live in Virginia, your governor has set up a hotline where they can rat out your teachers to the government. If you live in Florida, your governor wants your parents to sue your school if it ever makes you feel “discomfort” about who you are
  • Adults keep telling you the pandemic will never end, your education is being destroyed by ideologues, digital technology is poisoning your soul, democracy is collapsing, and the planet is dying—but they’re counting on you to fix everything when you grow up.
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  • It isn’t clear how the American public-school system will survive the COVID years. Teachers, whose relative pay and status have been in decline for decades, are fleeing the field. In 2021, buckling under the stresses of the pandemic, nearly 1 million people quit jobs in public education, a 40 percent increase over the previous year.
  • These kids, and the investments that come with them, may never return—the beginning of a cycle of attrition that could continue long after the pandemic ends and leave public schools even more underfunded and dilapidated than before. “It’s an open question whether the public-school system will recover,” Steiner said. “That is a real concern for democratic education.”
  • The high-profile failings of public schools during the pandemic have become a political problem for Democrats, because of their association with unions, prolonged closures, and the pedagogy of social justice, which can become a form of indoctrination.
  • The party that stands for strong government services in the name of egalitarian principles supported the closing of schools far longer than either the science or the welfare of children justified, and it has been woefully slow to acknowledge how much this damaged the life chances of some of America’s most disadvantaged students.
  • Public education is too important to be left to politicians and ideologues. Public schools still serve about 90 percent of children across red and blue America.
  • Since the common-school movement in the early 19th century, the public school has had an exalted purpose in this country. It’s our core civic institution—not just because, ideally, it brings children of all backgrounds together in a classroom, but because it prepares them for the demands and privileges of democratic citizenship. Or at least, it needs to.
  • What is school for? This is the kind of foundational question that arises when a crisis shakes the public’s faith in an essential institution. “The original thinkers about public education were concerned almost to a point of paranoia about creating self-governing citizens,”
  • “Horace Mann went to his grave having never once uttered the phrase college- and career-ready. We’ve become more accustomed to thinking about the private ends of education. We’ve completely lost the habit of thinking about education as citizen-making.”
  • School can’t just be an economic sorting system. One reason we have a stake in the education of other people’s children is that they will grow up to be citizens.
  • Public education is meant not to mirror the unexamined values of a particular family or community, but to expose children to ways that other people, some of them long dead, think.
  • If the answer were simply to push more and more kids into college, the United States would be entering its democratic prime
  • So the question isn’t just how much education, but what kind. Is it quaint, or utopian, to talk about teaching our children to be capable of governing themselves?
  • The COVID era, with Donald Trump out of office but still in power and with battles over mask mandates and critical race theory convulsing Twitter and school-board meetings, shows how badly Americans are able to think about our collective problems—let alone read, listen, empathize, debate, reconsider, and persuade in the search for solutions.
  • democratic citizenship can, at least in part, be learned.
  • The history warriors build their metaphysics of national good or evil on a foundation of ignorance. In a 2019 survey, only 40 percent of Americans were able to pass the test that all applicants for U.S. citizenship must take, which asks questions like “Who did the United States fight in World War II?” and “We elect a President for how many years?” The only state in which a majority passed was Vermont.
  • he orthodoxies currently fighting for our children’s souls turn the teaching of U.S. history into a static and morally simple quest for some American essence. They proceed from celebration or indictment toward a final judgment—innocent or guilty—and bury either oppression or progress in a subordinate clause. The most depressing thing about this gloomy pedagogy of ideologies in service to fragile psyches is how much knowledge it takes away from students who already have so little
  • A central goal for history, social-studies, and civics instruction should be to give students something more solid than spoon-fed maxims—to help them engage with the past on its own terms, not use it as a weapon in the latest front of the culture wars.
  • Releasing them to do “research” in the vast ocean of the internet without maps and compasses, as often happens, guarantees that they will drown before they arrive anywhere.
  • The truth requires a grounding in historical facts, but facts are quickly forgotten without meaning and context
  • The goal isn’t just to teach students the origins of the Civil War, but to give them the ability to read closely, think critically, evaluate sources, corroborate accounts, and back up their claims with evidence from original documents.
  • This kind of instruction, which requires teachers to distinguish between exposure and indoctrination, isn’t easy; it asks them to be more sophisticated professionals than their shabby conditions and pay (median salary: $62,000, less than accountants and transit police) suggest we are willing to support.
  • To do that, we’ll need to help kids restore at least part of their crushed attention spans.
  • staring at a screen for hours is a heavy depressant, especially for teenagers.
  • we’ll look back on the amount of time we let our children spend online with the same horror that we now feel about earlier generations of adults who hooked their kids on smoking.
  • “It’s not a choice between tech or no tech,” Bill Tally, a researcher with the Education Development Center, told me. “The question is what tech infrastructure best enables the things we care about,” such as deep engagement with instructional materials, teachers, and other students.
  • The pandemic should have forced us to reassess what really matters in public school; instead, it’s a crisis that we’ve just about wasted.
  • Like learning to read as historians, learning to sift through the tidal flood of memes for useful, reliable information can emancipate children who have been heedlessly hooked on screens by the adults in their lives
  • Finally, let’s give children a chance to read books—good books. It’s a strange feature of all the recent pedagogical innovations that they’ve resulted in the gradual disappearance of literature from many classrooms.
  • The best way to interest young people in literature is to have them read good literature, and not just books that focus with grim piety on the contemporary social and psychological problems of teenagers.
  • We sell them insultingly short in thinking that they won’t read unless the subject is themselves. Mirrors are ultimately isolating; young readers also need windows, even if the view is unfamiliar, even if it’s disturbing
  • connection through language to universal human experience and thought is the reward of great literature, a source of empathy and wisdom.
  • The culture wars, with their atmosphere of resentment, fear, and petty faultfinding, are hostile to the writing and reading of literature.
  • W. E. B. Du Bois wrote: “Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”
  • The classroom has become a half-abandoned battlefield, where grown-ups who claim to be protecting students from the virus, from books, from ideologies and counter-ideologies end up using children to protect themselves and their own entrenched camps.
  • American democracy can’t afford another generation of adults who don’t know how to talk and listen and think. We owe our COVID-scarred children the means to free themselves from the failures of the past and the present.
  • Students are leaving as well. Since 2020, nearly 1.5 million children have been removed from public schools to attend private or charter schools or be homeschooled.
  • “COVID has encouraged poor parents to question the quality of public education. We are seeing diminished numbers of children in our public schools, particularly our urban public schools.” In New York, more than 80,000 children have disappeared from city schools; in Los Angeles, more than 26,000; in Chicago, more than 24,000.
Javier E

Climate Change: The Technologies That Could Make All the Difference - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-make-a-difference-11650656071

climate change technology research development

shared by Javier E on 25 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • The modularity of DAC systems implies that costs for CO2 removal might drop 90% to 95% over a couple of decades, just like the recent cost declines for other modular solutions such as wind turbines, solar panels and lithium-ion batteries.
  • Unlike other pollutants, what matters with carbon dioxide isn’t the location of its release but the total atmospheric accumulation. Releasing greenhouse gases in industrial corridors and then removing them from the atmosphere in remote locations has essentially the same net effect as if the carbon wasn’t emitted in the first place. That means we can deploy DAC systems wherever the energy for their operation is cheapest, ecosystem impacts are lowest, and the economic activity would be welcome.
  • A solar microgrid, which generates, stores and distributes clean energy to homes and facilities in a local network, provides a strong answer to these needs and wants. It can integrate with the main electric grid or disconnect and operate autonomously if the main grid is stressed or goes down. The physical pieces—solar panels, batteries and inverters—have been improving for a while. What’s new and coming, though, is the ability to orchestrate these different pieces into agile electric grids.
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  • With digital tools and data science, demand for energy can now be sculpted locally to match available resources, reducing the number of power plants that utilities need to keep in reserve.
  • The key is giving consumers the ability to separate flexible energy uses—say, operating a Jacuzzi—from essential needs, which can now be done with phone apps for smart appliances and service panels.
  • Meanwhile, connections between groups of customers can be opened and closed as needed with modern, communicating circuit switchgear.
  • The good news is that record amounts of batteries are being installed in U.S. homes and on the electric grid, despite supply-chain bottlenecks.
  • The bad news is that current battery technology only offers a few hours of storage. What’s needed are more-powerful battery systems that can extend the length or scale of storing, which could be even more enabling to sun and wind power.
  • Two such solutions are on the horizon. Stationary metal-air batteries, such as iron-air batteries, don’t hold as much energy per kilogram as lithium-ion batteries so it takes a larger, heavier battery to do the job. But they are cheaper, iron is a plentiful metal, and the batteries, whose chemistry works via interaction of the metal with air, can be sized and installed to store and discharge a large level of electricity over days or weeks.
  • improved large iron-air batteries are poised to become a great new backup for renewable energy within the next couple of years to address those times of year when drops in renewable energy production can last for days and not hours.
  • For households, a battery configuration called a virtual power plant also holds huge potential to extend the use of renewables. These systems allow a local utility or electricity distributor to collect excess energy stored in multiple households’ battery systems and feed it back to the grid when there is a surge in demand or generation shortfall.
  • Electrification is a good choice for smaller vessels on short voyages, like the world’s largest all-electric ferry launched in Norway in 2021. It isn’t yet a viable option for ships on transoceanic voyages because batteries are still too large and heavy, though innovative approaches for battery swapping are being explored.
  • Greener Shipping
  • For longer voyages, e-ammonia, a hydrogen-derived fuel made with renewable energy, has been identified as a prime candidate, although work is needed to ensure safety. Ammonia has a higher energy density than some other options, making it a more economical option for powering large ships across oceans.
  • Among ammonia projects in the works, MAN Energy Solutions is developing engines that can run on conventional fossil fuel or ammonia, a coalition of Nordic partners is designing the world’s first ammonia-powered vessel, and Singapore is evaluating how to bunker the fuel.
  • Some EV makers such as Tesla are now embracing an older, less-expensive battery technology known as lithium-iron-phosphate, or LFP, used originally in scooters and small EVs in China
  • . It draws entirely on cheap and abundant minerals and is less flammable. The power density of LFP is less than NMC, but that disadvantage can be overcome by advances in vehicle design.
  • One approach being tested eliminates the outer packaging of the batteries altogether and directly installs cells, packed in layers, into a cavity in the EV’s body chassis.
  • Eventually, solid-state batteries—with a solid electrolyte made from common minerals like glass or ceramics—could become a key EV battery technology.
  • The solid electrolyte is more chemically stable, lighter, recharges faster and has many more lifetime recharging cycles than lithium-ion batteries, which depend on heavy liquid electrolytes.
  • these innovations are good news for those hoping to speed up EV adoption. They also suggest that batteries, far from becoming a standardized commodity, are going to be customized as auto makers create their own vehicle designs and battery makers develop proprietary platforms.
Javier E

Afire Is a Comedy of Manners at the End of the World | The New Republic - 0 views

newrepublic.com/...-christian-petzold-film-review

climate change environment response crisis culture psychology art

shared by Javier E on 10 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • Christian Petzold likes terrible, irreversible events: accidents, suicides, eternal separations. In his melodramas, Petzold has established a fascination with the trope of love lost at the hands of misrecognition. At the crossroads of historical circumstance and feelings of personal guilt and shame, his protagonists carry burdensome secrets, with devastating consequences.
  • His latest film at first appears to diverge from recent work. Set in contemporary seaside Germany, Afire takes a break from the backdrops of extreme repression and deprivation that the director has favored for at least a decade
  • fire is really a slow build to the disaster that Petzold does so well. Only by dint of calamitous events, it seems, can Leon awaken to the reality he resolutely shuts out. The arrival of a forest fire, suddenly overwhelming the plotless plot, seems to satisfy a perverse fantasy grounded in the belief that extremity is required for a life lived fully.
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  • Taking cues from Éric Rohmer’s summertime romantic comedy-dramas, Petzold fills much of the film with routine errands, trips to the beach, and aimless conversations over dinner—scenes of leisure and languor that appear plotless.
  • In Afire, Petzold revisits the question posed in Transit. Does the search for humanity in cataclysm—a pursuit that can take over one’s life—make us, conversely, less human?
  • With the events in the last act of Afire, Leon finally possesses “real experience” of the sort that can rescue him from his solipsistic writing. His writing and conduct outwardly improve at a rapid clip. The newly mature Leon is thoughtful and expansive, yet there is something garish about his transformation at the eleventh hour.
  • The characters of Afire confront a crisis that threatens to vacate all narratives of meaning, and Leon comes out the other end with a feeble text. It’s better than what came before, but can it begin to make sense of what has taken place? This time, the atrocity is not historical but natural, and Petzold is cynical about the redemptive potential of melodrama in an age in which disasters, if still largely caused by human decisions, unfold beyond the grasp of our control. If he wants Leon to scrutinize the stories he tells about himself, the ending of Afire suggests that there is a possibility he finds even more concerning: a future with no stories at all.
Javier E

Did Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely Fabricate Data for the Same Study? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...674891

data fraud experiment scientific research

shared by Javier E on 02 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • Had the doctoring been done by someone from the insurer, as Ariely implied? There didn’t seem to be a way to dispute that contention, and the company itself wasn’t saying much. Then, last week, NPR’s Planet Money delivered a scoop: The company, called The Hartford, informed the show that it had finally tracked down the raw numbers that were provided to Ariely—and that the data had been “manipulated inappropriately” in the published study.
  • The analysis of insurance data from The Hartford appeared as “Experiment 3” in the paper. On the preceding page, an analysis of a different dataset—the one linked to Gino—was written up as “Experiment 1.” The scientists who say they discovered issues with both experiments—Leif Nelson, Uri Simonsohn, and Joe Simmons—dubbed the apparent double fraud a “clusterfake.” When I spoke with the scientific-misconduct investigator and Atlantic contributor James Heathers, he had his own way of describing it: “This is some kind of mad, fraudulent unicorn.”
  • When they set about reviewing Ariely’s work on the 2012 paper, a few quirks in the car-insurance data tipped them off that something might be amiss. Some entries were in one font, some in another. Some were rounded to the nearest 500 or 1,000; some were not. But the detail that really caught their attention was the distribution of recorded values. With such a dataset, you’d expect to see the numbers fall in a bell curve—most entries bunched up near the mean, and the rest dispersed along the tapering extremes. But the data that Ariely said he’d gotten from the insurance company did not form a bell curve; the distribution was completely flat. Clients were just as likely to have claimed that they’d driven 1,000 miles as 10,000 or 50,000 miles. It’s “hard to know what the distribution of miles driven should look like in those data,” the scientists wrote. “It is not hard, however, to know what it should not look like.”
Javier E

J. Robert Oppenheimer's Defense of Humanity - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...s-defense-of-humanity-d83903b3

humanity alignment technology science research survival Oppenheimer

shared by Javier E on 15 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • Von Neumann, too, was deeply concerned about the inability of humanity to keep up with its own inventions. “What we are creating now,” he said to his wife Klári in 1945, “is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left.” Moving to the subject of future computing machines he became even more agitated, foreseeing disaster if “people” could not “keep pace with what they create.”
  • Oppenheimer, Einstein, von Neumann and other Institute faculty channeled much of their effort toward what AI researchers today call the “alignment” problem: how to make sure our discoveries serve us instead of destroying us. Their approaches to this increasingly pressing problem remain instructive.
  • Von Neumann focused on applying the powers of mathematical logic, taking insights from games of strategy and applying them to economics and war planning. Today, descendants of his “game theory” running on von Neumann computing architecture are applied not only to our nuclear strategy, but also many parts of our political, economic and social lives. This is one approach to alignment: humanity survives technology through more technology, and it is the researcher’s role to maximize progress.
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  • he also thought that this approach was not enough. “What are we to make of a civilization,” he asked in 1959, a few years after von Neumann’s death, “which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life, and…which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody, except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?”
  • to design a “fairness algorithm” we need to know what fairness is. Fairness is not a mathematical constant or even a variable. It is a human value, meaning that there are many often competing and even contradictory visions of it on offer in our societies.
  • Hence Oppenheimer set out to make the Institute for Advanced Study a place for thinking about humanistic subjects like Russian culture, medieval history, or ancient philosophy, as well as about mathematics and the theory of the atom. He hired scholars like George Kennan, the diplomat who designed the Cold War policy of Soviet “containment”; Harold Cherniss, whose work on the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle influenced many Institute colleagues; and the mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson, who had been one of the youngest collaborators in the Manhattan Project. Traces of their conversations and collaborations are preserved not only in their letters and biographies, but also in their research, their policy recommendations, and in their ceaseless efforts to help the public understand the dangers and opportunities technology offers the world.
  • In their biography “American Prometheus,” which inspired Nolan’s film, Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird document Oppenheimer’s conviction that “the safety” of a nation or the world “cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess.” If humanity wants to survive technology, he believed, it needs to pay attention not only to technology but also to ethics, religions, values, forms of political and social organization, and even feelings and emotions.
  • Preserving any human value worthy of the name will therefore require not only a computer scientist, but also a sociologist, psychologist, political scientist, philosopher, historian, theologian. Oppenheimer even brought the poet T.S. Eliot to the Institute, because he believed that the challenges of the future could only be met by bringing the technological and the human together. The technological challenges are growing, but the cultural abyss separating STEM from the arts, humanities, and social sciences has only grown wider. More than ever, we need institutions capable of helping them think together.
Javier E

Reality is your brain's best guess - Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...ty-brain-predictive-processing

reality brain guess predictive processing misinformation self psychology

shared by Javier E on 16 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • Andy Clark admits it’s strange that he took up “predictive processing,” an ambitious leading theory of how the brain works. A philosopher of mind at the University of Sussex, he has devoted his career to how thinking doesn’t occur just between the ears—that it flows through our bodies, tools, and environments. “The external world is functioning as part of our cognitive machinery
  • But 15 years ago, he realized that had to come back to the center of the system: the brain. And he found that predictive processing provided the essential links among the brain, body, and world.
  • There’s a traditional view that goes back at least to Descartes that perception was about the imprinting of the outside world onto the sense organs. In 20th-century artificial intelligence and neuroscience, vision was a feed-forward process in which you took in pixel-level information, refined it into a two and a half–dimensional sketch, and then refined that into a full world model.
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  • a new book, The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality, which is remarkable for how it connects the high-level concepts to everyday examples of how our brains make predictions, how that process can lead us astray, and what we can do about it.
  • being driven to stay within your own viability envelope is crucial to the kind of intelligence that we know about—the kind of intelligence that we are
  • If you ask what is a predictive brain for, the answer has to be: staying alive. Predictive brains are a way of staying within your viability envelope as an embodied biological organism: getting food when you need it, getting water when you need it.
  • in predictive processing, perception is structured around prediction. Perception is about the brain having a guess at what’s most likely to be out there and then using sensory information to refine the guess.
  • artificial curiosity. Predictive-processing systems automatically have that. They’re set up so that they predict the conditions of their own survival, and they’re always trying to get rid of prediction errors. But if they’ve solved all their practical problems and they’ve got nothing else to do, then they’ll just explore. Getting rid of any error is going to be a good thing for them. If you’re a creature like that, you’re going to be a really good learning system. You’re going to love to inhabit the environments that you can learn most from, where the problems are not too simple, not too hard, but just right.
  • It’s an effect that you also see in Marieke Jepma et al.’s work on pain. They showed that if you predict intense pain, the signal that you get will be interpreted as more painful than it would otherwise be, and vice versa. Then they asked why you don’t correct your misimpression. If it’s my expectation that is making it feel more painful, why don’t I get prediction errors that correct it?
  • The reason is that there are no errors. You’re expecting a certain level of pain, and your prediction helps bring that level about; there is nothing for you to correct. In fact, you’ve got confirmation of your own prediction. So it can be a vicious circle
  • Do you think this self-fulfilling loop in psychosis and pain perception helps to account for misinformation in our society’s and people’s susceptibility to certain narratives?Absolutely. We all have these vulnerabilities and self-fulfilling cycles. We look at the places that tend to support the models that we already have, because that’s often how we judge whether the information is good or not
  • Given that we know we’re vulnerable to self-fulfilling information loops, how can we make sure we don’t get locked into a belief?Unfortunately, it’s really difficult. The most potent intervention is to remind ourselves that we sample the world in ways that are guided by the models that we’ve currently got. The structures of science are there to push back against our natural tendency to cherry-pick.
Javier E

The Great PowerPoint Panic of 2003 - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...674797

media presentation critique effects technology

shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • if all of those bad presentations really led to broad societal ills, the proof is hard to find.
  • Some scientists have tried to take a formal measure of the alleged PowerPoint Effect, asking whether the software really influences our ability to process information. Sebastian Kernbach, a professor of creativity and design at the University of St. Gallen, in Switzerland, has co-authored multiple reviews synthesizing this literature. On the whole, he told me, the research suggests that Tufte was partly right, partly wrong. PowerPoint doesn’t seem to make us stupid—there is no evidence of lower information retention or generalized cognitive decline, for example, among those who use it—but it does impose a set of assumptions about how information ought to be conveyed: loosely, in bullet points, and delivered by presenters to an audience of passive listeners. These assumptions have even reshaped the physical environment for the slide-deck age, Kernbach said: Seminar tables, once configured in a circle, have been bent, post-PowerPoint, into a U-shape to accommodate presenters.
  • When I spoke with Kernbach, he was preparing for a talk on different methods of visual thinking to a group of employees at a large governmental organization. He said he planned to use a flip chart, draw on blank slides like a white board, and perhaps even have audience members do some drawing of their own. But he was also gearing up to use regular old PowerPoint slides. Doing so, he told me, would “signal preparation and professionalism” for his audience. The organization was NASA.
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  • The fact that the American space agency still uses PowerPoint should not be surprising. Despite the backlash it inspired in the press, and the bile that it raised in billionaires, and the red alert it caused within the military, the corporate-presentation juggernaut rolls on. The program has more monthly users than ever before, according to Shawn Villaron, Microsoft’s vice president of product for PowerPoint—well into the hundreds of millions. If anything, its use cases have proliferated. During lockdown, people threw PowerPoint parties on Zoom. Kids now make PowerPoint presentations for their parents when they want to get a puppy or quit soccer or attend a Niall Horan meet and greet. If PowerPoint is evil, then evil rules the world.
  • it’s tempting to entertain counterfactuals and wonder how things might have played out if Tufte and the rest of us had worried about social media back in 2003 instead of presentation software. Perhaps a timely pamphlet on The Cognitive Style of Friendster or a Wired headline asserting that “LinkedIn Is Evil” would have changed the course of history. If the social-media backlash of the past few years had been present from the start, maybe Facebook would never have grown into the behemoth it is now, and the country would never have become so hopelessly divided.
  • it could be that nothing whatsoever would have changed. No matter what their timing, and regardless of their aptness, concerns about new media rarely seem to make a difference. Objections get steamrolled. The new technology takes over. And years later, when we look back and think, How strange that we were so perturbed, the effects of that technology may well be invisible.
Javier E

Opinion | Will Translation Apps Make Learning Foreign Languages Obsolete? - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...on-apps-foreign-languages.html

translation app learning language technology obsolescence AI

shared by Javier E on 26 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • In Europe, nine out of 10 students study a foreign language. In the United States, only one in five do. Between 1997 and 2008, the number of American middle schools offering foreign languages dropped from 75 percent to 58 percent. Between 2009 and 2013, one American college closed its foreign language program; between 2013 and 2017, 651 others did the same.
  • At first glance, these statistics look like a tragedy. But I am starting to harbor the odd opinion that maybe they are not. What is changing my mind is technology.
  • what about spoken language? I was in Belgium not long ago, and I watched various tourists from a variety of nations use instant speech translation apps to render their own languages into English and French. The newer ones can even reproduce the tone of the speaker’s voice; a leading model, iTranslate, publicizes that its Translator app has had 200 million downloads so far.
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  • I don’t think these tools will ever render learning foreign languages completely obsolete. Real conversation in the flowing nuances of casual speech cannot be rendered by a program, at least not in a way that would convey full humanity.
  • even if it may fail at genuine, nuanced conversation — for now, at least — technology is eliminating most of the need to learn foreign languages for more utilitarian purposes.
  • The old-school language textbook scenarios, of people reserving hotel rooms or ordering meals in the language of the country they are visiting — “Greetings. Please bring me a glass of lemonade and a sandwich!” — will now be obsolete
  • to actively enjoy piecing together how other languages work is an individual quirk, not a human universal
  • Obsessive language learners have come to call themselves the polyglot community over the past couple of decades, and I am one of them, to an extent. As such, I know well how hard it can be to recognize that most human beings are numb to this peculiar desire.
  • Most human beings are interested much less in how they are saying things, and which language they are saying them in, than in what they are saying.
  • Learning to express this what — beyond the very basics — in another language is hard. It can be especially hard for us Anglophones, as speaking English works at least decently in so many places
  • To polyglots, foreign languages are Mount Everests daring us to climb them — a metaphor used by Hofstadter in his article. But to most people, they are just a barrier to get to the other side of.
  • After all, despite the sincere and admirable efforts of foreign language teachers nationwide, fewer than one in 100 American students become proficient in a language they learned in school.
  • Because I love trying to learn languages and am endlessly fascinated by their varieties and complexities, I am working hard to wrap my head around this new reality. With an iPhone handy and an appropriate app downloaded, foreign languages will no longer present most people with the barrier or challenge they once did
  • Learning to genuinely speak a new language will hardly be unknown. It will continue to beckon, for instance, for those actually relocating to a new country. And it will persist with people who want to engage with literature or media in the original language, as well as those of us who find pleasure in mastering these new codes just because they are “there.”
  • In other words, it will likely become an artisanal pursuit, of interest to a much smaller but more committed set of enthusiasts. And weird as that is, it is in its way a kind of progress.
peterconnelly

Zero trust vs. zero-knowledge proof: What's the difference? - 0 views

www.techtarget.com/...dge-proof-Whats-the-difference

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • zero-knowledge proof
  • Zero trust is a security framework that requires users and devices to be authenticated, authorized and continuously validated over time. Each user and device is tied to a set of granular controls it must adhere to when communicating with other users, devices and systems within a secure network.
  • The idea is to place applications and services into logically created secure zones.
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  • Related Expert Q&A
  • This methodology involves one party proving it has information it claims is true and a second party that wants to verify that the first party's information is indeed true. With a zero-knowledge proof system, the proving party does not transmit any secretive information that could substantiate whether what it claims is true.
  • – SearchSecurity
  • A zero-knowledge proof requires no real knowledge or secret information to prove the claim.
  • Zero-knowledge proofs are used in modern cybersecurity in situations where one system claims to possess sensitive data yet does not want to transmit that data to prove it to another system.
peterconnelly

The Supreme Court vs. Social Media - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...upreme-court-social-media.html

new york times supreme court social media

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The Supreme Court handed social media companies a win on Tuesday by blocking, for now, a Texas law that would have banned large apps including Facebook and Twitter from weeding out messages based on the views they expressed.
  • Do sites like Facebook have a First Amendment right to allow some material and not others, or an obligation to distribute almost anything?
  • The First Amendment restricts government censorship, but it doesn’t apply to decisions made by businesses.
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  • Conservative politicians have long complained that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media companies unfairly remove or demote some conservative viewpoints.
  • Associations of internet companies and some constitutional rights groups said that the Texas law violated the First Amendment because it allowed the state to tell private businesses what kinds of speech they could or could not distribute.
  • Texas countered that Facebook, Twitter and the like don’t have such First Amendment protections because they are more like old telegraphs, telephone companies and home internet providers.
  • A federal appeals court recently deemed unconstitutional a Florida law passed last year that similarly tried to restrict social media companies’ discretion over speech.
  • written by Justice Samuel Alito that said: “It is not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies.”
  • These cases force us to wrestle with a fundamental question about what kind of world we want to live in: Are Facebook, Twitter and YouTube so influential in our world that the government should restrain their decisions, or are they private companies that should have the freedom to set their own rules?
peterconnelly

Opinion: Want to keep your employees happy? Offer these 5 things - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • To attract workers in today's tight labor market, companies are touting better workplace amenities. Amazon is running ads about the company's pay and benefits. Levi Strauss is offering to cover travel costs for workers seeking abortions. Airbnb is allowing its employees to permanently work remotely. This is a workers' paradise in the making.
  • But they also made clear that willingness to stay with the current employer is also a matter of whether their direct managers can deliver on five other factors beyond the paycheck that keep people happy, productive and on the team.
  • Now, increasing numbers of people demand the ability to choose when, where and how to work.
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  • This made the employee feel like remote work was just another set of disempowering rules.
  • Workers clearly felt empowered by having more control over their own work life. Companies must give people choices that match their unique work and life needs.
  • People crave predictability. Surprises make it harder for employees to plan their lives and have peace of mind. When constant change is inflicted on them, without a chance to anticipate it or participate in decisions about it, people get anxious and passive, and dream of escape.
  • For instance, workers who get unexpected spot bonuses sometimes feel that they don't know what to count on when calculating their future compensation; they'd rather have a predictable total package.
  • People thrive when their value is acknowledged by getting more responsibility, recognition and stature, such as a bigger title.
  • Jobs that convey a sense of purpose and meaning are more likely to exercise an emotional hold on people. Whether or not the company overall thinks it stands for social responsibility, people want to see that chance to make a difference in their immediate work experience.
  • Conventional wisdom holds that the best way to improve employment circumstances is to get an offer from a new company. That shouldn't have to be the case. Managers who want to retain people should act as if they are just now hiring them.
  • The best labor pool could be the one companies already have. They should treat their people as a precious resource and give them what they want from work. Rewarding them will reward the business.
peterconnelly

Why You Need To Beat Confirmation Bias To Win Your Customers - 0 views

martechseries.com/...ion-bias-to-win-your-customers

bias

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret information in a way that is always consistent with existing beliefs. Simply, it occurs when someone views information in a positive, affirming light, even though the information could be telling a drastically different story.
  • While confirmation bias can often be chalked up to human nature, in a business setting, failure to adequately evaluate and respond to information can be a legitimate issue for a company, and particularly its marketing team.
  • This is where confirmation bias can be dangerous because it’s easy for brands to assume customers view the company through the same lens they do and have a similar opinion of the company, but this isn’t necessarily true.
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  • To beat confirmation bias, it’s vital for brands to face reality when measuring the success of their campaigns and gauging customer brand perception.
  • As a marketer, it can be easy to fall victim to simply measuring customer behavioural data (like click-through rates, ad engagement, unsubscribes, etc.). However, the best marketing teams lean on an outside-in perspective to improve customer experiences and create a better brand reputation.
  • Additionally, marketing teams would be wise to connect with potential customers who did not convert. They will be most able to point out the pain points in a marketing campaign that are dissuading buyers. It’s just as important to ask consumers why they didn’t interact with a brand as it is to ask why they do.
  • Obtaining these insights allows marketers to gauge specifics into how their competitors are beating them out, and conversely, how they can improve their product and boost customer retention.
  • At the end of the day, customers want to know that their feedback is valued and has the power to drive change. Companies that choose to neglect customer feedback are prime examples of the dangers of confirmation bias.
  • It doesn’t matter how marketing teams or their company define success, it’s up to the customer.
  • For example, in industries like video tech and security, where the community is extremely tight knit, marketing teams must have a deep understanding of their audience’s business needs to have any chance of selling to them. Brands that understand consumer perception and needs, will be able to personalize messages to their target audience and create a more positive customer experience. By gauging and adapting to direct feedback, marketing teams can avoid the dangers of confirmation bias, and make wholesale changes that will turn customers into brand champions.
peterconnelly

Wikipedia acts as a check on Putin's false view of history - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...wikipedia-hitler-putin-lavrov

wikipedia putin history

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Whether to call Hitler gravely immoral or evil is one of literally hundreds of discussions about this article, which is among the most viewed ever on the site — more than 125 million times over the last 15 years, twice as many as Jesus’s total and in the neighborhood of the number for the soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo.
  • Setting the record straight matters because historical misinformation walks hand in hand with current disinformation.
  • Putin has two claims he says are backed by the historical record: that there has never been a separate Ukrainian nation, and that people who claim there is a separate nation must have another motive, whether personal gain or an ideological cause like Nazism.
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  • She showed that accounts of so-called “aces” — fighters said to have heroically held off much more powerful enemies with a single tank or plane — were based on propaganda.
  • In making these repairs, Coffman faced resistance from a group of editors who were mainly military buffs and wanted to write about battlefield valor without too much scrutiny. She, however, kept coming back to facts and sources — how do we know what we think we know? — and an insistence that Wikipedia not be swept up in mythology.
  • In a speech last year, Putin strolled through 1,000 years of battles and alliances to justify his claim of the “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”
  • Just look at the rhetoric around Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, which Vladimir Putin has described as a battle to “de-Nazify” the leadership of Ukraine.
  • Since the Russian invasion, the English Wikipedia articles about the historical figures and topics Putin invoked have been racking up pop-star numbers.
  • When it comes to allegations about Nazi collaboration by prominent Ukrainian nationalists like Bandera, Wikipedia has pulled no punches. Even as Putin has emphasized these Nazi ties as a reason for his invasion, Wikipedia has resisted attempts to water down this history.
  • When Putin’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, was asked how Ukraine could be in need of de-Nazification if its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish, Lavrov replied: “I could be wrong, but Hitler also had Jewish blood. [That Zelensky is Jewish] means absolutely nothing. Wise Jewish people say that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews.” It was an appalling answer that, according to the Israeli government, Putin apologized for.
  • In an unusual step, the English Wikipedia article brings up this particular falsehood to explicitly refute it.
  • The Wikipedia project comes with a stubborn confidence that facts can guide us through the darkness. In Wikipedia’s 20-year history, this belief has never been asked to do more.
peterconnelly

CNN boss' message for staffers: Cool it with 'Breaking News' banner - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...-the-breaking-news-banner.html

cnn breaking news

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • New CNN chief Chris Licht has a message for his employees: not everything needs to be labeled “Breaking News.”
  • Licht came to the conclusion there should be parameters around when to use the red chyron
  • “This is a great starting point to try to make ‘Breaking News’ mean something BIG is happening,” Licht wrote in the memo, which CNBC has obtained. “We are truth-tellers, focused on informing, not alarming our viewers. You’ve already seen far less of the ‘Breaking News’ banner across our programming. The tenor of our voice holistically has to reflect that.”
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  • “I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with,” Malone told CNBC in November.
  • Zaslav said in April that CNN’s measured take on news is essential for “a civilized society” and crucial for it to avoid the image of being an “advocacy” network.
criscimagnael

Social media's toxic content can harm teens | News | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public... - 0 views

www.hsph.harvard.edu/...-teens-into-a-dangerous-spiral

shared by criscimagnael on 30 May 22 - No Cached
  • social media platforms—especially image-based platforms like Instagram—have very harmful effects on teen mental health, especially for teens struggling with body image, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.
  • we know that Instagram, with its algorithmically-driven feeds of content tailored to each user’s engagement patterns, can draw vulnerable teens into a dangerous spiral of negative social comparison and hook them onto unrealistic ideals of appearance and body size and shape.
  • Keep in mind that this is not about just about putting teens in a bad mood. Over time, with exposure to harmful content on social media, the negative impacts add up. And we now have more cause for worry than ever, with the pandemic worsening mental health stressors and social isolation for teens, pushing millions of youth to increase their social media use. We are witnessing dramatic increases in clinical level depression, anxiety, and suicidality, and eating disorders cases have doubled or even tripled at children’s hospitals across the country.
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  • The company knows that strong negative emotions, which can be provoked by negative social comparison, keep users’ attention longer than other emotions—and Instagram’s algorithms are expressly designed to push teens toward toxic content so that they stay on the platform.
  • Instagram is peddling a false narrative that the platform is simply a reflection of its users’ interests and experiences, without distortion or manipulation by the platform. But Instagram knows full well that this not true. In fact, their very business model is predicated on how much they can manipulate users’ behavior to boost engagement and extend time spent on the platform, which the platform then monetizes to sell to advertisers.
  • The business model, which has proven itself to be exquisitely profitable, is self-reinforcing for investors and top management.
  • Although it’s a real struggle for parents to keep their kids off social media, they can set limits on its use, for instance by requiring that everyone’s phones go into a basket at mealtimes and at bedtime.
  • With all that we know today about the harmful effects of social media and its algorithms, combined with the powerful stories of teens, parents, and community advocates, we may finally have the opportunity to get meaningful federal regulation in place.
Javier E

You Have Permission to Be a Smartphone Skeptic - The Bulwark - 0 views

www.thebulwark.com/ion-to-be-a-smartphone-skeptic

smartphone weaponisation tech psychology manipulation internet social media education

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

Pupils at elite Welsh school to get lessons in climate change - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...ange-curriculum-2023-rcdkd8mgx

IB curriculum global issues new climate change assessment innovation testing learning

shared by Javier E on 26 May 23 - No Cached
  • For the first time in 50 years, the directors of the IB are collaborating with schools to create an updated version of the qualification taken by 16 to 19-year-olds as an alternative to A-levels
  • A cohort of 20 pupils at UWC will drop a third of the traditional subjects usually studied within the IB. Instead they will spend 300 hours, over two years of study, on the new areas. Forms of assessment have yet to be finalised but there will be no exams on these subjects.
  • Learning will be project-based, collaborative and designed to tackle “multiple global crises” around the world. IB says it is creating the new qualification because there is a growing disconnect between the education children are receiving and the education they need.
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  • Olli-Pekka Heinonen, director-general of the IB, told The Times that teenagers taking the new diploma would be “uniquely empowered” on leaving school.
  • Traditional assessment often led to pupils forgetting what they had learnt once exams were over, he said. “The aim of this type of assessment is to strengthen deep learning and understanding, something you learn that stays with you and is part of you. We’re experimenting with non-exam assessment and finding the best ways to evaluate.
  • “Biodiversity, food, migration and energy are meaningful and attractive to young people. They’re appealing and relevant.“We’re looking at these areas through the lens of systems leadership — ie, how it’s possible to make change happen.”
  • The school hosts pupils from 80 different countries and charges fees of £37,000 a year. It is set in St Donat’s Castle, in 122 acres and its grounds include woodland, farmland, a valley and its own seafront.
  • Naheed Bardai, principal of UWC Atlantic, said he felt dissatisfied with the state of education in the world today as pupils should be prepared to become leaders of organisations and government in the 2040s and 2050s.
  • He said the new qualification would help them understand the root causes of problems but also become compassionate world leaders that can create “transformative solutions”.
  • “Our core policies are peace, sustainability and experiential learning but there’s very little education for young people at the intersection of problems, particularly where the human meets the natural world,”
  • We need people who can take constructive action as inequality is growing at a tremendous rate.”
  • Bardai said the school had been given a free hand in curriculum writing and was looking at more radical forms of assessment. This may include interviews, peer assessment and portfolios.
Javier E

Everyone's Over Instagram - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...672305

social media instagram

shared by Javier E on 02 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • “Gen Z’s relationship with Instagram is much like millennials’ relationship with Facebook: Begrudgingly necessary,” Casey Lewis, a youth-culture consultant who writes the youth-culture newsletter After School, told me over email. “They don’t want to be on it, but they feel it’s weird if they’re not.”
  • a recent Piper Sandler survey found that, of 14,500 teens surveyed across 47 states, only 20 percent named Instagram their favorite social-media platform (TikTok came first, followed by Snapchat).
  • Simply being on Instagram is a very different thing from actively engaging with it. Participating means throwing pictures into a void, which is why it’s become kind of cringe. To do so earnestly suggests a blithe unawareness of your surroundings, like shouting into the phone in public.
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  • In other words, Instagram is giving us the ick: that feeling when a romantic partner or crush does something small but noticeable—like wearing a fedora—that immediately turns you off forever.
  • “People who aren’t influencers only use [Instagram] to watch other people make big announcements,” Lee Tilghman, a former full-time Instagram influencer, told me over the phone. “My close friends who aren’t influencers, they haven’t posted in, like, two years.”
  • although Instagram now has 2 billion monthly users, it faces an existential problem: What happens when the 18-to-29-year-olds who are most likely to use the app, at least in America, age out or go elsewhere? Last year, The New York Times reported that Instagram was privately worried about attracting and retaining the new young users that would sustain its long-term growth—not to mention whose growing shopping potential is catnip to advertisers.
  • Over the summer, these frustrations boiled over. An update that promised, among other things, algorithmically recommended video content that would fill the entire screen was a bridge too far. Users were fed up with watching the app contort itself into a TikTok copycat that prioritized video and recommended posts over photos from friends
  • . Internal documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal show that Instagram users spend 17.6 million hours a day watching Reels, Instagram’s TikTok knockoff, compared with the 197.8 million hours people spend watching TikTok every day. The documents also revealed that Reels engagement has declined by 13.6 percent in recent months, with most users generating “no engagement whatsoever.”
  • Instagram may not be on its deathbed, but its transformation from cool to cringe is a sea change in the social-media universe. The platform was perhaps the most significant among an old generation of popular apps that embodied the original purpose of social media: to connect online with friends and family. Its decline is about not just a loss of relevance, but a capitulation to a new era of “performance” media, in which we create online primarily to reach people we don’t know instead of the people we do
  • . Lavish brand deals, in which an influencer promotes a brand’s product to their audience for a fee, have been known to pay anywhere from $100 to $10,000 per post, depending on the size of the creator’s following and their engagement. Now Tilghman, who became an Instagram influencer in 2015 and at one point had close to 400,000 followers, says she’s seen her rate go down by 80 percent over the past five years. The market’s just oversaturated.
  • The author Jessica DeFino, who joined Instagram in 2018 on the advice of publishing agents, similarly began stepping back from the platform in 2020, feeling overwhelmed by the constant feedback of her following. She has now set up auto-replies to her Instagram DMs: If one of her 59,000 followers sends her a message, they’re met with an invitation to instead reach out to DeFino via email.
  • would she get back on Instagram as a regular user? Only if she “created a private, personal account — somewhere I could limit my interactions to just family and friends,” she says. “Like what Instagram was in the beginning, I guess.”
  • That is if, by then, Instagram’s algorithm-driven, recommendation-fueled, shopping-heavy interface would even let her. Ick.
Javier E

Why The CHIPS and Science Act Is a Climate Bill - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671095

policy industrial energy research science technology

shared by Javier E on 10 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • Over the next five years, the CHIPS Act will direct an estimated $67 billion, or roughly a quarter of its total funding, toward accelerating the growth of zero-carbon industries and conducting climate-relevant research, according to an analysis from RMI, a nonpartisan energy think tank based in Colorado.
  • That means that the CHIPS Act is one of the largest climate bills ever passed by Congress. It exceeds the total amount of money that the government spent on renewable-energy tax credits from 2005 to 2019
  • And it’s more than half the size of the climate spending in President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill. That’s all the more remarkable because the CHIPS Act was passed by large bipartisan majorities, with 41 Republicans and nearly all Democrats supporting it in the House and the Senate.
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  • When viewed with the Inflation Reduction Act, which the House is poised to pass later this week, and last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law, a major shift in congressional climate spending comes into focus. According to the RMI analysis, these three laws are set to more than triple the federal government’s average annual spending on climate and clean energy this decade, compared with the 2010s.
  • Within a few years, when the funding has fully ramped up, the government will spend roughly $80 billion a year on accelerating the development and deployment of zero-carbon energy and preparing for the impacts of climate change. That exceeds the GDP of about 120 of the 192 countries that have signed the Paris Agreement on Climate Change
  • By the end of the decade, the federal government will have spent more than $521 billion
  • the bill’s programs focus on the bleeding edge of the decarbonization problem, investing money in technology that should lower emissions in the 2030s and beyond.
  • The International Energy Association has estimated that almost half of global emissions reductions by 2050 will come from technologies that exist only as prototypes or demonstration projects today.
  • To get those technologies ready in time, we need to deploy those new ideas as fast as we can, then rapidly get them to commercial scale, Carey said. “What used to take two decades now needs to take six to 10 years.” That’s what the CHIPS Act is supposed to do
  • The law, for instance, establishes a new $20 billion Directorate for Technology, which will specialize in pushing new technologies from the prototype stage into the mass market. It is meant to prevent what happened with the solar industry—where America invented a new technology, only to lose out on commercializing it—from happening again
  • Congress has explicitly tasked the new office with studying “natural and anthropogenic disaster prevention or mitigation” as well as “advanced energy and industrial efficiency technologies,” including next-generation nuclear reactors.
  • The bill also directs about $12 billion in new research, development, and demonstration funding to the Department of Energy, according to RMI’s estimate. That includes doubling the budget for ARPA-E, the department’s advanced-energy-projects skunk works.
  • it allocates billions to upgrade facilities at the government’s in-house defense and energy research institutes, including the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and Berkeley Lab, which conducts environmental-science research.
  • RMI’s estimate of the climate spending in the CHIPS bill should be understood as just that: an estimate. The bill text rarely specifies how much of its new funding should go to climate issues.
  • When you add CHIPS, the IRA, and the infrastructure law together, Washington appears to be unifying behind a new industrial policy, focused not only on semiconductors and defense technology but clean energy
  • The three bills combine to form a “a coordinated, strategic policy for accelerating the transition to the technologies that are going to define the 21st century,”
  • scholars and experts have speculated about whether industrial policy—the intentional use of law to nurture and grow certain industries—might make a comeback to help fight climate change. Industrial policy was central to some of the Green New Deal’s original pitch, and it has helped China develop a commanding lead in the global solar industry.
  • “Industrial policy,” he said, “is back.”
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