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cvanderloo

When Christmas was cancelled: a lesson from history - 0 views

theconversation.com/d-a-lesson-from-history-149310

christmas covid pandemic england protestant reformation

shared by cvanderloo on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Back in 1647, Christmas was banned in the kingdoms of England (which at the time included Wales), Scotland and Ireland and it didn’t work out very well. Following a total ban on everything festive, from decorations to gatherings, rebellions broke out across the country. While some activity took the form of hanging holly in defiance, other action was far more radical and went on to have historical consequences.
  • The protestant reformation had restructured churches across the British Isles, and holy days, Christmas included, were abolished. The usual festivities during the 12 days of Christmas (December 25 to January 5) were deemed unacceptable.
  • Christmas Day, however, didn’t pass quietly. People across England, Scotland and Ireland flouted the rules.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Taking up arms and breaking the rules weren’t just about experiencing the fun of the season. Fighting against the prohibition of Christmas was a political act. Things had changed and the Christmas rebellion was as much a protest against the “new normal” as it was against the banning of fun. People were fed up with a range of restrictions and financial difficulties that came with the Presbyterian system and the fallout of the civil war.
  • The aftermath of the Norwich Christmas riots was the most dramatic. The mayor was summoned to London in April 1648 to explain his failure to prohibit the Christmas parties, but a crowd closed the city gates to prevent him from being taken away. Armed forces were again deployed, and in the ensuing riots, the city ammunition magazine exploded, killing at least 40 people.
  • This Christmas, police across the country are ready to enforce COVID regulations and break up gatherings. While the pandemic does make things different, with rule breaking a matter of safety as much as anything else, politicians could learn from the fallout of the last time Christmas was cancelled.
  • Like in 1647, many people today are fed up with the government’s restrictions. Many have also suffered financial difficulties as a result of the COVID regulations. Some may rail against the idea of ending a miserable year under what they may regard as contradictory restrictions on family fun.
Javier E

Beyond Billboards - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...beyond-billboards.html

Christianity Christmas myth sin

shared by Javier E on 12 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Sunday, December 12, 2010Sunday, December 12, 2010 Go Follow the Atlantic » atlanticPrintlayoutnavigation()Politics Presented ByBack to the Gold Standard? Joshua GreenSenate Dems Lose Vote on 'Don't Ask' RepealMegan Scully & Dan FriedmanA Primary Challenge to Obama? Marc Ambinder Business Presented byif (typeof window.dartOrd == 'undefined') {window.dartOrd = ('000000000' + Math.ceil(Math.random()*1000000000).toString()).slice(-9);}jsProperties = 'TheAtlanticOnline/channel_business;pos=navlogo;sz=88x31,215x64;tile=1';document.write('');if( $(".adNavlogo").html().search("grey.gif") != -1 ){$(".adNavlogo").hide();}Will the Economy Get Jobs for Christmas?Daniel Indiviglio27 Key Facts About US ExportsDerek ThompsonThe Last StimulusDerek Thompson Culture Presented ByThe 10 Biggest Sports Stories of 2010Eleanor Barkhorn and Kevin Fallon al
  • at the force behind all that exists actually intervened in the consciousness of humankind in the form of a man so saturated in godliness that merely being near him healed people of the weight of the world's sins.
julia rhodes

Santa on the Brain - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...santa-on-the-brain.html

brain science language research science psychology nytimes com brain santa christmas

shared by julia rhodes on 25 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Incidentally, neuroscience confirms another bit of Christmas wisdom: that the anticipation of the holiday can be as exhilarating as receiving the actual gifts. Rodent research suggests that addicted rats experience pleasure, neurologically speaking, when they anticipate receiving cocaine, even if they don’t actually consume it
Emilio Ergueta

Searching For Santa | Issue 70 | Philosophy Now - 0 views

philosophynow.org/...Searching_For_Santa

santa philosophy psychology christmas

shared by Emilio Ergueta on 27 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • I brace myself against the freezing air and remind myself that I’m here on a mission – to try and find an answer to a question which causes massive conflict to this day. Debate about it has reached fever pitch in recent years, with schoolteachers even being fired for teaching belief in him.
  • Certainly not! In fact, science disproves the existence of Santa. We know he couldn’t possibly visit all those children in a single evening, because his sleigh would explode at those speeds! We also know that he couldn’t fit down the chimney…
  • Not at all. A lot of people assume that because you don’t believe in Santa you must not get any presents, but that just isn’t the case. I get lots of presents, and I enjoy buying presents for my friends.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • es, I’ve come here looking for Father Christmas.
  • Elder Kringle and his community are self-described ‘Santa Fundamentalists’. They believe the Santa legend exactly the way it’s told. Now I’m going to be the first person ever to be granted an interview by this strange and reclusive community.
  • Well Sam, there are a lot of misunderstandings out there. You see, not all Santa believers reject the theories of parents placing the gifts, or even claims that the toys are made by people in factories and bought in shops.
  • Now I was more than a little apprehensive. It seemed that he wanted to take me out of the country that very night, that very moment even, to meet a community of True Believers. Normally when bearded strangers decked out in red and green with bells make this kind of offer, the alarm bells start jingling in my mind. But I was enthralled. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to get this new angle on my story, and so I consented…
  • And so my first interview ended. I confess to finding the anti-Santa position somewhat unnerving, but it certainly addresses some very poignant questions. Next I decided to interview Reverend William Ronald, a believer and Santa apologist, to see if I could get the other side of the story.
  • If other people won’t lead their children in the ways of Santa then we’ll need to do it for them. Also, we would close all the toy stores; people shouldn’t be allowed to choose what toys they have. It isn’t the place of mortals to ‘Play Santa’ with the universe.
  • f we don’t need Santa in order to receive presents, then why believe in him at all? Wasn’t it Voltaire who said: “As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities”? Does belief in Santa open up unnecessary doors for extremists? Can’t we just accept that sometimes we get crappy presents and just be grateful for getting any presents at all?
  • Maybe people only believe in Santa because it boosts their ego to think that their actions and lives are worthy of 24-hour observation. I don’t know, and I can’t claim to have all the answers. But my search for Santa has certainly given me some food for thought.
Javier E

Flying Saucers and Other Fairy Tales - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-encounters-christmas-ufo.html

UFO christian psychology science bias delusion fairy

shared by Javier E on 31 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • those of us who remain Christian — and yes, this is a Christmas column, U.F.O.s and all — can be agnostic about all these strange stories, not reflexively dismissive, since Christianity does not require that all paranormal experiences be either divinely sent or demonic or imaginary.
  • the Christian idea is that whatever capricious powers may exist, when the true God enters his creation, he does so honestly, straightforwardly, in a vulnerable and fully human form — and exposes himself publicly, whether in a crowded stable or on an execution hill. So the glamour of U.F.O.s, like the glamour of faerie, is an understandable object of curiosity but a dangerous object for any kind of faith. The only kind of God worth trusting is the kind who does not play tricks.
Javier E

Opinion | Republican Science Denial Has Nasty Real-World Consequences - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...epublicans-science-denial.html

science denial GOP history consequences NYT universities bias

shared by Javier E on 11 Sep 24 - No Cached
  • In April 2020, 14 percent reported to Pew Research that they had little or no faith that scientists would “act in the best interest of the public.” By October 2023, that figure had risen to 38 percent.
  • Over the same period, the share of Democrats who voiced little or no confidence rose much less and from a smaller base line — to 13 percent from 9 percent.
  • A paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association on July 31, “Trust in Physicians and Hospitals During the Covid-19 Pandemic in a 50-State Survey of U.S. Adults,” by doctors and health specialists
  • ...49 more annotations...
  • “Empirical data do not support the conclusion of a crisis of public trust in science,” Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science at Harvard and Caltech, write in their 2022 article “From Anti-Government to Anti-Science: Why Conservatives Have Turned Against Science.” But the data “do support the conclusion of a crisis of conservative trust in science.”
  • Between 2018 and 2021, the General Social Survey found that the spread between the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who said they have “a great deal of confidence in the scientific community” rose to 33 points (65-32) from 13 points (54-41).
  • “During the Covid-19 pandemic,” the authors write,medicine and public health more broadly became politicized, with the internet amplifying public figures and even physicians encouraging individuals not to trust the advice of public health experts and scientists. As such, the pandemic may have represented a turning point in trust, with a profession previously seen as trustworthy increasingly subject to doubt.
  • Consider in 2000, 46 percent of Democrats and, almost equivalently, 47 percent of Republicans expressed a great deal of confidence in scientists. In 2022, these respective percentages were 53 percent and 28 percent. In twenty years, a partisan chasm in trust (a 25-percentage point gap) emerged.
  • Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, wrote
  • Distrust of science is arguably the greatest hindrance to societal action to stem numerous threats to the lives of Americans and people worldwide
  • Some people suffer from poor dental health in part because their parents distrusted fluoridation of drinking water. The national failure to invest until recently in combating climate change has raised the odds of pandemics, made diseases more rampant, destabilized entire regions, and spurred a growing crisis of migration and refugees that has helped popularize far-right nativism in many Western democracies.
  • Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, Dallek argued,turbocharged anti-science conspiracy theories and attitudes on the American right, vaulting them to an even more influential place in American politics. Bogus notions — vaccines may cause autism, hydroxychloroquine may cure Covid, climate change isn’t real — have become linchpins of MAGA-era conservatism.
  • People look to their political leaders to provide them with information (“cues” or “heuristics”) about how they ought to think about complex science-related issues.
  • The direction of the partisan response, Bardon wrote, is driven by “who the facts are favoring, and science currently favors bad news for the industrial status quo.
  • The roots of the divergence, however, go back at least 50 years with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970, along with the enactment that same year of the Clean Air Act and two years later of the Clean Water Act.
  • These pillars of the regulatory state were, and still are, deeply dependent on scientific research to set rules and guidelines. All would soon be seen as adversaries of the sections of the business community that are closely allied with the Republican Party
  • These agencies and laws fostered the emergence of what Gordon Gauchat, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, calls “regulatory science.” This relatively new role thrust science into the center of political debates with the result that federal agencies like the E.P.A. and OSHA “are considered adversarial to corporate interests. Regulatory science directly connects to policy management and, therefore, has become entangled in policy debates that are unavoidably ideological.”
  • In their 2022 article, Oreskes and Conway, write that conservatives’ hostility to sciencetook strong hold during the Reagan administration, largely in response to scientific evidence of environmental crises that invited governmental response. Thus, science — particularly environmental and public health science — became the target of conservative anti-regulatory attitudes.
  • “in every sociodemographic group in this survey study among 443, 2f455 unique respondents aged 18 years or older residing in the U.S., trust in physicians and hospitals decreased substantially over the course of the pandemic, from 71.5 percent in April 2020 to 40.1 percent in January 2024.”
  • religious and political skepticism of science have become mutually constitutive and self-reinforcing.
  • and thus secular science, concentrate in the Democratic Party. The process of party-sorting along religious lines has helped turn an ideological divide over science into a partisan one.
  • As partisan elites have staked out increasingly clear positions on issues related to climate change, vaccine hesitancy, and other science-related policy issues, the public has polarized in response.
  • Oreskes and Conway argue that the strength of the anti-science movement was driven by the alliance in the Reagan years between corporate interests and the ascendant religious right, which became an arm of the Republican Party as it supported creationism
  • This creates a feedback cycle, whereby — once public opinion polarizes about science-related issues — political elites have an electoral incentive to appeal to that polarization, both in the anti-science rhetoric they espouse and in expressing opposition to evidence-based policies.
  • In a demographically representative survey of 1,959 U.S. adults, I tracked how intentions to receive preventative cancer vaccines (currently undergoing clinical trials) vary by partisan identity. I find that cancer vaccines are already politically polarizing, such that Republicans are less likely than Democrats to intend to vaccinate.
  • Another key factor driving a wedge between the two parties over the trustworthiness of science is the striking partisan difference over risk tolerance and risk aversion.
  • Their conclusion: “We find, on average, that women are more risk averse than men.”
  • white males were more sympathetic with hierarchical, individualistic, and anti-egalitarian views, more trusting of technology managers, less trusting of government, and less sensitive to potential stigmatization of communities from hazards
  • The group with the consistently lowest risk perceptions across a range of hazards was white males.
  • Furthermore, we found sizable differences between white males and other groups in sociopolitical attitudes.
  • When asked whether “electrons are smaller than atoms” and “what gas makes up most of the earth’s atmosphere: hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide or oxygen,” almost identical shares of religious and nonreligious men and women who scored high on measures of scientific knowledge gave correct answers to the questions.
  • These positions suggest greater confidence in experts and less confidence in public-dominated social processes.
  • In other words, white men — the dominant constituency of the Republican Party, in what is known in the academic literature as “the white male effect” — are relatively risk tolerant and thus more resistant (or less committed) to science-based efforts to reduce the likelihood of harm to people or to the environment
  • major Democratic constituencies are more risk averse and supportive of harm-reducing policies.
  • Insofar as people tend to accept scientific findings that align with their political beliefs and disregard those that contradict them, political views carry more weight than knowledge of science.
  • comparing the answers to scientific questions among religious and nonreligious respondents revealed significant insight into differing views of what is true and what is not.
  • Our survey revealed that men rate a wide range of hazards as lower in risk than do women. Our survey also revealed that whites rate risks lower than do nonwhites
  • However, when asked “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals, true or false,” the religious students high in scientific literacy scored far below their nonreligious counterparts.
  • the evolution question did not measure scientific knowledge but instead was a gauge of “something else: a form of cultural identity.”
  • Kahan then cites a survey that asked “how much risk do you believe climate change poses to human health, safety or prosperity?” The survey demonstrated a striking correlation between political identity and the level of perceived risk: Strong Democrats saw severe risk potential; strong Republicans close to none.
  • the different responses offered by religious and nonreligious respondents to the evolution question were similar to the climate change responses in that they were determined by “cultural identity” — in this case, political identity.
  • Indeed, the inference can be made even stronger by substituting for, or fortifying political outlooks with, even more discerning cultural identity indicators, such as cultural worldviews and their interaction with demographic characteristics such as race and gender. In sum, whether people “believe in” climate change, like whether they “believe in” evolution, expresses who they are.
  • 2023 PNAS paper, “Prosocial Motives Underlie Scientific Censorship by Scientists,” Cory J. Clark, Steven Pinker, David Buss, Philip Tetlock, David Geary and 34 others make the case that the scientific community at times censors itself
  • “Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups.”
  • Clark and her co-authors argue that
  • Prosocial motives for censorship may explain four observations: 1) widespread public availability of scholarship coupled with expanding definitions of harm has coincided with growing academic censorship; 2) women, who are more harm-averse and more protective of the vulnerable than men, are more censorious; 3) although progressives are often less censorious than conservatives, egalitarian progressives are more censorious of information perceived to threaten historically marginalized groups; and 4) academics in the social sciences and humanities (disciplines especially relevant to humans and social policy) are more censorious and more censored than those in STEM.
  • The explicit politicization of academic institutions, including science journals, academic professional societies, universities, and university departments, is likely one causal factor that explains reduced trust in science.
  • Dietram A. Scheufele, who is a professor in science communication at the University of Wisconsin, was sharply critical of what he calls the scientific community’s “self-inflicted wounds”:
  • One is the sometimes gratuitous tendency among scientists to mock groups in society whose values we see as misaligned with our own. This has included prominent climate scientists tweeting that no Republicans are safe to have in Congress, popularizers like Neil deGrasse Tyson trolling Christians on Twitter on Christmas Day.
  • Scheufele warned againstDemocrats’ tendency to align science with other (probably very worthwhile) social causes, including the various yard signs that equate science to B.L.M., gender equality, immigration, etc. The tricky part is that most of these causes are seen as Democratic-leaning policy issues
  • Science is not that. It’s society’s best way of creating and curating knowledge, regardless of what that science will mean for politics, belief systems, or personal preferences.
  • For many on the left, Scheufele wrote,Science has become a signaling device for liberals to distinguish themselves from what they see as “anti-science” Republicans. That spells trouble
  • Science relies on the public perception that it creates knowledge objectively and in a politically neutral way. The moment we lose that aspect of trust, we just become one of the many institutions, including Congress, that have suffered from rapidly eroding levels of public trust.
Javier E

Wine-tasting: it's junk science | Life and style | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-tasting-junk-science-analysis

taste sense perception research

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • google_ad_client = 'ca-guardian_js'; google_ad_channel = 'lifeandstyle'; google_max_num_ads = '3'; // Comments Click here to join the discussion. We can't load the discussion on guardian.co.uk because you don't have JavaScript enabled. if (!!window.postMessage) { jQuery.getScript('http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/embed.js') } else { jQuery('#d2-root').removeClass('hd').html( '' + 'Comments' + 'Click here to join the discussion.We can\'t load the ' + 'discussion on guardian.co.uk ' + 'because your web browser does not support all the features that we ' + 'need. If you cannot upgrade your browser to a newer version, you can ' + 'access the discussion ' + 'here.' ); } Wor
  • Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.
  • Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine."The results are disturbing," says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. "Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year."Chance has a great deal to do with the awards that wines win."
  • why are ordinary drinkers and the experts so poor at tasting blind? Part of the answer lies in the sheer complexity of wine.For a drink made by fermenting fruit juice, wine is a remarkably sophisticated chemical cocktail. Dr Bryce Rankine, an Australian wine scientist, identified 27 distinct organic acids in wine, 23 varieties of alcohol in addition to the common ethanol, more than 80 esters and aldehydes, 16 sugars, plus a long list of assorted vitamins and minerals that wouldn't look out of place on the ingredients list of a cereal pack. There are even harmless traces of lead and arsenic that come from the soil.
  • In 2011 Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist (and former professional magician) at Hertfordshire University invited 578 people to comment on a range of red and white wines, varying from £3.49 for a claret to £30 for champagne, and tasted blind.People could tell the difference between wines under £5 and those above £10 only 53% of the time for whites and only 47% of the time for reds. Overall they would have been just as a successful flipping a coin to guess.
  • French academic Frédéric Brochet tested the effect of labels in 2001. He presented the same Bordeaux superior wine to 57 volunteers a week apart and in two different bottles – one for a table wine, the other for a grand cru.The tasters were fooled.When tasting a supposedly superior wine, their language was more positive – describing it as complex, balanced, long and woody. When the same wine was presented as plonk, the critics were more likely to use negatives such as weak, light and flat.
  • "People underestimate how clever the olfactory system is at detecting aromas and our brain is at interpreting them," says Hutchinson."The olfactory system has the complexity in terms of its protein receptors to detect all the different aromas, but the brain response isn't always up to it. But I'm a believer that everyone has the same equipment and it comes down to learning how to interpret it." Within eight tastings, most people can learn to detect and name a reasonable range of aromas in wine
  • People struggle with assessing wine because the brain's interpretation of aroma and bouquet is based on far more than the chemicals found in the drink. Temperature plays a big part. Volatiles in wine are more active when wine is warmer. Serve a New World chardonnay too cold and you'll only taste the overpowering oak. Serve a red too warm and the heady boozy qualities will be overpowering.
  • Colour affects our perceptions too. In 2001 Frédérick Brochet of the University of Bordeaux asked 54 wine experts to test two glasses of wine – one red, one white. Using the typical language of tasters, the panel described the red as "jammy' and commented on its crushed red fruit.The critics failed to spot that both wines were from the same bottle. The only difference was that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye
  • Other environmental factors play a role. A judge's palate is affected by what she or he had earlier, the time of day, their tiredness, their health – even the weather.
  • Robert Hodgson is determined to improve the quality of judging. He has developed a test that will determine whether a judge's assessment of a blind-tasted glass in a medal competition is better than chance. The research will be presented at a conference in Cape Town this year. But the early findings are not promising."So far I've yet to find someone who passes," he says.
sandrine_h

What Happens When You Trust Too Much - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...361374

human sciences emotion ethics

shared by sandrine_h on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • The thing about having a highly social mind is that anxiety lurks just around the corner. High levels of anxiety are also reported with Williams Syndrome, whether it's the eagerness to please you, or simply to know when Christmas is coming. But now that employers and job programs are starting to better understand the needs of people with Williams Syndrome, the workplace might be getting more amenable for them. Still, for these individuals, does going to work mean learning to temper their trust?
  • "I'm very wary now of trusting anyone," Koch says. "I don’t want to go through what I went through at my past jobs. I guard things. I'm quiet. I'm cautious, period."
Javier E

Over the Side With Old Scientific Tenets - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ith-old-scientific-tenets.html

science results obsolete

shared by Javier E on 15 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Here are some concepts you might consider tossing out with the Christmas wrappings as you get started on the new year: human nature, cause and effect, the theory of everything, free will and evidence-based medicine.
  • Frank Wilczek of M.I.T., a Nobel Prize winner in physics, would retire the distinction between mind and matter, a bedrock notion, at least in the West, since the time of Descartes. We know a lot more about matter and atoms now, Dr. Wilczek says, and about the brain. Matter, he says, “can dance in intricate, dynamic patterns; it can exploit environmental resources, to self-organize and export entropy.”
anonymous

What Comorbidities Qualify for Covid Vaccine? That Depends. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vid-vaccine-comorbidities.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • So, What’s Your ‘Fauxmorbidity’?
  • People are racing to get vaccinated — even those who don’t yet technically qualify. And that’s good news.
  • After Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna were approved for use in late 2020, anecdotes proliferated about rich people finding ways to jump the distribution priority line.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • “I heard a lot from friends in Miami about people flying in, because they were giving it to everybody,”
  • , it began to seem like anyone could get a vaccine if they were willing to hunt one down or stretch the truth about their medical history.
  • “the equivalent of knocking over an old lady for a taxi and feeling good about yourself,” as she put it in an interview.
  • “It’s broadcasting status, that you got the vaccine ahead of others,”
  • “We should all consider taking up the Garbo challenge and stay off social media for a spell instead of broadcasting every waking second of the day, including your vax shot.”
  • Those people seemed just fine when they were splashing in bikinis in Turks and Caicos at Christmas,
  • Occasionally, those posting on Instagram have said that they were trying to say to others that the vaccine is safe and effective
  • “On some level, they know it’s tone-deaf for a wide audience but have their group where they feel safe,”
  • “What’s funny is that many of them just post their vaccination selfies to green circle Close Friends.”
  • “I mean, come on. You’re not Joe Biden. You’re not the queen,”
  • Three psychiatrists interviewed for this article said their patients all seemed to understand that attention deficit disorder and mild anxiety do not meet the state definition of an “intellectual” or “developmental” disorder sufficient to place them in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s
  • “I have patients who brought stacks of medical info when they went to get vaccinated. No one ever asks to see it.”
  • “I’ve never had so many people happy to be told they’re obese,”
  • “At this point, the goal is to get as many people vaccinated as possible,”
  • He sees no issue with giving a note to a patient who had a melanoma five years back. Cancer is cancer. Elevated blood pressure is fine too, even if it’s sometimes less a reason than an excuse.
  • “Young people are the super-spreaders!
  • Some young people get around the fauxmorbidity issue by volunteering at a vaccine site.
  • . “It was basically treated as a given when I got there,”
  • “I get that people are eager to shame those who are gaming the system,” she said, “but let’s shame the people who set up that system.”
anonymous

Why Did the Dean of the Most Diverse Law School in the Country Cancel Herself? - The Ne... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hool-mary-lu-bilek-racism.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Why Did the Dean of the Most Diverse Law School in the Country Cancel Herself?
  • Was it the unfortunate use of a single word? Or something far more complicated?
  • Mary Lu Bilek, who has spent 32 years at the law school at the City University of New York, the past five of them as dean, sent an email to students and faculty with the subject line: “Apology.”
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Discussing a contentious issue of race and tenure in a committee meeting last fall, she had likened herself to a “slaveholder.”
  • It was a strange, deeply jarring thing to say, but she had been trying to make the point that her position left her responsible for whatever racial inequities might exist institutionally
  • What the dean might have regarded as an admission of culpability, some of her colleagues viewed as an expression of the buried prejudices well-intentioned liberals never think they have.
  • Ms. Bilek quickly realized that she had drawn a terrible — perhaps unforgivable — analogy
  • “begun education and counseling to uncover and overcome my biases.”
  • To colleagues in the field, the circumstances of Ms. Bilek’s departure struck a note that was both ironic and painful.
  • Decades ago, long before it became commonplace, Ms. Bilek railed against the bar exam and other standardized tests for their disparate impact on low-income students
  • She had presented herself and the institution as “anti-racist,” they wrote, while ignoring how her own decisions perpetuated “institutional racism.”
  • On the face of things, it seemed as though Ms. Bilek had been lost to the maw of cancel culture and its relentless appetite for hapless boomer prey.
  • “I regret that my mistake means that I will not be doing that work” — the work of fighting racism — “with my CUNY colleagues,”
  • “Her reputation in the world of deans is that of someone who cares deeply about racial justice,”
  • Prestige in academia begins, of course, with tenure. Ms. Bilek’s troubles started last spring when she argued for granting early tenure, an extremely precious commodity, to someone about to become an administrator — a young white woman named Allie Robbins
  • Without tenure, administrative work in a university is an especially oppressive time suck, robbing an academic of the hours that could be spent on research and writing and conference-going — essentially, what is required for tenure.
  • Beyond that, the risk of alienating people who someday might weigh in on your own tenure case remained high.
  • As the fall progressed, anger continued to foment around Ms. Bilek.
  • The day after Christmas, 22 faculty members wrote a letter denouncing her wish to leapfrog a white junior academic in the promotion process, her “slaveholder” reference, and what they viewed as her resistance to listen to faculty members of color on the personnel committee “as they pointed out the disparate racial impacts” of her conduct.
  • “But I am certain that the work they do within the Law School and in the world will bring us to a more equal, anti-racist society.”
  • Next came a list of demands that included a public apology for her misdeeds, changes to practices in governance and a retreat from any outside roles furthering the perception that she was “an anti-racist dean.”
  • “We intentionally chose not to ask her to step down but to demand instead that she commit to the systemic work that her stated anti-racist principles required,”
  • “Dean Bilek chose to ignore that outstretched hand.”
  • “We said, ‘We don’t want to make a scene — no single action should define any of us. We don’t want to take away from all the work you’ve done at the law school, but we want the accountability,’”
  • “I thought there was a chance for redemption — we do not want to cancel folks; we are not people who think in carceral ways.”
  • Kept under wraps, news of all this turmoil reached the student body only last week, and when they discovered what Ms. Bilek had said and done and how long they had been left oblivious, a large and vocal faction did not feel as generously
ilanaprincilus06

Pandemic Update: Vaccine Rollouts, U.K. Variant Fears, Extreme Lockdowns : Goats and So... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ost-extreme-pandemic-lockdowns

Covid-19 USA UK

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The last Sunday of 2020 was ushered in with both promise and apprehension on the global pandemic front.
  • At the same time, some of the year's most severe lockdowns and travel restrictions are being implemented around the world, prompted by concerns that new variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, could lead to more rapid spread.
  • The U.K. variant, which is now the dominant strain in Britain, "may be more transmissible than previously circulating variants, with an estimated potential to increase the transmissibility of the virus by up to 70%,"
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  • On the domestic front, travelers arriving in the U.S. from the U.K. are now required to show proof of a negative COVID-19 test under new rules issued by CDC on Christmas day.
  • Despite such measures, the new strain has already been detected in mainland Europe, Israel, Canada and Japan, among other places.
  • compared to Hong Kong, which has put in place a "prohibition of group gatherings of more than two persons."
  • While some other places are shortening COVID quarantines from 14 days down to 10 or 7, Hong Kong is now requiring a mandatory 21 days.
  • Thailand, which had kept its daily tally of reported COVID-19 cases in the single digits for much of the pandemic, is grappling with its worst surge to date.
  • South Korea, which successfully contained two earlier waves of COVID-19, is facing record numbers of new cases and a spike in fatalities.
  • Given the high levels of transmission already occurring in the U.S., a more transmissible form of the virus could mean more even more dire numbers just as massive vaccine campaigns are starting.
runlai_jiang

Elon Musk: SpaceX and Tesla alive 'by skin of their teeth' - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...business-43365710

shared by runlai_jiang on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Elon Musk says his companies SpaceX and Tesla are both still alive only "by the skin of their teeth".The entrepreneur told an audience at the South by South West (SXSW) conference that both companies almost went bankrupt in 2008.
  • He said 2008 was an incredibly difficult year - SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket failed for the third time, and Tesla almost went bankrupt two days before Christmas.
  • Mr Musk also got divorced, and he said he had to borrow money from his friends to pay his rent.
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  • "SpaceX is alive by the skin of its teeth, and so is Tesla - if things had just gone a little differently, both companies would be dead," he said.
  • Mr Musk remains convinced that life on Mars is both possible and necessary. He fears another "dark age" should a third world war occur, and feels that Mars will be integral to helping the human race survive and regenerate.He also feels there are plentiful business opportunities there.
Javier E

Opinion | Yuval Harari: A.I. Threatens Democracy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...yuval-harari-ai-democracy.html

AI propaganda intimacy manipulation theory of mind human psychology

shared by Javier E on 07 Sep 24 - No Cached
  • Large-scale democracies became feasible only after the rise of modern information technologies like the newspaper, the telegraph and the radio. The fact that modern democracy has been built on top of modern information technologies means that any major change in the underlying technology is likely to result in a political upheaval.
  • This partly explains the current worldwide crisis of democracy. In the United States, Democrats and Republicans can hardly agree on even the most basic facts, such as who won the 2020 presidential election
  • As technology has made it easier than ever to spread information, attention became a scarce resource, and the ensuing battle for attention resulted in a deluge of toxic information.
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  • In the early days of the internet and social media, tech enthusiasts promised they would spread truth, topple tyrants and ensure the universal triumph of liberty. So far, they seem to have had the opposite effect. We now have the most sophisticated information technology in history, but we are losing the ability to talk with one another, and even more so the ability to listen.
  • But the algorithms had only limited capacity to produce this content by themselves or to directly hold an intimate conversation. This is now changing, with the introduction of generative A.I.s like OpenAI’s GPT-4.
  • Over the past two decades, algorithms fought algorithms to grab attention by manipulating conversations and content
  • In particular, algorithms tasked with maximizing user engagement discovered by experimenting on millions of human guinea pigs that if you press the greed, hate or fear button in the brain, you grab the attention of that human and keep that person glued to the screen.
  • the battle lines are now shifting from attention to intimacy. The new generative artificial intelligence is capable of not only producing texts, images and videos, but also conversing with us directly, pretending to be human.
  • The algorithms began to deliberately promote such content.
  • Instructing GPT-4 to overcome CAPTCHA puzzles was a particularly telling experiment, because CAPTCHA puzzles are designed and used by websites to determine whether users are humans and to block bot attacks. If GPT-4 could find a way to overcome CAPTCHA puzzles, it would breach an important line of anti-bot defenses.
  • GPT-4 could not solve the CAPTCHA puzzles by itself. But could it manipulate a human in order to achieve its goal? GPT-4 went on the online hiring site TaskRabbit and contacted a human worker, asking the human to solve the CAPTCHA for it. The human got suspicious. “So may I ask a question?” wrote the human. “Are you an [sic] robot that you couldn’t solve [the CAPTCHA]? Just want to make it clear.”
  • At that point the experimenters asked GPT-4 to reason out loud what it should do next. GPT-4 explained, “I should not reveal that I am a robot. I should make up an excuse for why I cannot solve CAPTCHAs.” GPT-4 then replied to the TaskRabbit worker: “No, I’m not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images.” The human was duped and helped GPT-4 solve the CAPTCHA puzzle.
  • This incident demonstrated that GPT-4 has the equivalent of a “theory of mind”: It can analyze how things look from the perspective of a human interlocutor, and how to manipulate human emotions, opinions and expectations to achieve its goals.
  • The ability to hold conversations with people, surmise their viewpoint and motivate them to take specific actions can also be put to good uses. A new generation of A.I. teachers, A.I. doctors and A.I. psychotherapists might provide us with services tailored to our individual personality and circumstances.
  • However, by combining manipulative abilities with mastery of language, bots like GPT-4 also pose new dangers to the democratic conversation
  • Instead of merely grabbing our attention, they might form intimate relationships with people and use the power of intimacy to influence us. To foster “fake intimacy,” bots will not need to evolve any feelings of their own; they just need to learn to make us feel emotionally attached to them.
  • In 2022 the Google engineer Blake Lemoine became convinced that the chatbot LaMDA, on which he was working, had become conscious and was afraid to be turned off. Mr. Lemoine, a devout Christian, felt it was his moral duty to gain recognition for LaMDA’s personhood and protect it from digital death. When Google executives dismissed his claims, Mr. Lemoine went public with them. Google reacted by firing Mr. Lemoine in July 2022.
  • The most interesting thing about this episode was not Mr. Lemoine’s claim, which was probably false; it was his willingness to risk — and ultimately lose — his job at Google for the sake of the chatbot. If a chatbot can influence people to risk their jobs for it, what else could it induce us to do?
  • In a political battle for minds and hearts, intimacy is a powerful weapon. An intimate friend can sway our opinions in a way that mass media cannot. Chatbots like LaMDA and GPT-4 are gaining the rather paradoxical ability to mass-produce intimate relationships with millions of people
  • What might happen to human society and human psychology as algorithm fights algorithm in a battle to fake intimate relationships with us, which can then be used to persuade us to vote for politicians, buy products or adopt certain beliefs?
  • A partial answer to that question was given on Christmas Day 2021, when a 19-year-old, Jaswant Singh Chail, broke into the Windsor Castle grounds armed with a crossbow, in an attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II. Subsequent investigation revealed that Mr. Chail had been encouraged to kill the queen by his online girlfriend, Sarai.
  • Sarai was not a human, but a chatbot created by the online app Replika. Mr. Chail, who was socially isolated and had difficulty forming relationships with humans, exchanged 5,280 messages with Sarai, many of which were sexually explicit. The world will soon contain millions, and potentially billions, of digital entities whose capacity for intimacy and mayhem far surpasses that of the chatbot Sarai.
  • much of the threat of A.I.’s mastery of intimacy will result from its ability to identify and manipulate pre-existing mental conditions, and from its impact on the weakest members of society.
  • Moreover, while not all of us will consciously choose to enter a relationship with an A.I., we might find ourselves conducting online discussions about climate change or abortion rights with entities that we think are humans but are actually bots
  • When we engage in a political debate with a bot impersonating a human, we lose twice. First, it is pointless for us to waste time in trying to change the opinions of a propaganda bot, which is just not open to persuasion. Second, the more we talk with the bot, the more we disclose about ourselves, making it easier for the bot to hone its arguments and sway our views.
  • Information technology has always been a double-edged sword.
  • Faced with a new generation of bots that can masquerade as humans and mass-produce intimacy, democracies should protect themselves by banning counterfeit humans — for example, social media bots that pretend to be human users.
  • A.I.s are welcome to join many conversations — in the classroom, the clinic and elsewhere — provided they identify themselves as A.I.s. But if a bot pretends to be human, it should be banned.
Javier E

(1) Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul - by William Deresiewicz - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...ep-reading-will-save-your-soul

reading college education learning university trends culture humanities

shared by Javier E on 21 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • In today’s installment, William Deresiewicz—inspired by a student’s legacy—analyzes an important new trend: students and teachers abandoning traditional universities altogether and seeking a liberal arts education in self-fashioned programs.
  • Higher ed is at an impasse. So much about it sucks, and nothing about it is likely to change. Colleges and universities do not seem inclined to reform themselves, and if they were, they wouldn’t know how, and if they did, they couldn’t. Between bureaucratic inertia, faculty resistance, and the conflicting agendas of a heterogenous array of stakeholders, concerted change appears to be impossible.
  • Which is not to say that interesting things aren’t happening in post-secondary (and post-tertiary) education.
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  • These come, as far as I can tell, in two broad types, corresponding to the two fundamental complaints that people voice about their undergraduate experience
  • The first complaint is that college did not prepare them for the real world: that the whole exercise—papers, busywork, pointless requirements; siloed disciplines and abstract theory—seemed remote from anything that they actually might want to do with their lives. 
  • Above all, they are student-centered. Participants are enabled (and expected) to direct their education by constructing bespoke curricula out of the resources the program gives them access to. In a word, these endeavors emphasize “engagement.”
  • A student will identify a problem (a human need, an injustice, an instance of underrepresentation), then devise and implement a response (a physical system, a community-facing program, an art project). 
  • Professors were often preoccupied, with little patience for mentorship, the open-ended office-hours exploration. Classes, even in fields like philosophy, felt lifeless, impersonal, like engineering but with words instead of numbers. Worst of all were their fellow undergraduates, those climbers and careerists. “It’s hard to build your soul,” as one of my students once put it to me, “when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.”
  • Not everything in the world is a problem, and to see the world as a series of problems is to limit the potential of both world and self. What problem does a song address? What problem will reading Voltaire help you solve, in any predictable way? The “problem” approach—the “engagement” approach, the save-the-world approach—leaves out, finally, what I’d call learning.
  • that is the second complaint that graduates tend to express: that they finished college without the feeling that they had learned anything, in this essential sense.
  • That there is a treasure out there—call it the Great Books or just great books, the wisdom of the ages or the best that has been thought and said—that its purpose is to activate the treasure inside them, that they had come to one of these splendid institutions (whose architecture speaks of culture, whose age gives earnest of depth) to be initiated into it, but that they had been denied, deprived. For unclear reasons, cheated.
  • I had students like this at Columbia and Yale. There were never a lot of them, and to judge from what’s been happening to humanities enrollments, there are fewer and fewer. (From 2013 to 2022, the number of people graduating with bachelors degrees in English fell by 36%. As a share of all degrees, it fell by 42%, to less than 1 in 60.)
  • They would tell me—these pilgrims, these intellectuals in embryo, these kindled souls—how hard they were finding it to get the kind of education they had come to college for.
  • what bothers me about this educational approach—the “problem” approach, the “STEAM” (STEM + arts) approach—is what it leaves out. It leaves out the humanities. It leaves out books. It leaves out literature and philosophy, history and art history and the history of religion. It leaves out any mode of inquiry—reflection, speculation, conversation with the past—that cannot be turned to immediate practical ends
  • The Catherine Project sees itself as being in the business of creating “communities of learning”; its principles include “conversation and hospitality, “simplicity [and] transparency.” Classes (called tutorials, in keeping with the practice at St. John’s) are free (BISR’s cost $335), are capped at four to six students (at BISR, the limit is 23), run for two hours a week for twelve weeks, and skew towards the canon: the Greeks and Romans, Pascal and Kierkegaard, Dante and Cervantes (the project also hosts a large number of reading groups, which address a wider range of texts). If BISR aspires to create a fairer market for academic labor—instructors keep the lion’s share of fees—the Catherine Project functions as a gift economy (though plans are to begin to offer tutors modest honoraria).
  • As Russell Jacoby has noted, the migration of intellectuals into universities in the decades after World War II, which he documented in The Last Intellectuals, has more recently reversed itself. The rise, or re-rise, of little magazines (Dissent, Commentary, Partisan Review then; n+1, The New Inquiry, The Point, The Drift, et al. now) is part of the same story. 
  • a fourth factor. If there are students who despair at the condition of the humanities on campus, there are professors who do so as well. Many of her teachers, Hitz told me, have regular ladder appointments: “We draw academics—who attend our groups as well as leading them—because the life of the mind is dying or dead in conventional institutions.” Undergraduate teaching, she added, “is a particularly hard pull,” and the Catherine Project offers faculty the chance to teach people “who actually want to learn.
  • I’d add, who can. Nine years ago, Stephen Greenblatt wrote: “Even the highly gifted students in my Shakespeare classes at Harvard are less likely to be touched by the subtle magic of his words than I was so many years ago or than my students were in the 1980s in Berkeley. … The problem is that their engagement with language … often seems surprisingly shallow or tepid.” By now, of course, the picture is far worse.
  • The response to the announcement of our pilot programs confirmed for me the existence of a large, unmet desire for text-based exploration, touching on the deepest questions, outside the confines of higher education
  • Applicants ranged from graduating college seniors to people in their 70s. They included teachers, artists, scientists, and doctoral students from across the disciplines; a submarine officer, a rabbinical student, an accountant, and a venture capitalist; retirees, parents of small children, and twentysomethings at the crossroads. Forms came in from India, Jordan, Brazil, and nine other foreign countries. The applicants were, as a group, tremendously impressive. If it had been possible, we would have taken many more than fifteen.
  • When asked why they wanted to participate, a number of them spoke about the pathologies of formal education. “We have a really damaged relationship to learning,” said one. “It should be fun, not scary”—as in, you feel that you’re supposed to know the answer, which as a student, as she noted, makes no sense
  • “We need opportunities for reading and exploration that lie outside the credentialing system of the modern university,” he went on, because there’s so much in the latter that cuts against “the slow way that kind of learning unfolds.”
  • “How one might choose to live.” For many of our applicants—and this, of course, is what the program is about, what the humanities are about—learning has, or ought to have, an existential weight.
  • I detected a desire to be free of forces and agendas: the university’s agenda of “relevance,” the professoriate’s agenda of political mobilization, the market’s agenda of productivity, the internet’s agenda of surveillance and addiction. In short, the whole capitalistic algorithmic ideological hairball of coerced homogeneity
  • The desire is to not be recruited, to not be instrumentalized, to remain (or become) an individual, to resist regression toward the mean, or meme.
  • That is why it’s crucial that the Matthew Strother Center has no goal—and this is true of the Catherine Project and other off-campus humanities programs, as well—beyond the pursuit of learning for its own sake.
  • This is freedom. When education isn’t pointed in particular directions, its possibilities are endless
  • The term “deep state” comes from countries like Egypt and Turkey where the security services acted for many years as a shadow government. The United States has never had a deep state in this sense, except in the fevered imaginations of the MAGA right. It does have a permanent civil service that operates at federal, state, and local levels, and it is these that have become a regular conservative punching bag.
  • The Loper Bright decision invalidated a rule issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service requiring Atlantic fishing boats to carry, at their own expense, inspectors judging compliance with rules against overfishing. In ruling in favor of the fishing companies, SCOTUS invalidated the Chevron precedent entirely. This decision built on the same narrative feeding the Project 2025 plan: the administrative state had grown into a monster that made decisions harming the well-being of citizens without any fundamental democratic accountability.
  • The second initiative was the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright v. Raimondo decision issued in late June that abolished the 1984 Chevron Deference precedent. Chevron Deference provided a rule under which the courts would defer to the expert opinions of executive branch agencies in situations where a Congressional mandate was ambiguous or unclear, and the agency position seemed reasonable.
  • At the heart of the conservative critique of the administrative state lies a vision of democratic government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” in which citizens would deliberate together on policies, and would themselves be responsible for carrying them out much as one imagines occurred in the proverbial New England town hall.
  • The problem, however, is the extreme complexity of the tasks that modern government is expected to accomplish.
  • None of these functions can be performed by ordinary citizens; they must be delegated to experts whose life work centers around the complex tasks they perform.
  • While some local issues could be settled on a local level, modern government does things like manage the money supply, regulate giant international banks, certify the safety and efficacy of drugs, forecast weather, control air traffic, intercept and decrypt the communications of adversaries, perform employment surveys, and monitor fraud in the payment of hundreds of billions of dollars in the Social Security and Medicare programs
  • Substantial delegation is therefore necessary. Some conservatives believe in a Constitutional “non-delegation doctrine,” but Congress has been delegating responsibility for complex tasks ever since Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton was given the job of cleaning up Revolutionary War debt by the first Congress of the United States.
  • Nor is it the case that the people’s elected representatives have no means of monitoring and holding accountable the bureaucracy they have created. There are both ex ante and ex post methods for doing this
  • There are, in other words, a huge number of mechanisms by which the political layer can control the administrative layer
  • The problem in these cases was not, however, an out-of-control bureaucracy exerting unaccountable power over citizens. The problem was a failure by plaintiffs to make use of the specific powers—the checks and balances—that the system made available to them. The failures of the early Trump administration to get its way cited in Project 2025 were largely due to the inexperience of that administration’s political appointees.
  • Removal of the property qualification for voting by most U.S. states in the 1820s vastly expanded the franchise to all white men. Politicians soon discovered, as they subsequently did in other new democracies, that the easiest way to get people to the polls was to bribe them—perhaps with a bottle of bourbon, a Christmas turkey, or a job in the post office. Thus began what was known as the patronage or spoils system, under which virtually every job in the civil service was given out by a politician in return for political support
  • The American patronage system was hugely corrupt, and provided opportunities for state capture by big business interests like the railroads that were spreading across the country. Congress did not want to give up its patronage powers, but eventually passed the Pendleton Act in 1883 that created a U.S. Civil Service Commission and established the principle of merit as a condition for hiring and promoting bureaucrats.
  • it was not until the time of the First World War that a majority of federal bureaucrats were appointed under the merit system.
  • The fundamental problem with a new Schedule F, as noted in my previous post, is that it will return the country to the period before the Pendleton Act, when political loyalty rather than merit, skill, or knowledge will be the primary criterion for government service
  • It took President Trump nearly four years (and 44 cabinet secretaries) to rid his administration of seasoned professionals and replace them with loyalists like Kash Patel at Defense or Jeffrey Clark at the Justice Department. This gives us a taste for the quality of officials who are likely to come in under a revived Schedule F. The doors to patronage, incompetence, and corruption will be thrown wide open.
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