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Javier E

If 'permacrisis' is the word of 2022, what does 2023 have in store for our me... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ord-of-2022-2023-mental-health

crisis history effects mental health health psychology research

shared by Javier E on 30 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • the Collins English Dictionary has come to a similar conclusion about recent history. Topping its “words of the year” list for 2022 is permacrisis, defined as an “extended period of insecurity and instability”. This new word fits a time when we lurch from crisis to crisis and wreckage piles upon wreckage
  • The word permacrisis is new, but the situation it describes is not. According to the German historian Reinhart Koselleck we have been living through an age of permanent crisis for at least 230 years
  • During the 20th century, the list got much longer. In came existential crises, midlife crises, energy crises and environmental crises. When Koselleck was writing about the subject in the 1970s, he counted up more than 200 kinds of crisis we could then face
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  • Koselleck observes that prior to the French revolution, a crisis was a medical or legal problem but not much more. After the fall of the ancien regime, crisis becomes the “structural signature of modernity”, he writes. As the 19th century progressed, crises multiplied: there were economic crises, foreign policy crises, cultural crises and intellectual crises.
  • When he looked at 5,000 creative individuals over 127 generations in European history, he found that significant creative breakthroughs were less likely during periods of political crisis and instability.
  • Victor H Mair, a professor of Chinese literature at the University of Pennsylvania, points out that in fact the Chinese word for crisis, wēijī, refers to a perilous situation in which you should be particularly cautious
  • “Those who purvey the doctrine that the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ is composed of elements meaning ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’ are engaging in a type of muddled thinking that is a danger to society,” he writes. “It lulls people into welcoming crises as unstable situations from which they can benefit.” Revolutionaries, billionaires and politicians may relish the chance to profit from a crisis, but most people world prefer not to have a crisis at all.
  • A common folk theory is that times of great crisis also lead to great bursts of creativity.
  • The first world war sparked the growth of modernism in painting and literature. The second fuelled innovations in science and technology. The economic crises of the 1970s and 80s are supposed to have inspired the spread of punk and the creation of hip-hop
  • psychologists have also found that when we are threatened by a crisis, we become more rigid and locked into our beliefs. The creativity researcher Dean Simonton has spent his career looking at breakthroughs in music, philosophy, science and literature. He has found that during periods of crisis, we actually tend to become less creative.
  • psychologists have found that it is what they call “malevolent creativity” that flourishes when we feel threatened by crisis.
  • during moments of significant crisis, the best leaders are able to create some sense of certainty and a shared fate amid the seas of change.
  • These are innovations that tend to be harmful – such as new weapons, torture devices and ingenious scams.
  • A 2019 study which involved observing participants using bricks, found that those who had been threatened before the task tended to come up with more harmful uses of the bricks (such as using them as weapons) than people who did not feel threatened
  • Students presented with information about a threatening situation tended to become increasingly wary of outsiders, and even begin to adopt positions such as an unwillingness to support LGBT people afterwards.
  • during moments of crisis – when change is really needed – we tend to become less able to change.
  • When we suffer significant traumatic events, we tend to have worse wellbeing and life outcomes.
  • , other studies have shown that in moderate doses, crises can help to build our sense of resilience.
  • we tend to be more resilient if a crisis is shared with others. As Bruce Daisley, the ex-Twitter vice-president, notes: “True resilience lies in a feeling of togetherness, that we’re united with those around us in a shared endeavour.”
  • Crises are like many things in life – only good in moderation, and best shared with others
  • The challenge our leaders face during times of overwhelming crisis is to avoid letting us plunge into the bracing ocean of change alone, to see if we sink or swim. Nor should they tell us things are fine, encouraging us to hide our heads in the san
  • Waking up each morning to hear about the latest crisis is dispiriting for some, but throughout history it has been a bracing experience for others. In 1857, Friedrich Engels wrote in a letter that “the crisis will make me feel as good as a swim in the ocean”. A hundred years later, John F Kennedy (wrongly) pointed out that in the Chinese language, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters, “one representing danger, and the other, opportunity”. More recently, Elon Musk has argued “if things are not failing, you are not innovating enough”.
  • This means people won’t feel an overwhelming sense of threat. It also means people do not feel alone. When we feel some certainty and common identity, we are more likely to be able to summon the creativity, ingenuity and energy needed to change things.
Javier E

Opinion | Tesla suffers from the boss's addiction to Twitter - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...n-musk-tesla-twitter-obsession

twitter musk social media technology status

shared by Javier E on 05 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • For some perspective on what’s happening with Elon Musk and Twitter, I suggest spending a few minutes familiarizing yourself with one of Twitter’s sillier episodes from the past, a fight that erupted almost a year ago between the “shape rotators” of Silicon Valley and the “wordcels” (aspersion intended) of journalism and related professions. Many of the combatants were, at first, merely fighting over which group should have higher social status (theirs), but the episode also highlighted real divisions between West Coast and East — math and verbal, free-speech culture and safety culture, people who make things happen and people who talk about them afterward.
  • For years now, conflict between the two groups has been boiling over onto social media, into courtrooms and onto the pages of major news outlets. Team Shape Rotator believes Team Wordcel is parasitic and dangerous, ballyragging institutions into curbing both free speech and innovation in the name of safety. Team “Stop calling me a Wordcel” sees its opponents as self-centered and reckless, disrupting and mean-meming their way toward some vaguely imagined doom.
  • his audacity seems to be backfiring, as of course did Napoleon’s eventually.
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  • You can think of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter as the latest sortie, a takeover of the ultimate wordcel site by the world’s most successful shape rotator.
  • more likely, he fell prey to a different delusion, one in which the shape rotators and the wordcels are united: thinking of Twitter in terms of words and arguments, as a “digital public square” where vital questions are hashed out. It is that, sometimes, but that’s not what it’s designed for. It’s designed to maximize engagement, which is to say, it’s an addiction machine for the highly verbal.
  • Both groups theoretically understand what the machine is doing — the wordcels write endless articles about bad algorithms, and the shape rotators build them. But both nonetheless talk as though they’re saving the world even as they compulsively follow the programming. The shape rotators bait the wordcels because that’s what makes the machine spit out more rewarding likes and retweets. We wordcels return the favor for the same reason.
  • Musk could theoretically rework Twitter’s architecture to downrank provocation and make it less addictive. But of course, that would make it a less profitable business
  • More to the point, the reason he bought it is that he, like his critics, is hooked on it the way it is now. Unfortunately for Tesla shareholders, Musk has now put himself in the position of a dealer who can spend all day getting high on his own supply.
Javier E

It's Not Just the Discord Leak. Group Chats Are the Internet's New Chaos Machine. - The... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...673738

social media chaos internet group in-group dynamics

shared by Javier E on 15 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Digital bulletin-board systems—proto–group chats, you could say—date back to the 1970s, and SMS-style group chats popped up in WhatsApp and iMessage in 2011.
  • As New York magazine put it in 2019, group chats became “an outright replacement for the defining mode of social organization of the past decade: the platform-centric, feed-based social network.”
  • unlike the Facebook feed or Twitter, where posts can be linked to wherever, group chats are a closed system—a safe and (ideally) private space. What happens in the group chat ought to stay there.
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  • In every group chat, no matter the size, participants fall into informal roles. There is usually a leader—a person whose posting frequency drives the group or sets the agenda. Often, there are lurkers who rarely chime in
  • Larger group chats are not immune to the more toxic dynamics of social media, where competition for attention and herd behavior cause infighting, splintering, and back-channeling.
  • It’s enough to make one think, as the writer Max Read argued, that “venture-capitalist group chats are a threat to the global economy.” Now you might also say they are a threat to national security.
  • thanks to the private nature of the group chats, this information largely stayed out of the public eye. As Bloomberg reported, “By the time most people figured out that a bank run was a possibility … it was already well underway.”
  • The investor panic that led to the swift collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March was effectively caused by runaway group-chat dynamics. “It wasn’t phone calls; it wasn’t social media,” a start-up founder told Bloomberg in March. “It was private chat rooms and message groups.
  • Unlike traditional social media or even forums and message boards, group chats are nearly impossible to monitor.
  • as our digital social lives start to splinter off from feeds and large audiences and into siloed areas, a different kind of unpredictability and chaos awaits. Where social networks create a context collapse—a process by which information meant for one group moves into unfamiliar networks and is interpreted by outsiders—group chats seem to be context amplifiers
  • group chats provide strong relationship dynamics, and create in-jokes and lore. For decades, researchers have warned of the polarizing effects of echo chambers across social networks; group chats realize this dynamic fully.
  • Weird things happen in echo chambers. Constant reinforcement of beliefs or ideas might lead to group polarization or radicalization. It may trigger irrational herd behavior such as, say, attempting to purchase a copy of the Constitution through a decentralized autonomous organization
  • Obsession with in-group dynamics might cause people to lose touch with the reality outside the walls of a particular community; the private-seeming nature of a closed group might also lull participants into a false sense of security, as it did with Teixiera.
  • the age of the group chat appears to be at least as unpredictable, swapping a very public form of volatility for a more siloed, incalculable version
Javier E

A Psychiatrist Tried to Quit Gambling. Betting Apps Kept Her Hooked. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...n-sports-betting-apps-4463cde0

psychiatrist gambling betting apps addiction tech psychology brain science technology

shared by Javier E on 19 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • Yet she was up against an industry skilled in the art of leveraging data analytics and human behavior to keep customers betting. Gambling companies tracked the ups and downs of Fischer’s betting behavior and gave bonus credits to keep her playing. VIP customer representatives offered encouragement and gifts.
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