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Javier E

Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...liu-cixins-war-of-the-worlds

china science fiction realpolitik psychology science

shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • he briskly dismissed the idea that fiction could serve as commentary on history or on current affairs. “The whole point is to escape the real world!” he said.
  • Chinese tech entrepreneurs discuss the Hobbesian vision of the trilogy as a metaphor for cutthroat competition in the corporate world; other fans include Barack Obama, who met Liu in Beijing two years ago, and Mark Zuckerberg. Liu’s international career has become a source of national pride. In 2015, China’s then Vice-President, Li Yuanchao, invited Liu to Zhongnanhai—an off-limits complex of government accommodation sometimes compared to the Kremlin—to discuss the books and showed Liu his own copies, which were dense with highlights and annotations.
  • In China, one of his stories has been a set text in the gao kao—the notoriously competitive college-entrance exams that determine the fate of ten million pupils annually; another has appeared in the national seventh-grade-curriculum textbook. When a reporter recently challenged Liu to answer the middle-school questions about the “meaning” and the “central themes” of his story, he didn’t get a single one right. “I’m a writer,” he told me, with a shrug.
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  • Liu’s tomes—they tend to be tomes—have been translated into more than twenty languages, and the trilogy has sold some eight million copies worldwide. He has won China’s highest honor for science-fiction writing, the Galaxy Award, nine times, and in 2015 he became the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award, the most prestigious international science-fiction prize
  • Liu believes that this trend signals a deeper shift in the Chinese mind-set—that technological advances have spurred a new excitement about the possibilities of cosmic exploration.
  • Concepts that seemed abstract to others took on, for him, concrete forms; they were like things he could touch, inducing a “druglike euphoria.” Compared with ordinary literature, he came to feel, “the stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional
  • Pragmatic choices like this one, or like the decision his grandparents made when their sons were conscripted, recur in his fiction—situations that present equally unconscionable choices on either side of a moral fulcrum
  • The great flourishing of science fiction in the West at the end of the nineteenth century occurred alongside unprecedented technological progress and the proliferation of the popular press—transformations that were fundamental to the development of the genre
  • Joel Martinsen, the translator of the second volume of Liu’s trilogy, sees the series as a continuation of this tradition. “It’s not hard to read parallels between the Trisolarans and imperialist designs on China, driven by hunger for resources and fear of being wiped out,” he told me. Even Liu, unwilling as he is to endorse comparisons between the plot and China’s current face-off with the U.S., did at one point let slip that “the relationship between politics and science fiction cannot be underestimated.”
  • Speculative fiction is the art of imagining alternative worlds, and the same political establishment that permits it to be used as propaganda for the existing regime is also likely to recognize its capacity to interrogate the legitimacy of the status quo.
  • Liu has been criticized for peopling his books with characters who seem like cardboard cutouts installed in magnificent dioramas. Liu readily admits to the charge. “I did not begin writing for love of literature,” he told me. “I did so for love of science.”
  • “The Three-Body Problem” takes its title from an analytical problem in orbital mechanics which has to do with the unpredictable motion of three bodies under mutual gravitational pull. Reading an article about the problem, Liu thought, What if the three bodies were three suns? How would intelligent life on a planet in such a solar system develop? From there, a structure gradually took shape that almost resembles a planetary system, with characters orbiting the central conceit like moons. For better or worse, the characters exist to support the framework of the story rather than to live as individuals on the page.
  • Liu’s imagination is dauntingly capacious, his narratives conceived on a scale that feels, at times, almost hallucinogenic. The time line of the trilogy spans 18,906,450 years, encompassing ancient Egypt, the Qin dynasty, the Byzantine Empire, the Cultural Revolution, the present, and a time eighteen million years in the future
  • The first book is set on Earth, though some of its scenes take place in virtual reality; by the end of the third book, the scope of the action is interstellar and annihilation unfolds across several dimensions. The London Review of Books has called the trilogy “one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written.”
  • Although physics furnishes the novels’ premises, it is politics that drives the plots. At every turn, the characters are forced to make brutal calculations in which moral absolutism is pitted against the greater good
  • In Liu’s fictional universe, idealism is fatal and kindness an exorbitant luxury. As one general says in the trilogy, “In a time of war, we can’t afford to be too scrupulous.” Indeed, it is usually when people do not play by the rules of Realpolitik that the most lives are lost.
  • “I know what you are thinking,” he told me with weary clarity. “What about individual liberty and freedom of governance?” He sighed, as if exhausted by a debate going on in his head. “But that’s not what Chinese people care about. For ordinary folks, it’s the cost of health care, real-estate prices, their children’s education. Not democracy.”
  • Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.”
  • Liu explained to me, the existing regime made the most sense for today’s China, because to change it would be to invite chaos. “If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth,”
  • It was an opinion entirely consistent with his systems-level view of human societies, just as mine reflected a belief in democracy and individualism as principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes
  • “I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.
  • Chinese people of his generation were lucky, he said. The changes they had seen were so huge that they now inhabited a world entirely different from that of their childhood. “China is a futuristic country,” he said. “I realized that the world around me became more and more like science fiction, and this process is speeding up.”
  • “We have statues of a few martyrs, but we never—We don’t memorialize those, the individuals.” He took off his glasses and blinked, peering into the wide expanse of green and concrete. “This is how we Chinese have always been,” he said. “When something happens, it passes, and time buries the stories.”
Javier E

The Price of the Coronavirus Pandemic | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ce-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic

pandemic profit economic response opportunity financial

shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • “You don’t know anyone who has made as much money out of this as I have,” he said over the phone. No argument here. He wouldn’t specify an amount, but reckoned that he was up almost two thousand per cent on the year.
  • He bought a big stake in Alpha Pro Tech, one of the few North American manufacturers of N95 surgical masks, with the expectation that when the virus made it across the Pacific the company would get government contracts to produce more. The stock was trading at about three dollars and fifty cents a share, and so, for cents on the dollar, he bought options to purchase the shares at a future date for ten dollars: he was betting that it would go up much more than that. By the end of February, the stock was trading at twenty-five dollars a share
  • He quickly put some money to work
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  • He shorted oil and, as a proxy for oil, the Canadian dollar. (That is, he bet against both.) Finally, he shorted U.S. equities.
  • Last October, he listened to an audiobook by the Hardcore History podcaster, Dan Carlin, called “The End Is Always Near.” “So I had pandemics and plagues in my head,” the Australian said. “In December, I started seeing the first articles about this wet-market thing going on in China, and then in early January there was a lot on Twitter about the shit in Wuhan.” He was in Switzerland on a ski holiday with his family, and he bought all the surgical masks and gloves he could find.
  • The Australian, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used, is a voluble redhead just shy of fifty.
  • The problem, he said, was that, perhaps more now than ever, Americans lack what he called “social cohesion,” and thus the collective will, to commit to such a path.
  • perhaps the government should reward each citizen who strictly observed the quarantine with fifty thousand dollars. “The virus would burn out after four weeks,” he said. The U.S. had all the food and water and fuel it would need to survive months, if not years, of total isolation from the world. “If you don’t trade with China, they’re screwed,” he said. “You’d win this war. Let the rest of the world burn.
  • I’d been eavesdropping for a week on the friend’s WhatsApp conversation with dozens of his acquaintances and colleagues (he called them the Fokkers, for an acronym involving his name), all of them men, most of them expensively educated financial professionals, some of them very rich, a few with connections in high places. The general disposition of the participants, with exceptions, was the opposite of the Australian’s
  • they expressed the belief, with a conviction that occasionally tipped into stridency or mockery, that the media, the modellers, and the markets were overreacting to the threat of the coronavirus
  • They mocked Jim Cramer, the host of the market program “Mad Money,” on CNBC, for predicting a great depression and wondering if anyone would ever board an airplane again. Anecdotes, hyperbole: the talking chuckleheads sowing and selling fear.
  • it’s hard for a coldhearted capitalist to know just how cold the heart must go. Public-health professionals make a cost-benefit calculation, too, with different weightings.
  • This brutal shock is attacking a body that was already vulnerable. In the event of a global depression, a postmortem might identify COVID-19 as the cause of death, but, as with so many of the virus’s victims, the economy had a preëxisting condition—debt, instead of pulmonary disease.
  • “It’s as if the virus is almost beside the point,” a trader I know told me. “This was all set up to happen.”
  • the “smart money,” like the giant asset-management firms Blackstone and the Carlyle Group, was now telling companies to draw down their bank lines, and borrow as much as they could, in case the lenders went out of business or found ways to say no. Sure enough, by March’s end, corporations had reportedly tapped a record two hundred and eight billion dollars from their revolving-credit lines
  • In a world where we talk, suddenly, of trillions, two hundred billion may not seem like a lot, but it is: in 2007, the subprime-mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, in drawing down “just” $11.5 billion, helped bring the system to its knees.
  • It is hard to navigate out of the debt trap. Creditors can forgive debtors, but that process, especially at this level, would be almost impossibly laborious and fraught. Meanwhile, defaults flood the market with collateral, be it buildings, stocks, or aircraft. The price of that collateral collapses—haircuts for baldheads—leading to more defaults.
  • In New York State, where nearly half a million new claims had been filed in two weeks, the unemployment-insurance trust began to teeter toward insolvency. Come summer, there would be no money left to pay unemployment benefits.
  • As April arrived, businesses, large and small, decided not to pay rent, either because they didn’t have the cash on hand or because, with a recession looming, they wanted to preserve what cash they had. Furloughed or fired employees, meanwhile, faced similar decisions
  • On March 20th, Goldman Sachs spooked the world, by predicting a twenty-four-per-cent decline in G.D.P. in the second quarter, a falloff in activity that seemed at once both unthinkable and inevitable. Subsequent predictions grew even more disma
douglasn89

The Simple Economics of Machine Intelligence - 0 views

hbr.org/...nomics-of-machine-intelligence

shared by douglasn89 on 06 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • The year 1995 was heralded as the beginning of the “New Economy.” Digital communication was set to upend markets and change everything. But economists by and large didn’t buy into the hype.
  • Today we are seeing similar hype about machine intelligence. But once again, as economists, we believe some simple rules apply. Technological revolutions tend to involve some important activity becoming cheap, like the cost of communication or finding information. Machine intelligence is, in its essence, a prediction technology, so the economic shift will center around a drop in the cost of prediction.
  • The first effect of machine intelligence will be to lower the cost of goods and services that rely on prediction. This matters because prediction is an input to a host of activities including transportation, agriculture, healthcare, energy manufacturing, and retail.
    • douglasn89
      douglasn89 on 06 Mar 17
       
      This emphasis on prediction ties into the previous discussion and reading we had which included the idea that humans by nature are poor predictors, so because of that, they have begun to design machines to predict.
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  • As machine intelligence lowers the cost of prediction, we will begin to use it as an input for things for which we never previously did. As a historical example, consider semiconductors, an area of technological advance that caused a significant drop in the cost of a different input: arithmetic. With semiconductors we could calculate cheaply, so activities for which arithmetic was a key input, such as data analysis and accounting, became much cheaper.
  • As machine intelligence improves, the value of human prediction skills will decrease because machine prediction will provide a cheaper and better substitute for human prediction, just as machines did for arithmetic.
  • Using the language of economics, judgment is a complement to prediction and therefore when the cost of prediction falls demand for judgment rises. We’ll want more human judgment.
  • But it yields two key implications: 1) an expanded role of prediction as an input to more goods and services, and 2) a change in the value of other inputs, driven by the extent to which they are complements to or substitutes for prediction. These changes are coming.
    • douglasn89
      douglasn89 on 06 Mar 17
       
      This article agrees with the readings from Unit 5 Lesson 6 in its prediction of changes.
Javier E

Economic Statistics Miss the Benefits of Technology - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...he-benefits-of-technology.html

technology benefits economics GDP income

shared by Javier E on 02 May 13 - No Cached
  • Value added by the information technology and communications industries — mostly hardware and software — has remained stuck at around 4 percent of the nation’s economic output for the last quarter century.
  • But these statistics do not tell the whole story. Because they miss much of what technology does for people’s well-being. News organizations that take advantage of computers to let go of journalists, secretaries and research assistants will show up in the economic statistics as more productive, making more with less. But statisticians have no way to value more thorough, useful, fact-dense articles. What’s more, gross domestic product only values the goods and services people pay for. It does not capture the value to consumers of economic improvements that are given away free. And until recently this is what news media organizations like The New York Times were doing online.
  • “G.D.P. is not a measure of how much value is produced for consumers,” said Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Everybody should recognize that G.D.P. is not a welfare metric.”
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  • people who had access to a search engine took 15 minutes less to answer a question than those without online access.
  • how to measure the Internet’s contribution to our lives? A few years ago, Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago and Peter J. Klenow of Stanford gave it a shot. They estimated that the value consumers gained from the Internet amounted to about 2 percent of their income — an order of magnitude larger than what they spent to go online. Their trick was to measure not only how much money users spent on access but also how much of their leisure time they spent online.
  • Gross domestic product has always failed to capture many things — from the costs of pollution and traffic jams to the gains of unpaid household work. A
  • Measured in money — what it contributes to G.D.P. — the recording industry is shrinking. Yet never before have Americans had access to so much music.
  • the consumer surplus from free online services — the value derived by consumers from the experience above what they paid for it — has been growing by $34 billion a year, on average, since 2002. If it were tacked on as “economic output,” it would add about 0.26 of a percentage point to annual G.D.P. growth.
  • The Internet is hardly the first technology to offer consumers valuable free goods. The consumer surplus from television is about five times as large as that delivered by free stuff online, according to Mr. Brynjolfsson’s calculations.
  • Varian estimated that a search engine might be worth about $500 annually to the average worker. Across the working population, this would add up to $65 billion a year.
  • . The missed consumer surplus from the Internet may be no bigger than the unmeasured gains in the production, for example, of electric light.
  • The amount of time Americans devote to the Internet has doubled in the last five years.
  • “We know less about the sources of value in the economy than we did 25 years ago,”
Javier E

The Science of Snobbery: How We're Duped Into Thinking Fancy Things Are Better - The At... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...279571

psychology judgment intuition bias unconscious expertise perception

shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Expert judges and amateurs alike claim to judge classical musicians based on sound. But Tsay’s research suggests that the original judges, despite their experience and expertise, judged the competition (which they heard and watched live) based on visual information, just as amateurs do.
  • just like with classical music, we do not appraise wine in the way that we expect. 
  • Priceonomics revisited this seemingly damning research: the lack of correlation between wine enjoyment and price in blind tastings, the oenology students tricked by red food dye into describing a white wine like a red, a distribution of medals at tastings equivalent to what one would expect from pure chance, the grand crus described like cheap wines and vice-versa when the bottles are switched.
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  • Taste does not simply equal your taste buds. It draws on information from all our senses as well as context. As a result, food is susceptible to the same trickery as wine. Adding yellow food dye to vanilla pudding leads people to experience a lemony taste. Diners eating in the dark at a chic concept restaurant confuse veal for tuna. Branding, packaging, and price tags are equally important to enjoyment. Cheap fish is routinely passed off as its pricier cousins at seafood and sushi restaurants. 
  • Just like with wine and classical music, we often judge food based on very different criteria than what we claim. The result is that our perceptions are easily skewed in ways we don’t anticipate. 
  • What does it mean for wine that presentation so easily trumps the quality imbued by being grown on premium Napa land or years of fruitful aging? Is it comforting that the same phenomenon is found in food and classical music, or is it a strike against the authenticity of our enjoyment of them as well? How common must these manipulations be until we concede that the influence of the price tag of a bottle of wine or the visual appearance of a pianist is not a trick but actually part of the quality?
  • To answer these questions, we need to investigate the underlying mechanism that leads us to judge wine, food, and music by criteria other than what we claim to value. And that mechanism seems to be the quick, intuitive judgments our minds unconsciously make
  • this unknowability also makes it easy to be led astray when our intuition makes a mistake. We may often be able to count on the price tag or packaging of food and wine for accurate information about quality. But as we believe that we’re judging based on just the product, we fail to recognize when presentation manipulates our snap judgments.
  • Participants were just as effective when watching 6 second video clips and when comparing their ratings to ratings of teacher effectiveness as measured by actual student test performance. 
  • The power of intuitive first impressions has been demonstrated in a variety of other contexts. One experiment found that people predicted the outcome of political elections remarkably well based on silent 10 second video clips of debates - significantly outperforming political pundits and predictions made based on economic indicators.
  • In a real world case, a number of art experts successfully identified a 6th century Greek statue as a fraud. Although the statue had survived a 14 month investigation by a respected museum that included the probings of a geologist, they instantly recognized something was off. They just couldn’t explain how they knew.
  • Cases like this represent the canon behind the idea of the “adaptive unconscious,” a concept made famous by journalist Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink. The basic idea is that we constantly, quickly, and unconsciously do the equivalent of judging a book by its cover. After all, a cover provides a lot of relevant information in a world in which we don’t have time to read every page.
  • Gladwell describes the adaptive unconscious as “a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.”
  • In a famous experiment, psychologist Nalini Ambady provided participants in an academic study with 30 second silent video clips of a college professor teaching a class and asked them to rate the effectiveness of the professor.
  • In follow up experiments, Chia-Jung Tsay found that those judging musicians’ auditions based on visual cues were not giving preference to attractive performers. Rather, they seemed to look for visual signs of relevant characteristics like passion, creativity, and uniqueness. Seeing signs of passion is valuable information. But in differentiating between elite performers, it gives an edge to someone who looks passionate over someone whose play is passionate
  • Outside of these more eccentric examples, it’s our reliance on quick judgments, and ignorance of their workings, that cause people to act on ugly, unconscious biases
  • It’s also why - from a business perspective - packaging and presentation is just as important as the good or service on offer. Why marketing is just as important as product. 
  • Gladwell ends Blink optimistically. By paying closer attention to our powers of rapid cognition, he argues, we can avoid its pitfalls and harness its powers. We can blindly audition musicians behind a screen, look at a piece of art devoid of other context, and pay particular attention to possible unconscious bias in our performance reports.
  • But Gladwell’s success in demonstrating how the many calculations our adaptive unconscious performs without our awareness undermines his hopeful message of consciously harnessing its power.
  • As a former world-class tennis player and coach of over 50 years, Braden is a perfect example of the ideas behind thin slicing. But if he can’t figure out what his unconscious is up to when he recognizes double faults, why should anyone else expect to be up to the task?
  • flawed judgment in fields like medicine and investing has more serious consequences. The fact that expertise is so tricky leads psychologist Daniel Kahneman to assert that most experts should seek the assistance of statistics and algorithms in making decisions.
  • In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he describes our two modes of thought: System 1, like the adaptive unconscious, is our “fast, instinctive, and emotional” intuition. System 2 is our “slower, more deliberative, and more logical” conscious thought. Kahneman believes that we often leave decisions up to System 1 and generally place far “too much confidence in human judgment” due to the pitfalls of our intuition described above.
  • Not every judgment will be made in a field that is stable and regular enough for an algorithm to help us make judgments or predictions. But in those cases, he notes, “Hundreds of studies have shown that wherever we have sufficient information to build a model, it will perform better than most people.”
  • Experts can avoid the pitfalls of intuition more easily than laypeople. But they need help too, especially as our collective confidence in expertise leads us to overconfidence in their judgments. 
  • This article has referred to the influence of price tags and context on products and experiences like wine and classical music concerts as tricks that skew our perception. But maybe we should consider them a real, actual part of the quality.
  • Losing ourselves in a universe of relativism, however, will lead us to miss out on anything new or unique. Take the example of the song “Hey Ya!” by Outkast. When the music industry heard it, they felt sure it would be a hit. When it premiered on the radio, however, listeners changed the channel. The song sounded too dissimilar from songs people liked, so they responded negatively. 
  • It took time for people to get familiar with the song and realize that they enjoyed it. Eventually “Hey Ya!” became the hit of the summer.
  • Many boorish people talking about the ethereal qualities of great wine probably can't even identify cork taint because their impressions are dominated by the price tag and the wine label. But the classic defense of wine - that you need to study it to appreciate it - is also vindicated. The open question - which is both editorial and empiric - is what it means for the industry that constant vigilance and substantial study is needed to dependably appreciate wine for the product quality alone. But the questions is relevant to the enjoyment of many other products and experiences that we enjoy in life.
  • Maybe the most important conclusion is to not only recognize the fallibility of our judgments and impressions, but to recognize when it matters, and when it doesn’t
Javier E

Scientists Discover Some of the Oldest Signs of Life on Earth - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...541251

life origins geology biology research

shared by Javier E on 27 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • The Earth was formed around 4.54 billion years ago. If you condense that huge swath of prehistory into a single calendar year, then the 3.95-billion-year-old graphite that the Tokyo team analyzed was created in the third week of February. By contrast, the earliest fossils ever found are 3.7 billion years old; they were created in the second week of March.
  • Those fossils, from the Isua Belt in southwest Greenland, are stromatolites—layered structures created by communities of bacteria. And as I reported last year, their presence suggests that life already existed in a sophisticated form at the 3.7-billion-year mark, and so must have arisen much earlier. And indeed, scientists have found traces of biologically produced graphite throughout the region, in other Isua Belt rocks that are 3.8 billion years old, and in hydrothermal vents off the coast of Quebec that are at least a similar age, and possibly even older.
  • “As far back as the rock record extends—that is, as far back as we can look for direct evidence of early life, we are finding it. Earth has been a biotic, life-sustaining planet since close to its beginning.”
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  • living organisms concentrate carbon-12 in their cells—and when they die, that signature persists. When scientists find graphite that’s especially enriched in carbon-12, relative to carbon-13, they can deduce that living things were around when that graphite was first formed. And that’s exactly what the Tokyo team found in the Saglek Block—grains of graphite, enriched in carbon-12, encased within 3.95-billion-year-old rock.
  • the team calculated the graphite was created at temperatures between 536 and 622 Celsius—a range that’s consistent with the temperatures at which the surrounding metamorphic rocks were transformed. This suggests that the graphite was already there when the rocks were heated and warped, and didn’t sneak in later. It was truly OG—original graphite.
  • Still, all of this evidence suggests Earth was home to life during its hellish infancy, and that such life abounded in a variety of habitats. Those pioneering organisms—bacteria, probably—haven’t left any fossils behind. But Sano and Komiya hope to find some clues about them by analyzing the Saglek Block rocks. The levels of nitrogen, iron, and sulfur in the rocks could reveal which energy sources those organisms exploited, and which environments they inhabited. They could tell us how life first lived.
clairemann

Bottom Trawling for Fish Boosts Carbon Emissions, Study Says | Time - 0 views

time.com/...rawling-carbon-emissions-study

science research knowledge environment

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • It’s been well established by now that the agricultural systems producing our food contribute at least one fifth of global anthropogenic carbon emissions—and up to a third if waste and transportation are factored in.
  • According to calculations conducted by the report’s 26 authors, bottom trawling is responsible for one gigaton of carbon emissions a year—a higher annual total than (pre-pandemic) aviation emissions.
  • measures how much each so-called “pixel” contributes to global marine biodiversity, fish stocks and climate protection, based on a complex analysis of location, water temperature, salinity and species distribution, among other factors. It also tracks how much CO2 each pixel is capable of absorbing as a carbon sink.
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  • Worse still, the practice also impacts the ocean’s ability to absorb atmospheric carbon: if the water is already saturated from sources down below, it will be unable to absorb human-caused emissions from above, hamstringing one of our best assets in the fight against climate change.
  • Technological innovations such as green power generation and battery storage are vital for reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. But we still need to reduce atmospheric carbon, and so far technology has not been able to do that affordably and at scale.
cvanderloo

Feeding cows a few ounces of seaweed daily could sharply reduce their contribution to c... - 0 views

theconversation.com/ution-to-climate-change-157192

cows climatechange seaweed methane science technology

shared by cvanderloo on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • About 70% of agricultural methane comes from enteric fermentation – chemical reactions in the stomachs of cows and other grazing animals as they break down plants. The animals burp out most of this methane and pass the rest as flatulence.
  • A 2015 study suggested that using seaweed as an additive to cattle’s normal feed could reduce methane production, but this research was done in a laboratory, not in live animals.
  • If these findings can be scaled up and commercialized, they could transform cattle production into a more economically and environmentally sustainable industry.
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  • This process also generates byproducts that the cow’s body does not take up, such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Methane-producing microbes, called methanogens, use these compounds to form methane, which the cow’s body expels.
  • In that work, we showed that supplementing dairy cows’ feed with about 10 ounces of seaweed a day reduced methane emissions by up to 67%. However, the cattle that ate this relatively large quantity of seaweed consumed less feed. This reduced their milk production – a clear drawback for dairy farmers.
  • We wanted to know whether the seaweed was stable when stored for up to three years; whether microbes that produce methane in cows’ stomachs could adapt to the seaweed, making it ineffective; and whether the type of diet that the cows ate changed the seaweed’s effectiveness in reducing methane emissions. And we used less seaweed than in our 2019 study.
  • As we expected, the steers released a lot more hydrogen – up to 750% more, mostly from their mouths – as their systems produced less methane. Hydrogen has minimal impact on the environment.
  • We also found that seaweed that had been stored in a freezer for three years maintained its effectiveness, and that microbes in the cows’ digestive systems did not adapt to the seaweed in ways that neutralized its effects.
  • For example, we calculate that a producer finishing 1,000 head of beef cattle – that is, feeding them a high-energy diet to grow and add muscle – could reduce feed costs by US$40,320 to $87,320 depending on how much seaweed the cattle consumed.
  • We don’t know for certain why feeding cattle seaweed supplements helped them convert more of their diet to weight gain. However, previous research has suggested that some rumen microorganisms can use hydrogen that is no longer going into methane production to generate energy-dense nutrients that the cow can then use for added growth.
  • Commercializing seaweed as a cattle feed additive would involve many steps. First, scientists would need to develop aquaculture techniques for producing seaweed on a large scale, either in the ocean or in tanks on land.
Javier E

Climatologist Michael E Mann: 'Good people fall victim to doomism. I do too sometimes' ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...omism-climate-crisis-interview

climate response strategy solutions 2021 personal strategy activism

shared by Javier E on 04 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • the “inactivists”, as I call them, haven’t given up; they have simply shifted from hard denial to a new array of tactics that I describe in the book as the new climate war.
  • Who is the enemy in the new climate war?It is fossil fuel interests, climate change deniers, conservative media tycoons, working together with petrostate actors like Saudi Arabia and Russia. I call this the coalition of the unwilling.
  • Today Russia uses cyberware – bot armies and trolls – to get climate activists to fight one another and to seed arguments on social media. Russian trolls have attempted to undermine carbon pricing in Canada and Australia, and Russian fingerprints have been detected in the yellow-vest protests in France.
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  • I am optimistic about a favourable shift in the political wind. The youth climate movement has galvanised attention and re-centred the debate on intergenerational ethics. We are seeing a tipping point in public consciousness. That bodes well. There is still a viable way forward to avoid climate catastrophe.
  • You can see from the talking points of inactivists that they are really in retreat. Republican pollsters like Frank Luntz have advised clients in the fossil fuel industry and the politicians who carry water for them that you can’t get away with denying climate change any more.
  • Let’s dig into deniers’ tactics. One that you mention is deflection. What are the telltale signs?Any time you are told a problem is your fault because you are not behaving responsibly, there is a good chance that you are being deflected from systemic solutions and policies
  • Blaming the individual is a tried and trusted playbook that we have seen in the past with other industries. In the 1970s, Coca Cola and the beverage industry did this very effectively to convince us we don’t need regulations on waste disposal. Because of that we now have a global plastic crisis. The same tactics are evident in the gun lobby’s motto, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, which is classic deflection
  • look at BP, which gave us the world’s first individual carbon footprint calculator. Why did they do that? Because BP wanted us looking at our carbon footprint not theirs.
  • Of course lifestyle changes are necessary but they alone won’t get us where we need to be. They make us more healthy, save money and set a good example for others.
  • But we can’t allow the forces of inaction to convince us these actions alone are the solution and that we don’t need systemic changes
  • I don’t eat meat. We get power from renewable energy. I have a plug-in hybrid vehicle. I do those things and encourage others to do them. but i don’t think it is helpful to shame people people who are not as far along as you.
  • Instead, let’s help everybody to move in that direction. That is what policy and system change is about: creating incentives so even those who don’t think about their environmental footprint are still led in that direction.
  • Another new front in the new climate war is what you call “doomism”. What do you mean by that?Doom-mongering has overtaken denial as a threat and as a tactic. Inactivists know that if people believe there is nothing you can do, they are led down a path of disengagement
  • They unwittingly do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by giving up.What is so pernicious about this is that it seeks to weaponise environmental progressives who would otherwise be on the frontline demanding change. These are folk of good intentions and good will, but they become disillusioned or depressed and they fall into despair.
  • Many of the prominent doomist narratives – [Jonathan] Franzen, David Wallace-Wells, the Deep Adaptation movement – can be traced back to a false notion that an Arctic methane bomb will cause runaway warming and extinguish all life on earth within 10 years. This is completely wrong. There is no science to support that.
  • Good people fall victim to doomism. I do too sometimes. It can be enabling and empowering as long as you don’t get stuck there. It is up to others to help ensure that experience can be cathartic.
  • the entry of new participants. Bill Gates is perhaps the most prominent. His new book, How to Prevent a Climate Disaster, offers a systems analyst approach to the problem, a kind of operating system upgrade for the planet. What do you make of his take?I want to thank him for using his platform to raise awareness of the climate crisis
  • I disagree with him quite sharply on the prescription. His view is overly technocratic and premised on an underestimate of the role that renewable energy can play in decarbonising our civilisation
  • If you understate that potential, you are forced to make other risky choices, such as geoengineering and carbon capture and sequestration. Investment in those unproven options would crowd out investment in better solutions.
  • Gates writes that he doesn’t know the political solution to climate change. But the politics are the problem buddy. If you don’t have a prescription of how to solve that, then you don’t have a solution and perhaps your solution might be taking us down the wrong path.
  • What are the prospects for political change with Joe Biden in the White House?Breathtaking. Biden has surprised even the most ardent climate hawks in the boldness of his first 100 day agenda, which goes well beyond any previous president, including Obama when it comes to use of executive actions. He has incorporated climate policy into every single government agency and we have seen massive investments in renewable energy infrastructure, cuts in subsidies for fossil fuels, and the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline.
  • On the international front, the appointment of John Kerry, who helped negotiate the Paris Accord, has telegraphed to the rest of the world that the US is back and ready to lead again
  • That is huge and puts pressure on intransigent state actors like [Australian prime minister] Scott Morrison, who has been a friend of the fossil fuel industry in Australia. Morrison has changed his rhetoric dramatically since Biden became president. I think that creates an opportunity like no other.
  • Have the prospects for that been helped or hindered by Covid?I see a perfect storm of climate opportunity. Terrible as the pandemic has been, this tragedy can also provide lessons, particularly on the importance of listening to the word of science when facing risks
  • Out of this crisis can come a collective reconsideration of our priorities. How to live sustainably on a finite planet with finite space, food and water. A year from now, memories and impacts of coronavirus will still feel painful, but the crisis itself will be in the rear-view mirror thanks to vaccines. What will loom larger will be the greater crisis we face – the climate crisis.
martinelligi

It's not just a social media problem - how search engines spread misinformation - St Ge... - 0 views

www.stgeorgeutah.com/...-engines-spread-misinformation

social media psychology

shared by martinelligi on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Ad-driven search engines, like social media platforms, are designed to reward clicking on enticing links because it helps the search companies boost their business metrics. As researchers who study the search and recommendation systems, my colleagues and I show that this dangerous combination of corporate profit motive and individual susceptibility makes the problem difficult to fix.
  • It is in the search engine companies’ best interest to give you things that you want to read, watch or simply click. Therefore, as a search engine or any recommendation system creates a list of items to present, it calculates the likelihood that you’ll click on the items.
  • Similar to problematic social media algorithms, search engines learn to serve you what you and others have clicked on before. Because people are drawn to the sensational, this dance between algorithms and human nature can foster the spread of misinformatio
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Search engine companies, like most online services, make money not only by selling ads but also by tracking users and selling their data through real-time bidding on it. People are often led to misinformation by their desire for sensational and entertaining news as well as information that is either controversial or confirms their views.
  • This pattern of thrilling and unverified stories emerging and people clicking on them continues, with people apparently either being unconcerned with the truth or believing that if a trusted service such as Google Search is showing these stories to them then the stories must be true. More recently, a disproven report claiming China let the coronavirus leak from a lab gained traction on search engines because of this vicious cycle.
caelengrubb

The Economics of Bitcoin - Econlib - 0 views

www.econlib.org/...Murphybitcoin.html

shared by caelengrubb on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Bitcoin is an ingenious peer-to-peer “virtual” or “digital currency” that challenges the way economists have traditionally thought about money.
  • My conclusion is that, in principle, nothing stands in the way of the whole world embracing Bitcoin or some other digital currency. Yet I predict that, even with the alternative of Bitcoin, people would resort to gold if only governments got out of the way.
  • According to its official website: “Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority; managing transactions and the issuing of bitcoins is carried out collectively by the network.”
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  • To fully understand how Bitcoin operates, one would need to learn the subtleties of public-key cryptography.
  • In the real world, when people want to buy something using Bitcoin, they transfer their ownership of a certain number of bitcoins to other people, in exchange for goods and services.
  • This transfer is effected by the network of computers performing computations and thereby changing the “public key” to which the “sold” bitcoins are assigned.
  • The encryption involved in Bitcoin concerns the identification of the legitimate owner of a particular bitcoin.
  • Without delving into the mathematics, suffice it to say: There is a way that the legitimate owner of a bitcoin can publicly demonstrate to the computers in the network that he or she really is the owner of that bitcoin.
  • Only someone with the possession of the “private key” will be able to produce a valid “signature” that convinces the computers in the network to update the public ledger to reflect the transfer of the bitcoin to another party.
  • When Bitcoin was first implemented in early 2009, computers in the network—dubbed “miners”—received 50 new bitcoins when performing the computations necessary to add a “block” of transactions to the public ledger.
  • In principle, the developers of Bitcoin could have released all 21 million units of the currency immediately with the software.
  • With the current arrangement—where the “mining” operations needed to keep the system running simultaneously yield new bitcoins to the machines performing the calculations—there is an incentive for owners to devote their machines’ processing power to the network.
  • Here, the danger is that the issuing institution—once it had gotten the world to accept its notes or electronic deposits as money—would face an irresistible temptation to issue massive quantities.6
  • Bitcoin has no such vulnerability. No external technological or physical event could cause Bitcoin inflation, and since no one is in charge of Bitcoin, there is no one tempted to inflate “from within.”
  • Some critics argue that Bitcoin’s fixed quantity would imply constant price deflation. Although this is true, everyone will have seen this coming with more than a century’s notice, and so long-term contracts would have been designed accordingly.
  • Whether to call Bitcoin a “fiat” currency depends on the definition. If “fiat” means a currency that is not legally redeemable in some other commodity, then yes, Bitcoin is a fiat currency. But if “fiat” means a currency relying on government fiat to define what will count as legal money, then Bitcoin is not.
  • Bitcoin is an ingenious concept that challenges the way economists have traditionally thought about money. Its inbuilt scarcity provides an assurance of purchasing power arguably safer than any other system yet conceived.
  • We need to let the decentralized market test tell us what is the best money, or monies.
Javier E

Opinion | Humans Are Animals. Let's Get Over It. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...humans-animals-philosophy.html

animal human nature philosophy human

shared by Javier E on 01 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The separation of people from, and the superiority of people to, members of other species is a good candidate for the originating idea of Western thought. And a good candidate for the worst.
  • Like Plato, Hobbes associates anarchy with animality and civilization with the state, which gives to our merely animal motion moral content for the first time and orders us into a definite hierarchy.
  • It is rationality that gives us dignity, that makes a claim to moral respect that no mere animal can deserve. “The moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality,” writes Immanuel Kant in “Critique of Practical Reason.” In this assertion, at least, the Western intellectual tradition has been remarkably consistent.
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  • the devaluation of animals and disconnection of us from them reflect a deeper devaluation of the material universe in general
  • In this scheme of things, we owe nature nothing; it is to yield us everything. This is the ideology of species annihilation and environmental destruction, and also of technological development.
  • Further trouble is caused when the distinctions between humans and animals are then used to draw distinctions among human beings
  • Some of us, in short, are animals — and some of us are better than that. This, it turns out, is a useful justification for colonialism, slavery and racism.
  • The classical source for this distinction is certainly Aristotle. In the “Politics,” he writes, “Where then there is such a difference as that between soul and body, or between men and animals (as in the case of those whose business is to use their body, and who can do nothing better), the lower sort are by nature slaves.
  • Every human hierarchy, insofar as it can be justified philosophically, is treated by Aristotle by analogy to the relation of people to animals.
  • One difficult thing to face about our animality is that it entails our deaths; being an animal is associated throughout philosophy with dying purposelessly, and so with living meaninglessly.
  • this line of thought also happens to justify colonizing or even extirpating the “savage,” the beast in human form.
  • Our supposed fundamental distinction from “beasts, “brutes” and “savages” is used to divide us from nature, from one another and, finally, from ourselves
  • In Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates divides the human soul into two parts. The soul of the thirsty person, he says, “wishes for nothing else than to drink.” But we can restrain ourselves. “That which inhibits such actions,” he concludes, “arises from the calculations of reason.” When we restrain or control ourselves, Plato argues, a rational being restrains an animal.
  • In this view, each of us is both a beast and a person — and the point of human life is to constrain our desires with rationality and purify ourselves of animality
  • These sorts of systematic self-divisions come to be refigured in Cartesian dualism, which separates the mind from the body, or in Sigmund Freud’s distinction between id and ego, or in the neurological contrast between the functions of the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.
  • I don’t know how to refute it, exactly, except to say that I don’t feel myself to be a logic program running on an animal body; I’d like to consider myself a lot more integrated than that.
  • And I’d like to repudiate every political and environmental conclusion ever drawn by our supposed transcendence of the order of nature
  • There is no doubt that human beings are distinct from other animals, though not necessarily more distinct than other animals are from one another. But maybe we’ve been too focused on the differences for too long. Maybe we should emphasize what all us animals have in common.
caelengrubb

Making green energy the default choice can help tackle climate change, study finds -- S... - 1 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...210311123507.htm

shared by caelengrubb on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Researchers studying the Swiss energy market have found that making green energy the default option for consumers leads to an enduring shift to renewables and thus has the potential to cut CO2 emissions by millions of tonnes.
  • Both business and private customers largely accepted the default option, even though it was slightly more expensive, and the switch to green sources proved a lasting one.
  • Both companies restructured their products to offer a choice between conventional power, renewable power and "renewable plus," one company in 2009 and the other in 2016.
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  • Consumers were assigned the renewable package unless they opted out, a behavioural mechanism known to have success in a range of settings.
  • Further analysis of customer data in the household sector showed that women were around 6 per cent more likely than men to accept the green default, while women business owners were 8 per cent more likely to stick with the renewable package.
  • It is sometimes argued that the introduction of green energy defaults leads to an increase in energy use -- because the energy is 'clean' consumers are more relaxed about using it.
  • Large green default effects can considerably reduce CO2 emissions in countries with high fossil fuel share in their energy mix. Taking Germany as a case study and assuming a default effect of 80% in the household sector, the study calculated a CO2 reduction of about 45 million tonnes and a positive welfare effect of €1,240 million.
  • While the impact of default effects can be massive, the exact CO2 reduction figures and welfare gains depend on the CO2 emission factor and social cost of carbon.
caelengrubb

How Cognitive Bias Affects Your Business - 0 views

www.investopedia.com/...bias-affects-your-business.asp

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Human beings often act in irrational and unexpected ways when it comes to business decisions, money, and finance.
  • Behavioral finance tries to explain the difference between what economic theory predicts people will do and what they actually do in the heat of the moment. 
  • There are two main types of biases that people commit causing them to deviate from rational decision-making: cognitive and emotional.
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  • Cognitive errors result from incomplete information or the inability to analyze the information that is available. These cognitive errors can be classified as either belief perseverance or processing errors
  • Processing errors occur when an individual fails to manage and organize information properly, which can be due in part to the mental effort required to compute and analyze data.
  • Conservatism bias, where people emphasize original, pre-existing information over new data.
  • Base rate neglect is the opposite effect, whereby people put too little emphasis on the original information. 
  • Confirmation bias, where people seek information that affirms existing beliefs while discounting or discarding information that might contradict them.
  • Anchoring and Adjustment happens when somebody fixates on a target number, such as the result of a calculation or valuation.
  • Hindsight bias occurs when people perceive actual outcomes as reasonable and expected, but only after the fact.
  • Sample size neglect is an error made when people infer too much from a too-small sample size.
  • Mental accounting is when people earmark certain funds for certain goals and keep them separate. When this happens, the risk and reward of projects undertaken to achieve these goals are not considered as an overall portfolio and the effect of one on another is ignored.
  • Availability bias, or recency bias skews perceived future probabilities based on memorable past events
  • Framing bias is when a person will process the same information differently depending on how it is presented and received.
  • Cognitive errors in the way people process and analyze information can lead them to make irrational decisions which can negatively impact business or investing decisions
  • . These information processing errors could have arisen to help primitive humans survive in a time before money or finance came into existence.
ilanaprincilus06

Federal Government Executes Corey Johnson For 1992 Murders In Virginia : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...corey-johnson-for-1992-murders

government death penalty

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The federal government Thursday night executed a drug trafficker responsible for seven murders in 1992.
  • He is the 12th person to be executed by the government since July after the Trump administration restarted federal executions following a 17-year hiatus.
  • Dustin Higgins is the last person scheduled to be executed before President-elect Joe Biden, is sworn in.
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  • Biden has indicated he may seek to abolish federal executions.
  • He told the victims' families, "I would have said I was sorry before, but I didn't know how. I hope you will find peace."
  • Donald Salzman, an attorney for Johnson, had argued that executing Johnson would be cruel and unusual punishment due to his COVID-19 infection.
  • His attorneys also said Johnson had an IQ of 69. In a statement following Johnson's death, they said the government executed a person "with an intellectual disability, in stark violation of the Constitution and federal law."
  • "Courts have repeatedly and correctly concluded that Johnson's seven murders were planned to advance his drug trafficking and were not impulsive acts by someone incapable of making calculated judgments, and are therefore eligible for the death penalty."
pier-paolo

Opinion | Your Brain Is Not for Thinking - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...brain-neuroscience-stress.html

shared by pier-paolo on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • This new activity of hunting started an evolutionary arms race. Over millions of years, both predators and prey evolved more complex bodies that could sense and move more effectively to catch or elude other creatures.
  • Eventually, some creatures evolved a command center to run those complex bodies. We call it a brain.
  • Your brain’s most important job isn’t thinking; it’s running the systems of your body to keep you alive and well. According to recent findings in neuroscience, even when your brain does produce conscious thoughts and feelings, they are more in service to the needs of managing your body than you realize.
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  • Much of your brain’s activity happens outside your awareness. In every moment, your brain must figure out your body’s needs for the next moment and execute a plan to fill those needs in advance.
  • The budget for your body tracks resources
  • Each action that spends resources, such as standing up, running, and learning, is like a withdrawal from your account. Actions that replenish your resources, such as eating and sleeping, are like deposits.
  • Every thought you have, every feeling of happiness or anger or awe you experience, every kindness you extend and every insult you bear or sling is part of your brain’s calculations as it anticipates and budgets your metabolic needs.
  • This view of the brain has many implications for understanding human beings. So often, for example, we conceive of ourselves in mental terms, separate from the physical
  • There is no such thing as a purely mental cause, because every mental experience has roots in the physical budgeting of your body
  • When an unpleasant thought pops into your head, like “I can’t take this craziness anymore,” ask yourself body-budgeting questions. “Did I get enough sleep last night? Am I dehydrated? Should I take a walk? Call a friend? Because I could use a deposit or two in my body budget.”
  • I’m suggesting that it’s possible to acknowledge what your brain is actually doing and take some comfort from it. Your brain is not for thinking. Everything that it conjures, from thoughts to emotions to dreams, is in the service of body budgeting. This perspective, adopted judiciously, can be a source of resilience in challenging times.
caelengrubb

Copernicus, the Revolutionary who Feared Changing the World | OpenMind - 0 views

www.bbvaopenmind.com/...-who-feared-changing-the-world

shared by caelengrubb on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The sages had placed the Earth at the centre of the universe for nearly two thousand years until Copernicus arrived on the scene and let it spin like a top around the Sun, as we know it today.
  • Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) was not the first to explain that everything revolves around the Sun, but he did it so thoroughly, in that book, that he initiated a scientific revolution against the universal order established by the greatest scholar ever known, the Greek philosopher Aristotle.
  • Aristotle said in the fourth century BC that a mystical force moved the Sun and the planets in perfect circles around the Earth. Although this was much to the taste of the Church, in order to fit this idea with the strange movements of the planets seen in the sky, astronomers had to resort to the mathematical juggling that another Greek, Ptolemy, invented in the second century AD.
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  • hus Copernicus started to look for something simpler, almost at the same time that Michelangelo undertook another great project, that of decorating the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
  • Copernicus had a full Renaissance résumé: studies in medicine, art, mathematics, canon law and philosophy; experience as an economist and a diplomat; and also a good position as an ecclesiastical official.
  • By 1514, he had already written a sketch of his theory, although he did not publish it for fear of being condemned as a heretic and also because he was a perfectionist. He spent 15 more years repeating his calculations, diagrams and observations with the naked eye, prior to the invention of the telescope.
  • Copernicus was the first to recite them in order: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the 6 planets that were then known.
  • When Copernicus finally decided to publish his theory, the book’s publisher softened it in the prologue: he said that there were “only easier mathematics” for predicting the movements of the planets, and not a whole new way of looking at the reality of the universe. But this was understood as a challenge to Aristotle, to the Church, and to common sense.
  • It would be 150 years before the Copernican revolution triumphed, and the world finally admitted that the Earth was just one more spinning top.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Aren't We Curious About the Things We Want to Be Curious About? - The New... - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...curiosity-brain.html

curiosity psychology research

shared by Javier E on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • why do I so often learn things I don’t want to know? When I’m surfing the web I want to be drawn in by articles on Europe’s political history or the nature of quasars, but I end up reading trivia like a menu from Alcatraz prison. Why am I not curious about the things I want to be curious about?
  • if you understand what prompts curiosity, you may be able to channel it a little better.
  • Across evolutionary time, curious animals were more likely to survive because they learned about their environments;
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • it’s good to know about your environment even if it doesn’t promise a reward right now; knowledge may be useless today, but vital next week. Therefore, evolution has left us with a brain that can reward itself; satisfying curiosity feels pleasurable, so you explore the environment even when you don’t expect any concrete payoff
  • What’s more, curiosity doesn’t just ensure new opportunities for learning, it enhances learning itself
  • subjects better remembered those appearing after trivia questions that made them curious. Curiosity causes a brain state that amplifies learning.
  • This function of curiosity — to heighten memory — is the key to understanding why we’re curious about some things and not others. We feel most curious when exploration will yield the most learning.
  • Suppose I ask you, “What’s the most common type of star in the Milky Way?” You’ll obviously feel no curiosity if you already know the answer. But you’ll also feel little interest if you know nothing about stars; if you learned the answer, you couldn’t connect it to other knowledge, so it would seem nearly meaningless, an isolated factoid
  • We’re maximally curious when we sense that the environment offers new information in the right proportion to complement what we already know.
  • Note that your brain calculates what you might learn in the short term — your long-term interests aren’t a factor
  • Many websites that snare your time feature scores of stories on the front page, banking that one will strike each reader’s sweet spot of knowledge. So visit websites that use the same strategy but offer richer content, for example, JSTOR Daily, Arts & Letters Daily or ScienceDaily.
  • Curiosity arises from the right balance of the familiar and the novel. Naturally, writers vary in what they assume their audience already knows and wants to know; when you find an author who tends to have your number, stick with her.
ilanaprincilus06

Why the modern world is bad for your brain | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ized-mind-information-overload

smartphone social media multitasking communication

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Our brains are busier than ever before. We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting.
  • Our smartphones have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebook updater, and flashlight.
  • But there’s a fly in the ointment. Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost in doing so.”
  • Even though we think we’re getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.
  • Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.
  • The irony here for those of us who are trying to focus amid competing activities is clear: the very brain region we need to rely on for staying on task is easily distracted.
  • Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.
  • His research found that being in a situation where you are trying to concentrate on a task, and an email is sitting unread in your inbox, can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points.
  • Wilson showed that the cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from pot‑smoking.
  • If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve.
  • All this activity gives us a sense that we’re getting things done – and in some cases we are. But we are sacrificing efficiency and deep concentration when we interrupt our priority activities with email.
  • This uncertainty wreaks havoc with our rapid perceptual categorisation system, causes stress, and leads to decision overload. Every email requires a decision! Do I respond to it? If so, now or later? How important is it? What will be the social, economic, or job-related consequences if I don’t answer, or if I don’t answer right now?
  • A lever in the cage allowed the rats to send a small electrical signal directly to their nucleus accumbens. Do you think they liked it? Boy how they did! They liked it so much that they did nothing else. They forgot all about eating and sleeping. Long after they were hungry, they ignored tasty food if they had a chance to press that little chrome bar;
  • But remember, it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centres in the prefrontal cortex. Make no mistake: email-, Facebook- and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction.
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