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Javier E

This Sociological Theory Explains Why Wall Street Is Rigged for Crisis - Bill Davidow -... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...280077

theory complexity normal accident system sociology

shared by Javier E on 30 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • near brush with nuclear catastrophe, brought on by a single foraging bear, is an example of what sociologist Charles Perrow calls a “normal accident.” These frightening incidents are “normal” not because they happen often, but because they are almost certain to occur in any tightly connected complex system.
  • Perrow had a fairly simple solution for the problem. High-risk systems, such as nuclear power plants, should be built only as a last resort.
  • errow stresses the role that human error and mismanagement play in these scenarios. The important lesson: failures in complex systems are caused not only by the hardware and software problems but by people and their motivations.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Normal accidents, like these, occur because two or more independent failures happen and interact in unpredictable ways. After studying calamities such as the Three Mile Island meltdown, explosions at chemical plants, and ships colliding in the open sea, Perrow observed that safety mechanisms put in place to make the systems safer in fact frequently trigger the final failure.
  • That solution won’t work for financial markets. We need currency hedges, futures markets, and derivatives to keep our economic systems functioning. But we also have to realize tweaking the current system will not fix the problem. Most of the supposedly strong cures implemented by legislators to date, such as prohibiting bank holding companies from proprietary trading, are inadequate as well.
  • how do we make our markets less danger prone? A good place to start would be to reduce the excessive trading volumes that lie at the root of accidents like the Flash Freeze, Flash Cash, and Goldman debacle. There is no valid reason for high frequency trading to make up more than 50 percent of all stock trades, and there is no pressing need for some $4 trillion in daily foreign currency transactions. A Tobin tax on transactions, first suggested by Noble laureate James Tobin in 1972, of as little as 0.1 percent, would significantly reduce these volumes. Smaller transaction volumes would reduce the size of accidents and possibly their frequency.
  • But tinkering with the current system and looking for easy ways out, as we are now, is bound to fail. We’re in danger of letting normal accidents in the financial system become all too normal.
sissij

Woman Drivers: Worse Than Men? Yes... and No | Reader's Digest - 0 views

www.rd.com/...-men-better-drivers-than-women

research knowledge language bias

shared by sissij on 10 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • In studies, men as a whole display less cautious behavior than women, such as driving at higher speeds and closer to other cars, not wearing seat belts, and driving while intoxicated more often.
  • However, this slight edge in ability doesn’t translate into better driving records.
  • According to one study, men are more than three times as likely to be ticketed for “aggressive driving” than women, and more than 25 percent as likely to be at fault in an accident.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Similarly, the stereotype that women are weaker drivers may negatively affect their performance behind the wheel.
  • sissij on 10 Nov 16
     
    I found it very interesting that although there is a stereotype that women drive poorly, men actually cause more accidents in researches. I very agree with the author because he make the term "better" clear in the passage, which most other claims mentioned vaguely. In his writing, "better" has two meanings: how safe one drives and how well one drives. I think looking at the problem through the two very different meaning of "better" can lead to very different conclusions. I think that's why different article held opposite views on this issue. They don't speak in the same language; they are speaking of different "better"s. --Sissi (11/10/2016)
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.”
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • 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
  • “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.
  • 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.
  • 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
marleen_ueberall

Does Everything Happen for a Reason? | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...oes-everything-happen-reason-0

Reason

shared by marleen_ueberall on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • When people have to cope with difficult situations in their lives, they sometimes reassure themselves by saying that everything happens for a reason.
  • When people have to cope with difficult situations in their lives, they sometimes reassure themselves by saying that everything happens for a reason.
  • The saying that everything happens for a reason is the modern, New Age version of the old religious saying: “It’s God’s will.”
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  • problem—the complete lack of evidence that they’re true. 
  • Even if events that affect human lives do not happen by quantum chance, many of them should be viewed as happening by accident, in the sense that they are the improbable result of the intersection of independent causal chains.
  • The German philosopher Hegel maintained that in historical development the real is rational and the rational is real.
  • n history, economics, biology, and psychology, we should always be willing to consider evidence for the alternative hypothesis that some events occur because of a combination of chance, accidents, and human irrationality.
  • But if the real isn’t rational, how can we cope with life’s disasters?
  • Life can be highly meaningful even if some things that happen are just accidents. Stuff happens and you deal with it.
Javier E

Plagues of the Body and Plagues of the Mind - The Bulwark - 0 views

www.thebulwark.com/lagues-of-the-mind-orhan-pamuk

turkey literature authoritarian nationalism history culture politics narrative postmodernism myth

shared by Javier E on 04 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • Though Pamuk is playful where Tolstoy is strident, behind all the beautiful descriptions of Mingherian flowers and mountains of rose-colored marble, he is undeniably making an argument. If Tolstoy’s great theme in War and Peace is the powerlessness of humanity to remake the world through acts of will alone, Pamuk’s is the role of accident in shaping history and its writing. Tolstoy’s enemy was Napoleon, the embodiment of modernity’s hubris. Pamuk’s is the historiographic crimes of nationalism.
  • This is a bold thing to say in Turkey, a country that has gone to great lengths to promulgate a heroic and highly sanitized account of its founding. It is even bolder when one notes that Mingheria’s struggle for independence, and its troubled post-independence history, function very well as an allegory of Turkey itself. Major Kâmil is, like Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, an Ottoman war hero and secularist who tries to found a country divided by ethnic and religious rivalries on a conception of linguistic and ethnic nationalism.
  • Mingheria becomes independent not only through the great accident of the plague, but also through thousands of tiny accidents at crucial moments. The problem with nations, the book suggests, is that they take all these small instances in which things could just as well have been otherwise and cast them as a monumental inevitability. Once a nation-state comes into existence, the machinery of education and civic ritual and the instruments of propaganda and state violence are wielded to turn chance into fate. And that fate becomes inexorable.
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  • Like all of these books, it is about the power and untrustworthiness of written texts—history texts in particular. These various strands don’t always cohere. The question of who killed Bonkowski Pasha is part of the main story of the novel, and yet it disappears for chapters at a time. Perhaps more seriously, the postmodern elements sometimes sit uncomfortably with the torrents of historical and sensory detail
lenaurick

IQ can predict your risk of death, and 8 other smart facts about intelligence - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...iq-test-intelligence

intelligence science research psychology brain science education

shared by lenaurick on 31 May 16 - No Cached
  • But according to Stuart Ritchie, an intelligence researcher at the University of Edinburgh, there's a massive amount of data showing that it's one of the best predictors of someone's longevity, health, and prosperity
  • In a new book, Intelligence: All that Matters, Ritchie persuasively argues that IQ doesn't necessarily set the limit for what we can do, but it does give us a starting point
  • Most people you meet are probably average, and a few are extraordinarily smart. Just 2.2 percent have an IQ of 130 or greate
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • "The classic finding — I would say it is the most replicated finding in psychology — is that people who are good at one type of mental task tend to be good at them all,"
  • G-factor is real in the sense it can predict outcomes in our lives — how much money you'll make, how productive of a worker you might be, and, most chillingly, how likely you are to die an earlier death.
  • According to the research, people with high IQs tend to be healthier and live longer than the rest of us
  • One is the fact that people with higher IQs tend to make more money than people with lower scores. Money is helpful in maintaining weight, nutrition, and accessing good health care.
  • IQ often beats personality when it comes to predicting life outcomes: Personality traits, a recent study found, can explain about 4 percent of the variance in test scores for students under age 16. IQ can explain 25 percent, or an even higher proportion, depending on the study.
  • Many of these correlations are less than .5, which means there's plenty of room for individual differences. So, yes, very smart people who are awful at their jobs exist. You're just less likely to come across them.
  • The correlation between IQ and happiness is usually positive, but also usually smaller than one might expect (and sometimes not statistically significant)," Ritchie says.
  • It could also be that people with higher IQs are smart enough to avoid accidents and mishaps. There's actually some evidence to support this: Higher-IQ people are less likely to die in traffic accidents.
  • Even though intelligence generally declines with age, those who had high IQs as children were most likely to retain their smarts as very old people.
  • "If we know the genes related to intelligence — and we know these genes are related to cognitive decline as well — then we can start to a predict who is going to have the worst cognitive decline, and devote health care medical resources to them," he says.
  • Studies comparing identical and fraternal twins find about half of IQ can be explained by genetics.
  • genetics seems to become more predictive of IQ with age.
  • The idea is as we age, we grow more in control of our environments. Those environments we create can then "amplify" the potential of our genes.
  • About half the variability in IQ is attributed to the environment. Access to nutrition, education, and health care appear to play a big role.
  • People’s lives are really messy, and the environments they are in are messy. There’s a possibility that a lot of the environmental effect on a person’s intelligence is random."
  • Hurray! Mean IQ scores appear to be increasing between 2 and 3 points per decade.
  • This phenomenon is know as the Flynn effect, and it is likely the result of increasing quality of childhood nutrition, health care, and education.
Emily Freilich

All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines - Nicholas ... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...309516

automation knowledge technology psychology

shared by Emily Freilich on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • We rely on computers to fly our planes, find our cancers, design our buildings, audit our businesses. That's all well and good. But what happens when the computer fails?
  • On the evening of February 12, 2009, a Continental Connection commuter flight made its way through blustery weather between Newark, New Jersey, and Buffalo, New York.
  • The Q400 was well into its approach to the Buffalo airport, its landing gear down, its wing flaps out, when the pilot’s control yoke began to shudder noisily, a signal that the plane was losing lift and risked going into an aerodynamic stall. The autopilot disconnected, and the captain took over the controls. He reacted quickly, but he did precisely the wrong thing: he jerked back on the yoke, lifting the plane’s nose and reducing its airspeed, instead of pushing the yoke forward to gain velocity.
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  • The crash, which killed all 49 people on board as well as one person on the ground, should never have happened.
  • aptain’s response to the stall warning, the investigators reported, “should have been automatic, but his improper flight control inputs were inconsistent with his training” and instead revealed “startle and confusion.
  • Automation has become so sophisticated that on a typical passenger flight, a human pilot holds the controls for a grand total of just three minutes.
  • We humans have been handing off chores, both physical and mental, to tools since the invention of the lever, the wheel, and the counting bead.
  • And that, many aviation and automation experts have concluded, is a problem. Overuse of automation erodes pilots’ expertise and dulls their reflexes,
  • No one doubts that autopilot has contributed to improvements in flight safety over the years. It reduces pilot fatigue and provides advance warnings of problems, and it can keep a plane airborne should the crew become disabled. But the steady overall decline in plane crashes masks the recent arrival of “a spectacularly new type of accident,”
  • “We’re forgetting how to fly.”
  • The experience of airlines should give us pause. It reveals that automation, for all its benefits, can take a toll on the performance and talents of those who rely on it. The implications go well beyond safety. Because automation alters how we act, how we learn, and what we know, it has an ethical dimension. The choices we make, or fail to make, about which tasks we hand off to machines shape our lives and the place we make for ourselves in the world.
  • What pilots spend a lot of time doing is monitoring screens and keying in data. They’ve become, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say, computer operators.
  • Examples of complacency and bias have been well documented in high-risk situations—on flight decks and battlefields, in factory control rooms—but recent studies suggest that the problems can bedevil anyone working with a computer
  • That may leave the person operating the computer to play the role of a high-tech clerk—entering data, monitoring outputs, and watching for failures. Rather than opening new frontiers of thought and action, software ends up narrowing our focus.
  • A labor-saving device doesn’t just provide a substitute for some isolated component of a job or other activity. It alters the character of the entire task, including the roles, attitudes, and skills of the people taking part.
  • when we work with computers, we often fall victim to two cognitive ailments—complacency and bias—that can undercut our performance and lead to mistakes. Automation complacency occurs when a computer lulls us into a false sense of security. Confident that the machine will work flawlessly and handle any problem that crops up, we allow our attention to drift.
  • Automation bias occurs when we place too much faith in the accuracy of the information coming through our monitors. Our trust in the software becomes so strong that we ignore or discount other information sources, including our own eyes and ears
  • Automation is different now. Computers can be programmed to perform complex activities in which a succession of tightly coordinated tasks is carried out through an evaluation of many variables. Many software programs take on intellectual work—observing and sensing, analyzing and judging, even making decisions—that until recently was considered the preserve of humans.
  • Automation turns us from actors into observers. Instead of manipulating the yoke, we watch the screen. That shift may make our lives easier, but it can also inhibit the development of expertise.
  • Since the late 1970s, psychologists have been documenting a phenomenon called the “generation effect.” It was first observed in studies of vocabulary, which revealed that people remember words much better when they actively call them to mind—when they generate them—than when they simply read them.
  • When you engage actively in a task, you set off intricate mental processes that allow you to retain more knowledge. You learn more and remember more. When you repeat the same task over a long period, your brain constructs specialized neural circuits dedicated to the activit
  • What looks like instinct is hard-won skill, skill that requires exactly the kind of struggle that modern software seeks to alleviate.
  • In many businesses, managers and other professionals have come to depend on decision-support systems to analyze information and suggest courses of action. Accountants, for example, use the systems in corporate audits. The applications speed the work, but some signs suggest that as the software becomes more capable, the accountants become less so.
  • You can put limits on the scope of automation, making sure that people working with computers perform challenging tasks rather than merely observing.
  • Experts used to assume that there were limits to the ability of programmers to automate complicated tasks, particularly those involving sensory perception, pattern recognition, and conceptual knowledge
  • Who needs humans, anyway? That question, in one rhetorical form or another, comes up frequently in discussions of automation. If computers’ abilities are expanding so quickly and if people, by comparison, seem slow, clumsy, and error-prone, why not build immaculately self-contained systems that perform flawlessly without any human oversight or intervention? Why not take the human factor out of the equation?
  • The cure for imperfect automation is total automation.
  • That idea is seductive, but no machine is infallible. Sooner or later, even the most advanced technology will break down, misfire, or, in the case of a computerized system, encounter circumstances that its designers never anticipated. As automation technologies become more complex, relying on interdependencies among algorithms, databases, sensors, and mechanical parts, the potential sources of failure multiply. They also become harder to detect.
  • conundrum of computer automation.
  • Because many system designers assume that human operators are “unreliable and inefficient,” at least when compared with a computer, they strive to give the operators as small a role as possible.
  • People end up functioning as mere monitors, passive watchers of screens. That’s a job that humans, with our notoriously wandering minds, are especially bad at
  • people have trouble maintaining their attention on a stable display of information for more than half an hour. “This means,” Bainbridge observed, “that it is humanly impossible to carry out the basic function of monitoring for unlikely abnormalities.”
  • a person’s skills “deteriorate when they are not used,” even an experienced operator will eventually begin to act like an inexperienced one if restricted to just watching.
  • You can program software to shift control back to human operators at frequent but irregular intervals; knowing that they may need to take command at any moment keeps people engaged, promoting situational awareness and learning.
  • What’s most astonishing, and unsettling, about computer automation is that it’s still in its early stages.
  • most software applications don’t foster learning and engagement. In fact, they have the opposite effect. That’s because taking the steps necessary to promote the development and maintenance of expertise almost always entails a sacrifice of speed and productivity.
  • Learning requires inefficiency. Businesses, which seek to maximize productivity and profit, would rarely accept such a trade-off. Individuals, too, almost always seek efficiency and convenience.
  • Abstract concerns about the fate of human talent can’t compete with the allure of saving time and money.
  • The small island of Igloolik, off the coast of the Melville Peninsula in the Nunavut territory of northern Canada, is a bewildering place in the winter.
  • , Inuit hunters have for some 4,000 years ventured out from their homes on the island and traveled across miles of ice and tundra to search for game. The hunters’ ability to navigate vast stretches of the barren Arctic terrain, where landmarks are few, snow formations are in constant flux, and trails disappear overnight, has amazed explorers and scientists for centuries. The Inuit’s extraordinary way-finding skills are born not of technological prowess—they long eschewed maps and compasses—but of a profound understanding of winds, snowdrift patterns, animal behavior, stars, and tides.
  • The Igloolik hunters have begun to rely on computer-generated maps to get around. Adoption of GPS technology has been particularly strong among younger Inuit, and it’s not hard to understand why.
  • But as GPS devices have proliferated on Igloolik, reports of serious accidents during hunts have spread. A hunter who hasn’t developed way-finding skills can easily become lost, particularly if his GPS receiver fails.
  • The routes so meticulously plotted on satellite maps can also give hunters tunnel vision, leading them onto thin ice or into other hazards a skilled navigator would avoid.
  • An Inuit on a GPS-equipped snowmobile is not so different from a suburban commuter in a GPS-equipped SUV: as he devotes his attention to the instructions coming from the computer, he loses sight of his surroundings. He travels “blindfolded,” as Aporta puts it
  • A unique talent that has distinguished a people for centuries may evaporate in a generation.
  • Computer automation severs the ends from the means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing. As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face an existential question: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want?
  • Emily Freilich on 01 Nov 13
     
    Automation increases efficiency and speed of tasks, but decreases the individual's knowledge of a task and decrease's a human's ability to learn. 
Javier E

When a 1-in-a-Billion Chance of Accident May Not Seem 'Safe Enough' - James Fallows - T... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...359780

numeracy probability safety standards

shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • First-world commercial air travel has become so extremely safe that when something does go wrong, figuring it out can be a huge challenge -- which heightens the mystery and, for many people, the terror of these episodes, by making them seem so random.
  • the FAA standard, and pretty much the global standard, for certifying critical components and systems is one in a billion probability of failure, or 10 to the minus 9th. The FAA calls this standard "improbable."
  • That means in a transport category airplane [JF note: this includes airliners] the certification standard for a failure, or combination of failures, that would prevent the airplane from successfully landing on a runway must be one in a billion flights. Not hours, flights.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Transport flying is now so safe that the long time standard of 10 to the minus 
  • 9th may not satisfy the public
sissij

Want to Get From A to B Safer? The Color of Your Car Matters | Big Think - 2 views

bigthink.com/...w-taxis-may-be-safer-than-blue

brain science research education

shared by sissij on 16 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • If you’ve taken to the United States streets anytime lately, you may have noticed that most public school buses are a very particular shade of yellow. That shade is called National School Bus Glossy Yellow in Canada and the US, and it was specially designed by Dr. Frank Cyr.
  • Yellow is easy to see in the dim lights of early morning or late evening, and because it's seen across both the green and red cones in the eye, it pops in our vision faster than other colors.
  • What’s more, while the majority of those who are color blind have trouble distinguishing red from green, they can still see yellow just fine.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • It makes sense that yellow taxi cabs are safer than the blue ones.
  • Furthermore, the drivers tend to drive at similar speeds, so the color of the cabs isn’t attracting certain driver personalities. It is mostly linked to the color of the cab.
  • The long-standing association of yellow being the color of cabs means many people purchase cars that are specifically not yellow, because of the connection, but they will purchase blue cars. People are more careful around the yellow vehicle for the same reason they are careful around the school bus: they know what the color means.
  • Of course, this is all a short-term worry: we won't be at the mercy human error for much longer.
  • sissij on 16 Mar 17
     
    I think this is very interesting that even the color of a car can be associated with the accident rate of the taxi. The yellow color on the taxi make use of the pattern recognition in human mind as people tends to make connection between yellow and caution. I really like this idea because it shows that sometimes the fallacies in our logic can benefit us in the modern society. It is not totally useless. --Sissi (3/15/2017)
Javier E

'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia | Technol... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...iction-silicon-valley-dystopia

dystopia distraction attention fb google manipulation advertising addiction psychology technology social media brain science

shared by Javier E on 06 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.
  • “It is very common,” Rosenstein says, “for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.”
  • most concerned about the psychological effects on people who, research shows, touch, swipe or tap their phone 2,617 times a day.
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”
  • Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.
  • Without irony, Eyal finished his talk with some personal tips for resisting the lure of technology. He told his audience he uses a Chrome extension, called DF YouTube, “which scrubs out a lot of those external triggers” he writes about in his book, and recommended an app called Pocket Points that “rewards you for staying off your phone when you need to focus”.
  • “One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before,” Rosenstein says. It may or may not be relevant that Rosenstein, Pearlman and most of the tech insiders questioning today’s attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls.
  • One morning in April this year, designers, programmers and tech entrepreneurs from across the world gathered at a conference centre on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. They had each paid up to $1,700 to learn how to manipulate people into habitual use of their products, on a course curated by conference organiser Nir Eyal.
  • Eyal, 39, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, has spent several years consulting for the tech industry, teaching techniques he developed by closely studying how the Silicon Valley giants operate.
  • “The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions,” Eyal writes. “It’s the impulse to check a message notification. It’s the pull to visit YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter for just a few minutes, only to find yourself still tapping and scrolling an hour later.” None of this is an accident, he writes. It is all “just as their designers intended”
  • He explains the subtle psychological tricks that can be used to make people develop habits, such as varying the rewards people receive to create “a craving”, or exploiting negative emotions that can act as “triggers”. “Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation,” Eyal writes.
  • The most seductive design, Harris explains, exploits the same psychological susceptibility that makes gambling so compulsive: variable rewards. When we tap those apps with red icons, we don’t know whether we’ll discover an interesting email, an avalanche of “likes”, or nothing at all. It is the possibility of disappointment that makes it so compulsive.
  • Finally, Eyal confided the lengths he goes to protect his own family. He has installed in his house an outlet timer connected to a router that cuts off access to the internet at a set time every day. “The idea is to remember that we are not powerless,” he said. “We are in control.
  • But are we? If the people who built these technologies are taking such radical steps to wean themselves free, can the rest of us reasonably be expected to exercise our free will?
  • Not according to Tristan Harris, a 33-year-old former Google employee turned vocal critic of the tech industry. “All of us are jacked into this system,” he says. “All of our minds can be hijacked. Our choices are not as free as we think they are.”
  • Harris, who has been branded “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”, insists that billions of people have little choice over whether they use these now ubiquitous technologies, and are largely unaware of the invisible ways in which a small number of people in Silicon Valley are shaping their lives.
  • “I don’t know a more urgent problem than this,” Harris says. “It’s changing our democracy, and it’s changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships that we want with each other.” Harris went public – giving talks, writing papers, meeting lawmakers and campaigning for reform after three years struggling to effect change inside Google’s Mountain View headquarters.
  • He explored how LinkedIn exploits a need for social reciprocity to widen its network; how YouTube and Netflix autoplay videos and next episodes, depriving users of a choice about whether or not they want to keep watching; how Snapchat created its addictive Snapstreaks feature, encouraging near-constant communication between its mostly teenage users.
  • The techniques these companies use are not always generic: they can be algorithmically tailored to each person. An internal Facebook report leaked this year, for example, revealed that the company can identify when teens feel “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost”. Such granular information, Harris adds, is “a perfect model of what buttons you can push in a particular person”.
  • Tech companies can exploit such vulnerabilities to keep people hooked; manipulating, for example, when people receive “likes” for their posts, ensuring they arrive when an individual is likely to feel vulnerable, or in need of approval, or maybe just bored. And the very same techniques can be sold to the highest bidder. “There’s no ethics,” he says. A company paying Facebook to use its levers of persuasion could be a car business targeting tailored advertisements to different types of users who want a new vehicle. Or it could be a Moscow-based troll farm seeking to turn voters in a swing county in Wisconsin.
  • It was Rosenstein’s colleague, Leah Pearlman, then a product manager at Facebook and on the team that created the Facebook “like”, who announced the feature in a 2009 blogpost. Now 35 and an illustrator, Pearlman confirmed via email that she, too, has grown disaffected with Facebook “likes” and other addictive feedback loops. She has installed a web browser plug-in to eradicate her Facebook news feed, and hired a social media manager to monitor her Facebook page so that she doesn’t have to.
  • Harris believes that tech companies never deliberately set out to make their products addictive. They were responding to the incentives of an advertising economy, experimenting with techniques that might capture people’s attention, even stumbling across highly effective design by accident.
  • It’s this that explains how the pull-to-refresh mechanism, whereby users swipe down, pause and wait to see what content appears, rapidly became one of the most addictive and ubiquitous design features in modern technology. “Each time you’re swiping down, it’s like a slot machine,” Harris says. “You don’t know what’s coming next. Sometimes it’s a beautiful photo. Sometimes it’s just an ad.”
  • The reality TV star’s campaign, he said, had heralded a watershed in which “the new, digitally supercharged dynamics of the attention economy have finally crossed a threshold and become manifest in the political realm”.
  • “Smartphones are useful tools,” he says. “But they’re addictive. Pull-to-refresh is addictive. Twitter is addictive. These are not good things. When I was working on them, it was not something I was mature enough to think about. I’m not saying I’m mature now, but I’m a little bit more mature, and I regret the downsides.”
  • All of it, he says, is reward-based behaviour that activates the brain’s dopamine pathways. He sometimes finds himself clicking on the red icons beside his apps “to make them go away”, but is conflicted about the ethics of exploiting people’s psychological vulnerabilities. “It is not inherently evil to bring people back to your product,” he says. “It’s capitalism.”
  • He identifies the advent of the smartphone as a turning point, raising the stakes in an arms race for people’s attention. “Facebook and Google assert with merit that they are giving users what they want,” McNamee says. “The same can be said about tobacco companies and drug dealers.”
  • McNamee chooses his words carefully. “The people who run Facebook and Google are good people, whose well-intentioned strategies have led to horrific unintended consequences,” he says. “The problem is that there is nothing the companies can do to address the harm unless they abandon their current advertising models.”
  • But how can Google and Facebook be forced to abandon the business models that have transformed them into two of the most profitable companies on the planet?
  • McNamee believes the companies he invested in should be subjected to greater regulation, including new anti-monopoly rules. In Washington, there is growing appetite, on both sides of the political divide, to rein in Silicon Valley. But McNamee worries the behemoths he helped build may already be too big to curtail.
  • Rosenstein, the Facebook “like” co-creator, believes there may be a case for state regulation of “psychologically manipulative advertising”, saying the moral impetus is comparable to taking action against fossil fuel or tobacco companies. “If we only care about profit maximisation,” he says, “we will go rapidly into dystopia.”
  • James Williams does not believe talk of dystopia is far-fetched. The ex-Google strategist who built the metrics system for the company’s global search advertising business, he has had a front-row view of an industry he describes as the “largest, most standardised and most centralised form of attentional control in human history”.
  • It is a journey that has led him to question whether democracy can survive the new technological age.
  • He says his epiphany came a few years ago, when he noticed he was surrounded by technology that was inhibiting him from concentrating on the things he wanted to focus on. “It was that kind of individual, existential realisation: what’s going on?” he says. “Isn’t technology supposed to be doing the complete opposite of this?
  • That discomfort was compounded during a moment at work, when he glanced at one of Google’s dashboards, a multicoloured display showing how much of people’s attention the company had commandeered for advertisers. “I realised: this is literally a million people that we’ve sort of nudged or persuaded to do this thing that they weren’t going to otherwise do,” he recalls.
  • Williams and Harris left Google around the same time, and co-founded an advocacy group, Time Well Spent, that seeks to build public momentum for a change in the way big tech companies think about design. Williams finds it hard to comprehend why this issue is not “on the front page of every newspaper every day.
  • “Eighty-seven percent of people wake up and go to sleep with their smartphones,” he says. The entire world now has a new prism through which to understand politics, and Williams worries the consequences are profound.
  • g. “The attention economy incentivises the design of technologies that grab our attention,” he says. “In so doing, it privileges our impulses over our intentions.”
  • That means privileging what is sensational over what is nuanced, appealing to emotion, anger and outrage. The news media is increasingly working in service to tech companies, Williams adds, and must play by the rules of the attention economy to “sensationalise, bait and entertain in order to survive”.
  • It is not just shady or bad actors who were exploiting the internet to change public opinion. The attention economy itself is set up to promote a phenomenon like Trump, who is masterly at grabbing and retaining the attention of supporters and critics alike, often by exploiting or creating outrage.
  • All of which has left Brichter, who has put his design work on the backburner while he focuses on building a house in New Jersey, questioning his legacy. “I’ve spent many hours and weeks and months and years thinking about whether anything I’ve done has made a net positive impact on society or humanity at all,” he says. He has blocked certain websites, turned off push notifications, restricted his use of the Telegram app to message only with his wife and two close friends, and tried to wean himself off Twitter. “I still waste time on it,” he confesses, “just reading stupid news I already know about.” He charges his phone in the kitchen, plugging it in at 7pm and not touching it until the next morning.
  • He stresses these dynamics are by no means isolated to the political right: they also play a role, he believes, in the unexpected popularity of leftwing politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, and the frequent outbreaks of internet outrage over issues that ignite fury among progressives.
  • All of which, Williams says, is not only distorting the way we view politics but, over time, may be changing the way we think, making us less rational and more impulsive. “We’ve habituated ourselves into a perpetual cognitive style of outrage, by internalising the dynamics of the medium,” he says.
  • It was another English science fiction writer, Aldous Huxley, who provided the more prescient observation when he warned that Orwellian-style coercion was less of a threat to democracy than the more subtle power of psychological manipulation, and “man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”.
  • If the attention economy erodes our ability to remember, to reason, to make decisions for ourselves – faculties that are essential to self-governance – what hope is there for democracy itself?
  • “The dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will,” he says. “If politics is an expression of our human will, on individual and collective levels, then the attention economy is directly undermining the assumptions that democracy rests on.”
jmfinizio

Egypt train crash: More than 30 killed in Sohag governorate as trains collide - CNN - 0 views

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

egypt train crash killed

shared by jmfinizio on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • At least 32 people have been killed and 84 injured after two trains collided in Egypt on Friday, according to government statements.
  • The collision happened after an unidentified person pulled an emergency brake, Egypt's railway authority said in a statement.
  • Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said that "whoever has caused the Sohag train accident, will receive the deterrent penalty."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But the most lethal accident in Egyptian rail history occurred in 2002, when a fire on a passenger train traveling from Cairo south to Luxor killed more than 360 people.
anonymous

Opinion | I Don't Want Another Family to Lose a Child the Way We Did - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...suicide-prevention.html

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • I Don’t Want Another Family to Lose a Child the Way We Did
  • The thought of suicide is terrifying, but we have to make talking about it a part of everyday life.
  • I always felt so blessed watching my boy-girl twins; even as teenagers they would walk arm in arm down the street, chatting and laughing together.
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • But that blessed feeling evaporated in June of 2019, when I lost my daughter, Frankie, to suicide, three weeks before her high school graduation
  • Ever since that day, I have thought of little else except how I could help the next struggling teenager, the next Frankie.
  • Several days after her passing, we opened our home up to our community, including Frankie’s very large group of teenage friends
  • “What strength Frankie had. It must have taken enormous energy for her to do what she did each day.”
  • That was Frankie. She had the strength to engage in school and in theater, despite her anxiety and depression. She had an ability to connect — emotionally, profoundly — with others, even when she was struggling herself
  • “empathy personified, with quite the fabulous earring collection.”
  • Whether that strength came from her home or somewhere else, or both, Frankie just had a way of drawing out warmth wherever she went.
  • Just as my parents couldn’t predict in the 1980s what seatbelt safety would look like now, I am not sure what suicide prevention should look like in the future.
  • Suicidal thinking, whether it is the result of mental illness, stress, trauma or loss, is actually far more common and difficult to see than many of us realize
  • A June 2020 Centers for Disease Control survey found that one in four 18- to 24-year-olds reported that they had seriously thought about taking their lives in the past 30 days; prepandemic estimates found that just under one in five high schoolers had seriously considered suicide, and just under one in 10 had made at least one suicide attempt during the previous year.
  • Despite 50 years of research, predicting death by suicide is still nearly impossible
  • Like others who have lost a child to suicide, I have spent countless hours going over relentless “what ifs.”
  • Maybe what we need are seatbelts for suicide.
  • “Click it or Ticket” was born in part out of a concern in the 1980s about teenagers dying in car accidents. Just as with suicides today, adults couldn’t predict who would get into a car accident, and one of the best solutions we had — seatbelts — was used routinely, in some estimates, by only 15 percent of the population. Indeed, as children, my siblings and I used to make a game of rolling around in the back of our car, seatbelts ignored.
  • Three decades later, our world is unlike anything I could have imagined as a child. Putting on a seatbelt is the first lesson of driver’s education; cars get inspected annually for working seatbelts; car companies embed those annoying beeping sounds to remind you to buckle your seatbelt
  • But like many who struggle with suicidal thinking, she kept her own pain camouflaged for a long time, perhaps for too long.
  • Most of us (estimates range as high as 91 percent) now wear a seatbelt.
  • But I imagine a world in which every health worker, school professional, employer and religious leader can recognize the signs of suicidal thinking and know how to ask about it, respond to it and offer resources to someone who is struggling
  • When I told Frankie’s orthodontist about her suicide, his response surprised me: “We really don’t come across that in our practice.” Even though orthodontists don’t ask about it, they see children during their early teenage years, when suicidal thinking often begins to emerge. Can you imagine a world in which signs for the prevention hotline and text line are posted for kids to see as they get their braces adjusted?
  • What if the annual teenage pediatric checkup involved a discussion of one-at-a-time pill packaging and boxes to lock up lethal medications, the way there is a discussion of baby-proofing homes when children start to crawl? What if pediatricians handed each adolescent a card with the prevention hotline on it (or better yet, if companies preprogrammed that number into cellphones) and the pediatrician talked through what happens when a teenager calls? What if doctors coached parents on how to ask their teenager, “Are you thinking about suicide?”
  • What if we required and funded every school to put in place one of the existing programs that train teachers and other school professionals to be a resource for struggling students?
  • I recognize that despite progress identifying effective programs to combat suicidal thinking, their success rate and simplicity does not compare with what we see with seatbelts. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do more.
  • Part of doing more also includes making the world more just and caring. To give one example, state-level same-sex-marriage policies that were in place before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationally have been linked to reductions in suicide attempts among adolescents, especially among sexual minorities.
  • Just as safer highways and car models make seatbelts more effective, asking about and responding to suicidal thinking is only one part of a solution that also includes attention to societal injustices.
  • I understand, of course, that asking about suicidal thinking is scary. But if it is scary for you to ask about it, it is even scarier for the teenager who is thinking about it.
  • I will never forget sitting with Frankie in the waiting room in the pediatric psychiatric wing on the night I brought her to the inpatient unit, three months before she took her life
  • “You know, I am so glad you finally know.” I could hear the relief in her voice. I just nodded, understandingly, but it broke my heart that she held on to such a painful secret for so long.
  • I find myself inspired by Frankie’s teenage friends, who cared deeply for her and now support one another after her passing.
  • On good days, she would sit on the worn couch in that office, snuggle in a pile of teenagers and discuss plays, schoolwork and their lives.
  • And in that corner space, she would text a friend to help her get to class or, after she had opened up about her struggles, encourage others to open up as well.
  • The fall after Frankie left us, some students decided to remake that hidden corner, dotting the walls with colored Post-it notes. Scrawled on a pink Post-it were the words “you matter”; a yellow one read “it gets better”; an orange one shared a cellphone number to call for help. Tiny Post-it squares had transformed the corner into a space to comfort, heal and support the next struggling teenager.
  • I don’t know if a seatbelt approach would have saved Frankie. And I understand that all the details of such an approach aren’t fully worked out here. But I don’t want us to lose any more children because we weren’t brave enough to take on something that scares us, something we don’t fully understand, something that is much more prevalent than many of us realize.
  • If 17- and 18-year-olds who’ve lost a friend have the strength to imagine a world dotted with healing, then the least we can do as adults is design and build the structure to support them
Javier E

Understanding What's Wrong With Facebook | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...ding-whats-wrong-with-facebook

evil structural tension 2nd generation internet comparative externality engine tech network manipulation architecture

shared by Javier E on 19 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • to really understand the problem with Facebook we need to understand the structural roots of that problem, how much of it is baked into the core architecture of the site and its very business model
  • much of it is inherent in the core strategies of the post-2000, second wave Internet tech companies that now dominate our information space and economy.
  • Facebook is an ingenious engine for information and ideational manipulation.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Good old fashioned advertising does that to a degree. But Facebook is much more powerful, adaptive and efficient.
  • Facebook is designed to do specific things. It’s an engine to understand people’s minds and then manipulate their thinking.
  • Those tools are refined for revenue making but can be used for many other purposes. That makes it ripe for misuse and bad acting.
  • The core of all second wave Internet commerce operations was finding network models where costs grow mathematically and revenues grow exponentially.
  • The network and its dominance is the product and once it takes hold the cost inputs remained constrained while the revenues grow almost without limit.
  • Facebook is best understood as a fantastically profitable nuclear energy company whose profitability is based on dumping the waste on the side of the road and accepting frequent accidents and explosions as inherent to the enterprise.
  • That’s why these companies employ so few people relative to scale and profitability.
  • managing or distinguishing between legitimate and bad-acting uses of the powerful Facebook engine is one that would require huge, huge investments of money and armies of workers to manage
  • The core economic model requires doing all of it on the cheap. Indeed, what Zuckerberg et al. have created with Facebook is so vast that the money required not to do it on the cheap almost defies imagination.
  • Facebook’s core model and concept requires not taking responsibility for what others do with the engine created to drive revenue.
  • It all amounts to a grand exercise in socializing the externalities and keeping all the revenues for the owners.
  • Here’s a way to think about it. Nuclear power is actually incredibly cheap. The fuel is fairly plentiful and easy to pull out of the ground. You set up a little engine and it generates energy almost without limit. What makes it ruinously expensive is managing the externalities – all the risks and dangers, the radiation, accidents, the constant production of radioactive waste.
  • That’s why there’s no phone support for Google or Facebook or Twitter. If half the people on the planet are ‘customers’ or users that’s not remotely possible.
  • But back to Facebook. The point is that they’ve created a hugely powerful and potentially very dangerous machine
  • The core business model is based on harvesting the profits from the commercial uses of the machine and using algorithms and very, very limited personnel (relative to scale) to try to get a handle on the most outrageous and shocking abuses which the engine makes possible.
  • Zuckerberg may be a jerk and there really is a culture of bad acting within the organization. But it’s not about him being a jerk. Replace him and his team with non-jerks and you’d still have a similar core problem.
  • To manage the potential negative externalities, to take some responsibility for all the dangerous uses the engine makes possible would require money the owners are totally unwilling and in some ways are unable to spend.
Javier E

Very Nice Guy (and Important Psychologist) Dies - Robert Wright - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...263595

psychology happiness longevity positive

shared by Javier E on 15 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Chris published a pathbreaking study showing that optimists live longer than pessimists
  • he thought a lot about how each of us can brighten our outlook and bring meaning and purpose into our lives. (Having a sense of purpose, he was quick to point out, is yet another positive mental element that is correlated with longevity.)
  • 'Other people matter' was his trademark phrase, and he was one of those unique individuals who actually walked the walk, didn't just talk the talk.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • he found that people who "catastrophize"--attribute negative events to global causes--are prone to untimely death (even by violence and accidents), and he found that optimists are less prone to strokes than pessimists.
  • His final book, Pursuing the Good Life, will be published by Oxford University Press in December
Javier E

Why Listening Is So Much More Than Hearing - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...so-much-more-than-hearing.html

sense perception hearing listening attention brain science psychology

shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Studies have shown that conscious thought takes place at about the same rate as visual recognition, requiring a significant fraction of a second per event. But hearing is a quantitatively faster sense.
  • hearing has evolved as our alarm system — it operates out of line of sight and works even while you are asleep. And because there is no place in the universe that is totally silent, your auditory system has evolved a complex and automatic “volume control,” fine-tuned by development and experience, to keep most sounds off your cognitive radar unless they might be of use as a signal
  • The sudden loud noise that makes you jump activates the simplest type: the startle.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • There are different types of attention, and they use different parts of the brain.
  • Hearing, in short, is easy. You and every other vertebrate that hasn’t suffered some genetic, developmental or environmental accident have been doing it for hundreds of millions of years. It’s your life line, your alarm system, your way to escape danger and pass on your genes
  • This simplest form of attention requires almost no brains at all and has been observed in every studied vertebrate.
  • But listening, really listening, is hard when potential distractions are leaping into your ears every fifty-thousandth of a second — and pathways in your brain are just waiting to interrupt your focus to warn you of any potential dangers.
  • Listening is a skill that we’re in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction and information overload.
  • we can train our listening just as with any other skill. Listen to new music when jogging rather than familiar tunes. Listen to your dog’s whines and barks: he is trying to tell you something isn’t right. Listen to your significant other’s voice — not only to the words, which after a few years may repeat, but to the sounds under them, the emotions carried in the harmonics.
  • “You never listen” is not just the complaint of a problematic relationship, it has also become an epidemic in a world that is exchanging convenience for content, speed for meaning. The richness of life doesn’t lie in the loudness and the beat, but in the timbres and the variations that you can discern if you simply pay attention.
Javier E

Richard Mourdock's Pious Cruelty - Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...264030

rape God moral reasoning moral

shared by Javier E on 24 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • to argue that the female body has the means to "shut that whole thing down," or that the torture of women is somehow divinely sanctioned takes more than just an accident of biology. It takes the ability to speak about things of which you are ignorant as though you are informed. It takes unacknowledged blindness. It takes an appetite for cruelty. 
Megan Flanagan

'Affluenza' teen's mom, Tonya Couch, has bond lowered - CNN.com - 0 views

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

brain mom crisis

shared by Megan Flanagan on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • has posted bail after her bond was lowered from $1 million to $75,000.
  • after she's fitted with an electronic ankle monitor
  • Tonya Couch of helping her son leave the country to avoid a probation hearing that might have led to jail time for him
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • after a Los Angeles judge approved her extradition more than a week after Mexican authorities detained mother and son in a Pacific resort town
  • undergo a mental exam after the court found "reasonable cause" to believe that she suffers from "a mental illness or is a person with a mental retardation,"
  • mental examination will determine whether there is clinical evidence to support the argument that Tonya Couch may be incompetent to stand trial.
  • withdrew $30,000 from her account and told her husband that he would not see them again,
  • on probation for killing four people in a drunken driving accident in 2013, when he was 16.
  • lawyers cited the now notorious "affluenza" defense, suggesting he was too rich and spoiled to understand the consequences of his actions.
  • Mexican judge granted the teen a temporary stay, halting deportation proceedings.
  • Mothers Against Drunk Driving started a petition
  • ask for Ethan Couch to be moved from the juvenile justice system to the adult criminal system
lenaurick

The scientific mystery of why humans love music - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...why-do-we-like-music

humans music psychology research science language culture

shared by lenaurick on 13 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • From an evolutionary perspective, it makes no sense whatsoever that music makes us feel emotions. Why would our ancestors have cared about music?
  • Why does something as abstract as music provoke such consistent emotions?
  • Studies have shown that when we listen to music, our brains release dopamine, which in turn makes us happy
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • It's quite possible that our love of music was simply an accident. We originally evolved emotions to help us navigate dangerous worlds (fear) and social situations (joy). And somehow, the tones and beats of musical composition activate similar brain areas.
  • Nature Neuroscience, led by Zatorre, researchers found that dopamine release is strongest when a piece of music reaches an emotional peak and the listener feels "chills"— the spine-tingling sensation of excitement and awe.
  • "Music engages the same [reward] system, even though it is not biologically necessary for survival," says Zatorre.
  • Presumably, we evolved to recognize patterns because it's an essential skill for survival. Does a rustling in the trees mean a dangerous animal is about to attack? Does the smell of smoke mean I should run, because a fire may be coming my way?
  • Music is a pattern. As we listen, we're constantly anticipating what melodies, harmonies, and rhythms may come next.
  • That's why we typically don't like styles of music we're not familiar with. When we're unfamiliar with a style of music, we don't have a basis to predict its patterns
  • We learn through our cultures what sounds constitute music. The rest is random noise.
  • When we hear a piece of music, its rhythm latches onto us in a process called entrainment. If the music is fast-paced, our heartbeats and breathing patterns will accelerate to match the beat.
  • Another hypothesis is that music latches onto the regions of the brain attuned to speech — which convey all of our emotions.
  • "It makes sense that our brains are really good at picking up emotions in speech," the French Institute of Science's Aucouturier says. It's essential to understand if those around us are happy, sad, angry, or scared. Much of that information is contained in the tone of a person's speech. Higher-pitched voices sound happier. More warbled voices are scared.
  • Music may then be an exaggerated version of speech.
  • And because we tend to mirror the emotions we hear in others, if the music is mimicking happy speech, then the listener will become happy too.
sissij

How Murphy's Law Works - HowStuffWorks - 0 views

people.howstuffworks.com/murphys-law.htm

murphy's law psychology brain science bias

shared by sissij on 18 Nov 16 - Cached
  • You're sitting in eight lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. You're more than ready to get home, but you notice, to your great dismay, that all of the other lanes seem to be moving. You change lanes. But once you do, the cars in your new lane come to a dead halt. At a standstill, you notice every lane on the highway (including the one you just left) is moving -- except yours.
  • whatever can go wrong will go wrong.
  • After all, we expect that things should work out in our favor. But when things go badly, we look for reasons.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It seems to poke fun at us for being such hotheads, and it uses the rules of probability -- the mathematical likeliness that something will occur -- to support itself.
  • sissij on 18 Nov 16
     
    I found this law very interesting because it is related to our topic of our lack of ability to deal with probabilities. We always tends to notice the bad things and rare things that happen to us and we named it coincidence. However, by math, coincidence is not only limited to things that rarely happen; it should also include things that has a high probability to happen. In the reading we did on Lesson Five, it mentions that we tend to think the cluster is not random, so we only find patterns between rarely happened things. For example, the death of two America presidents Lincoln and Kennedy. But what about the presidents who make through their presidency alive? Is it be a coincidence that they all live through their presidency? --Sissi (11/18/2016)
sissij

What Michelle Obama Wore and Why It Mattered - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-obama-first-lady-fashion.html

new york times social media psychology

shared by sissij on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • it had just been revealed that the campaign clothes budget for Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, was $150,000
  • And thus was an eight-year obsession born. Not to mention a new approach to the story of dress and power.
  • it set in motion a strategic rethink about the use of clothes that not only helped define her tenure as first lady, but also started a conversation that went far beyond the label or look that she wore and that is only now, maybe, reaching its end.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • If you know everyone is going to see what you wear and judge it, then what you wear becomes fraught with meaning.
  • She realized very early on that everything she did had ramifications
  • Just because something appears trivial does not mean it is any less powerful as a means of persuasion and outreach. In some ways its very triviality — the fact that everyone could talk about it, dissect it, imitate it — makes fashion the most potentially viral item in the subliminal political toolbox.
  • as she said to Vogue in her third cover story, the most of any first lady, one of the factors in choosing a garment always has to be, “Is it cute?”
  • she saw it as a way to frame her own independence and points of difference, add to her portfolio and amplify her husband’s agenda.
  • Mrs. Obama seemed to work with them all.
  • We all tend to gravitate toward certain designers in part because of sheer laziness: We know what suits us, what we like, and so we go there first. To have been so, well, evenhanded in her choices could have happened only with careful calculation.
  • Especially because Mrs. Obama not only wore their clothes, she also took their business seriously, framing fashion as a credible, covetable job choice during her education initiatives.
  • If you think that was an accident, there’s a bridge I can sell you — just as the fact she wore Jason Wu to her husband’s farewell address in Chicago, a designer she also wore at both inaugural balls, was no coincidence. It was closure.
  • But above all, her wardrobe was representative of the country her husband wanted to lead.
  • It may be because the point of what Mrs. Obama wore was never simply that it was good to mix up your wardrobe among a group of designers, but rather that clothes were most resonant when they were an expression of commitment to an idea, or an ideal, that had resonance.
  • sissij on 16 Jan 17
     
    This article takes a close look to Mrs. Obama's wardrobe, which I found to be very interesting. Even clothes can represent what a person is think about. There is a quote in this article that I really like: "Just because something appears trial does not mean it is any less powerful as a means of persuasion and outreach." Especial that it is the era of internet and you can find literally every detail online. People always like to assign meanings to things they see, though sometimes others don't mean it. Also, people are very easily influenced by social medias. For example, when I finish reading this article, the clothes Mrs. Obama chose suddenly become meaningful. Twenty-first century is an era of information. Even the smallest thing such as clothing can be a delivery of information
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