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Javier E

Moral code | Rough Type - 0 views

www.roughtype.com/?p=2173

morality technology robotics conscience

shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • So you’re happily tweeting away as your Google self-driving car crosses a bridge, its speed precisely synced to the 50 m.p.h. limit. A group of frisky schoolchildren is also heading across the bridge, on the pedestrian walkway. Suddenly, there’s a tussle, and three of the kids are pushed into the road, right in your vehicle’s path. Your self-driving car has a fraction of a second to make a choice: Either it swerves off the bridge, possibly killing you, or it runs over the children. What does the Google algorithm tell it to do?
  • As we begin to have computer-controlled cars, robots, and other machines operating autonomously out in the chaotic human world, situations will inevitably arise in which the software has to choose between a set of bad, even horrible, alternatives. How do you program a computer to choose the lesser of two evils? What are the criteria, and how do you weigh them?
  • Since we humans aren’t very good at codifying responses to moral dilemmas ourselves, particularly when the precise contours of a dilemma can’t be predicted ahead of its occurrence, programmers will find themselves in an extraordinarily difficult situation. And one assumes that they will carry a moral, not to mention a legal, burden for the code they write.
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  • We don’t even really know what a conscience is, but somebody’s going to have to program one nonetheless.
Javier E

Why Rotterdam Wouldn't Allow a Bridge to Be Dismantled for Bezos' Yacht - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bezos-yacht-rotterdam.html

culture history politics netherlands rich Equality

shared by Javier E on 03 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • explaining the anger that Mr. Bezos and Oceanco, the maker of the three-masted, $500 million schooner, inspired after making what may have sounded like a fairly benign request. The company asked the local government to briefly dismantle the elevated middle span of the Hef, which is 230 feet tall at its highest point, allowing the vessel to sail down the King’s Harbor channel and out to sea.
  • The whole process would have taken a day or two and Oceanco would have covered the costs.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story
  • The bridge, a lattice of moss-green steel in the shape of a hulking “H,” is not actually used by anyone. It served as a railroad bridge for decades until it was replaced by a tunnel and decommissioned in the early 1990s. It’s been idle ever since.
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  • In sum, the operation would have been fast, free and disrupted nothing. So why the fuss?
  • “What can you buy if you have unlimited cash? Can you bend every rule? Can you take apart monuments?”
  • “There’s a principle at stake,”
  • The first problem was the astounding wealth of Mr. Bezos.
  • “The Dutch like to say, ‘Acting normal is crazy enough,’
mcginnisca

Donald Trump Just Called for Ending All Muslim Immigration to the US | VICE | United St... - 0 views

www.vice.com/...muslim-immigration-to-us-vgtrn

donald trump muslim immigration united states language anchoring heuristics bias logic probability

shared by mcginnisca on 09 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Monday afternoon, the Trump campaign issued a press release that, amid an increasingly Islamophobic climate in the US and abroad, called for a blanket ban on any Muslim immigration—a position so starkly bigoted that the two-paragraph statement went viral on Twitter in a matter of moments. (Some users even questioned whether it was real, but it's as real as everything in this universe.)
  • "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on," the release begins, leaving it unclear what exactly Trump thinks could possibly be "going on." An infiltration of the country by ISIS that the candidate has alluded to? A hostile population of American-born Muslims?
  • Trump goes on to discuss the "hatred" Muslims apparently have for Americans, or America, or something. "Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine," Trump says in the statement. "Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life." How the government could "determine" the source of this alleged hatred isn't explained, nor does Trump address how he or anyone else might put a stop to it.
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  • The release cites a poll from something called the Center for Security Policy that claims 25 percent of Muslims surveyed said they were OK with violence against Americans and 51 percent "agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah." Those numbers sound too awful to be true, and there's evidence that they aren't—Georgetown's Bridge Initiative, which studies Islamophobia in America, has called the poll into question and noted that the CSP's founder Frank Gaffney once accused General David Petraeus, of all people, of "submission" to Islamic law.
  • the latest CNN poll had put The Donald in the lead in Iowa, a key early voting state, though another poll that used different sampling techniques showed Cruz ahead of Trump.
sissij

Language family - Wikipedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Language_family

language knowledge wikipedia

shared by sissij on 26 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent modification, to species in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy.
  • the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Romance, and Indo-Iranian language families are branches of a larger Indo-European language family. There is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry[3] that was verified statistically.
  • A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations. Thus, different sources give sometimes wildly different accounts of the number of languages within a family. Classifications of the Japonic family, for example, range from one language (a language isolate) to nearly twenty.
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  • A language isolated in its own branch within a family, such as Armenian within Indo-European, is often also called an isolate, but the meaning of isolate in such cases is usually clarified. For instance, Armenian may be referred to as an "Indo-European isolate". By contrast, so far as is known, the Basque language is an absolute isolate: it has not been shown to be related to any other language despite numerous attempts.
  • The common ancestor of a language family is seldom known directly since most languages have a relatively short recorded history. However, it is possible to recover many features of a proto-language by applying the comparative method, a reconstructive procedure worked out by 19th century linguist August Schleicher.
  • sissij on 26 Nov 16
     
    I found this metaphor very accurate because I think languages certainly have some intimate relationship like family members. Languages are not all very different from one another and isolated. Although people speaking different language may not understand one another, their languages are still connected. I think this article can show that language in some ways are connected like bridges instead of walls. --Sissi (11/26/2016)
anonymous

Six Vintage-Inspired Animations on Critical Thinking | Brain Pickings - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...critical-thinking

shared by anonymous on 10 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 10 Feb 12
     
    Australian outfit Bridge 8, who have the admirable mission of devising "creative strategies for science and society," have put together six fantastic two-minute animations on various aspects of critical thinking, aimed at kids ages 8 to 10 but also designed to resonate with grown-ups. Inspired by the animation style of the 1950s, most recognizably Saul Bass, the films are designed to promote a set of educational resources on critical thinking by TechNYou, an emerging technologies public information project funded by the Australian government.
Akili Dorsey-Bell

A Bridge Between Western Science and Eastern Faith- Kim Severson - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...faith-with-the-Dalai-Lama.html

science knowledge bias education technology

shared by Akili Dorsey-Bell on 14 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Akili Dorsey-Bell on 14 Oct 13
     
    Hey Guys! just thought this would be some food for thought. Since we had just watched a movie relating to the sciences and the churches in the 1500's , Its interesting to see how this conflict is still happening today.
carolinewren

Bridgegate scandal coverage puts media 'bias' on 'full display,' Christie says | NJ.com - 0 views

www.nj.com/...ge_puts_media_bias_on_ful.html

media bias coverage

shared by carolinewren on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Gov. Chris Christie insisted during his latest trip to New Hampshire that the fallout from the George Washington Bridge scandal wouldn't have been as nearly as intense if he were a Democrat.
  • argued to early-primary voters Hillary Clinton escaped scrutiny for clearing the private server housing emails from her tenure as secretary of state because she's a Democrat and he declared "bias is on full display" when that's compared to his own controversy.
  • "Could you imagine if my response the day after
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  • "As you all know, I went through a really fun time the last 15 months with lots of different people investigating me too, right?"
  • all of that happened last January was, 'Oh, by the way, ... I have a private email server and all my emails were on this private server and I deleted a bunch of them, but they were only personal, and you're going to have to take my word for it cause the servers gone."
  • "There is a bias," Christie insisted
  • not the first time the governor suggested media bias was to blame for the fallout of the George Washington Bridge lane closure controversy.
  • December 2013, a month before the now infamous "time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee" email from a top Christie staffer was revealed, Christie brushed off questions about the lane closures during a Statehouse news conference
  • "I know you guys are obsessed with this, I'm not. I'm really not. It's not that big a deal," Christie insisted. "Just because press runs around and writes about it, both here and nationally, I know why that is and so do you, let's not pretend it's because of the gravity of the issue. It's because I am a national figure and anything like this will be written a lot about now, so let's not pretend this is some grave thing."
  • Christie signaled in New Hampshire he's intent on pressing Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential race, on the attacks in Benghazi, Libya that's been a lighting rod for Clinton critics just as the governor declared during a recent trip here that he's done "apologizing" for the Bridgegate scandal
  • "I don't think there's been nearly enough questions asked about this," Christie said. "We need to ask a lot more questions about Benghazi. We need to get to the bottom of what happened because it does matter, madam secretary."
julia rhodes

Masculine or Feminine? (And Why It Matters) | Psychology Today - 2 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...or-feminine-and-why-it-matters

science research psychology language brain science feminine masculine thought cognition

shared by julia rhodes on 15 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • If you’ve ever studied a foreign language, you know that in many languages, nouns —even inanimate objects— have grammatical gender.
  • As it turns out, a language’s grammatical gender can have significant and surprising effects on cognition.
  • So linguistic gender can spill over into other mental processes, leading us to judge and categorize inanimate and abstract nouns as truly having a gender, even though we logically know better.
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  • Can grammatical gender influence speakers’ cognitive processes when they’re speaking another language entirely?
  • They created a list of 24 objects that have opposite genders in Spanish and German; in each language, half of the objects were masculine and half were feminine.
  • peaking English and using materials written in English
  • The word “bridge” is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. Sure enough, German speakers described bridges as beautiful, elegant, fragile, pretty, and slender, while Spanish speakers said they were big, dangerous, strong, sturdy, and towering.
  • As these studies show, grammatical gender can influence people’s thinking, even when they’re speaking a language with no grammatical gender to speak of —and even when they’re not speaking any language at all!
  • Small, unnoticed features of language can influence our thoughts, sometimes in big ways. Knowing that, imagine how else language, culture, and society might affect our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
  • it seems we are not yet free of gender stereotypes
Javier E

The Trouble With Brain Science - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rouble-with-brain-science.html

brain science theory science

shared by Javier E on 14 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • What would a good theory of the brain actually look like?
  • Different kinds of sciences call for different kinds of theories. Physicists, for example, are searching for a “grand unified theory” that integrates gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces into a neat package of equations.
  • The living world is bursting with variety and unpredictable complexity, because biology is the product of historical accidents, with species solving problems based on happenstance that leads them down one evolutionary road rather than another.
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  • ut biological complexity is only part of the challenge in figuring out what kind of theory of the brain we’re seeking.
  • What we are really looking for is a bridge, some way of connecting two separate scientific languages — those of neuroscience and psychology.
  • An example is the discovery of DNA, which allowed us to understand how genetic information could be represented and replicated in a physical structure. In one stroke, this bridge transformed biology from a mystery — in which the physical basis of life was almost entirely unknown — into a tractable if challenging set of problems
  • We know that there must be some lawful relation between assemblies of neurons and the elements of thought, but we are currently at a loss to describe those laws.
Javier E

Does Your Language Shape How You Think? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...29language-t.html

language thinking

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - Cached
  • various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them
  • Did the opposite genders of “bridge” in German and Spanish, for example, have an effect on the design of bridges in Spain and Germany? Do the emotional maps imposed by a gender system have higher-level behavioral consequences for our everyday life? Do they shape tastes, fashions, habits and preferences in the societies concerned? At the current state of our knowledge about the brain, this is not something that can be easily measured in a psychology lab. But it would be surprising if they didn’t.
Javier E

Ian Hacking, Eminent Philosopher of Science and Much Else, Dies at 87 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ian-hacking-dead.html

philosopher knowledge bias language

shared by Javier E on 28 May 23 - No Cached
  • In an academic career that included more than two decades as a professor in the philosophy department of the University of Toronto, following appointments at Cambridge and Stanford, Professor Hacking’s intellectual scope seemed to know no bounds. Because of his ability to span multiple academic fields, he was often described as a bridge builder.
  • “Ian Hacking was a one-person interdisciplinary department all by himself,” Cheryl Misak, a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto, said in a phone interview. “Anthropologists, sociologists, historians and psychologists, as well as those working on probability theory and physics, took him to have important insights for their disciplines.”
  • Professor Hacking wrote several landmark works on the philosophy and history of probability, including “The Taming of Chance” (1990), which was named one of the best 100 nonfiction books of the 20th century by the Modern Library.
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  • “I have long been interested in classifications of people, in how they affect the people classified, and how the effects on the people in turn change the classifications,” he wrote in “Making Up People
  • His work in the philosophy of science was groundbreaking: He departed from the preoccupation with questions that had long concerned philosophers. Arguing that science was just as much about intervention as it was about representation, be helped bring experimentation to center stage.
  • Regarding one such question — whether unseen phenomena like quarks and electrons were real or merely the theoretical constructs of physicists — he argued for reality in the case of phenomena that figured in experiments, citing as an example an experiment at Stanford that involved spraying electrons and positrons into a ball of niobium to detect electric charges. “So far as I am concerned,” he wrote, “if you can spray them, they’re real.”
  • His book “The Emergence of Probability” (1975), which is said to have inspired hundreds of books by other scholars, examined how concepts of statistical probability have evolved over time, shaping the way we understand not just arcane fields like quantum physics but also everyday life.
  • “I was trying to understand what happened a few hundred years ago that made it possible for our world to be dominated by probabilities,” he said in a 2012 interview with the journal Public Culture. “We now live in a universe of chance, and everything we do — health, sports, sex, molecules, the climate — takes place within a discourse of probabilities.”
  • Whatever the subject, whatever the audience, one idea that pervades all his work is that “science is a human enterprise,” Ragnar Fjelland and Roger Strand of the University of Bergen in Norway wrote when Professor Hacking won the Holberg Prize. “It is always created in a historical situation, and to understand why present science is as it is, it is not sufficient to know that it is ‘true,’ or confirmed. We have to know the historical context of its emergence.”
  • Hacking often argued that as the human sciences have evolved, they have created categories of people, and that people have subsequently defined themselves as falling into those categories. Thus does human reality become socially constructed.
  • In 2000, he became the first Anglophone to win a permanent position at the Collège de France, where he held the chair in the philosophy and history of scientific concepts until he retired in 2006.
  • “I call this the ‘looping effect,’” he added. “Sometimes, our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before.”
  • In “Why Race Still Matters,” a 2005 article in the journal Daedalus, he explored how anthropologists developed racial categories by extrapolating from superficial physical characteristics, with lasting effects — including racial oppression. “Classification and judgment are seldom separable,” he wrote. “Racial classification is evaluation.”
  • Similarly, he once wrote, in the field of mental health the word “normal” “uses a power as old as Aristotle to bridge the fact/value distinction, whispering in your ear that what is normal is also right.”
  • In his influential writings about autism, Professor Hacking charted the evolution of the diagnosis and its profound effects on those diagnosed, which in turn broadened the definition to include a greater number of people.
  • Encouraging children with autism to think of themselves that way “can separate the child from ‘normalcy’ in a way that is not appropriate,” he told Public Culture. “By all means encourage the oddities. By no means criticize the oddities.”
  • His emphasis on historical context also illuminated what he called transient mental illnesses, which appear to be so confined 0cto their time 0c 0cthat they can vanish when times change.
  • “hysterical fugue” was a short-lived epidemic of compulsive wandering that emerged in Europe in the 1880s, largely among middle-class men who had become transfixed by stories of exotic locales and the lure of trave
  • His intellectual tendencies were unmistakable from an early age. “When he was 3 or 4 years old, he would sit and read the dictionary,” Jane Hacking said. “His parents were completely baffled.”
  • He wondered aloud, the interviewer noted, if the whole universe was governed by nonlocality — if “everything in the universe is aware of everything else.”“That’s what you should be writing about,” he said. “Not me. I’m a dilettante. My governing word is ‘curiosity.’”
katieb0305

Rick Perry: The truth about 'American Sniper' Chris Kyle | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...merican-sniper-chris-kyle.html

shared by katieb0305 on 30 May 16 - No Cached
  • Despite the high regard in which Americans have held the military for generations, there is a lot about the military that those who haven’t served don’t quite understand.
  • That gap of understanding between the protected and their protectors is typically bridged by mutual respect, but can also be a gutter in which liars and character assassins slither.
  • As any veteran will tell you, a DD-214 is THE definitive record of a person’s time in the military, used to prove the authenticity, duration and character of said service.  The official name for the form is Certificate of Release or Discharge from Active Duty and veterans learn early on to keep a copy handy.
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.
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  • 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
Javier E

The post-truth world of the Trump administration is scarier than you think - The Washin... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-b994-f45a208f7a73_story.html

post-truth illogic facts demagogue

shared by Javier E on 03 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • it’s time to cross another bridge — into a world without facts. Or, more precisely, where facts do not matter a whit.
  • “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts,” she declared on “The Diane Rehm Show”
  • Hughes, a frequent surrogate for President-elect Donald Trump and a paid commentator for CNN during the campaign, kept on defending that assertion at length
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  • What matters now, Hughes argued, is not whether his fraud claim is true. No, what matters is who believes it.
  • “You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally,” said Lewandowski, who was another ill-advised CNN hire. “The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar — you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”
  • two other Trump surrogates echoed this sentiment.
  • Ousted Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, speaking during an election post-mortem at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, blamed journalists for — yes — believing what his candidate said.
  • “Mr. Trump’s tweet, amongst a certain crowd, a large — a large part of the population, are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some — in his — amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies, and there’s no facts to back it up.”
  • but Trump is not a guy at a bar; he was the Republican nominee for president of the United States and will pretty soon be the leader of the free world
  • When CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway about the same election-fraud claim discussed above — specifically, whether disseminating misinformation was “presidential”
  • “He’s the president-elect, so that’s presidential behavior,” Conway said, using mind-bending pseudo-logic
Javier E

The Selfish Gene turns 40 | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ideas-stand-up-adam-rutherford

science gene genetics selfishness natural selection darwinism

shared by Javier E on 30 May 16 - No Cached
  • The idea was this: genes strive for immortality, and individuals, families, and species are merely vehicles in that quest. The behaviour of all living things is in service of their genes hence, metaphorically, they are selfish.
  • Before this, it had been proposed that natural selection was honing the behaviour of living things to promote the continuance through time of the individual creature, or family, or group or species. But in fact, Dawkins said, it was the gene itself that was trying to survive, and it just so happened that the best way for it to survive was in concert with other genes in the impermanent husk of an individual
  • This gene-centric view of evolution also began to explain one of the oddities of life on Earth – the behaviour of social insects. What is the point of a drone bee, doomed to remain childless and in the service of a totalitarian queen? Suddenly it made sense that, with the gene itself steering evolution, the fact that the drone shared its DNA with the queen meant that its servitude guarantees not the individual’s survival, but the endurance of the genes they shar
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  • the subject is taught bafflingly minimally and late in the curriculum even today; evolution by natural selection is crucial to every aspect of the living world. In the words of the Russian scientist Theodosius Dobzhansky: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
  • his true legacy is The Selfish Gene and its profound effect on multiple generations of scientists and lay readers. In a sense, The Selfish Gene and Dawkins himself are bridges, both intellectually and chronologically, between the titans of mid-century biology – Ronald Fisher, Trivers, Hamilton, Maynard Smith and Williams – and our era of the genome, in which the interrogation of DNA dominates the study of evolution.
  • Genes aren’t what they used to be either. In 1976 they were simply stretches of DNA that encoded proteins. We now know about genes made of DNA’s cousin, RNA; we’ve discovered genes that hop from genome to genome
  • Since 1976, our understanding of why life is the way it is has blossomed and changed. Once the gene became the dominant idea in biology in the 1990s there followed a technological goldrush – the Human Genome Project – to find them all.
  • None of the complications of modern genomes erodes the central premise of the selfish gene.
  • Much of the enmity stems from people misunderstanding that selfishness is being used as a metaphor. The irony of these attacks is that the selfish gene metaphor actually explains altruism. We help others who are not directly related to us because we share similar versions of genes with them.
  • In the scientific community, the chief objection maintains that natural selection can operate at the level of a group of animals, not solely on genes or even individuals
  • To my mind, and that of the majority of evolutionary biologists, the gene-centric view of evolution always emerges intact.
  • the premise remains exciting that a gene’s only desire is to reproduce itself, and that the complexity of genomes makes that reproduction more efficient.
Javier E

Our Ecological Boredom - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...our-ecological-boredom.html

freedom wilderness conformity boredom ecological psychology human origins

shared by Javier E on 19 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Live free or die: This is the maxim of our age. But the freedoms we celebrate are particular and limited. We fetishize the freedom of business from state control; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to carry guns and speak our minds and worship whom we will. But despite, in some cases because of, this respect for particular freedoms, every day the scope of our lives appears to contract.
  • Half a century ago, we were promised that rising wealth would mean less work, longer vacations and more choice
  • our working hours rise in line with economic growth, and they are now governed by a corporate culture of snooping and quantification, of infantilizing dictats and impossible demands, all of which smothers autonomy and creativity. Technologies that promised to save time and free us from drudgery (such as email and smartphones) fill our heads with a clatter so persistent it stifles the ability to think.
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  • Young people, who have no place in this dead-eyed, sanitized landscape, scarcely venture from their bedrooms. Political freedom now means choosing between alternative versions of market fundamentalism.
  • Even the freedoms we do possess we tend not to exercise. We spend hours every day watching other people doing what we might otherwise be doing: dancing, singing, playing sports, even cooking. We venture outdoors to seek marginally different varieties of stuff we already possess
  • We entertain the illusion that we have chosen our lives. Why, if this is the case, do our apparent choices differ so little from those of other people? Why do we live and work and travel and eat and dress and entertain ourselves in almost identical fashion? It’s no wonder, when we possess and use it so little, that we make a fetish out of freedom.Continue reading the main story
  • our survival in the modern economy requires the use of few of the mental and physical capacities we possess. Sometimes it feels like a small and shuffling life. Our humdrum, humiliating lives leave us, I believe, ecologically bored.
  • Across many rich nations, especially the United States, global competition is causing the abandonment of farming on less fertile land. Rather than trying to tame and hold back the encroaching wilds, I believe we should help to accelerate the process of reclamation, removing redundant roads and fences, helping to re-establish missing species, such as wolves and cougars and bears, building bridges between recovering habitats to create continental-scale wildlife corridors, such as those promoted by the Rewilding Institute.
  • This rewilding of the land permits, if we choose, a partial rewilding of our own lives. It allows us to step into a world that is not controlled and regulated, to imagine ourselves back into the rawer life from which we came
Javier E

Sullivan: Is Political Gravity Finally Sinking Donald Trump? - 0 views

nymag.com/...ally-sinking-donald-trump.html

stoicism terrorism sang-froid english crisis psychology

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Bill Kristo
  • “We are not afraid,” declared Prime Minister Theresa May after the latest Islamist horror on Westminster Bridge. She went on about the importance of being “normal.” It’s a very British response to terrorism. It’s called stoicism — a quality unknown, it appears, in the home of the “brave.”
  • Compare this with, say, the reaction to the Boston marathon bombing. An entire city was brought to a standstill and locked down, while the pursuit of a deranged, unarmed teenager continued. You can understand that, I suppose, given that the suspect was still at large. But to subsequently celebrate the event with the slogan “Boston Strong” was perverse. The truth was: “Boston Shit-Scared.”
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  • The response of Americans to terror is to be terrified — 9/11’s trauma has never been fully exorcised. Until we get over that, until we manage to stiffen our upper lips like the Brits, jihadist terrorists will exercise control over the American psyche like no one else. We can do better, can’t we? If we want the Constitution to survive both Islamism’s threat and the potential response of a beleaguered Trump, we’ll have to.
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