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Javier E

Is Everyone a Little Bit Racist? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ryone-a-little-bit-racist.html

racism discrimination research

shared by Javier E on 29 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Research in the last couple of decades suggests that the problem is not so much overt racists. Rather, the larger problem is a broad swath of people who consider themselves enlightened, who intellectually believe in racial equality, who deplore discrimination, yet who harbor unconscious attitudes that result in discriminatory policies and behavior.
  • The player takes on the role of a police officer who is confronted with a series of images of white or black men variously holding guns or innocent objects such as wallets or cellphones. The aim is to shoot anyone with a gun while holstering your weapon in other cases.Ordinary players (often university undergraduates) routinely shoot more quickly at black men than at white men, and are more likely to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black man than an unarmed white man.
  • Correll has found no statistically significant difference between the play of blacks and that of whites in the shooting game.
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  • “There’s a whole culture that promotes this idea of aggressive young black men,” Correll notes. “In our minds, young black men are associated with danger.”
  • One finding is that we unconsciously associate “American” with “white.” Thus, in 2008, some California college students — many who were supporting Barack Obama for president — unconsciously treated Obama as more foreign than Tony Blair, the former British prime minister.
  • an uncomfortable starting point is to understand that racial stereotyping remains ubiquitous, and that the challenge is not a small number of twisted white supremacists but something infinitely more subtle and complex: People who believe in equality but who act in ways that perpetuate bias and inequality.
  • Joshua Correll of the University of Colorado at Boulder has used an online shooter video game to try to measure these unconscious attitudes (you can play the game yourself).
Adam Clark

Why You Can't Trust The Media - 0 views

www.viralnova.com/media-twists-truth

bias Perspective truth

shared by Adam Clark on 03 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Adam Clark on 03 Sep 14
     
    As networks and publications try and fill the 24-hour news cycle, it's hard to tell truth from fiction someone created to have something to talk about for the next half hour to half year. Unfortunately for us, the viewers and readers, that is the media telling untruths in its most harmless form. As you'll see below, there might be more sinister motives to the way the media tells a story. If true, this is pretty scary stuff.
Javier E

Measles Proves Delicate Issue to G.O.P. Field - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...licate-issue-to-gop-field.html

vaccine skepticism science denial GOP conservatism politics

shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The politics of medicine, morality and free will have collided in an emotional debate over vaccines and the government’s place in requiring them, posing a challenge for Republicans who find themselves in the familiar but uncomfortable position of reconciling modern science with the skepticism of their core conservative voters.
  • There is evidence that vaccinations have become more of a political issue in recent years. Pew Research Center polls show that in 2009, 71 percent of both Republicans and Democrats favored requiring the vaccination of children. Five years later, Democratic support had grown to 76 percent, but Republican support had fallen to 65 percent.
  • The vaccination controversy is a twist on an old problem for the Republican Party: how to approach matters that have largely been settled among scientists but are not widely accepted by conservatives.
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  • It is a dance Republican candidates often do when they hedge their answers about whether evolution should be taught in schools. It is what makes the fight over global warming such a liability for their party, and what led last year to a widely criticized response to the Ebola scare.
  • the national debate is forcing the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential hopefuls to confront questions about whether it is in the public’s interest to allow parents to decide for themselves.
  • The debate does not break entirely along right-left lines. The movement to forgo vaccinations has been popular in more liberal and affluent communities where some parents are worried that vaccines cause autism or other disorders among children.
  • Howard Dean, a presidential candidate in 2004 and a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said there are three groups of people who object to required vaccines: “One is people who are very much scared about their kids getting autism, which is an idea that has been completely discredited. Two, is entitled people who don’t want to put any poison in their kids and view this as poison, which is ignorance more than anything else. And three, people who are antigovernment in any way.”
  • The issue has more political potency among conservative voters who are highly skeptical of anything required by the government.
  • for Republicans like Mr. Paul who appeal to the kind of libertarian conservatives who are influential in states like Iowa and New Hampshire, which hold the first two contests in the battle for the nomination, there is an appeal in framing the issue as one of individual liberty.Asked about immunizations again later on Monday, Mr. Paul was even more insistent, saying it was a question of “freedom.” He grew irritated with a CNBC host who pressed him and snapped: “The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own the children.”
kushnerha

How to Cultivate the Art of Serendipity - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...te-the-art-of-serendipity.html

new york times perception luck innovation

shared by kushnerha on 03 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • A surprising number of the conveniences of modern life were invented when someone stumbled upon a discovery or capitalized on an accident
  • wonder whether we can train ourselves to become more serendipitous. How do we cultivate the art of finding what we’re not seeking?
  • Croatian has no word to capture the thrill of the unexpected discovery, so she was delighted when — after moving to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship in the 1980s — she learned the English word “serendipity.”
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  • Today we think of serendipity as something like dumb luck. But its original meaning was very different.
  • suggested that this old tale contained a crucial idea about human genius: “As their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” And he proposed a new word — “serendipity” — to describe this princely talent for detective work. At its birth, serendipity meant a skill rather than a random stroke of good fortune.
  • sees serendipity as something people do. In the mid-1990s, she began a study of about 100 people to find out how they created their own serendipity, or failed to do so.
  • As people dredge the unknown, they are engaging in a highly creative act. What an inventor “finds” is always an expression of him- or herself.
  • subjects fell into three distinct groups. Some she called “non-encounterers”; they saw through a tight focus, a kind of chink hole, and they tended to stick to their to-do lists when searching for information rather than wandering off into the margins. Other people were “occasional encounterers,” who stumbled into moments of serendipity now and then. Most interesting were the “super-encounterers,” who reported that happy surprises popped up wherever they looked.
  • “gathering string” is just another way of talking about super-encountering. After all, “string” is the stuff that accumulates in a journalist’s pocket. It’s the note you jot down in your car after the interview, the knickknack you notice on someone’s shelf, or the anomaly that jumps out at you in Appendix B of an otherwise boring research study.
  • came up with the term super-encounterer to give us a way to talk about the people rather than just the discoveries. Without such words, we tend to become dazzled by the happy accident itself, to think of it as something that exists independent of an observer.
  • We can slip into a twisted logic in which we half-believe the penicillin picked Alexander Fleming to be its emissary, or that the moons of Jupiter wanted to be seen by Galileo. But discoveries are products of the human mind.
  • You become a super-encounterer, according to Dr. Erdelez, in part because you believe that you are one — it helps to assume that you possess special powers of perception
  • One survey of patent holders (the PatVal study of European inventors, published in 2005) found that an incredible 50 percent of patents resulted from what could be described as a serendipitous process. Thousands of survey respondents reported that their idea evolved when they were working on an unrelated project — and often when they weren’t even trying to invent anything.
  • need to develop a new, interdisciplinary field — call it serendipity studies — that can help us create a taxonomy of discoveries in the chemistry lab, the newsroom, the forest, the classroom, the particle accelerator and the hospital. By observing and documenting the many different “species” of super-encounterers, we might begin to understand their minds.
  • Of course, even if we do organize the study of serendipity, it will always be a whimsical undertaking, given that the phenomenon is difficult to define, amazingly variable and hard to capture in data. The clues will no doubt emerge where we least expect them
carolinewren

Researchers at Brown University shattered an electron wave function | Motherboard - 1 views

motherboard.vice.com/...eirder-shattered-wavefunctions

knowledge electron researchers

shared by carolinewren on 27 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • When we say some element of the quantum world occupies many states at once, what’s really being referred to is the element’s wave function. A wave function can be viewed as a space occupied simultaneously by many different possibilities or degrees of freedom.
  • Even what we’d normally (deterministically) consider empty space has a wave function and, as such, contains very real possibilities of not being empty.
  • Visually, we might imagine a particle in its undisturbed state looking more like a cloud than a point in space.
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  • a bunch of particles can share these states at the same time, effectively becoming instances of the same particle. And so: entanglement.
  • possible to strip away all of this indeterminateness
  • wave functions are very fragile, subject to a “collapse” in which all of those possibilities become just a single particle at a single point at a single time.
  • physicists have observed a very peculiar behavior of electrons in supercooled baths of helium. When an electron enters the bath, it acts to
  • two probabilities can be isolated from each other, cordoned off like quantum crime scenes
  • it’s possible to take a wave function and isolate it into different parts. So, if our electron has some probability of being in position (x1,y1,z1) and another probability of being in position (x2,y2,z2), those two probabilities can be isolated from each other, cordoned off like quantum crime scenes
  • when a macroscopic human attempts to measure a quantum mechanical system: The wave drops away and all that’s left is a boring, well-defined thing.
  • trapping the chance of finding the electron, not pieces of the electron
  • using tiny bubbles of helium as physical “traps.
  • repel the surrounding helium atoms, forming its own little bubble or cavity in the process.
  • That an electron (or other particle) can be in many places at the same time is strange enough, but the notion that those possibilities can be captured and shuttled away adds a whole new twist.
  • wave function isn’t a physical thing. It’s mathematics that describe a phenomenon.
  • The electron, upon measurement, will be in precisely one bubble.
  • “No one is sure what actually constitutes a measurement,”
  • Is consciousness required? We don’t really know.”
kushnerha

BBC - Future - The secret "anti-languages" you're not supposed to know - 2 views

www.bbc.com/...ges-youre-not-supposed-to-know

bbc language

shared by kushnerha on 19 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • speak an English “anti-language”. Since at least Tudor times, secret argots have been used in the underworld of prisoners, escaped slaves and criminal gangs as a way of confusing and befuddling the authorities.Thieves’ Cant, Polari, and Gobbledygook (yes, it’s a real form of slang) are just a few of the examples from the past – but anti-languages are mercurial beasts that are forever evolving into new and more vibrant forms.
  • A modern anti-language could very well be spoken on the street outside your house. Unless you yourself are a member of the “anti-society”, the strange terms would sound like nonsense. Yet those words may have nevertheless influenced your swear words, the comedy you enjoy and the music on your iPod – without you even realising the shady interactions that shaped them.
  • One of the first detailed records of an anti-language comes from a 16th Century magistrate called Thomas Harman. Standing at his front door, he offered food and money to passing beggars in return for nothing more than words. “He would say 'either I throw you in prison or you give me your Cant,'”
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  • “Slang may not represent us at our best, or our most admirable, but it represents us as human beings with anger, fear, self-aggrandisement, and our obsession with sex and bodily parts.”
  • This clever, playful use of metaphor would come to define anti-languages for Halliday. As you could see from the dialogue between the two Elizabethan ruffians, the strange, nonsensical words render a sentence almost impossible to comprehend for outsiders, and the more terms you have, the harder it is for an outsider to learn the code. It is the reason that selling words to the police can be heavily punished among underworld gangs.
  • All borrow the grammar of the mother language but replace words (“London”, “purse”, “money”, “alehouse”) with another, elliptical term (“Rome”, “bounge”, “lower”, “bowsing ken”). Often, the anti-language may employ dozens of terms that have blossomed from a single concept – a feature known as “over-lexicalisation”. Halliday points to at least 20 terms that Elizabethan criminals used to describe fellow thieves, for instance
  • Similarly, the Kolkata underworld had 41 words for police and more than 20 for bomb. Each anti-society may have its own way of generating new terms; often the terms are playful metaphors (such as “bawdy basket”), but they can also be formed from existing words by swapping around or inserting syllables – “face” might become “ecaf”, for instance.
  • striking similarities in the patois spoken by all three underground groups and the ways it shaped their interactions.
  • Halliday doubted that secrecy was the only motive for building an anti-language, though; he found that it also helps define a hierarchy within the “anti-society”. Among the Polish prisoners, refusing to speak the lingo could denigrate you to the lowest possible rung of the social ladder, the so-called “suckers”.
  • “The better you are, the higher the status between those users,” explains Martin Montgomery, author of An Introduction to Language and Society.
  • The concept of an anti-language throws light on many of the vibrant slangs at the edges of society, from Cockney rhyming slang and Victorian “Gobbledygook” to the “Mobspeak” of the Mafia and “Boobslang” found uniquely in New Zealand prisons. The breadth and range of the terms can be astonishing; a lexicography of Boobslang reaches more than 200 pages, with 3,000 entries covering many areas of life.
  • Consider Polari. Incorporating elements of criminal cants, the gypsy Romani language, and Italian words, it was eventually adopted by the gay community of early 20th Century Britain, when homosexuality was still illegal. (Taking a “vada” at a “bona omi” for instance, means take a look at the good-looking man). Dropping an innocent term into a conversation would have been a way of identifying another gay man, without the risk of incriminating yourself among people who were not in the know.
  • His success is a startling illustration of the power of an anti-language to subvert – using the establishment's prudish "Auntie"  to broadcast shocking scenes of gay culture, two years before the Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexuality. The show may have only got the green light thanks to the fact that the radio commissioners either didn’t understand the connotations
  • the song Girl Loves Me on David Bowie’s latest album was written as a combination of Polari and Nadsat, the fictional anti-language in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.
  • Montgomery thinks we can see a similar process in the lyrics of hip-hop music. As with the other anti-languages, you can witness the blossoming of words for the illegal activities that might accompany gang culture. “There are so many words for firearm, for different kinds of drug, for money,”
  • Again, the imaginitive terms lend themselve to artistic use. “There’s quite often a playful element you elaborate new terms for old,” Montgomery says. “To use broccoli as a word for a drug – you take a word from the mainstream and convert it to new use and it has semi-humorous twist to it.”
  • He thinks that the web will only encourage the creation of slang that share some of the qualities of anti-languages; you just need to look at the rich online vocabulary that has emerged to describe prostitution;
  • new, metaphorical forms of speech will also proliferate in areas threatened by state censorship; already, you can see a dozen euphemisms flourishing in place of every term that is blocked from a search engine or social network.  If we can learn anything from this rich history of criminal cants, it is the enormous resilience of human expression in the face of oppression.
sissij

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

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

new york times bias social media technology

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

Opinion | Why Covid's Airborne Transmission Was Acknowledged So Late - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rus-airborne-transmission.html

who cdc transmission Covid-19 Science research psychology bias

shared by Javier E on 08 May 21 - No Cached
  • A week ago, more than a year after the World Health Organization declared that we face a pandemic, a page on its website titled “Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19): How Is It Transmitted?” got a seemingly small update.
  • The revised response still emphasizes transmission in close contact but now says it may be via aerosols — smaller respiratory particles that can float — as well as droplets. It also adds a reason the virus can also be transmitted “in poorly ventilated and/or crowded indoor settings,” saying this is because “aerosols remain suspended in the air or travel farther than 1 meter.”
  • on Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also updated its guidance on Covid-19, clearly saying that inhalation of these smaller particles is a key way the virus is transmitted, even at close range, and put it on top of its list of how the disease spreads.
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  • But these latest shifts challenge key infection control assumptions that go back a century, putting a lot of what went wrong last year in context
  • They may also signal one of the most important advancements in public health during this pandemic.
  • If the importance of aerosol transmission had been accepted early, we would have been told from the beginning that it was much safer outdoors, where these small particles disperse more easily, as long as you avoid close, prolonged contact with others.
  • We would have tried to make sure indoor spaces were well ventilated, with air filtered as necessary.
  • Instead of blanket rules on gatherings, we would have targeted conditions that can produce superspreading events: people in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, especially if engaged over time in activities that increase aerosol production, like shouting and singing
  • We would have started using masks more quickly, and we would have paid more attention to their fit, too. And we would have been less obsessed with cleaning surfaces.
  • The implications of this were illustrated when I visited New York City in late April — my first trip there in more than a year.
  • A giant digital billboard greeted me at Times Square, with the message “Protecting yourself and others from Covid-19. Guidance from the World Health Organization.”
  • That billboard neglected the clearest epidemiological pattern of this pandemic: The vast majority of transmission has been indoors, sometimes beyond a range of three or even six feet. The superspreading events that play a major role in driving the pandemic occur overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, indoors.
  • The billboard had not a word about ventilation, nothing about opening windows or moving activities outdoors, where transmission has been rare and usually only during prolonged and close contact. (Ireland recently reported 0.1 percent of Covid-19 cases were traced to outdoor transmission.)
  • Mary-Louise McLaws, an epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and a member of the W.H.O. committees that craft infection prevention and control guidance, wanted all this examined but knew the stakes made it harder to overcome the resistance. She told The Times last year, “If we started revisiting airflow, we would have to be prepared to change a lot of what we do.” She said it was a very good idea, but she added, “It will cause an enormous shudder through the infection control society.”
  • In contrast, if the aerosols had been considered a major form of transmission, in addition to distancing and masks, advice would have centered on ventilation and airflow, as well as time spent indoors. Small particles can accumulate in enclosed spaces, since they can remain suspended in the air and travel along air currents. This means that indoors, three or even six feet, while helpful, is not completely protective, especially over time.
  • To see this misunderstanding in action, look at what’s still happening throughout the world. In India, where hospitals have run out of supplemental oxygen and people are dying in the streets, money is being spent on fleets of drones to spray anti-coronavirus disinfectant in outdoor spaces. Parks, beaches and outdoor areas keep getting closed around the world. This year and last, organizers canceled outdoor events for the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C. Cambodian customs officials advised spraying disinfectant outside vehicles imported from India. The examples are many.
  • Meanwhile, many countries allowed their indoor workplaces to open but with inadequate aerosol protections. There was no attention to ventilation, installing air filters as necessary or even opening windows when possible, more to having people just distancing three or six feet, sometimes not requiring masks beyond that distance, or spending money on hard plastic barriers, which may be useless at best
  • clear evidence doesn’t easily overturn tradition or overcome entrenched feelings and egos. John Snow, often credited as the first scientific epidemiologist, showed that a contaminated well was responsible for a 1854 London cholera epidemic by removing the suspected pump’s handle and documenting how the cases plummeted afterward. Many other scientists and officials wouldn’t believe him for 12 years, when the link to a water source showed up again and became harder to deny.
  • Along the way to modern public health shaped largely by the fight over germs, a theory of transmission promoted by the influential public health figure Charles Chapin took hold
  • Dr. Chapin asserted in the early 1900s that respiratory diseases were most likely spread at close range by people touching bodily fluids or ejecting respiratory droplets, and did not allow for the possibility that such close-range infection could occur by inhaling small floating particles others emitted
  • He was also concerned that belief in airborne transmission, which he associated with miasma theories, would make people feel helpless and drop their guard against contact transmission. This was a mistake that would haunt infection control for the next century and more.
  • It was in this context in early 2020 that the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. asserted that SARS-CoV-2 was transmitted primarily via these heavier, short-range droplets, and provided guidance accordingly
  • Amid the growing evidence, in July, hundreds of scientists signed an open letter urging the public health agencies, especially the W.H.O., to address airborne transmission of the coronavirus.
  • Last October, the C.D.C. published updated guidance acknowledging airborne transmission, but as a secondary route under some circumstances, until it acknowledged airborne transmission as crucial on Friday. And the W.H.O. kept inching forward in its public statements, most recently a week ago.
  • Linsey Marr, a professor of engineering at Virginia Tech who made important contributions to our understanding of airborne virus transmission before the pandemic, pointed to two key scientific errors — rooted in a lot of history — that explain the resistance, and also opened a fascinating sociological window into how science can get it wrong and why.
  • Dr. Marr said that if you inhale a particle from the air, it’s an aerosol.
  • biomechanically, she said, nasal transmission faces obstacles, since nostrils point downward and the physics of particles that large makes it difficult for them to move up the nose. And in lab measurements, people emit far more of the easier-to-inhale aerosols than the droplets, she said, and even the smallest particles can be virus laden, sometimes more so than the larger ones, seemingly because of how and where they are produced in the respiratory tract.
  • Second, she said, proximity is conducive to transmission of aerosols as well because aerosols are more concentrated near the person emitting them. In a twist of history, modern scientists have been acting like those who equated stinky air with disease, by equating close contact, a measure of distance, only with the larger droplets, a mechanism of transmission, without examination.
  • Since aerosols also infect at close range, measures to prevent droplet transmission — masks and distancing — can help dampen transmission for airborne diseases as well. However, this oversight led medical people to circularly assume that if such measures worked at all, droplets must have played a big role in their transmission.
  • Another dynamic we’ve seen is something that is not unheard-of in the history of science: setting a higher standard of proof for theories that challenge conventional wisdom than for those that support it.
  • Another key problem is that, understandably, we find it harder to walk things back. It is easier to keep adding exceptions and justifications to a belief than to admit that a challenger has a better explanation.
  • The ancients believed that all celestial objects revolved around the earth in circular orbits. When it became clear that the observed behavior of the celestial objects did not fit this assumption, those astronomers produced ever-more-complex charts by adding epicycles — intersecting arcs and circles — to fit the heavens to their beliefs.
  • In a contemporary example of this attitude, the initial public health report on the Mount Vernon choir case said that it may have been caused by people “sitting close to one another, sharing snacks and stacking chairs at the end of the practice,” even though almost 90 percent of the people there developed symptoms of Covid-19
  • So much of what we have done throughout the pandemic — the excessive hygiene theater and the failure to integrate ventilation and filters into our basic advice — has greatly hampered our response.
  • Some of it, like the way we underused or even shut down outdoor space, isn’t that different from the 19th-century Londoners who flushed the source of their foul air into the Thames and made the cholera epidemic worse.
  • Righting this ship cannot be a quiet process — updating a web page here, saying the right thing there. The proclamations that we now know are wrong were so persistent and so loud for so long.
  • the progress we’ve made might lead to an overhaul in our understanding of many other transmissible respiratory diseases that take a terrible toll around the world each year and could easily cause other pandemics.
  • So big proclamations require probably even bigger proclamations to correct, or the information void, unnecessary fears and misinformation will persist, damaging the W.H.O. now and in the future.
  • I’ve seen our paper used in India to try to reason through aerosol transmission and the necessary mitigations. I’ve heard of people in India closing their windows after hearing that the virus is airborne, likely because they were not being told how to respond
  • The W.H.O. needs to address these fears and concerns, treating it as a matter of profound change, so other public health agencies and governments, as well as ordinary people, can better adjust.
  • It needs to begin a campaign proportional to the importance of all this, announcing, “We’ve learned more, and here’s what’s changed, and here’s how we can make sure everyone understands how important this is.” That’s what credible leadership looks like. Otherwise, if a web page is updated in the forest without the requisite fanfare, how will it matter?
Javier E

America Is Flunking Math - Persuasion - 1 views

www.persuasion.community/...ica-is-flunking-math-education

STEM math education math education anti-racism Critical Theory research Science bias

shared by Javier E on 17 May 21 - No Cached
  • One can argue that the preeminence of each civilization was, in part, due to their sophisticated understanding and use of mathematics. This is particularly clear in the case of the West, which forged ahead in the 17th century with the discovery of calculus, one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time.
  • The United States became the dominant force in the mathematical sciences in the wake of World War II, largely due to the disastrous genocidal policies of the Third Reich. The Nazis’ obsession with purging German science of what it viewed as nefarious Jewish influence led to a massive exodus of Jewish mathematicians and scientists to America
  • Indeed, academic institutions in the United States have thrived largely because of their ability to attract talented individuals from around the world.
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  • The quality of mathematics research in the United States today is the envy of the scientific world. This is a direct result of the openness and inclusivity of the profession.
  • Can Americans maintain this unmatched excellence in the future? There are worrisome signs that suggest not.
  • The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development compares mathematical proficiency among 15-year-olds by country worldwide. According to its 2018 report, America ranked 37th while China, America’s main competitor for world leadership, came in first.
  • This is despite the fact that the United States is the fifth-highest spender per pupil among the 37 developed OECD nations
  • This massive failure of our K-12 education system trickles through the STEM pipeline.
  • At the undergraduate level, too few American students are prepared for higher-level mathematics courses. These students are then unprepared for rigorous graduate-level work
  • According to our own experiences at the universities where we teach, an overwhelming majority of American students with strong math backgrounds are either foreign-born or first-generation students who have additional support from their education-conscious families. At all levels, STEM disciplines are more and more dependent on a constant flow of foreign talent.
  • There are many reasons for this failure, but the way that we educate and prepare teachers is particularly influential. The vast majority of K-12 math teachers are graduates of teacher-preparation programs that teach very little substantive mathematics
  • This has led to a constant stream of ill-advised and dumbed-down reforms. One of the latest fads is anti-racist mathematics. Promoted in several states, the bizarre doctrine threatens to further degrade the teaching of mathematics.
  • Another major concern is the twisted interpretation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
  • Under the banner of DEI, universities are abandoning the use of standardized tests like the SAT and GRE in admissions, and cities are considering scrapping academic tracking and various gifted programs in schools, which they deem “inequitable.”
  • such programs are particularly effective, when properly implemented, at discovering and encouraging talented children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
  • The new 2021 Mathematics Framework, currently under consideration by California’s Department of Education, does away “with all tracking, acceleration, gifted programs, or any instruction that involves clustering by individual differences, without expressing any awareness of the impact these drastic alterations would have in preparing STEM-ready candidates.”
  • These measures will not only hinder the progress of the generations of our future STEM workforce but also contribute to structural inequalities, as they are uniquely detrimental to students whose parents cannot send them to private schools or effective enrichment programs.
  • These are just a few examples of an unprecedented fervor for revolutionary change in the name of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a doctrine that views the world as a fierce battleground for the narratives of various identity groups.
  • This will only lead to a further widening of racial disparities in educational outcomes while lowering American children’s rankings in education internationally.
  • Ill-conceived DEI policies, often informed by CRT, and the declining standards of K-12 math education feed each other in a vicious circle
  • Regarding minorities, in particular, public K-12 education all too often produces students unprepared to compete, thus leading to large disparities in admissions at universities, graduate programs, and faculty positions. This disparity is then condemned as a manifestation of structural racism, resulting in administrative measures to lower the evaluation criteria. Lowering standards at all levels leads eventually to even worse outcomes and larger disparities, and so on in a downward spiral.
  • A case in point is the recent report by the American Mathematical Society that accuses the entire mathematics community, with the thinnest of specific evidence, of systemic racial discrimination. A major justification put forward for such a grave accusation is the lack of sufficient representation of Black mathematicians in the professio
  • the report, while raising awareness of several ugly facts from the long-ago past, makes little effort to address the real reasons for this, mainly the catastrophic failure of the K-12 mathematical educational system.
  • The National Science Foundation, a federal institution meant to support fundamental research, is now diverting some of its limited funding to various DEI initiatives of questionable benefit.
  • Meanwhile, other countries, especially China, are doing precisely the opposite, following the model of our past dedication to objective measures of excellence. How long before we will see a reverse exodus, away from the United States?
  • The present crisis can still be reversed by focusing on a few concrete actions:
  • Improve schools in urban areas and inner-city neighborhoods by following the most promising education programs. These programs demonstrate that inner-city children benefit if they are challenged by high standards and a nurturing environment.
  • Follow the lead of other highly successful rigorous programs such as BASIS schools and Math for America, which focus on rigorous STEM curricula, combined with 21st-century teaching methods, and recruit talented teachers to help them build on their STEM knowledge and teaching methods.
  • Increase, rather than eliminate, tailored instruction, both for accelerated and remedial math courses.
  • Reject the soft bigotry of low expectations, that Black children cannot do well in competitive mathematics programs and need dumbed-down ethnocentric versions of mathematics.
  • Uphold the objective selection process based on merit at all levels of education and research.
Javier E

The Art of Thinking Well - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-art-of-thinking-well.html

art thinking reasoning discourse prestige relations psychology bias education

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Thaler et al. were only scratching the surface of our irrationality. Most behavioral economists study individual thinking. They do much of their research in labs where subjects don’t intimately know the people around them.
  • It’s when we get to the social world that things really get gnarly. A lot of our thinking is for bonding, not truth-seeking, so most of us are quite willing to think or say anything that will help us be liked by our group
  • This is where Alan Jacobs’s absolutely splendid forthcoming book “How to Think” comes in
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Jacobs’s emphasis on the relational nature of thinking is essential for understanding why there is so much bad thinking in political life right now.
  • Jacobs makes good use of C. S. Lewis’s concept of the Inner Ring. In every setting — a school, a company or a society — there is an official hierarchy. But there may also be a separate prestige hierarchy, where the cool kids are. They are the Inner Ring.
  • think of how you really persuade people. Do you do it by writing thoughtful essays that carefully marshal facts? That works some of the time.
  • Jacobs notices that when somebody uses “in other words” to summarize another’s argument, what follows is almost invariably a ridiculous caricature of that argument, in order to win favor with the team.
  • Jacobs nicely shows how our thinking processes emerge from emotional life and moral character. If your heart and soul are twisted, your response to the world will be, too.
  • I’d say that if social life can get us into trouble, social life can get us out.
  • “The passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”
  • the real way to persuade people is to create an attractive community that people want to join. If you do that, they’ll bend their opinions to yours. If you want people to be reasonable, create groups where it’s cool to be reasonable.
  • Jacobs mentions that at the Yale Political Union members are admired if they can point to a time when a debate totally changed their mind on something. That means they take evidence seriously; that means they can enter into another’s mind-set. It means they treat debate as a learning exercise and not just as a means to victory.
  • How many public institutions celebrate these virtues? The U.S. Senate? Most TV talk shows? Even the universities?
  • People will, for example, identify and attack what Jacobs calls the Repugnant Cultural Other — the group that is opposed to the Inner Ring, which must be assaulted to establish membership in it.
pier-paolo

How Play Energizes Your Kid's Brain - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...play-brain-science.html

shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • To the untrained eye, play can seem aimless, repetitive, wild or foolish. But play can offer a window into the developing mind. Piaget viewed certain kinds of play as milestones, signs that a child had reached a new stage of development.
  • nstead of simply making objects move through space, they begin to make believe. A banana might become a telephone and a pencil might take flight like an airplane.
  • by pretending, children are practicing deciphering others’ emotions and beliefs. But an alternate hypothesis is that pretend play helps kids develop a skill known as counterfactual reasoning.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Mulling over past “what ifs” helps us better plan for the future.
  • “That’s a very important, very distinctive human ability,”
  • That means separating actual events from possible events and pretend play helps children do that. What would happen if I could use this banana to call my grandma? What if this pencil could take flight
  • That is, the ones who could imagine hypotheticals that hadn’t occurred were also the best at pretending to operate an imaginary machine with an imaginary zando.
  • Open the box, they told the kids, and you’ll be able to play with the toy.
  • They asked a quarter of the children to pretend to be someone else while they completed the task — Batman or an intrepid adventurer like Dora the Explorer.
  • And the kids did get frustrated. In an odd twist, none of the keys actually worked
  • The children who pretended to be the hardworking fictional characters stayed calmer. They also spent more time trying to open the box and tried more keys.
  • For kids, of course, play isn’t about learning or planning or regulating emotions. It’s about having fun. Play may be “evolution’s way of building in an insurance policy” to learn and develop, said Dr. Feigenson. It’s so enjoyable that most kids can’t resist, and along the way they develop the skills they need to succeed as adults.
runlai_jiang

8 Dead as Truck Careens Down Bike Path in Manhattan in Terror Attack - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-shooting-lower-manhattan.html

shared by runlai_jiang on 01 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • The truck came crashing to a stop near the corner of Chambers and West Streets by Stuyvesant High School. Sirus Minovi, 14, a freshman there who was hanging out with friends, said people scattered.
  • Over the last two years, a terrorism investigation by the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security, the New York Police Department and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn resulted in charges against five men from
  • Martin Feely, a spokesman for the New York F.B.I. office, declined to comment on whether Mr. Saipov was known to the bureau.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The attack unfolded as nearby schools were letting out on a crisp Halloween afternoon. It ended five blocks north of the World Trade Center. The driver left a roughly mile-long crime scene: a tree-lined bike path strewn with bodies, mangled bicycles and bicycle parts, from wheels twisted like pretzels to a dislodged seat.
katherineharron

Donald Trump's twisted definition of toughness - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 02 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • "Today, I have strongly recommended to every governor to deploy the National Guard in sufficient numbers that we dominate the streets," he said.
  • "One law and order, and that is what it is, one law. We have one, beautiful law," he said.
  • D.C. had no problems last night," Trump tweeted Tuesday morning. "Many arrests. Great job done by all. Overwhelming force. Domination. Likewise, Minneapolis was great (thank you President Trump!)."
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The whole thing -- the speech punctuated with talk of "law and order" and the need to "dominate," the walk across ground that had been the site of protests moments before -- was orchestrated to push back against a story that had broken over the weekend: That amid the protests on Friday night outside the White House, Trump had been taken to the bunker under the White House for his protection.
  • The image of Trump cowering in a bunker while people take to the streets to protest the death of a(nother) unarmed black man immediately became fodder for Trump's two preferred mediums of communication: cable TV and Twitter. "Trump's Bunker" trended on Twitter. Cable TV repeatedly ran the story of a President being whisked away to safety.
  • On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump repeatedly defended the use of waterboarding and other methods of torture to get information out of enemy combatants. "Don't tell me it doesn't work — torture works,"
  • And the world is split between people willing to use their power over others and those too afraid to exert it.
  • Trump urged officers to treat arrested gang members rougher. He said this: "When you guys put somebody in the car and you're protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over? Like, don't hit their head, and they just killed somebody -- don't hit their head," Trump continued. "I said, you can take the hand away, OK?"
  • Throw them out into the cold," Trump famously/infamously said of protesters at a rally in Burlington, Vermont, in January 2016. "Don't give them their coats. No coats! Confiscate their coats."
  • Get tough Democrat Mayors and Governors," Trump urged in response to the protests. "These people are ANARCHISTS. Call in our National Guard NOW. The World is watching and laughing at you and Sleepy Joe. Is this what America wants? NO!!!"
  • There is nothing Trump cares more about -- and, of course, fears more -- than being perceived as weak and being mocked and laughed at for it. He is willing to say and do absolutely anything to keep from being put in that situation. So when he was being mocked for retreating to the White House bunker, his response was immediate: I'll show them. ... I'll walk right across the ground they were protesting on!
  • oughness is not always about exerting your dominance because you can. True strength is rooted in the actions you don't take, the ability to understand that brute force should be your last resort, not your first instinct.
  • But it's especially true for a President of the United States faced with protests on American streets driven by the death of yet another black man at the hands of the police. Truly tough people, truly strong people -- they don't need to show and tell everyone how strong and tough they are. It's in their restraint, in their understanding that might doesn't make right that their true strength shines through.Donald Trump doesn't know that.
katherineharron

George Floyd's heartbreaking cry for 'Mama' hits home (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 29 May 20 - No Cached
  • His final minutes in the custody of the police were captured in a devastating video, as he screamed "Mama." Floyd was pleading with the officers -- one of whom held a knee to his neck -- that he couldn't breathe, to the growing alarm of bystanders, one of whom recorded the scene. Floyd's mother is deceased. But in his cry -- "Mama!" -- I heard a twisted combination of hope and horror. Hope because in that moment he hoped the person who gave him life could save his life even in death. She'd undoubtedly done it before when she was alive. And horror because that's never how a black mama wants to hear her sacred title.
  • It's an unwavering declaration of faith. Whether they are three, 12, 20 or 46, like Floyd, children yell it when they're excited, proud, threatened or in pain.
  • I've heard that sound of panicked hope and belief that I could, and would, solve all problems and heal all wounds.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • I heard Floyd scream "Mama," and through my tears, even though I knew the events in the video had already unfolded to a tragic conclusion, I was still ready to fight. He wasn't my baby, but he was someone's child. And he needed someone with a mother's love to help him
  • I'm tired of being scared for him. I'm tired of reading about Ahmaud, Travis, George and so many others. The list never stops. I need the white mamas to share this burden. I need my white friends to love me and mine enough to come running, too.
  • While I'm waiting for white mothers to come running, to let me rest for just a moment while they carry the baton for a bit, I have a special thank you for my friend Stacie. I'm blessed with a multi-cultural array of friends. Stacie personifies compassion, sensitivity, godliness and intellect. She knows the world sees and treats her differently because she's white, financially comfortable and socially connected. In her heart, she's just a mama like me.
  • My baby calls me every time he's caught being black -- the security officer trailing him in the Harvard museum while he waited for his friend's commencement to start last May.
  • And the white woman who scurried away from the ladies' room on his college campus, presumably because he was walking toward her? Wasn't he just going in the same direction to use the adjacent men's room?
  • I need them to hear that cry and to tell their sons and daughters that my child is a human. I need them to declare and believe that he's in danger, that I can't protect him by myself and that his life matters to me and to them. I need them to tell their white friends' children, too. My child's life is sacred. My child is not dangerous.
  • She sees my blackness and the pain it brings. She'd never declare, as too many do, that she "doesn't see color." She sees it because she truly sees me. She knows it shapes how I see the world and how the world sees me. She knows my son, and she authentically cares about him. She knows I'm hurting without my having to tell her. And one mama to another, she cared.
johnsonel7

Why don't we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus? | Owen Jone... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...onavirus-urgent-climate-crisis

coronavirus climate change

shared by johnsonel7 on 06 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • It is a global emergency that has already killed on a mass scale and threatens to send millions more to early graves. As its effects spread, it could destabilise entire economies and overwhelm poorer countries lacking resources and infrastructure. But this is the climate crisis, not the coronavirus. Governments are not assembling emergency national plans and you’re not getting push notifications transmitted to your phone breathlessly alerting you to dramatic twists and developments from South Korea to Italy.
  • More than 3,000 people have succumbed to coronavirus yet, according to the World Health Organization, air pollution alone – just one aspect of our central planetary crisis – kills seven million people every year. There have been no Cobra meetings for the climate crisis, no sombre prime ministerial statements detailing the emergency action being taken to reassure the public. In time, we’ll overcome any coronavirus pandemic. With the climate crisis, we are already out of time
  • Pandemics and the climate crisis may go hand in hand, too: research suggests that changing weather patterns may drive species to higher altitudes, potentially putting them in contact with diseases for which they have little immunity.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • There is a key difference between coronavirus and climate crisis, of course, and it is shame. “We didn’t know coronavirus was coming,” says Stirling. “We’ve known the climate crisis was on the cards for 30 or 40 years.” And yet – despite being inadequately prepared because of an underfunded, under-resourced NHS – the government can swiftly announce an emergency pandemic plan.
melnikju

The False and Exaggerated Claims Still Being Spread About the Capitol Riot - Glenn Gree... - 0 views

greenwald.substack.com/...e-false-and-exaggerated-claims

shared by melnikju on 17 Feb 21 - No Cached
    • melnikju
      melnikju on 17 Feb 21
       
      Both conservatives and liberals, people on any side of the argument, are trying to twist it to make themselves look better
  • But none of the other four deaths were at the hands of the protesters: the only other person killed with deliberate violence was a pro-Trump protester, Ashli Babbitt, unarmed when shot in the neck by a police officer at close range. The other three deaths were all pro-Trump protesters: Kevin Greeson, who died of a heart attack outside the Capitol; Benjamin Philips, 50, “the founder of a pro-Trump website called Trumparoo,” who died of a stroke that day; and Rosanne Boyland, a fanatical Trump supporter whom the Times says was inadvertently “killed in a crush of fellow rioters during their attempt to fight through a police line.”
    • melnikju
      melnikju on 17 Feb 21
       
      Obviously, news coverage wouldn't want to make the rioters look innocent or hurt at any point, so they wouldn't want to cover this
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The problem with this story is that it is false in all respects.
  • nobody saw video of it. No photographs depicted it. To this day, no autopsy report has been released. No details from any official source have been provided.
  • “with a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.”
  • does not say whether it came from the police or protesters.
  • With the impeachment trial now over, the articles are now rewritten to reflect that the original story was false. But there was nothing done by The New York Times to explain an error of this magnitude, let alone to try to undo the damage it did by misleading the public. They did not expressly retract or even “correct” the story.
  • far-right forums
    • melnikju
      melnikju on 17 Feb 21
       
      dividing people more by using labels that are extreme
  • and the FBI has acknowledged it has no evidence to the contrary
  • So it matters a great deal legally, but also politically, if the U.S. really did suffer an armed insurrection and continues to face one. Though there is no controlling, clear definition, that term usually connotes not a three-hour riot but an ongoing, serious plot by a faction of the citizenry to overthrow or otherwise subvert the government.
  • people rightly conclude the propaganda is deliberate and trust in journalism erodes further.
  • One can — and should — condemn the January 6 riot without inflating the threat it posed. And one can — and should — insist on both factual accuracy and sober restraint without standing accused of sympathy for the rioters.
Javier E

Dhar Mann, YouTube's Moral Philosopher - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dhar-mann-youtube.html

philosopher philosophy moral youtube video

shared by Javier E on 20 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • His “focus on universal truths,” he believes, is what has allowed him “to build such a massive audience.”
  • t’s 25 to 34. “Facebook and YouTube don’t give data for audience under 13 so I can’t say for sure 7 to 10 is the fastest growing audience, it just feels like it based on my interactions with people,” he wrote in an email.
  • Most of his videos incorporate timely narratives about police-calling Karens and Covid-19 hoarders, but in style and tone they are more reminiscent of 1980s after-school specials and the educational short films of the ’50s than other content that’s popular today.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The characters are broad and simple, each representing a demographic that any fourth grader could recognize: angry mom, spoiled wife, mean girl, lazy husband. They seem almost like instructional videos an alien species might watch to learn the basic points of American social dynamics.
  • Mr. Mann’s moral philosophy can at times feel thin and absolutist. A common narrative arc involves a bully mocking the protagonist for being poor or having acne; then a twist of fate strikes the bully with poverty or pimples. The videos often imply that having any kind of social problem is a form of shameful karmic punishment.
  • the size of his audience suggests that Mr. Mann is tapping into something millions of people find compelling. In trying times — say, a pandemic with no end in sight paired with devastating wildfires on several continents and a bleak climate outlook — people want to see villains reformed and lessons delivered. No ambiguity, no debates. Everything turns out just right.
Javier E

Opinion | The Alt-Right Manipulated My Comic. Then A.I. Claimed It. - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...w-algorithim-took-my-work.html

AI identity abuse exploitation creator

shared by Javier E on 05 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Legally, it appears as though LAION was able to scour what seems like the entire internet because it deems itself a nonprofit organization engaging in academic research. While it was funded at least in part by Stability AI, the company that created Stable Diffusion, it is technically a separate entity. Stability AI then used its nonprofit research arm to create A.I. generators first via Stable Diffusion and then commercialized in a new model called DreamStudio.
  • hat makes up these data sets? Well, pretty much everything. For artists, many of us had what amounted to our entire portfolios fed into the data set without our consent. This means that A.I. generators were built on the backs of our copyrighted work, and through a legal loophole, they were able to produce copies of varying levels of sophistication.
  • eing able to imitate a living artist has obvious implications for our careers, and some artists are already dealing with real challenges to their livelihood.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Greg Rutkowski, a hugely popular concept artist, has been used in a prompt for Stable Diffusion upward of 100,000 times. Now, his name is no longer attached to just his own work, but it also summons a slew of imitations of varying quality that he hasn’t approved. This could confuse clients, and it muddies the consistent and precise output he usually produces. When I saw what was happening to him, I thought of my battle with my shadow self. We were each fighting a version of ourself that looked similar but that was uncanny, twisted in a way to which we didn’t consent.
  • In theory, everyone is at risk for their work or image to become a vulgarity with A.I., but I suspect those who will be the most hurt are those who are already facing the consequences of improving technology, namely members of marginalized groups.
  • In the future, with A.I. technology, many more people will have a shadow self with whom they must reckon. Once the features that we consider personal and unique — our facial structure, our handwriting, the way we draw — can be programmed and contorted at the click of a mouse, the possibilities for violations are endless.
  • I’ve been playing around with several generators, and so far none have mimicked my style in a way that can directly threaten my career, a fact that will almost certainly change as A.I. continues to improve. It’s undeniable; the A.I.s know me. Most have captured the outlines and signatures of my comics — black hair, bangs, striped T-shirts. To others, it may look like a drawing taking shape.I see a monster forming.
Javier E

Book Review: 'Life Is Hard,' by Kieran Setiya - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ife-is-hard-kieran-setiya.html

life phiosophy suffering book review psychology happiness success

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • “Life Is Hard” pushes back against many platitudes of contemporary American self-improvement culture. Setiya is no friend to positive thinking — at best, it requires self-deception, and at worst, such glass-half-full optimism can be cruel to those whose pain we refuse to recognize.
  • Another theory Setiya challenges is the idea that happiness should be life’s primary pursuit. Instead, he argues that we should try to live well within our limits, even if this sometimes means acknowledging difficult truths.
  • If you really consider “happiness” in its everyday sense — a feeling of contentment and pleasure — its desirability is complicated; we can certainly be made to feel good by ignoring injustice, wars, climate change or the hardships of aging. But we cannot live meaningfully that way.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • what does living well mean in practice? To Setiya, it lies in embracing one of the many possible “good-enough lives” instead of aching for a perfect one
  • Setiya’s approach blends empathy with common sense. True, a person who is blind or lacks full movement may not be able to enjoy certain pleasures — at least, in the typical way. And suffering injury can be traumatic. But none of us can fit everything worth doing into one lifetime. Our possibilities and our choices are always limited, and we can live fully within those limits.
  • he invites the reader to join him as he looks at life’s challenges — loneliness, injustice, grief — and in turning them over to examine every angle. Sometimes these twists make it difficult to grasp his ultimate point; in his discussion of the potential extinction of human beings, for instance, Setiya argues movingly that it is hard to find meaning in our actions without the promise of future societies who will enjoy the result
  • The golden thread running through “Life Is Hard” is Setiya’s belief in the value of well-directed attention. Pain, as much as we wish to avoid it, forces us to remember that we are indelibly connected to our bodies.
  • Listening carefully, whether to good friends or to strangers on a bus, can help us feel less lonely. “Close reading” other people, trying as hard as possible to see them in their full humanity, is a small step toward a more just world. By cultivating our sensitivity to ourselves and to others, we escape another destructive modern myth: that we are separate from other people, and that we can live well without caring for them.
  • Mindfulness is also Setiya’s answer to the threat of personal failure. If we can teach ourselves to notice all the splendid, varied incidents of our lives, he claims, we are much less likely to brand ourselves with a single label, winner or loser.
  • He encourages readers to abandon simple narratives about success over the course of a lifetime. I suspect this is why Setiya so often finds his conclusions in poetry, not in philosophy: The experience of suffering leads to messy, counterintuitive truths.
  • “Life Is Hard” is a humane consolation for challenging times. Reading it is like speaking with a thoughtful friend who never tells you to cheer up, but, by offering gentle companionship and a change of perspective, makes you feel better anyway.
karenmcgregor

Solving the Puzzle: Network Design Assignment Helpers Unleashed - 0 views

Welcome to https://www.computernetworkassignmenthelp.com, where we unravel the complexities of network design assignments and bring you a team of expert network design assignment helpers ready to a...

#networkdesignassignmenthelper #assignmenthelpservices #onlinelearning #elearning #student #education technology knowledge education

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