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Javier E

The Israel-Hamas War Shows Just How Broken Social Media Has Become - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • major social platforms have grown less and less relevant in the past year. In response, some users have left for smaller competitors such as Bluesky or Mastodon. Some have simply left. The internet has never felt more dense, yet there seem to be fewer reliable avenues to find a signal in all the noise. One-stop information destinations such as Facebook or Twitter are a thing of the past. The global town square—once the aspirational destination that social-media platforms would offer to all of us—lies in ruins, its architecture choked by the vines and tangled vegetation of a wild informational jungle
  • Musk has turned X into a deepfake version of Twitter—a facsimile of the once-useful social network, altered just enough so as to be disorienting, even terrifying.
  • At the same time, Facebook’s user base began to erode, and the company’s transparency reports revealed that the most popular content circulating on the platform was little more than viral garbage—a vast wasteland of CBD promotional content and foreign tabloid clickbait.
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  • What’s left, across all platforms, is fragmented. News and punditry are everywhere online, but audiences are siloed; podcasts are more popular than ever, and millions of younger people online have turned to influencers and creators on Instagram and especially TikTok as trusted sources of news.
  • Social media, especially Twitter, has sometimes been an incredible news-gathering tool; it has also been terrible and inefficient, a game of do your own research that involves batting away bullshit and parsing half truths, hyperbole, outright lies, and invaluable context from experts on the fly. Social media’s greatest strength is thus its original sin: These sites are excellent at making you feel connected and informed, frequently at the expense of actually being informed.
  • At the center of these pleas for a Twitter alternative is a feeling that a fundamental promise has been broken. In exchange for our time, our data, and even our well-being, we uploaded our most important conversations onto platforms designed for viral advertising—all under the implicit understanding that social media could provide an unparalleled window to the world.
  • What comes next is impossible to anticipate, but it’s worth considering the possibility that the centrality of social media as we’ve known it for the past 15 years has come to an end—that this particular window to the world is being slammed shut.
Javier E

Opinion | A New Dark Age Looms - The New York Times - 0 views

  • IMAGINE a future in which humanity’s accumulated wisdom about Earth — our vast experience with weather trends, fish spawning and migration patterns, plant pollination and much more — turns increasingly obsolete. As each decade passes, knowledge of Earth’s past becomes progressively less effective as a guide to the future. Civilization enters a dark age in its practical understanding of our planet.
  • as Earth warms, our historical understanding will turn obsolete faster than we can replace it with new knowledge. Some patterns will change significantly; others will be largely unaffected, though it will be difficult to say what will change, by how much, and when.
  • Until then, farmers will struggle to reliably predict new seasonal patterns and regularly plant the wrong crops. Early signs of major drought will go unrecognized, so costly irrigation will be built in the wrong places. Disruptive societal impacts will be widespread.
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  • Such a dark age is a growing possibility. In a recent report, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine concluded that human-caused global warming was already altering patterns of some extreme weather events
  • disrupting nature’s patterns could extend well beyond extreme weather, with far more pervasive impacts.
  • Our foundation of Earth knowledge, largely derived from historically observed patterns, has been central to society’s progress.
  • Science has accelerated this learning process through advanced observation methods and pattern discovery techniques. These allow us to anticipate the future with a consistency unimaginable to our ancestors
  • As Earth’s warming stabilizes, new patterns begin to appear. At first, they are confusing and hard to identify. Scientists note similarities to Earth’s emergence from the last ice age. These new patterns need many years — sometimes decades or more — to reveal themselves fully, even when monitored with our sophisticated observing systems
  • The list of possible disruptions is long and alarming. We could see changes to the prevalence of crop and human pests, like locust plagues set off by drought conditions; forest fire frequency; the dynamics of the predator-prey food chain; the identification and productivity of reliably arable land, and the predictability of agriculture output.
  • Historians of the next century will grasp the importance of this decline in our ability to predict the future. They may mark the coming decades of this century as the period during which humanity, despite rapid technological and scientific advances, achieved “peak knowledge” about the planet it occupies
  • The intermediate time period is our big challenge. Without substantial scientific breakthroughs, we will remain reliant on pattern-based methods for time periods between a month and a decade. The problem is, as the planet warms, these patterns will become increasingly difficult to discern.
  • The oceans, which play a major role in global weather patterns, will also see substantial changes as global temperatures rise. Ocean currents and circulation patterns evolve on time scales of decades and longer, and fisheries change in response. We lack reliable, physics-based models to tell us how this occurs
  • Civilization’s understanding of Earth has expanded enormously in recent decades, making humanity safer and more prosperous. As the patterns that we have come to expect are disrupted by warming temperatures, we will face huge challenges feeding a growing population and prospering within our planet’s finite resources. New developments in science offer our best hope for keeping up, but this is by no means guaranteed
  • Our grandchildren could grow up knowing less about the planet than we do today. This is not a legacy we want to leave them. Yet we are on the verge of ensuring this happens.
huffem4

Does Unconscious Bias Training Really Work? - 1 views

  • The first step towards impacting unconscious bias is awareness. We must have an understanding that this issue exists in the first place—no one is exempt from having bias and being prejudice.
  • In order for unconscious bias training to be effective, it has to be ongoing and long-term
  • It’s essential to look at the linkage between unconscious bias and behaviors. Because unconscious bias is not something we are actively aware of, it in itself is difficult to actually eradicate. It is a more effective practice to analyze how unconscious bias can manifest in the workplace when hiring employees, evaluating employee performance and in the overall treatment of employees.
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  • Bias can be thought of as a malleable and quickly-adapting entity. It is important to anticipate situations which are likely to lead to bias or have led to discrimination in the past, and create systems to eliminate or lessen the likelihood of these behaviors from occurring.
  • Another aspect of unconscious bias training should include the standardization of company policies, protocol, and procedures.
  • when unconscious bias training is implemented, it is imperative to have measures in place to assess incremental changes and progress. How will you then learn whether the training was successful if you don’t know what point you started at? Data should be collected at several stages of the training intervention, which can ensure the effectiveness of the training.
Javier E

How stress weathers our bodies, causing illness and premature aging - Washington Post - 1 views

  • Stress is a physiological reaction that is part of the body’s innate programming to protect against external threats.
  • When danger appears, an alarm goes off in the brain, activating the body’s sympathetic nervous system — the fight-or-flight system. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is activated. Hormones, such as epinephrine and cortisol, flood the bloodstream from the adrenal glands.
  • The heart beats faster. Breathing quickens. Blood vessels dilate. More oxygen reaches large muscles. Blood pressure and glucose levels rise. The immune system’s inflammatory response activates, promoting quick healing.
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  • Life brings an accumulation of unremitting stress, especially for those subjected to inequity — and not just from immediate and chronic threats. Even the anticipation of those menaces causes persistent damage.
  • The body produces too much cortisol and other stress hormones, straining to bring itself back to normal. Eventually, the body’s machinery malfunctions.
  • The constant strain — the chronic sources of stress — resets what is “normal,” and the body begins to change.
  • t is the repeated triggering of this process year after year — the persistence of striving to overcome barriers — that leads to poor health.
  • Blood pressure remains high. Inflammation turns chronic. In the arteries, plaque forms, causing the linings of blood vessels to thicken and stiffen. That forces the heart to work harder. It doesn’t stop there. Other organs begin to fail.
  • , that people’s varied life experiences affect their health by wearing down their bodies. And second, she said: “People are not just passive victims of these horrible exposures. They withstand them. They struggle against them. These are people who weather storms.”
  • It isn’t just living in an unequal society that makes people sick. It’s the day-in, day-out effort of trying to be equal that wears bodies down.
  • Weathering doesn’t start in middle age.
  • It begins in the womb. Cortisol released into a pregnant person’s bloodstream crosses the placenta, which helps explain why a disproportionate number of babies born to parents who live in impoverished communities or who experience the constant scorn of discrimination are preterm and too small.
  • The argument weathering is trying to make is these are things we can change, but we have to understand them in their complexity,” Geronimus said. “This has to be a societal project, not the new app on your phone that will remind you to take deep breaths when you’re feeling stress.”
Javier E

How to Make Friends as an Adult - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • According to “The Friendship Report,” a global study commissioned by Snapchat in 2019, the average age at which we meet our best friends is 21—a stage when we’re not only bonding over formative new experiences such as first love and first heartbreak, but also growing more discerning about whom we befriend.
  • young adulthood is a time when many of us have time.
  • it typically takes more than 200 hours, ideally over six weeks, for a stranger to grow into a close friend.
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  • As we get older, the space we used to fill with laughter, gossip, and staying up until the sky grew light can get consumed by more “adult” concerns, such as marriage, procreation, and fully developed careers—and we tend to end up with less of ourselves to give.
  • making friends at 40 is more akin to dating than I had anticipated: It’s dependent not only on chemistry and common interests, but also on a shared vision of what your new relationship could provide. Half the struggle is finding someone who wants the same thing you do, and at the exact same time
  • In Montana, I’d need to find people who were not just delightful and committed to friendship generally, but also willing to expand beyond those best friends they made at 21—people who, for whatever reason, still had their light on.
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