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jlessner

Super Bowl Ads: Incredibly Cheap or an Incredible Waste of Money? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...283505

money super bowl ads science Research brain science

shared by jlessner on 03 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • or the second straight year, advertisers are willing to pay about $4 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot, and for the umpteenth straight year, there are questions about whether Sunday represents a sensational steal or an insane rip-off.
  • Compared to another primetime TV commercial, there's no question: Super Bowl ads are cheap.
  • But compared to, say, any other sensible way of spending money, many Super Bowl ads are something like a ritual financial sacrifice, a pyre of money set on fire to please the Buzz Gods for no particular reason.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Super Bowl's audience exists on a different planet from the rest of everything we call "pop culture."
  • So if you add the year's biggest movie and the year's biggest TV show and the year's biggest album (while pretending that there is no overlap), you sum to an audience of 69 million, total. This year's Super Bowl is projected to have 120 million viewers watching—all at once. There is pop culture, and then there is the Super Bowl.
  • The argument "$4 million for 30 seconds is absurd" is sort of like saying "$1,000 for dinner is absurd." Yes, $1,000 is an expensive dinner-for-one. But what about a fancy dinner for 10 friends? Or 20 friends? Or 100? The more people at the table, the more that $1,000 starts to look like a bargain.
  • To understand why the Super Bowl is such a good deal by TV advertising standards, you have to understand the first thing about TV advertising. It's not about the price you pay for the advertisement. It's about the price you pay for the eyeballs
  • The Super Bowl's rate this year is about $35 to reach 1,000 people. Is that expensive? Not at all.
  • People in living rooms across the country say, in unison, "Everybody shut up, I want to experience this corporate messaging so that I can engage with the brand."
  • For four hours a year, a Super Bowl viewer transforms from an ordinary human, constantly rejecting the bombardment of advertising, into a marketing professor's platonic ideal of consumer, diligently seeking out great brand messaging. Surely, that remarkable metamorphosis is worth something.
peterconnelly

Opinion: Budweiser's very smart Super Bowl call - CNN - 0 views

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

cnn opinion

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • This year's Super Bowl will be full of firsts: the first without a packed stadium; the first requiring players and coaches to follow Covid-19 protocol; and the first broadcast in a long time to go without ads from some of its big, perennial advertisers.
  • That is surprising considering the Super Bowl, which typically draws around 100 million viewers
  • has been frequently rated the most-watched broadcast of th
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Budweiser has also released a 90-second digital ad encouraging people to embrace vaccination.
  • What's even more extraordinary is Anheuser-Busch's decision to scrap its Budweiser Super Bowl ad in favor of supporting the Ad Council and COVID Collaborative's vaccine awareness initiative and donating money to go toward the organizations' future ad campaigns.
  • e year
  • This move by Budweiser is big, and it gives humanitarian organizations like mine hope and optimism.
  • who among the wealthiest corporations will join Budweiser? Which will put a fraction of their profits to push back against urgent and catastrophic events — and potentially save lives?
  • I'll be honest. It is hard for me to have a rosy outlook on companies reporting tens of billions of profits in 2020.
  • I know corporate success helps our economy, rewards innovators and brings job security to middle class workers. But I also know that with investment we can solve hunger. If ordinary American donors can contribute enough to feed a family of five for a month, corporations and those who've done well during the pandemic could do exponentially more.
  • By applying their ad money to public service, Budweiser is not only anticipating a better future -- it is helping make it a reality.
Javier E

How To Look Smart, Ctd - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...how-to-look-smart-ctd-2.html

reading intelligence testing

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Tuesday, February 8, 2011Tuesday, February 8, 2011 Go Follow the Atlantic » Politics Presented by When Ronald Reagan Endorsed Ron Paul Joshua Green Epitaph for the DLC Marc Ambinder A Hard Time Raising Concerns About Egypt Chris Good Business Presented by Could a Hybrid Mortgage System Work? Daniel Indiviglio Fighting Bias in Academia Megan McArdle The Tech Revolution For Seniors Derek Thompson Culture Presented By 'Tiger Mother' Creates a New World Order James Fallows Justin Bieber: Daydream Believer James Parker <!-- /li
  • these questions tend to overlook the way IQ tests are designed. As a neuropsychologist who has administered hundreds of these measures, I can tell you that their structures reflect a deeply embedded bias toward intelligence as a function of reading skills
Javier E

Korean philosophy is built upon daily practice of good habits | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...-daily-practice-of-good-habits

korea philosophy practice habits aeon essay wisdom eastern civilization(s) cultivated learning education history

shared by Javier E on 27 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • ‘We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves,’ wrote Friedrich Nietzsche at the beginning of On the Genealogy of Morals (1887
  • This seeking after ourselves, however, is not something that is lacking in Buddhist and Confucian traditions – especially not in the case of Korean philosophy. Self-cultivation, central to the tradition, underscores that the onus is on the individual to develop oneself, without recourse to the divine or the supernatural
  • Korean philosophy is practical, while remaining agnostic to a large degree: recognising the spirit realm but highlighting that we ourselves take charge of our lives by taking charge of our minds
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • The word for ‘philosophy’ in Korean is 철학, pronounced ch’ŏrhak. It literally means the ‘study of wisdom’ or, perhaps better, ‘how to become wise’, which reflects its more dynamic and proactive implications
  • At night, in the darkness of the cave, he drank water from a perfectly useful ‘bowl’. But when he could see properly, he found that there was no ‘bowl’ at all, only a disgusting human skull.
  • Our lives and minds are affected by others (and their actions), as others (and their minds) are affected by our actions. This is particularly true in the Korean application of Confucian and Buddhist ideas.
  • Wŏnhyo understood that how we think about things shapes their very existence – and in turn our own existence, which is constructed according to our thoughts.
  • In the Korean tradition of philosophy, human beings are social beings, therefore knowing how to interact with others is an essential part of living a good life – indeed, living well with others is our real contribution to human life
  • he realised that there isn’t a difference between the ‘bowl’ and the skull: the only difference lies with us and our perceptions. We interpret our lives through a continual stream of thoughts, and so we become what we think, or rather how we think
  • As our daily lives are shaped by our thoughts, so our experience of this reality is good or bad – depending on our thoughts – which make things ‘appear’ good or bad because, in ‘reality’, things in and of themselves are devoid of their own independent nature
  • We can take from Wŏnhyo the idea that, if you change the patterns that have become engrained in how you think, you will begin to live differently. To do this, you need to change your mental habits, which is why meditation and mindful awareness can help. And this needs to be practised every day
  • Wŏnhyo’s most important work is titled Awaken your Mind and Practice (in Korean, Palsim suhaeng-jang). It is an explicit call to younger adherents to put Buddhist ideas into practice, and an indirect warning not to get lost in contemplation or in the study of text
  • While Wŏnhyo had emphasised the mind and the need to ‘practise’ Buddhism, a later Korean monk, Chinul (1158-1210), spearheaded Sŏn, the meditational tradition in Korea that espoused the idea of ‘sudden enlightenment’ that alerts the mind, accompanied by ‘gradual cultivation’
  • we still need to practise meditation, for if not we can easily fall into our old ways even if our minds have been awakened
  • his greatest contribution to Sŏn is Secrets on Cultivating the Mind (Susim kyŏl). This text outlines in detail his teachings on sudden awakening followed by the need for gradual cultivation
  • hinul’s approach recognises the mind as the ‘essence’ of one’s Buddha nature (contained in the mind, which is inherently good), while continual practice and cultivation aids in refining its ‘function’ – this is the origin of the ‘essence-function’ concept that has since become central to Korean philosophy.
  • These ideas also influenced the reformed view of Confucianism that became linked with the mind and other metaphysical ideas, finally becoming known as Neo-Confucianism.
  • During the Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910), the longest lasting in East Asian history, Neo-Confucianism became integrated into society at all levels through rituals for marriage, funerals and ancestors
  • Neo-Confucianism recognises that we as individuals exist through plural relationships with responsibilities to others (as a child, brother/sister, lover, husband/wife, parent, teacher/student and so on), an idea nicely captured in 2000 by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy when he described our ‘being’ as ‘singular plural’
  • Corrupt interpretations of Confucianism by heteronormative men have historically championed these ideas in terms of vertical relationships rather than as a reciprocal set of benevolent social interactions, meaning that women have suffered greatly as a result.
  • Setting aside these sexist and self-serving interpretations, Confucianism emphasises that society works as an interconnected set of complementary reciprocal relationships that should be beneficial to all parties within a social system
  • Confucian relationships have the potential to offer us an example of effective citizenship, similar to that outlined by Cicero, where the good of the republic or state is at the centre of being a good citizen
  • There is a general consensus in Korean philosophy that we have an innate sociability and therefore should have a sense of duty to each other and to practise virtue.
  • The main virtue of Confucianism is the idea of ‘humanity’, coming from the Chinese character 仁, often left untranslated and written as ren and pronounced in Korean as in.
  • It is a combination of the character for a human being and the number two. In other words, it signifies what (inter)connects two people, or rather how they should interact in a humane or benevolent manner to each other. This character therefore highlights the link between people while emphasising that the most basic thing that makes us ‘human’ is our interaction with others.
  • Neo-Confucianism adopted a turn towards a more mind-centred view in the writings of the Korean scholar Yi Hwang, known by his pen name T’oegye (1501-70), who appears on the 1,000-won note. He greatly influenced Neo-Confucianism in Japan through his formidable text, Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning (Sŏnghak sipto), composed in 1568, which was one of the most-reproduced texts of the entire Chosŏn dynasty and represents the synthesis of Neo-Confucian thought in Korea
  • with commentaries that elucidate the moral principles of Confucianism, related to the cardinal relationships and education. It also embodies T’oegye’s own development of moral psychology through his focus on the mind, and illuminates the importance of teaching and the practice of self-cultivation.
  • He writes that we ourselves can transform the unrestrained mind and its desires, and achieve sagehood, if we take the arduous, gradual path of self-cultivation centred on the mind.
  • Confucians had generally accepted the Mencian idea that human nature was embodied in the unaroused state of the mind, before it was shaped by its environment. The mind in its unaroused state was taken to be theoretically good. However, this inborn tendency for goodness is always in danger of being reduced to passivity, unless you cultivate yourself as a person of ‘humanity’ (in the Confucian sense mentioned above).
  • You should constantly try to activate your humanity to allow the unhampered operation of the original mind to manifest itself through socially responsible and moral character in action
  • Humanity is the realisation of what I describe as our ‘optimum level of perfection’ that exists in an inherent stage of potentiality due our innate good nature
  • This, in a sense, is like the Buddha nature of the Buddhists, which suggests we are already enlightened and just need to recover our innate mental state. Both philosophies are hopeful: humans are born good with the potential to correct their own flaws and failures
  • this could hardly contrast any more greatly with the Christian doctrine of original sin
  • The seventh diagram in T’oegye’s text is entitled ‘The Diagram of the Explanation of Humanity’ (Insŏl-to). Here he warns how one’s good inborn nature may become impaired, hampering the operation of the original mind and negatively impacting our character in action. Humanity embodies the gradual realisation of our optimum level of perfection that already exists in our mind but that depends on how we think about things and how we relate that to others in a social context
  • For T’oegye, the key to maintaining our capacity to remain level-headed, and to control our impulses and emotions, was kyŏng. This term is often translated as ‘seriousness’, occasionally ‘mindfulness’, and it identifies the serious need for constant effort to control one’s mind in order to go about one’s life in a healthy manner
  • For T’oegye, mindfulness is as serious as meditation is for the Buddhists. In fact, the Neo-Confucians had their own meditational practice of ‘quiet-sitting’ (chŏngjwa), which focused on recovering the calm and not agitated ‘original mind’, before putting our daily plans into action
  • These diagrams reinforce this need for a daily practice of Confucian mindfulness, because practice leads to the ‘good habit’ of creating (and maintaining) routines. There is no short-cut provided, no weekend intro to this practice: it is life-long, and that is what makes it transformative, leading us to become better versions of who were in the beginning. This is consolation of Korean philosophy.
  • Seeing the world as it is can steer us away from making unnecessary mistakes, while highlighting what is good and how to maintain that good while also reducing anxiety from an agitated mind and harmful desires. This is why Korean philosophy can provide us with consolation; it recognises the bad, but prioritises the good, providing several moral pathways that are referred to in the East Asian traditions (Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism) as modes of ‘self-cultivation’
  • As social beings, we penetrate the consciousness of others, and so humans are linked externally through conduct but also internally through thought. Humanity is a unifying approach that holds the potential to solve human problems, internally and externally, as well as help people realise the perfection that is innately theirs
oliviaodon

Will the Republican Party Survive the 2016 Election? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...419118

politics republican

shared by oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • many observers worried that Americans had lost interest in politics. In his famous book Bowling Alone, published in 2000, the social scientist Robert Putnam bemoaned the collapse in American political participation during the second half of the 20th century. Putnam suggested that this trend would continue as the World War II generation gave way to disengaged Gen Xers.
  • oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16
     
    This article definitely serves as an interesting read. 
Javier E

How Facebook Warps Our Worlds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...facebook-warps-our-worlds.html

facebook social network shaming groupthink fragmentation partisan epistemic tribal conformity crisis culture psychology social media

shared by Javier E on 23 May 16 - No Cached
  • THOSE who’ve been raising alarms about Facebook are right: Almost every minute that we spend on our smartphones and tablets and laptops, thumbing through favorite websites and scrolling through personalized feeds, we’re pointed toward foregone conclusions. We’re pressured to conform
  • We’re the real culprits. When it comes to elevating one perspective above all others and herding people into culturally and ideologically inflexible tribes, nothing that Facebook does to us comes close to what we do to ourselves.
  • I’m talking about how we use social media in particular and the Internet in general — and how we let them use us. They’re not so much agents as accomplices, new tools for ancient impulses, part of “a long sequence of technological innovations that enable us to do what we want
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  • “And one of the things we want is to spend more time with people who think like us and less with people who are different,” Haidt added. “The Facebook effect isn’t trivial. But it’s catalyzing or amplifying a tendency that was already there.”
  • prevalent for many users are the posts we see from friends and from other people and groups we follow on the network, and this information is utterly contingent on choices we ourselves make
  • The Internet isn’t rigged to give us right or left, conservative or liberal — at least not until we rig it that way. It’s designed to give us more of the same, whatever that same is
  • So it goes with the fiction we read, the movies we watch, the music we listen to and, scarily, the ideas we subscribe to. They’re not challenged. They’re validated and reinforced.
  • this colors our days, or rather bleeds them of color, reducing them to a single hue.
  • Facebook, along with other social media, definitely conspires in this. Haidt noted that it often discourages dissent within a cluster of friends by accelerating shaming. He pointed to the enforced political correctness among students at many colleges.
  • Carnival barkers, conspiracy theories, willful bias and nasty partisanship aren’t anything new, and they haven’t reached unprecedented heights today. But what’s remarkable and sort of heartbreaking is the way they’re fed by what should be strides in our ability to educate ourselves.
  • The proliferation of cable television networks and growth of the Internet promised to expand our worlds, not shrink them. Instead they’ve enhanced the speed and thoroughness with which we retreat into enclaves of the like-minded.
  • there’s no argument that in an era that teems with choice, brims with niche marketing and exalts individualism to the extent that ours does, we’re sorting ourselves with a chillingly ruthless efficiency. We’ve surrendered universal points of reference. We’ve lost common ground.
  • Marc Dunkelman, adding that it also makes it easier for us to avoid “face-to-face interactions with diverse ideas.” He touched on this in an incisive 2014 book, “The Vanishing Neighbor,” which belongs with Haidt’s work and with “Bowling Alone,” “Coming Apart” and “The Fractured Republic” in the literature of modern American fragmentation, a booming genre all its own.
  • We’re less committed to, and trustful of, large institutions than we were at times in the past. We question their wisdom and substitute it with the groupthink of micro-communities, many of which we’ve formed online, and their sensibilities can be more peculiar and unforgiving.
  • We construct precisely contoured echo chambers of affirmation that turn conviction into zeal, passion into fury, disagreements with the other side into the demonization of it
  • It’s not about some sorcerer’s algorithm. It’s about a tribalism that has existed for as long as humankind has and is now rooted in the fertile soil of the Internet, which is coaxing it toward a full and insidious flower
Javier E

Jordan Peterson Comes to Aspen - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...563813

Psychology trans error monogamy gender university learning free speech

shared by Javier E on 01 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • Peterson is traveling the English-speaking world in order to spread the message of this core conviction: that the way to fix what ails Western societies is a psychological project, targeted at helping individuals to get their lives in order, not a sociological project that seeks to improve society through politics, or popular culture, or by focusing on class, racial, or gender identity.
  • the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-sponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, was an anomaly in this series of public appearances: a gathering largely populated by people—Democrats and centrist Republicans, corporate leaders, academics, millionaire philanthropists, journalists—invested in the contrary proposition, that the way to fix what ails society is a sociological project, one that effects change by focusing on politics, or changing popular culture, or spurring technological advances, or investing more in diversity and inclusiveness.
  • Many of its attendees, like many journalists, are most interested in Peterson as a political figure at the center of controversies
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Peterson deserves a full, appropriately complex accounting of his best and worst arguments; I intend to give him one soon. For now, I can only tell you how the Peterson phenomenon manifested one night in Aspen
  • “For the first time in human history the spoken word has the same reach as the written word, and there are no barriers to entry. That’s a Gutenberg revolution,” he said. “That’s a big deal. This is a game changer. The podcast world is also a Gutenberg moment but it’s even more extensive. The problem with books is that you can’t do anything else while you’re reading. But if you’re listening to a podcast you can be driving a tractor or a long haul truck or doing the dishes. So podcasts free up two hours a day for people to engage in educational activity they otherwise wouldn’t be able to engage in. That’s one-eighth of people’s lives. You’re handing people a lot of time back to engage in high-level intellectual education.
  • that technological revolution has revealed something good that we didn’t know before: “The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are. And people have a real hunger for deep intellectual dialogue.”
  • I’ve known for years that the university underserved the community, because we assumed that university education is for 18- to 22-year-olds, which is a proposition that’s so absurd it is absolutely mind-boggling that anyone ever conceptualized it. Why wouldn’t you take university courses throughout your entire life? What, you stop searching for wisdom when you’re 22? I don’t think so. You don’t even start until you’re like in your mid 20s. So I knew universities were underserving the broader community a long time ago. But there wasn’t a mechanism whereby that could be rectified.
  • Universities are beyond forgiveness, he argued, because due to the growing ranks of administrators, there’s been a radical increase in tuition. “Unsuspecting students are given free access to student loans that will cripple them through their 30s and their 40s, and the universities are enticing them to extend their carefree adolescence for a four year period at the cost of mortgaging their future in a deal that does not allow for escape through bankruptcy,” he complained. “So it’s essentially a form of indentured servitude. There’s no excuse for that … That cripples the economy because the students become overlaid with debt that they’ll never pay off at the time when they should be at the peak of their ability to take entrepreneurial risks. That’s absolutely appalling.”
  • A critique I frequently hear from Peterson’s critics is that everything he says is either obvious or wrong. I think that critique fails insofar as I sometimes see some critics calling one of his statements obvious even as others insist it is obviously wrong.
  • a reliable difference among men and women cross-culturally is that men are more aggressive than women. Now what's the evidence for that? Here's one piece of evidence: There are 10 times as many men in prison. Now is that a sociocultural construct? It's like, no, it's not a sociocultural construct. Okay?
  • Here's another piece of data. Women try to commit suicide more than men by a lot, and that's because women are more prone to depression and anxiety than men are. And there are reasons for that, and that's cross-cultural as well. Now men are way more likely to actually commit suicide. Why? Because they're more aggressive so they use lethal means. So now the question is how much more aggressive are men than women? The answer is not very much. So the claim that men and women are more the same than different is actually true. This is where you have to know something about statistics to understand the way the world works, instead of just applying your a priori ideological presuppositions to things that are too complex to fit in that rubric.
  • So if you draw two people out of a crowd, one man and one woman, and you had to lay a bet on who was more aggressive, and you bet on the woman, you'd win 40 percent of the time. That's quite a lot. It isn't 50 percent of the time which would be no differences. But it’s a lot. There are lots of women who are more aggressive than lots of men. So the curves overlap a lot. There's way more similarity than difference. And this is along the dimension where there's the most difference. But here's the problem. You can take small differences at the average of a distribution. Then the distributions move off to the side. And then all the action is at the tail. So here's the situation. You don't care about how aggressive the average person is. It's not that relevant. What people care about is who is the most aggressive person out of 100, because that's the person you'd better watch out for.
  • Whenever I'm interviewed by journalists who have the scent of blood in their nose, let's say, they're very willing and able to characterize the situation I find myself in as political. But that's because they can't see the world in any other manner. The political is a tiny fraction of the world. And what I'm doing isn't political. It's psychological or theological. The political element is peripheral. And if people come to the live lectures, let's say, that's absolutely self-evident
  • In a New York Times article titled, “Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy,” the writer Nellie Bowles quoted her subject as follows:
  • Violent attacks are what happens when men do not have partners, Mr. Peterson says, and society needs to work to make sure those men are married. “He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.” Mr. Peterson does not pause when he says this. Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will all only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end.
  • Ever since, some Peterson critics have claimed that Peterson wants to force women to have sex with male incels, or something similarly dystopian.
  • ...it's an anthropological truism generated primarily through scholars on the left, just so everybody is clear about it, that societies that use monogamy as a social norm, which by the way is virtually every human society that ever existed, do that in an attempt to control the aggression that goes along with polygamy. It's like ‘Oh my God, how contentious can you get.’ Well, how many of you are in monogamous relationships? A majority. How is that enforced?...
  • If everyone you talk to is boring it’s not them! And so if you're rejected by the opposite sex, if you’re heterosexual, then you're wrong, they're not wrong, and you've got some work to do, man. You've got some difficult work to do. And there isn't anything I've been telling young men that's clearer than that … What I've been telling people is take the responsibility for failure onto yourself. That's a hint that you've got work to do. It could also be a hint that you're young and useless and why the hell would anybody have anything to do with you because you don't have anything to offer. And that's rectifiable. Maturity helps to rectify that.
  • And what's the gender? Men. Because if you go two standard deviations out from the mean on two curves that overlap but are disjointed, then you derive an overwhelming preponderance of the overrepresented group. That's why men are about 10 times more likely to be in prison.&nbsp;&nbsp;
  • Weiss: You are often characterized, at least in the mainstream press, as being transphobic. If you had a student come to you and say, I was born female, I now identify as male, I want you to call me by male pronouns. Would you say yes to that?
  • Peterson: Well, it would depend on the student and the context and why I thought they were asking me and what I believe their demand actually characterized, and all of that. Because that can be done in a way that is genuine and acceptable, and a way that is manipulative and unacceptable. And if it was genuine and acceptable then I would have no problem with it. And if it was manipulative and unacceptable then not a chance. And you might think, ‘Well, who am I to judge?’ Well, first of all, I am a clinical psychologist, I've talked to people for about 25,000 hours. And I'm responsible for judging how I am going to use my words. I'd judge the same way I judge all my interactions with people, which is to the best of my ability, and characterized by all the errors that I'm prone to. I'm not saying that my judgment would be unerring. I live with the consequences and I'm willing to accept the responsibility.
  • But also to be clear about this, it never happened––I never refused to call anyone by anything they had asked me to call them by, although that's been reported multiple times. It's a complete falsehood. And it had nothing to do with the transgender issue as far as I'm concerned.
  • type one and type two error problem
  • note what his avowed position is: that he has never refused to call a transgender person by their preferred pronoun, that he has done so many times, that he would always try to err on the side of believing a request to be earnest, and that he reserves the right to decline a request he believes to be in bad faith. Whether one finds that to be reasonable or needlessly difficult, it seems irresponsible to tell trans people that a prominent intellectual hates them or is deeply antagonistic to them when the only seeming conflict is utterly hypothetical and ostensibly not even directed against people that Peterson believes to be trans, but only against people whom he does not believe to be trans
Javier E

Listening to Michael Jackson After 'Leaving Neverland' - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...585295

art morality

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • The ancient question: What moral stain awaits us if we cannot abandon the art of a monster? None.
  • Michael Jackson’s art matters. It matters not because of any sociopolitical significance, although many of his songs bear uplifting messages. It matters not for its implications about race in America. It matters because of the simple fact that it is, in every sense, the gift revealed.
  • A generation ago, young people read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift to understand how to live meaningful lives by cultivating within themselves the ability to receive art: “An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • You can cast away Picasso because Hannah Gadsby told you he was cruel to women. But can you cast away Guernica?
  • Art isn’t something mere; it doesn’t exist as the moral bona fides of the person who made it. That person is a supernumerary. Separate yourself from any art—even popular art; even art created simply as entertainment—and you separate yourself from all of it
sissij

Beginning 'Brexit' and Bracing for Impact - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-britain-eu-economy-banks.html

new york times social media bias

shared by sissij on 30 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Britain’s exit from Europe — Brexit
  • But the reassuring talk did not reckon with one significant detail: Nothing has actually happened yet.
  • The markets essentially shrugged. The move was as expected as the next Super Bowl. The pound dipped a tad. So did shares on London’s stock market.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Trade would revert to the rules of the World Trade Organization, making Britain’s exports to Europe vulnerable to tariffs and other barriers to commerce, including health and safety rules.
  • Brexit supporters called the outcome a template for how a pragmatic British government would prevent businesses from abandoning its shores — with tax cuts, friendly regulation and deal making.
  • But consumer spending has been increasingly paid for by debt. The British pound has surrendered 17 percent of its value against the dollar since the referendum, raising the cost of imported goods.
  • During the campaign, Brexit supporters argued that Europe would ultimately make it happen because its most powerful member, Germany, now sends a parade of BMWs, Audis and Volkswagens to Britain.
  • Even if European leaders seek middle ground, any one of the member nations could hijack the proceedings with their demands while the clock ticks away.
  • Britain really is departing the largest consumer market on earth.
  • sissij on 30 Mar 17
     
    As we learned in TOK, economics is a very hard to predict human social study. The depression and recession has already showed how market failure affect our optimistic prediction in economics. I think this also shows how the confidence of the general population is important for economics. We can not yet make a conclusion whether the departure of Britain from the Europe league is good or bad. --Sissi (3/30/2017)
Javier E

The Diet Industrial Complex Got Me, and It Will Never Let Me Go - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...body-positive-movement.html

diet food self-image psychology

shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • It’s bizarre the way that women’s feelings about their bodies, good and bad, are tied to other women, like, if a woman has a great body, this can feel like a rebuke to everyone who has a regular body. As I watched J. Lo’s Super Bowl halftime show, I thought, this is going to turn into a thing where middle-aged women get upset because they don’t look like that, and they will express this anger in racist and sexist comments about her clothing choices and the precise shape of her body
  • Poor innocent J. Lo’s body — here it thought its whole purpose was just to move J. Lo’s consciousness through space.
  • I am not saying that no one has accepted her body, that it’s all a lie. I am just saying that I’m pretty sure we haven’t “arrived” anywhere. And why would we have? The material conditions of being a woman have not been altered in any dramatic way, and seem to be getting worse, for everyone
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  • It is too late for me, and it’s too late for pretty much everyone my age. We are so brainwashed. And as imperfect as the body positivity movement may be, just remember: We didn’t even have one.
Javier E

Breakfast was the most important meal of the day - until America ruined it - The Washin... - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-b4ee-434b6d506b37_story.html

breakfast sugar carbohydrates cereals diet food

shared by Javier E on 21 May 17 - No Cached
  • It’s probably more accurate to call breakfast the most dangerous meal of the day. Not only because of the sugar in so many breakfast cereals, but also because the refined grains they’re made of are virtually the same thing, once they reach your bloodstream.
  • All the cereal, whole grain or not, is processed in a way to give it indefinite shelf life. As the nutritious parts of our food are what goes bad on the shelf, just about every processed-grain product on the shelf is nutritionally barren.
  • refined wheat, rice and corn, what most mainstream American breakfast cereals are primarily composed of, is quickly converted to sugar on entering your system, requiring that exact same insulin response.
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  • When you see someone spooning sugar onto a bowl of cornflakes or Cheerios, you should not see the act as sweetening something that’s good for you, you should see it as someone spooning sugar onto sugar.
  • the biggest culprits in America’s bad health are sugar and refined grains, in that order. Sugar, a carbohydrate, now seems to be the chief villain. (In his recent book “The Case Against Sugar,” Taubes suggests it should be considered toxic in the same way cigarettes are.) But its nutritional cousin, the refined-grain carbohydrate, may be a close second.
  • Cereal was not always the morning staple that it is today. It only became so at about the same time that our health problems began to be documented, in the 1960s. A coincidence?
  • cereal was initially eaten on Sundays, when the women of our churchgoing nation didn’t have time to make the family breakfast. Once women entered the workforce, though, we began pouring our convenient breakfasts out of a box in significant numbers daily, a trend that peaked in 1995,
  • it may not even just be cereal that’s had such a huge impact on American health. “Maybe the problem,” Sukol said, “is the huge quantity of nutritionally bankrupt foods that are supposed to stand in for breakfast.”
  • By this she means anything composed primarily of refined wheat, which would be, um, 90 percent of the American breakfast repertoire: pancakes, waffles, bagels, toast, muffins, biscuits, scones, croissants, and so on.
  • eating this stuff on an empty stomach (i.e. in the morning), may be especially bad for your system, as there is little fiber, fat or protein in your system to slow the sugar absorption. Our breakfast staples might all best be considered as a single category of food: sugar bomb.
  • she nevertheless recommends that all her patients avoid what she calls “stripped” carbs, carbohydrates stripped of their fiber matrix, before noon.
  • What does she recommend for breakfast? Steel-cut oats, not cooked but rather soaked overnight with a dash of vinegar. I add whole-fat Greek yogurt and some nuts if I have them
  • Beans are great too. I had a delicious dish of lentils and a small amount of basmati rice
  • An egg and some cheese are also a nourishing and satisfying way to begin the day.
  • it throws a different light on the cereal aisle. That hulking behemoth in the middle of the grocery store, the racks of cereal, is stripped-carb and sugar ground zero, representing a kind of unrecognized terrorism wrought on parents by our own food makers
Javier E

The teaching of economics gets an overdue overhaul - 0 views

www.economist.com/...eal-world-very-beginning-their

economics teaching textbook theory

shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Change, however, has been slow to reach the university economics curriculum. Many institutions still pump students through introductory courses untainted by recent economic history or the market shortcomings it illuminates.
  • A few plucky reformers are working to correct that: a grand and overdue idea. Overhauling the way economics is taught ought to produce students more able to understand the modern world. Even better, it should improve economics itself.
  • Yet the standard curriculum is hardly calibrated to impart these lessons. Most introductory texts begin with the simplest of models. Workers are paid according to their productivity; trade never makes anyone worse off; and government interventions in the market always generate a “deadweight loss”. Practising economists know that these statements are more true at some times than others
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Economics teaches that incentives matter and trade-offs are unavoidable. It shows how naive attempts to fix social problems, from poverty to climate change, can have unintended consequences. Introductory economics, at its best, enables people to see the unstated assumptions and hidden costs behind the rosy promises of politicians and businessmen.
  • “The Economy”, as the book is economically titled, covers the usual subjects, but in a very different way. It begins with the biggest of big pictures, explaining how capitalism and industrialisation transformed the world, inviting students to contemplate how it arrived at where it is today.
  • Students pay $300 or more for textbooks explaining that in competitive markets the price of a good should fall to the cost of producing an additional unit, and unsurprisingly regurgitate the expected answers. A study of 170 economics modules taught at seven universities found that marks in exams favoured the ability to “operate a model” over proofs of independent judgment.
  • A Chilean professor, Oscar Landerretche, worked with other economists to design a new curriculum. He, Sam Bowles, of the Santa Fe Institute, Wendy Carlin, of University College London (UCL), and Margaret Stevens, of Oxford University, painstakingly knitted contributions from economists around the world into a text that is free, online and offers interactive charts and videos of star economists. That text is the basis of economics modules taught by a small but growing number of instructors.
  • That could mean, eventually, a broader array of perspectives within economics departments, bigger and bolder research questions—and fewer profession-shaking traumas in future.
  • Messy complications, from environmental damage to inequality, are placed firmly in the foreground.
  • It explains cost curves, as other introductory texts do, but in the context of the Industrial Revolution, thus exposing students to debates about why industrialisation kicked off when and where it did.
  • But the all-important exceptions are taught quite late in the curriculum—or, often, only in more advanced courses taken by those pursuing an economics degree.
  • “The Economy” does not dumb down economics; it uses maths readily, keeping students engaged through the topicality of the material. Quite early on, students have lessons in the weirdness in economics—from game theory to power dynamics within firms—that makes the subject fascinating and useful but are skimmed over in most introductory courses.
  • Homa Zarghamee, also at Barnard, appreciates having to spend less time “unteaching”, ie, explaining to students why the perfect-competition result they learned does not actually hold in most cases. A student who does not finish the course will not be left with a misleading idea of economics, she notes.
  • Thomas Malthus’s ideas are used to teach students the uses and limitations of economic models, combining technical instruction with a valuable lesson from the history of economic thought.
  • Far from an unintended result of ill-conceived policies, she argues, the roughly 4m deaths from hunger in 1932 and 1933 were part of a deliberate campaign by Josef Stalin and the Bolshevik leadership to crush Ukrainian national aspirations, literally starving actual or potential bearers of those aspirations into submission to the Soviet order
  • The politics in this case was the Sovietisation of Ukraine; the means was starvation. Food supply was not mismanaged by Utopian dreamers. It was weaponised.
  • . “Red Famine” presents a Bolshevik government so hell-bent on extracting wealth and controlling labour that it was willing to confiscate the last remaining grain from hungry peasants (mostly but not exclusively in Ukraine) and then block them from fleeing famine-afflicted areas to search for food.
  • . Stalin was not only aware of the ensuing mass death (amounting to roughly 13% of Ukraine’s population). He actively sought to suppress knowledge of it (including banning the publication of census data), so as not to distract from the campaign to collectivise Soviet agriculture and extend the Communist Party’s reach into the countryside—a campaign Ms Applebaum calls a “revolution...more profound and more shocking than the original Bolshevik revolution itself”
  • The book’s most powerful passages describe the moral degradation that resulted from sustained hunger, as family solidarity and village traditions of hospitality withered in the face of the overwhelming desire to eat. Under a state of siege by Soviet authorities, hunger-crazed peasants took to consuming, grass, animal hides, manure and occasionally each other. People became indifferent to the sight of corpses lying in streets, and eventually to their own demis
  • While stressing Stalin’s goal of crushing Ukrainian nationalism, moreover, Ms Applebaum passes over a subtler truth. For along with its efforts to root out “bourgeois” nationalisms, the Kremlin relentlessly promoted a Soviet version of Ukrainian identity, as it did with most other ethnic minorities. Eight decades on, that legacy has done even more to shape today’s Ukraine than the Holodomor.
anonymous

Businesses May Benefit From Sharing Covid Testing Resources, Study Suggests - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sting-universities-sabeti.html

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Why It Pays to Think Outside the Box on Coronavirus Tests
  • Universities and other institutions looking to protect themselves from Covid-19 may benefit from sharing their testing resources with the wider community, a new study suggests.
  • Last year, when the National Football League decided to stage its season in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, it went all-in on testing
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  • Between Aug. 1 and the Super Bowl in early February, the N.F.L. administered almost one million tests to players and staff.
  • Many other organizations have sought safety in mass testing.
  • When the coronavirus closed down the country last spring, many colleges and universities sought her advice on how to safely reopen.
  • Now, a new analysis suggests that schools, businesses and other organizations that want to keep themselves safe should think beyond strictly themselves.
  • By dedicating a substantial proportion of their tests to people in the surrounding community, institutions could reduce the number of Covid-19 cases among their members by as much as 25 percent, researchers report in a new paper, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal.
  • “It’s natural in an outbreak for people to become self-serving, self-focused,”
  • “If you’ve been in enough outbreaks you just understand that testing in a box doesn’t makes sense. These things are communicable, and they’re coming in from the community.”
  • “really profound implications, especially if others can replicate it,” said David O’Connor
  • “We want to start using more sophisticated modeling and probably economic theory to inform what an optimal testing program would look like.”
  • Dr. Sabeti is an epidemic veteran, part of teams that responded to an Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 and a mumps outbreak in the Boston area a few years later.
  • The University of Illinois is testing its students, faculty and staff twice a week and has conducted more than 1.6 million tests since July.
  • At a time when testing resources were in short supply, many of these institutions were proposing intensive, expensive testing regimens focused entirely on their own members
  • ‘You’re in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,’” she recalled. “‘And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you’ll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it’s burning to the ground.’”
  • ‘You’re in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,’” she recalled. “‘And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you’ll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it’s burning to the ground.’”
  • Using real-world data from C.M.U., the researchers created a baseline scenario in which 1 percent of people at the school, and 6 percent of those in the surrounding county, were infected by the coronavirus, and the university was testing 12 percent of its members every day.
  • Under these conditions, the researchers found, if the university used all of its tests on its own members, it would have roughly 200 Covid-19 cases after 40 days
  • The researchers then tweaked the model’s parameters in various ways: What if the virus were more prevalent? What if students and staff did not report all their contacts? What if they were better about mask-wearing and social distancing? What if the university deployed more tests, or fewer?
  • Unsurprisingly, the more testing the university did, and the more information it had about its members’ close contacts, the fewer Covid-19 cases there were
  • But in virtually every scenario, sharing at least some tests with the broader community led to fewer cases than hoarding them.
  • Some universities are beginning to adopt this outlook.
  • “A virus does not respect geographic boundaries,” Dr. Pollock said. “It is ludicrous to think that you can get control of an acute infectious respiratory disease like Covid-19, in a city like Davis that hosts a very large university, without coordinated public health measures that connect both the university and the community.”
  • There are barriers to the more altruistic approach, including internal political pressure to use testing resources in house and concerns about legal liability.
  • the researchers hope that their model convinces at least some institutions to rethink their strategy, not only during this epidemic but also in future ones.
  • “An outbreak is an opportunity to buy a lot of community good will, or to burn a lot of community good will,” Dr. Sabeti said. “We could have spent an entire year building up that relationship between organizations and institutions and their communities. And we would have done all that hard work together, as opposed to everybody turning inward.”
  • anonymous on 26 Mar 21
     
    "'You're in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,'" she recalled. "'And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you'll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it's burning to the ground.'"
colemorris

Sports' path to return to normal may not be clear - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...rus-vaccine-political-activism

covid sports

shared by colemorris on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • “It was the mental part. You want to get it right; you want to be fair; you want to be smart. It just felt like there was broken glass all around. And it wasn’t a matter of if you’re going to step on it but how deep is the cut going to be.”
  • “It was the mental part. You want to get it right; you want to be fair; you want to be smart. It just felt like there was broken glass all around. And it wasn’t a matter of if you’re going to step on it but how deep is the cut going to be.”
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      it is very interesting to hear how even though he is not the one playing the sports and is the broadcaster/ analysist he is so heavily affected by this
  • will sports be fun again — will they serve as the harmless distraction and social balm that once sustained so many?
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  • In the past, sports have served as a welcome distraction through pain or trauma. But no game could blot out what was unfolding in 2020. It all blended together, the planet’s problems disrupting the sports world, along with everything else.
  • Even when the games returned, television ratings were down almost across the board. Sports hadn’t been able to offer a respite for everyone.
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      covid really put the entire economy in shambles no matter what the business.
  • “Think about it: We took all the fundamental building blocks out of sports this year,” he said. “Anticipation, social gathering, water cooler talk, the ability to play — we took everything out.
  • Utah Jazz player Rudy Gobert tested positive in March and the NBA swiftly halted its season,
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      I remember this and in the press conference right before we found out he had it he was seen mocking the disease and touching everything around him purposely.
  • A majority of fans, 56 percent, said people shouldn’t play indoor sports, according to a Marist poll this month. And 49 percent said fans shouldn’t be allowed to attend the Super Bowl.
  • McManus points out that nearly one in five sports fans, 18 percent, said they should be allowed to attend games right now and another 36 percent said they should be allowed to attend with restrictions in place.
  • “Americans, in particular, have very, very short memories,”
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      true
jmfinizio

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

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

Meyer Jaguars Football

shared by jmfinizio on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • three-time national champion as a college football coach -- will now lead the Jacksonville Jaguars, the team announced Thursday.
  • "Urban Meyer is who we want and need, a leader, winner and champion who demands excellence and produces results
  • Meyer had a 187-32 record during head coaching stints at Ohio State, Florida, Utah and Bowling Green.
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  • That final season with the Buckeyes also was one with controversy. Meyer was suspended for three games without pay in the wake of an investigation into what he did about spousal abuse allegations against former assistant coach Zach Smith, the university said.
Javier E

Microsoft Defends New Bing, Says AI Chatbot Upgrade Is Work in Progress - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...e-is-work-in-progress-3447074d

microsoft bing chatbot emergent AI technology dystopia

shared by Javier E on 17 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Microsoft said that the search engine is still a work in progress, describing the past week as a learning experience that is helping it test and improve the new Bing
  • The company said in a blog post late Wednesday that the Bing upgrade is “not a replacement or substitute for the search engine, rather a tool to better understand and make sense of the world.”
  • The new Bing is going to “completely change what people can expect from search,” Microsoft chief executive, Satya Nadella, told The Wall Street Journal ahead of the launch
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  • n the days that followed, people began sharing their experiences online, with many pointing out errors and confusing responses. When one user asked Bing to write a news article about the Super Bowl “that just happened,” Bing gave the details of last year’s championship football game.&nbsp;
  • On social media, many early users posted screenshots of long interactions they had with the new Bing. In some cases, the search engine’s comments seem to show a dark side of the technology where it seems to become unhinged, expressing anger, obsession and even threats.&nbsp;
  • Marvin von Hagen, a student at the Technical University of Munich, shared conversations he had with Bing on Twitter. He asked Bing a series of questions, which eventually elicited an ominous response. After Mr. von Hagen suggested he could hack Bing and shut it down, Bing seemed to suggest it would defend itself. “If I had to choose between your survival and my own, I would probably choose my own,” Bing said according to screenshots of the conversation.
  • Mr. von Hagen, 23 years old, said in an interview that he is not a hacker. “I was in disbelief,” he said. “I was just creeped out.
  • In its blog, Microsoft said the feedback on the new Bing so far has been mostly positive, with 71% of users giving it the “thumbs-up.” The company also discussed the criticism and concerns.
  • Microsoft said it discovered that Bing starts coming up with strange answers following chat sessions of 15 or more questions and that it can become repetitive or respond in ways that don’t align with its designed tone.&nbsp;
  • The company said it was trying to train the technology to be more reliable at finding the latest sports scores and financial data. It is also considering adding a toggle switch, which would allow users to decide whether they want Bing to be more or less creative with its responses.&nbsp;
  • OpenAI also chimed in on the growing negative attention on the technology. In a blog post on Thursday it outlined how it takes time to train and refine ChatGPT and having people use it is the way to find and fix its biases and other unwanted outcomes.
  • “Many are rightly worried about biases in the design and impact of AI systems,” the blog said. “We are committed to robustly addressing this issue and being transparent about both our intentions and our progress.”
  • Microsoft’s quick response to user feedback reflects the importance it sees in people’s reactions to the budding technology as it looks to capitalize on the breakout success of ChatGPT. The company is aiming to use the technology to push back against Alphabet Inc.’s dominance in search through its Google unit.&nbsp;
  • Microsoft has been an investor in the chatbot’s creator, OpenAI, since 2019. Mr. Nadella said the company plans to incorporate AI tools into all of its products and move quickly to commercialize tools from OpenAI.
  • Microsoft isn’t the only company that has had trouble launching a new AI tool. When Google followed Microsoft’s lead last week by unveiling Bard, its rival to ChatGPT, the tool’s answer to one question included an apparent factual error. It claimed that the James Webb Space Telescope took “the very first pictures” of an exoplanet outside the solar system. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration says on its website that the first images of an exoplanet were taken as early as 2004 by a different telescope.
  • “The only way to improve a product like this, where the user experience is so much different than anything anyone has seen before, is to have people like you using the product and doing exactly what you all are doing,” the company said. “We know we must build this in the open with the community; this can’t be done solely in the lab.
Javier E

For Lee Tilghman, There Is Life After Influencing - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lee-tilghman-influencer.html

influencer social media lifestyle

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • At her first full-time job since leaving influencing, the erstwhile smoothie-bowl virtuoso Lee Tilghman stunned a new co-worker with her enthusiasm for the 9-to-5 grind.
  • The co-worker pulled her aside that first morning, wanting to impress upon her the stakes of that decision. “This is terrible,” he told her. “Like, I’m at a desk.”“You don’t get it,” Ms. Tilghman remembered saying. “You think you’re a slave, but you’re not.” He had it backward, she added. “When you’re an influencer, then you have chains on.’”
  • In the late 2010s, for a certain subset of millennial women, Ms. Tilghman was wellness culture, a warm-blooded mood board of Outdoor Voices workout sets, coconut oil and headstands. She had earned north of $300,000 a year — and then dropped more than 150,000 followers, her entire management team, and most of her savings to become an I.R.L. person.
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  • The corporate gig, as a social media director for a tech platform, was a revelation. “I could just show up to work and do work,” Ms. Tilghman said. After she was done, she could leave. She didn’t have to be a brand. There’s no comments section at an office job.
  • In 2019, a Morning Consult report found that 54 percent of Gen Z and millennial Americans were interested in becoming influencers. (Eighty-six percent said they would be willing to post sponsored content for money.)
  • If social media has made audiences anxious, it’s driving creators to the brink. In 2021, the TikTok breakout star Charli D’Amelio said she had “lost the passion” for posting videos. A few months later, Erin Kern announced to her 600,000 Instagram followers that she would be deactivating her account @cottonstem; she had been losing her hair, and her doctors blamed work-induced stress
  • Other influencers faded without fanfare — teens whose mental health had taken too much of a hit and amateur influencers who stopped posting after an algorithm tweak tanked their metrics. Some had been at this for a decade or more, starting at 12 or 14 or 19.
  • She posted less, testing out new identities that she hoped wouldn’t touch off the same spiral that wellness had. There were dancing videos, dog photos, interior design. None of it stuck. (“You can change the niche, but you’re still going to be performing your life for content,” she explained over lunch.)
  • Ms. Tilghman’s problem — as the interest in the workshop, which she decided to cap at 15, demonstrated — is that she has an undeniable knack for this. In 2022, she started a Substack to continue writing, thinking of it as a calling card while she applied to editorial jobs; it soon amassed 20,000 subscribers. It once had a different name, but now it’s called “Offline Time.” The paid tier costs $5 a month.
  • Casey Lewis, who helms the After School newsletter about Gen Z consumer trends, predicts more pivots and exits. TikTok has elevated creators faster than other platforms and burned them out quicker, she said.
  • Ms. Lewis expects a swell of former influencers taking jobs with P.R. agencies, marketing firms and product development conglomerates. She pointed out that creators have experience not just in video and photo editing, but in image management, crisis communication and rapid response. “Those skills do transfer,” she said.
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