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Javier E

There's More to Life Than Being Happy - Emily Esfahani Smith - The Atlantic - 1 views

  • "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing," Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning, "the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
  • This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."
  • "To the European," Frankl wrote, "it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.'"
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  • the book's ethos -- its emphasis on meaning, the value of suffering, and responsibility to something greater than the self -- seems to be at odds with our culture, which is more interested in the pursuit of individual happiness than in the search for meaning.
  • "Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided,"
  • about 4 out of 10 Americans have not discovered a satisfying life purpose. Forty percent either do not think their lives have a clear sense of purpose or are neutral about whether their lives have purpose. Nearly a quarter of Americans feel neutral or do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful
  • the single-minded pursuit of happiness is ironically leaving people less happy, according to recent research. "It is the very pursuit of happiness," Frankl knew, "that thwarts happiness."
  • Examining their self-reported attitudes toward meaning, happiness, and many other variables -- like stress levels, spending patterns, and having children -- over a month-long period, the researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a "taker" while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a "giver."
  • How do the happy life and the meaningful life differ?
  • While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do
  • Happiness, they found, is about feeling good. Specifically, the researchers found that people who are happy tend to think that life is easy, they are in good physical health, and they are able to buy the things that they need and want.
  • Most importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish behavior -- being, as mentioned, a "taker" rather than a "giver." The psychologists give an evolutionary explanation for this: happiness is about drive reduction. If you have a need or a desire -- like hunger -- you satisfy it, and that makes you happy. People become happy, in other words, when they get wh
  • Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others,"
  • People who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in need.
  • What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans
  • People whose lives have high levels of meaning often actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves, they also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives than happy people.
  • Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment -- which is perhaps the most important finding of the study,
  • nearly 60 percent all Americans today feel happy without a lot of stress or worry
  • Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future. "Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life,"
  • Having negative events happen to you, the study found, decreases your happiness but increases the amount of meaning you have in life.
  • "If there is meaning in life at all," Frankl wrote, "then there must be meaning in suffering."
  • "Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself -- be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself -- by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love -- the more human he is."
Javier E

Stanford Magazine - History Detected - May/June 2013 - 2 views

  • an approach developed at Stanford's Graduate School of Education that's rapidly gaining adherents across the country
  • trial studies of the Stanford program demonstrated that when high school students engage regularly with challenging primary source documents, they not only make significant gains learning and retaining historical material, they also markedly improve their reading comprehension and critical thinking.
  • Colglazier builds his thought-provoking classes using an online tool called Reading Like a Historian. Designed by the Stanford History Education Group under Professor Sam Wineburg, the website offers 87 flexible lesson plans featuring documents from the Library of Congress
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  • "Textbooks are useful as background narrative. It's difficult to talk about the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution if students don't know where Vietnam is, or the Lincoln-Douglas debates if they don't know who Abe Lincoln was before he was Daniel Day-Lewis.
  • The website's lessons have been downloaded 800,000 times and spawned a lively online community of history educators grateful for the camaraderie
  • just 30 percent of the people who teach history-related courses in U.S. public high schools both majored in the field and are certified to teach it.
  • " By reading these challenging documents and discovering history for themselves, he says, "not only will they remember the content, they'll develop skills for life."
  • Teachers can download the lessons and adapt them for their own purposes, free of charge. Students learn how to examine documents critically, just as historians would, in order to answer intriguing questions: Did Pocahontas really rescue John Smith? Was Abraham Lincoln a racist? Who blinked first in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Russians or the Americans?
  • But when a ten-pound textbook becomes the script for a whole year's worth of instruction, a precious learning opportunity is lost. "Many students go through their entire middle and high school and never encounter the actual voice of a historical participant,"
  • The Common Core curriculum will bring radical changes in the standardized state tests that youngsters have been taking for decades. Instead of filling in multiple-choice bubbles, they will be expected to write out short answers that demonstrate their ability to analyze texts, and then cite those texts to support arguments—the exact skills that Reading Like a Historian fosters.
  • Wineburg realized that the art of historical thinking is not something that comes naturally to most people; it has to be cultivated. Students have to be taught to look at the source of a document before reading it, figure out the context in which it was written, and cross-check it with other sources before coming to a conclusion.
  • In 2008, Reisman was ready to conduct a test of the curriculum at five schools in the San Francisco Unified School District. As expected, students in the test classes showed an increased ability to retain historical knowledge, as well as a greater appreciation for history, compared to the control group. What took everyone by surprise, though, was how much the test students advanced in basic reading.
  • Fremont 11th grader Ayanna Black agrees. "In other history courses I have taken, I wasn't able to fully understand what was going on. It seemed that it was just a bunch of words I had to memorize for a future test," she says. "Now that I contextualize the information I am given, it helps me understand not only what is being said but also the reason behind it." The approach, she says, "leads me to remembering the information out of curiosity, rather than trying to pass a test."
  • Scholars in the Stanford History Education Group hope to develop more online lesson plans in world history
  • Wineburg devoured history books as a kid and did well in Advanced Placement courses at his public high school. But when he entered Brown University, he was shocked at how ill-prepared he was in the subject. Employed after college as a high school history teacher, he saw similar weaknesses in his students. "The best ones could repeat what the text said," he recalls, "but when I asked them to critically examine whether they believed the text, I could have been speaking Martian."
  • Wineburg and his PhD students have teamed up with the library on another project: a website called Beyond the Bubble,where teachers can learn how to evaluate their students using short written tests called History Assessments of Thinking. Each HAT asks students to consider a historical document—a letter drawn from the archives of the NAACP, for example—and justify their conclusions about it in three or four sentences. By scanning the responses, teachers can determine quickly whether their pupils are grasping basic concepts.
  • Wineburg hopes to make Reading Like a Historian lesson plans completely paperless, with exercise sheets that can be filled out on a laptop or tablet computer.
  • Though the work has been hard in history this year, she appreciates what it's taught her. "I've learned that you don't just read what is put in front of you and accept it, which is what I had been doing with my textbook all summer," she explains. "It can be frustrating to analyze documents that are contradictory, but I'm coming to appreciate that history is a collection of thousands of accounts and perspectives, and it's our job to interpret it."
Javier E

The Selfish Gene turns 40 | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

  • The idea was this: genes strive for immortality, and individuals, families, and species are merely vehicles in that quest. The behaviour of all living things is in service of their genes hence, metaphorically, they are selfish.
  • Before this, it had been proposed that natural selection was honing the behaviour of living things to promote the continuance through time of the individual creature, or family, or group or species. But in fact, Dawkins said, it was the gene itself that was trying to survive, and it just so happened that the best way for it to survive was in concert with other genes in the impermanent husk of an individual
  • This gene-centric view of evolution also began to explain one of the oddities of life on Earth – the behaviour of social insects. What is the point of a drone bee, doomed to remain childless and in the service of a totalitarian queen? Suddenly it made sense that, with the gene itself steering evolution, the fact that the drone shared its DNA with the queen meant that its servitude guarantees not the individual’s survival, but the endurance of the genes they shar
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  • the subject is taught bafflingly minimally and late in the curriculum even today; evolution by natural selection is crucial to every aspect of the living world. In the words of the Russian scientist Theodosius Dobzhansky: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
  • his true legacy is The Selfish Gene and its profound effect on multiple generations of scientists and lay readers. In a sense, The Selfish Gene and Dawkins himself are bridges, both intellectually and chronologically, between the titans of mid-century biology – Ronald Fisher, Trivers, Hamilton, Maynard Smith and Williams – and our era of the genome, in which the interrogation of DNA dominates the study of evolution.
  • Genes aren’t what they used to be either. In 1976 they were simply stretches of DNA that encoded proteins. We now know about genes made of DNA’s cousin, RNA; we’ve discovered genes that hop from genome to genome
  • Since 1976, our understanding of why life is the way it is has blossomed and changed. Once the gene became the dominant idea in biology in the 1990s there followed a technological goldrush – the Human Genome Project – to find them all.
  • None of the complications of modern genomes erodes the central premise of the selfish gene.
  • Much of the enmity stems from people misunderstanding that selfishness is being used as a metaphor. The irony of these attacks is that the selfish gene metaphor actually explains altruism. We help others who are not directly related to us because we share similar versions of genes with them.
  • In the scientific community, the chief objection maintains that natural selection can operate at the level of a group of animals, not solely on genes or even individuals
  • To my mind, and that of the majority of evolutionary biologists, the gene-centric view of evolution always emerges intact.
  • the premise remains exciting that a gene’s only desire is to reproduce itself, and that the complexity of genomes makes that reproduction more efficient.
Javier E

Google's new media apocalypse: How the search giant wants to accelerate the end of the ... - 0 views

  • Google is announcing that it wants to cut out the middleman—that is to say, other websites—and serve you content within its own lovely little walled garden. That sound you just heard was a bunch of media publishers rushing to book an extra appointment with their shrink.
  • Back when search, and not social media, ruled the internet, Google was the sun around which the news industry orbited. Getting to the top of Google’s results was the key that unlocked buckets of page views. Outlet after outlet spent countless hours trying to figure out how to game Google’s prized, secretive algorithm. Whole swaths of the industry were killed instantly if Google tweaked the algorithm.
  • Facebook is now the sun. Facebook is the company keeping everyone up at night. Facebook is the place shaping how stories get chosen, how they get written, how they are packaged and how they show up on its site. And Facebook does all of this with just as much secrecy and just as little accountability as Google did.
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  • Facebook just opened up its Instant Articles feature to all publishers. The feature allows external outlets to publish their content directly onto Facebook’s platform, eliminating that pesky journey to their actual website. They can either place their own ads on the content or join a revenue-sharing program with Facebook. Facebook has touted this plan as one which provides a better user experience and has noted the ability for publishers to create ads on the platform as well.
  • The benefit to Facebook is obvious: It gets to keep people inside its house. They don’t have to leave for even a second. The publisher essentially has to accept this reality, sigh about the gradual death of websites and hope that everything works out on the financial side.
  • It’s all part of a much bigger story: that of how the internet, that supposed smasher of gates and leveler of playing fields, has coalesced around a mere handful of mega-giants in the space of just a couple of decades. The gates didn’t really come down. The identities of the gatekeepers just changed. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon
Javier E

Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don't Fire Us? | Mother Jones - 0 views

  • There will be no place to go but the unemployment line.
  • There will be no place to go but the unemployment line.
  • at this point our tale takes a darker turn. What do we do over the next few decades as robots become steadily more capable and steadily begin taking away all our jobs?
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  • The economics community just hasn't spent much time over the past couple of decades focusing on the effect that machine intelligence is likely to have on the labor marke
  • The Digital Revolution is different because computers can perform cognitive tasks too, and that means machines will eventually be able to run themselves. When that happens, they won't just put individuals out of work temporarily. Entire classes of workers will be out of work permanently. In other words, the Luddites weren't wrong. They were just 200 years too early
  • Slowly but steadily, labor's share of total national income has gone down, while the share going to capital owners has gone up. The most obvious effect of this is the skyrocketing wealth of the top 1 percent, due mostly to huge increases in capital gains and investment income.
  • Robotic pets are growing so popular that Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who studies the way we interact with technology, is uneasy about it: "The idea of some kind of artificial companionship," she says, "is already becoming the new normal."
  • robots will take over more and more jobs. And guess who will own all these robots? People with money, of course. As this happens, capital will become ever more powerful and labor will become ever more worthless. Those without money—most of us—will live on whatever crumbs the owners of capital allow us.
  • Economist Paul Krugman recently remarked that our long-standing belief in skills and education as the keys to financial success may well be outdated. In a blog post titled "Rise of the Robots," he reviewed some recent economic data and predicted that we're entering an era where the prime cause of income inequality will be something else entirely: capital vs. labor.
  • while it's easy to believe that some jobs can never be done by machines—do the elderly really want to be tended by robots?—that may not be true.
  • Third, as more people compete for fewer jobs, we'd expect to see middle-class incomes flatten in a race to the bottom.
  • The question we want to answer is simple: If CBTC is already happening—not a lot, but just a little bit—what trends would we expect to see? What are the signs of a computer-driven economy?
  • if automation were displacing labor, we'd expect to see a steady decline in the share of the population that's employed.
  • Second, we'd expect to see fewer job openings than in the past.
  • In the economics literature, the increase in the share of income going to capital owners is known as capital-biased technological change
  • Fourth, with consumption stagnant, we'd expect to see corporations stockpile more cash and, fearing weaker sales, invest less in new products and new factories
  • Fifth, as a result of all this, we'd expect to see labor's share of national income decline and capital's share rise.
  • We're already seeing them, and not just because of the crash of 2008. They started showing up in the statistics more than a decade ago. For a while, though, they were masked by the dot-com and housing bubbles, so when the financial crisis hit, years' worth of decline was compressed into 24 months. The trend lines dropped off the cliff.
  • Corporate executives should worry too. For a while, everything will seem great for them: Falling labor costs will produce heftier profits and bigger bonuses. But then it will all come crashing down. After all, robots might be able to produce goods and services, but they can't consume them
  • in another sense, we should be very alarmed. It's one thing to suggest that robots are going to cause mass unemployment starting in 2030 or so. We'd have some time to come to grips with that. But the evidence suggests that—slowly, haltingly—it's happening already, and we're simply not prepared for it.
  • the first jobs to go will be middle-skill jobs. Despite impressive advances, robots still don't have the dexterity to perform many common kinds of manual labor that are simple for humans—digging ditches, changing bedpans. Nor are they any good at jobs that require a lot of cognitive skill—teaching classes, writing magazine articles
  • in the middle you have jobs that are both fairly routine and require no manual dexterity. So that may be where the hollowing out starts: with desk jobs in places like accounting or customer support.
  • In fact, there's even a digital sports writer. It's true that a human being wrote this story—ask my mother if you're not sure—but in a decade or two I might be out of a job too
  • Doctors should probably be worried as well. Remember Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing computer? It's now being fed millions of pages of medical information so that it can help physicians do a better job of diagnosing diseases. In another decade, there's a good chance that Watson will be able to do this without any human help at all.
  • Take driverless cars.
  • The next step might be passenger vehicles on fixed routes, like airport shuttles. Then long-haul trucks. Then buses and taxis. There are 2.5 million workers who drive trucks, buses, and taxis for a living, and there's a good chance that, one by one, all of them will be displaced
  • There will be no place to go but the unemployment lin
  • we'll need to let go of some familiar convictions. Left-leaning observers may continue to think that stagnating incomes can be improved with better education and equality of opportunity. Conservatives will continue to insist that people without jobs are lazy bums who shouldn't be coddled. They'll both be wrong.
  • The modern economy is complex, and most of these trends have multiple causes.
  • we'll probably have only a few options open to us. The simplest, because it's relatively familiar, is to tax capital at high rates and use the money to support displaced workers. In other words, as The Economist's Ryan Avent puts it, "redistribution, and a lot of it."
  • would we be happy in a society that offers real work to a dwindling few and bread and circuses for the rest?
  • Most likely, owners of capital would strongly resist higher taxes, as they always have, while workers would be unhappy with their enforced idleness. Still, the ancient Romans managed to get used to it—with slave labor playing the role of robots—and we might have to, as well.
  •  economist Noah Smith suggests that we might have to fundamentally change the way we think about how we share economic growth. Right now, he points out, everyone is born with an endowment of labor by virtue of having a body and a brain that can be traded for income. But what to do when that endowment is worth a fraction of what it is today? Smith's suggestion: "Why not also an endowment of capital? What if, when each citizen turns 18, the government bought him or her a diversified portfolio of equity?"
  • In simple terms, if owners of capital are capturing an increasing fraction of national income, then that capital needs to be shared more widely if we want to maintain a middle-class society.
  • it's time to start thinking about our automated future in earnest. The history of mass economic displacement isn't encouraging—fascists in the '20s, Nazis in the '30s—and recent high levels of unemployment in Greece and Italy have already produced rioting in the streets and larger followings for right-wing populist parties. And that's after only a few years of misery.
  • When the robot revolution finally starts to happen, it's going to happen fast, and it's going to turn our world upside down. It's easy to joke about our future robot overlords—R2-D2 or the Terminator?—but the challenge that machine intelligence presents really isn't science fiction anymore. Like Lake Michigan with an inch of water in it, it's happening around us right now even if it's hard to see
  • A robotic paradise of leisure and contemplation eventually awaits us, but we have a long and dimly lit tunnel to navigate before we get there.
Javier E

Scholarship and Politics - The Case of Noam Chomsky - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • (1) The academy is a world of its own, complete with rules, protocols, systems of evaluation, recognized achievements, agreed-on goals, a roster of heroes and a list of tasks yet to be done.
  • (2) Academic work proceeds within the confines of that world, within, that is, a professional, not a public, space, although its performance may be, and often is, public.
  • (3) academic work is only tangentially, not essentially, political; politics may attend the formation of academic units and the selection of academic personnel, but political concerns and pressures have no place in the unfolding of academic argument, except as objects of its distinctive forms of attention
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  • (4) The academic views of a professor are independent of his or her real-world political views; academic disputes don’t track partisan disputes or vice versa; you can’t reason from an academic’s disciplinary views to the positions he or she would take in the public sphere; they are independent variables.
  • The answer given in the first lecture — “What is Language?” — is that we are creatures with language, and that language as a uniquely human biological capacity appeared suddenly and quite late in the evolutionary story, perhaps 75,000 years ago.
  • Chomsky gave three lectures under the general title “What Kind of Creatures are We?”
  • Language, then, does not arise from the social/cultural environment, although the environment provides the stuff or input it works on. That input is “impoverished”; it can’t account for the creativity of language performance, which has its source not in the empirical world, but in an innate ability that is more powerful than the stimuli it utilizes and plays with. It follows that if you want to understand language, you shouldn’t look to linguistic behavior but to the internal mechanism — the Universal Grammar — of which particular linguistic behaviors are a non-exhaustive expression. (The capacity exceeds the empirical resources it might deploy.)
  • In his second lecture (“What Can We Understand?”), Chomsky took up the question of what humans are capable of understanding and his answer, generally, was that we can understand what we can understand, and that means that we can’t understand what is beyond our innate mental capacities
  • This does not mean, he said, that what we can’t understand is not real: “What is mysterious to me is not an argument that it does not exist.” It’s just that while language is powerful and creative, its power and creativity have limits; and since language is thought rather than an addition to or clothing of thought, the limits of language are the limits of what we can fruitfully think about
  • This is as good as it gets. There is “no evolution in our capacity for language.”
  • These assertions are offered as a counter to what Chomsky sees as the over-optimistic Enlightenment belief — common to many empiricist philosophies — that ours is a “limitless explanatory power” and that “we can do anything.”
  • In the third lecture (“What is the Common Good?”) Chomsky turned from the philosophy of mind and language to political philosophy and the question of what constitutes a truly democratic society
  • He likened dogmatic intellectual structures that interfere with free inquiry to coercive political structures that stifle the individual’s creative independence and fail to encourage humanity’s “richest diversity
  • He asserted that any institution marked by domination and hierarchy must rise to the challenge of justifying itself, and if it cannot meet the challenge, it should be dismantled.
  • He contrasted two accounts of democracy: one — associated by him with James Madison — distrusts the “unwashed” populace and puts its faith in representative government where those doing the representing (and the voting and the distributing of goods) constitute a moneyed and propertied elite
  • the other — associated by him with Adam Smith (in one of his moods), J. S. Mill, the 1960s and a tradition of anarchist writing — seeks to expand the franchise and multiply choices in the realms of thought, politics and economics. The impulse of this second, libertarian, strain of democracy, is “to free society from economic or theological guardianship,” and by “theological” Chomsky meant not formal religion as such but any assumed and frozen ideology that blocked inquiry and limited participation. There can’t, in short, be “too much democracy.”
  • It was thought of the highest order performed by a thinker, now 85 years old, who by and large eschewed rhetorical flourishes (he has called his own speaking style “boring” and says he likes it that way) and just did it, where ‘it” was the patient exploration of deep issues that had been explored before him by a succession of predecessors, fully acknowledged, in a conversation that is forever being continued and forever being replenished.
  • Yes, I said to myself, this is what we — those of us who bought a ticket on this particular train — do; we think about problems and puzzles and try to advance the understanding of them; and we do that kind of thinking because its pleasures are, in a strong sense, athletic and provide for us, at least on occasion, the experience of fully realizing whatever capabilities we might have. And we do it in order to have that experience, and to share it with colleagues and students of like mind, and not to make a moral or political point.
  • The term “master class” is a bit overused, but I feel no hesitation in using it here. It was a master class taught by a master, and if someone were to ask me what exactly is it that academics do, I would point to these lectures and say, simply, here it is, the thing itself.
grayton downing

Hunting boosts lizard numbers in Australian desert | Science News - 0 views

  • The presence of humans rarely improves the lives of neighboring species. Yet a study shows that indigenous Australian hunters create prime habitat for a desert-dwelling lizard.
  • The frequent burning creates a patchy mosaic of charred lands and vegetation springing up in various stages of regrowth.
  • The lizards may prefer these edges because emerging vegetation from recently burned patches bears more food, the researchers speculate.
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  • Indeed, when the Martu and other desert foragers were forced to leave their lands between the 1950s and 1970s, surveys showed that 10 to 20 native mammal species went extinct and the numbers of 43 others dropped sharply
  • The research compellingly argues that “small-scale human societies can actually exist in an ecosystem without damaging it over a very long period of time,” says archeologist Bruce Smith of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “It’s just wonderful science.”
carolinewren

Father's Lawsuit Claims Teaching Of Evolution Will Hinder Daughter's Future Veterinaria... - 0 views

  • parent of an aspiring veterinarian filed a lawsuit on May 12 alleging local, state and federal officials propagated a "religious faith" by teaching his daughter evolution. In the lawsuit, the man petitions the U.S. district court to declare the "policy of evolution" unconstitutional.
  • stated his daughter was taught a "faith base (evolutionary ideology) [sic] that just doesn't exist and has no math to back it." Due to this, Smith argued, his daughter's ability to enter college and obtain a good job and economic security in the veterinary field is compromised. Smith's lawsuit doesn't note his daughter's age.
  • He is also the author of a 2013 self-published book entitled The True Origin of Man, according to NCSE. The work reportedly "represents the truth of mans [sic] origins confirmed by DNA mathematical and scientific facts.
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  • appeals to “a Christian audience as well as a scientific audience,"
  • “For the scientific community, it presents something that they can take to the laboratory and test for themselves.
  • Those with a “biased” mind might find the book “controversial," he added
Ellie McGinnis

Social Connection Makes a Better Brain - Emily Esfahani Smith - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Recent trends show that people increasingly value material goods over relationships—but neuroscience and evolution say this goes against our nature.
  • Do you prioritize your career or your relationships?
  • “Man is by nature a social animal … Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.”
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  • Just as human beings have a basic need for food and shelter, we also have a basic need to belong to a group and form relationships.
  • Lieberman sees the brain as the center of the social self. Its primary purpose is social thinking.
  • Every time we are not engaged in an active task—like when we take a break between two math problems—the brain falls into a neural configuration called the “default network.” When you have down time, even if it’s just for a second, this brain system comes on automatically.
  • “The default network directs us to think about other people’s minds—their thoughts, feelings, and goals.”
  • “Evolution has made a bet,” Lieberman tells me, “that the best thing for our brain to do in any spare moment is to get ready for what comes next in social terms.”
  • When economists put a price tag on our relationships, we get a concrete sense of just how valuable our social connections are—and how devastating it is when they are broken.
  • If you have a friend that you see on most days, it’s like earning $100,000 more each year.
  • To the brain, social pain feels a lot like physical pain—a broken heart can feel like a broken leg, as Lieberman puts it in his book.
  • But over the last fifty years, while society has been growing more and more prosperous and individualistic, our social connections have been dissolving.
  • Over the same period of time that social isolation has increased, our levels of happiness have gone down, while rates of suicide and depression have multiplied. 
  • Across the board, people are increasingly sacrificing their personal relationships for the pursuit of wealth.
Javier E

Regulating Sex - The New York Times - 0 views

  • THIS is a strange moment for sex in America. We’ve detached it from pregnancy, matrimony and, in some circles, romance. At least, we no longer assume that intercourse signals the start of a relationship.
  • But the more casual sex becomes, the more we demand that our institutions and government police the line between what’s consensual and what isn’t. And we wonder how to define rape. Is it a violent assault or a violation of personal autonomy? Is a person guilty of sexual misconduct if he fails to get a clear “yes” through every step of seduction and consummation?
  • According to the doctrine of affirmative consent — the “yes means yes” rule — the answer is, well, yes, he is.
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  • if one person can think he’s hooking up while the other feels she’s being raped, it makes sense to have a law that eliminates the possibility of misunderstanding. “You shouldn’t be allowed to make the assumption that if you find someone lying on a bed, they’re free for sexual pleasure,”
  • About a quarter of all states, and the District of Columbia, now say sex isn’t legal without positive agreement,
  • And though most people think of “yes means yes” as strictly for college students, it is actually poised to become the law of the land.
  • But criminal law is a very powerful instrument for reshaping sexual mores.
  • Should we really put people in jail for not doing what most people aren’t doing? (Or at least, not yet?)
  • It’s one thing to teach college students to talk frankly about sex and not to have it without demonstrable pre-coital assent. Colleges are entitled to uphold their own standards of comportment, even if enforcement of that behavior is spotty or indifferent to the rights of the accused. It’s another thing to make sex a crime under conditions of poor communication.
  • Most people just aren’t very talkative during the delicate tango that precedes sex, and the re-education required to make them more forthcoming would be a very big project. Nor are people unerringly good at decoding sexual signals. If they were, we wouldn’t have romantic comedies.
  • “If there’s no social consensus about what the lines are,” says Nancy Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and a retired judge, then affirmative consent “has no business being in the criminal law.”
  • The example points to a trend evident both on campuses and in courts: the criminalization of what we think of as ordinary sex and of sex previously considered unsavory but not illegal.
  • Some new crimes outlined in the proposed code, for example, assume consent to be meaningless under conditions of unequal power. Consensual sex between professionals (therapists, lawyers and the like) and their patients and clients, for instance, would be a fourth-degree felony, punishable by significant time in prison.
  • most of these occupations already have codes of professional conduct, and victims also have recourse in the civil courts. Miscreants, she says, “should be drummed out of the profession or sued for malpractice.”
  • It’s important to remember that people convicted of sex crimes may not only go to jail, they can wind up on a sex-offender registry, with dire and lasting consequences.
  • We shouldn’t forget the harm done to American communities by the national passion for incarceration, either. In a letter to the American Law Institute, Ms. Smith listed several disturbing statistics: roughly one person in 100 behind bars, one in 31 under correctional supervision
  • the case for affirmative consent is “compelling,” he says. Mr. Schulhofer has argued that being raped is much worse than having to endure that awkward moment when one stops to confirm that one’s partner is happy to continue. Silence or inertia, often interpreted as agreement, may actually reflect confusion, drunkenness or “frozen fright,” a documented physiological response in which a person under sexual threat is paralyzed by terror
  • To critics who object that millions of people are having sex without getting unqualified assent and aren’t likely to change their ways, he’d reply that millions of people drive 65 miles per hour despite a 55-mile-per-hour speed limit, but the law still saves lives. As long as “people know what the rules of the road are,” he says, “the overwhelming majority will comply with them.”
  • He understands that the law will have to bring a light touch to the refashioning of sexual norms, which is why the current draft of the model code suggests classifying penetration without consent as a misdemeanor, a much lesser crime than a felony.
  • This may all sound reasonable, but even a misdemeanor conviction goes on the record as a sexual offense and can lead to registration
  • An affirmative consent standard also shifts the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, which represents a real departure from the traditions of criminal law in the United States. Affirmative consent effectively means that the accused has to show that he got the go-ahead
  • if the law requires a “no,” then the jury will likely perceive any uncertainty about that “no” as a weakness in the prosecution’s case and not convict. But if the law requires a “yes,” then ambiguity will bolster the prosecutor’s argument: The guy didn’t get unequivocal consent, therefore he must be guilty of rape.
  • “It’s an unworkable standard,” says the Harvard law professor Jeannie C. Suk. “It’s only workable if we assume it’s not going to be enforced, by and large.” But that’s worrisome too. Selectively enforced laws have a nasty history of being used to harass people deemed to be undesirable, because of their politics, race or other reasons.
  • it’s probably just a matter of time before “yes means yes” becomes the law in most states. Ms. Suk told me that she and her colleagues have noticed a generational divide between them and their students. As undergraduates, they’re learning affirmative consent in their mandatory sexual-respect training sessions, and they come to “believe that this really is the best way to define consent, as positive agreement,” she says. When they graduate and enter the legal profession, they’ll probably reshape the law to reflect that belief.
  • Sex may become safer for some, but it will be a whole lot more anxiety-producing for others.
Javier E

A Reply To Jonathan Chait On Stimulus | The New Republic - 0 views

  • It is certainly true that a large majority of professional economists accept the view that “increasing spending or reducing taxes temporarily increases economic growth”—but that is very far from claiming that disputing it is largely a political campaign.
  • in a genuinely scientific field which has accepted a predictive rule as valid to the point that there is a true consensus—such that the only reason for refusal to accept it is crankery or, in Chait’s terms, “politics”—you don’t usually see: several full professors at the top two departments in the subject, when speaking directly in their area of research expertise, challenge it; 10 percent of all practitioners in the field refuse to accept it; and the two leading global general circulation publications in field running op-eds questioning it.
  • A great many leading economists may accept the proposition that enough stimulus spending will probably cause at least some increase in output for a short period of time in some circumstances, yet are still uncomfortable with the kind of stimulus spending strategy that is the actual subject of current political debate. In 2009, James Buchanan (1986 Nobel Laureate in Economics), Edward Prescott (2004 Nobel Laureate in Economics), and Vernon Smith (2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics) promulgated this statement: “Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance.”
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  • It is nerdy-sounding, but I believe critical to this discussion, to distinguish between measurement and knowledge. I made a very strong claim about measurement, and a very specific claim about knowledge. I claim that we cannot usefully measure the effect of the stimulus program launched in 2009 at all.
  • All potentially useful predictions made about the output impact of the stimulus program are non-falsifiable. Failure of predictions can be simply justified by this sort of ad hoc explanation after the fact.
  • This argument will always degenerate back into endlessly dueling regressions, because there is no ability to adjudicate among them via experiment.
  • It simply means that we have no scientific knowledge about this topic. Macroeconomic assertions about the effect of a proposed stimulus policy are not valueless, but despite their complex mathematical justifications, do not have standing as knowledge that can trump common sense, historical reasoning, and so on in the same way that a predictive rule that has been verified through experimental testing can.
  • When using stimulus to ameliorate the economic crisis, we are like primitive tribesmen using herbs to treat an infection, and we should not allow ourselves to imagine that we are using antibiotics that have been proven through clinical trials. This should not imply merely a different feeling about the same actions, but should rationally lead us to greater circumspection.
  •  
    An incisive analysis of knowledge claims in economics, and Keynesian approaches.
Javier E

The Data of Hate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Stormfront was founded in 1995 by Don Black, a former Ku Klux Klan leader. Its most popular “social groups” are “Union of National Socialists” and “Fans and Supporters of Adolf Hitler.” Over the past year, according to Quantcast, roughly 200,000 to 400,000 Americans visited the site every month. A recent Southern Poverty Law Center report linked nearly 100 murders in the past five years to registered Stormfront members.
  • In the 1930s, Arthur F. Raper reported a correlation between bad economic conditions and lynchings of blacks. This led many scholars to the intuitive conclusion that people turn to hate because their lives are going poorly.
  • evidence is increasingly casting doubt on this idea. In 2001, the political scientists Donald P. Green, Laurence H. McFalls and Jennifer K. Smith used more data and found that there was actually no relationship between lynchings and economic hardship. Lynchings actually fell during the Great Depression.The economist Alan B. Krueger has shown that terrorists are not disproportionately poor. And the economists Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Steven D. Levitt found that Ku Klux Klan members were actually better educated than the typical American.
Roth johnson

The Myth of 'I'm Bad at Math' - Miles Kimball & Noah Smith - The Atlantic - 1 views

  •  
    Interesting article on the "I'm bad at math" myth.
kushnerha

What Drives Gun Sales: Terrorism, Obama and Calls for Restrictions - The New York Times - 0 views

  • On Sunday, President Obama called for making it harder to buy assault weapons after the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif. On Monday, the stock prices of two top gun makers, Smith & Wesson and Ruger, soared.
  • “President Obama has actually been the best salesman for firearms,” said Brian W. Ruttenbur, an analyst with BB&T Capital Markets
  • Fear of gun-buying restrictions has been the main driver of spikes in gun sales, far surpassing the effects of mass shootings and terrorist attacks alone, according to federal background-check data
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  • When a man shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., gun sales did not set records until five days later, after President Obama called for banning assault rifles and high-capacity magazines.
  • “It would be like you’ve never owned a toaster, you don’t really want a toaster, but the federal government says they’re going to ban toasters,” Mr. Ruttenbur said. “So you go out and buy a toaster.”
  • Gun sales rose in New Jersey in 2013 after Gov. Chris Christie proposed measures that included expanding background checks and banning certain rifles. (Mr. Christie later vetoed one of the most stringent parts
  • Catch-22 for gun control proponents: Pushing for new restrictions can lead to an influx of new guns.
  • Maryland approved one of the nation’s strictest gun-control measures in May 2013, gun sales jumped as buyers tried to beat the October deadline specified in the measure
  • after Hurricane Katrina, legally registered guns were confiscated from civilians. The confiscations outraged gun owners and prompted an increase in gun sales in the area. Conservatives responded by pushing for a federal law prohibiting the seizure of firearms from civilians during an emergency
  • Gun sales have more than doubled in a decade, to about 15 million in 2013 from about seven million in 2002. More firearms are sold to residents in the United States than in any other country
  • These estimates undercount total sales because they omit some purchases in states that do not require background checks for private sales. They also exclude permits that allow people in some states to buy multiple guns with a single background check.
  • The increase is mostly due to higher sales of handguns, which are typically bought for self-defense. Two of the fastest-growing segments of the market are women and gun owners with concealed carry permits.
  • When Missouri repealed a requirement that gun buyers obtain a permit to buy a handgun in 2007, estimated gun sales went up and stayed up, by roughly 9,000 additional guns per month. The influx shifted gun-trafficking patterns, reducing the number of guns used in crimes that had been brought in from neighboring states.
  • Supreme Court invalidated a ban on handguns in Washington, estimated handgun sales in the city went from near-zero to about 40 every month.
Javier E

An octopus is the closest thing to an alien here on earth - Quartz - 0 views

  • octopuses are the most complex animal with the most distant common ancestor to humans
  • “It was probably an animal about the size of a leech or flatworm with neurons numbering perhaps in the thousands, but not more than that.”
  • This means that octopuses have very little in common with humans, evolution-wise. They have developed eyes, limbs, and brains via a completely separate route, with very different ancestors, from humans. And they seem to have come by their impressive cognitive functioning—and likely consciousness—by different means.
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  • Broadly speaking, consciousness is often defined as there being an experience of what it’s like to be said creature. (This notion is explored in depth in philosopher Thomas Nagel’s essay, “What is it like to be a bat?”)
  • Octopuses display signs of curiosity, and Godfrey-Smith believes it’s extremely likely that they’re conscious beings. “I think the exploratory behaviors, the fact that they attend to things, they have good eyes, they evaluate, are little bits of good evidence that there’s something it’s like to be an octopus.”
  • Based on the current evidence, it seems that consciousness is not particularly unusual at all, but a fairly routine development in nature. “I suspect animal evolution, if were replayed again, it would produce subjectivity of a somewhat similar kind,” he adds. “You can see why it makes biological sense.”
Javier E

E.P.A. Dismisses Members of Major Scientific Review Board - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Members of the board say they have reviewed the E.P.A.’s scientific research on the public health impact of leaking underground fuel tanks, the toxicity of the chemicals used to clean up oil spills, and the effects of the spread of bark beetles caused by a warming climate. Advertisement Continue reading the main story A larger, corresponding panel, the 47-member Science Advisory Board, advises the agency on what areas it should conduct research in and evaluates the scientific integrity of some of its regulations.
  • Both boards, which until now have been composed almost entirely of academic research scientists, have long been targets of political attacks. Congressional Republicans and industry groups have sought to either change their composition or weaken their influence on the environmental regulatory process.
  • “In recent years, S.A.B. experts have become nothing more than rubber stamps who approve all of the E.P.A.’s regulations,” Mr. Smith said at a House hearing in February. “The E.P.A. routinely stacks this board with friendly scientists who receive millions of dollars in grants from the federal government. The conflict of interest here is clear.”
Javier E

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

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

Jacksonville Jaguars hire Urban Meyer as head coach - CNN - 0 views

  • three-time national champion as a college football coach -- will now lead the Jacksonville Jaguars, the team announced Thursday.
  • "Urban Meyer is who we want and need, a leader, winner and champion who demands excellence and produces results
  • Meyer had a 187-32 record during head coaching stints at Ohio State, Florida, Utah and Bowling Green.
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  • That final season with the Buckeyes also was one with controversy. Meyer was suspended for three games without pay in the wake of an investigation into what he did about spousal abuse allegations against former assistant coach Zach Smith, the university said.
katedriscoll

The Problem of Perception (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) - 0 views

  • Sense-perception has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. One pervasive and traditional problem, sometimes called “the Problem of Perception”, is created by the phenomena of perceptual illusion and hallucination: if these kinds of error are possible, how can perception be what we ordinarily understand it to be, an openness to and awareness of the world? The present entry is about how these possibilities of error challenge the intelligibility of the phenomenon of perception, and how the major theories of experience in the last century are best understood as responses to this challenge.
  • According to Awareness, we are sometimes perceptually aware of ordinary mind-independent objects in perceptual experience. Such awareness can come from veridical experiences—cases in which one perceives an object for what it is. But it can also come from illusory experiences. For we think of an illusion as “any perceptual situation in which a physical object is actually perceived, but in which that object perceptually appears other than it really is” Smith (2002: 23). For example, a white wall seen in yellow light can look yellow to one. (In such cases it is not necessary that one is deceived into believing that things are other than they are). The argument from illusion, in a radical form, aims to show that we are never perceptually aware of ordinary objects. Many things have been called “the argument from illusion”
marleen_ueberall

Markets and Governments: A Historical Perspective - The Globalist - 0 views

  • The idea that competitive markets are sufficient to ensure efficient outcomes and stable economies is under heavy intellectual fire
  • The crisis has prompted a fundamental re-think of the relationship between markets and governments
  • but between competing systems of political economy and models of governance.
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  • Striking the right balance between markets and government is the central issue in policy debates over economic developmen
  • What is the role of governments in promoting economic growth?
  • What can governments do to seize the opportunities of globalization, while minimizing its downsides?
  • we have to recognize that the tension between markets and government is not new. In fact, it has been the central issue in the evolution of political economy over the last 200 years.
  • There have been three distinct phases in this evolution.
  • Phase One: The rise of the market
  • The “rise of the market” began in the late 18th century, shaped by the writings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. The “invisible hand” of the market guided supply and demand toward equilibrium and efficiency.
  • This phase came to an end in the 1930s, when the concept of self-correcting markets collapsed under the weight of the Great Depression.
  • Falling prices, instead of bringing demand and supply into equilibrium,
  • Phase Two: The rise of government
  • markets were inherently unstable. Left on their own, they may not always self-correct
  • Government intervention was necessary to boost aggregate demand during periods of high unemployment.
  • The 1940s also saw the advent of the welfare state.
  • The welfare state was enabled through redistributive taxation and government regulation.
  • Phase Three: The return of the market
  • This phase began with growing disenchantment with government’s ability to deliver and was driven forward mainly by U.S.-based economists
  • The stagflation of the 1970s — persistently high inflation and unemployment — called into question the ability of governments to fine-tune the economy. Meanwhile, the welfare state began to impose an unsustainable fiscal burden,
  • Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman led the charge against “Big Government.” They argued eloquently how an overreaching government dulled the fundamental human instincts that power the capitalist system:
  • In the 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher reduced taxes, deregulated industries, privatized state-owned enterprises, curbed union power, and scaled back welfare programs. The global economy boomed.
  • Phase Four: Balancing markets and governments
  • The financial crisis has revealed significant imperfections in market mechanisms: information asymmetry, moral hazard, systemic risks and behavioral or nonrational motivators of choice.
  • In a more globalized and complex economy, governments have fewer levers to pull
  • It has also revealed the inherent limitations of governmen
  • Neither market fundamentalism nor central planning has worked.
  • Yet one thing is certain: The choice is not between big government and small government. It is about creating effective government. What matters is what governments do, not how big they are.
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