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Javier E

Strange things are taking place - at the same time - 0 views

edition.pagesuite.com/...dynamic_article_popover.aspx

coincidence miracle randomness fate psychology research

shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • In February 1973, Dr. Bernard Beitman found himself hunched over a kitchen sink in an old Victorian house in San Francisco, choking uncontrollably. He wasn’t eating or drinking, so there was nothing to cough up, and yet for several minutes he couldn’t catch his breath or swallow.The next day his brother called to tell him that 3,000 miles away, in Wilmington, Del., their father had died. He had bled into his throat, choking on his own blood at the same time as Beitman’s mysterious episode.
  • Overcome with awe and emotion, Beitman became fascinated with what he calls meaningful coincidences. After becoming a professor of psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia, he published several papers and two books on the subject and started a nonprofit, the Coincidence Project, to encourage people to share their coincidence stories.
  • “What I look for as a scientist and a spiritual seeker are the patterns that lead to meaningful coincidences,” said Beitman, 80, from his home in Charlottesville, Va. “So many people are reporting this kind of experience. Understanding how it happens is part of the fun.”
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Beitman defines a coincidence as “two events coming together with apparently no causal explanation.” They can be life-changing, like his experience with his father, or comforting, such as when a loved one’s favorite song comes on the radio just when you are missing them most.
  • Although Beitman has long been fascinated by coincidences, it wasn’t until the end of his academic career that he was able to study them in earnest. (Before then, his research primarily focused on the relationship between chest pain and panic disorder.)
  • He started by developing the Weird Coincidence Survey in 2006 to assess what types of coincidences are most commonly observed, what personality types are most correlated with noticing them and how most people explain them. About 3,000 people have completed the survey so far.
  • he has drawn a few conclusions. The most commonly reported coincidences are associated withmass media: A person thinks of an idea and then hears or sees it on TV, the radio or the internet. Thinking of someone and then having that person call unexpectedly is next on the list, followed by being in the right place at the right time to advance one’s work, career or education.
  • People who describe themselves as spiritual or religious report noticing more meaningful coincidences than those who do not, and people are more likely to experience coincidences when they are in a heightened emotional state — perhaps under stress or grieving.
  • The most popular explanation among survey respondents for mysterious coincidences: God or fate. The second explanation: randomness. The third is that our minds are connected to one another. The fourth is that our minds are connected to the environment.
  • “Some say God, some say universe, some say random and I say ‘Yes,’ ” he said. “People want things to be black and white, yes or no, but I say there is mystery.”
  • He’s particularly interested in what he’s dubbed “simulpathity”: feeling a loved one’s pain at a distance, as he believes he did with his father. Science can’t currently explain how it might occur, but in his books he offers some nontraditional ideas, such as the existence of “the psychosphere,” a kind of mental atmosphere through which information and energy can travel between two people who are emotionally close though physically distant.
  • In his new book published in September, “Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen,” he shares the story of a young man who intended to end his life by the shore of an isolated lake. While he sat crying in his car, another car pulled up and his brother got out. When the young man asked for an explanation, the brother said he didn’t know why he got in the car, where he was going, or what he would do when he got there. He just knew he needed to get in the car and drive.
  • David Hand, a British statistician and author of the 2014 book “The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day,” sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from Beitman. He says most coincidences are fairly easy to explain, and he specializes in demystifying even the strangest ones.
  • “When you look closely at a coincidence, you can often discover the chance of it happening is not as small as you think,” he said. “It’s perhaps not a 1-in-a-billion chance, but in fact a 1-in-a-hundred chance, and yeah, you would expect that would happen quite often.”
  • the law of truly large numbers. “You take something that has a very small chance of happening and you give it lots and lots and lots of opportunities to happen,” he said. “Then the overall probability becomes big.”
  • But just because Hand has a mathematical perspective doesn’t mean he finds coincidences boring. “It’s like looking at a rainbow,” he said. “Just because I understand the physics behind it doesn’t make it any the less wonderful.
  • Paying attention to coincidences, Osman and Johansen say, is an essential part of how humans make sense of the world. We rely constantly on our understanding of cause and effect to survive.
  • “Coincidences are often associated with something mystical or supernatural, but if you look under the hood, noticing coincidences is what humans do all the time,”
  • Zeltzer has spent 50 years studying the writings of Carl Jung, the 20th century Swiss psychologist who introduced the modern Western world to the idea of synchronicity. Jung defined synchronicity as “the coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same meaning.”
  • One of Jung’s most iconic synchronistic stories concerned a patient who he felt had become so stuck in her rationality that it interfered with her ability to understand her psychology and emotional life.
  • One day, the patient was recounting a dream in which she’d received a golden scarab. Just then, Jung heard a gentle tapping at the window. He opened the window and a scarab-like beetle flew into the room. Jung plucked the insect out of the air and presented it to his patient. “Here is your scarab,” he said.The experience proved therapeutic because it demonstrated to Jung’s patient that the world is not always rational, leading her to break her own identification with rationality and thus become more open to her emotional life, Zeltzer explained
  • Like Jung, Zeltzer believes meaningful coincidences can encourage people to acknowledge the irrational and mysterious. “We have a fantasy that there is always an answer, and that we should know everything,”
  • Honestly, I’m not sure what to believe, but I’m not sure it matters. Like Beitman, my attitude is “Yes.”
sissij

How Murphy's Law Works - HowStuffWorks - 0 views

people.howstuffworks.com/murphys-law.htm

murphy's law psychology brain science bias

shared by sissij on 18 Nov 16 - Cached
  • You're sitting in eight lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. You're more than ready to get home, but you notice, to your great dismay, that all of the other lanes seem to be moving. You change lanes. But once you do, the cars in your new lane come to a dead halt. At a standstill, you notice every lane on the highway (including the one you just left) is moving -- except yours.
  • whatever can go wrong will go wrong.
  • After all, we expect that things should work out in our favor. But when things go badly, we look for reasons.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It seems to poke fun at us for being such hotheads, and it uses the rules of probability -- the mathematical likeliness that something will occur -- to support itself.
  • sissij on 18 Nov 16
     
    I found this law very interesting because it is related to our topic of our lack of ability to deal with probabilities. We always tends to notice the bad things and rare things that happen to us and we named it coincidence. However, by math, coincidence is not only limited to things that rarely happen; it should also include things that has a high probability to happen. In the reading we did on Lesson Five, it mentions that we tend to think the cluster is not random, so we only find patterns between rarely happened things. For example, the death of two America presidents Lincoln and Kennedy. But what about the presidents who make through their presidency alive? Is it be a coincidence that they all live through their presidency? --Sissi (11/18/2016)
summertyler

Seeing Isn't Believing | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/43036/title/Seeing-Isn-t-Believing/

knowledge illusion

shared by summertyler on 02 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Much of the early research on motion perception was performed on insects,1 but similar results have been found for a huge range of species, from fishes to birds to mammals
  • Correspondingly, prey animals would find color vision of little use, but they are extremely good at seeing the motion of an approaching predator.
  • Ambiguous illusions that can be interpreted in two different ways, but not both ways at the same time, can also shed light on how we perceive the world around us
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • But as good as animals are at detecting motion, they can also be fooled.
  • Visual movement can be thought of as a change in brightness, or luminance, over space and time
  • Why does the visual system treat this jumping dot as a single object in motion, instead of seeing one spot disappear while an unrelated spot appears nearby at the same instant? First, the brain usually treats “suspicious coincidences” as being more than coincidences: it is more likely that this is a single spot in motion rather than two separate events. Second, the visual system is tolerant of brief gaps in stimuli, filling in those gaps when necessary. This perception of apparent motion is, of course, the basis of the entire movie and TV industries, as viewers see a smooth motion picture when in reality they are simply watching a series of stationary stills.
  • summertyler on 02 Jun 15
     
    The perception of illusions
Javier E

In Defense of Facts - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...508748

essay fact culture truth science knowledge wisdom skepticism research

shared by Javier E on 11 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • over 13 years, he has published a series of anthologies—of the contemporary American essay, of the world essay, and now of the historical American essay—that misrepresents what the essay is and does, that falsifies its history, and that contains, among its numerous selections, very little one would reasonably classify within the genre. And all of this to wide attention and substantial acclaim
  • D’Agata’s rationale for his “new history,” to the extent that one can piece it together from the headnotes that preface each selection, goes something like this. The conventional essay, nonfiction as it is, is nothing more than a delivery system for facts. The genre, as a consequence, has suffered from a chronic lack of critical esteem, and thus of popular attention. The true essay, however, deals not in knowing but in “unknowing”: in uncertainty, imagination, rumination; in wandering and wondering; in openness and inconclusion
  • Every piece of this is false in one way or another.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • There are genres whose principal business is fact—journalism, history, popular science—but the essay has never been one of them. If the form possesses a defining characteristic, it is that the essay makes an argument
  • That argument can rest on fact, but it can also rest on anecdote, or introspection, or cultural interpretation, or some combination of all these and more
  • what makes a personal essay an essay and not just an autobiographical narrative is precisely that it uses personal material to develop, however speculatively or intuitively, a larger conclusion.
  • Nonfiction is the source of the narcissistic injury that seems to drive him. “Nonfiction,” he suggests, is like saying “not art,” and if D’Agata, who has himself published several volumes of what he refers to as essays, desires a single thing above all, it is to be known as a maker of art.
  • D’Agata tells us that the term has been in use since about 1950. In fact, it was coined in 1867 by the staff of the Boston Public Library and entered widespread circulation after the turn of the 20th century. The concept’s birth and growth, in other words, did coincide with the rise of the novel to literary preeminence, and nonfiction did long carry an odor of disesteem. But that began to change at least as long ago as the 1960s, with the New Journalism and the “nonfiction novel.”
  • What we really seem to get in D’Agata’s trilogy, in other words, is a compendium of writing that the man himself just happens to like, or that he wants to appropriate as a lineage for his own work.
  • What it’s like is abysmal: partial to trivial formal experimentation, hackneyed artistic rebellion, opaque expressions of private meaning, and modish political posturing
  • If I bought a bag of chickpeas and opened it to find that it contained some chickpeas, some green peas, some pebbles, and some bits of goat poop, I would take it back to the store. And if the shopkeeper said, “Well, they’re ‘lyric’ chickpeas,” I would be entitled to say, “You should’ve told me that before I bought them.”
  • when he isn’t cooking quotes or otherwise fudging the record, he is simply indifferent to issues of factual accuracy, content to rely on a mixture of guesswork, hearsay, and his own rather faulty memory.
  • His rejoinders are more commonly a lot more hostile—not to mention juvenile (“Wow, Jim, your penis must be so much bigger than mine”), defensive, and in their overarching logic, deeply specious. He’s not a journalist, he insists; he’s an essayist. He isn’t dealing in anything as mundane as the facts; he’s dealing in “art, dickhead,” in “poetry,” and there are no rules in art.
  • D’Agata replies that there is something between history and fiction. “We all believe in emotional truths that could never hold water, but we still cling to them and insist on their relevance.” The “emotional truths” here, of course, are D’Agata’s, not Presley’s. If it feels right to say that tae kwon do was invented in ancient India (not modern Korea, as Fingal discovers it was), then that is when it was invented. The term for this is truthiness.
  • D’Agata clearly wants to have it both ways. He wants the imaginative freedom of fiction without relinquishing the credibility (and for some readers, the significance) of nonfiction. He has his fingers crossed, and he’s holding them behind his back. “John’s a different kind of writer,” an editor explains to Fingal early in the book. Indeed he is. But the word for such a writer isn’t essayist. It’s liar.
  • he point of all this nonsense, and a great deal more just like it, is to advance an argument about the essay and its history. The form, D’Agata’s story seems to go, was neglected during the long ages that worshiped “information” but slowly emerged during the 19th and 20th centuries as artists learned to defy convention and untrammel their imaginations, coming fully into its own over the past several decades with the dawning recognition of the illusory nature of knowledge.
  • Most delectable is when he speaks about “the essay’s traditional ‘five-paragraph’ form.” I almost fell off my chair when I got to that one. The five-paragraph essay—introduction, three body paragraphs, conclusion; stultifying, formulaic, repetitive—is the province of high-school English teachers. I have never met one outside of a classroom, and like any decent college writing instructor, I never failed to try to wean my students away from them. The five-paragraph essay isn’t an essay; it’s a paper.
  • What he fails to understand is that facts and the essay are not antagonists but siblings, offspring of the same historical moment
  • —by ignoring the actual contexts of his selections, and thus their actual intentions—D’Agata makes the familiar contemporary move of imposing his own conceits and concerns upon the past. That is how ethnography turns into “song,” Socrates into an essayist, and the whole of literary history into a single man’s “emotional truth.”
  • The history of the essay is indeed intertwined with “facts,” but in a very different way than D’Agata imagines. D’Agata’s mind is Manichaean. Facts bad, imagination good
  • When he refers to his selections as essays, he does more than falsify the essay as a genre. He also effaces all the genres that they do belong to: not only poetry, fiction, journalism, and travel, but, among his older choices, history, parable, satire, the sermon, and more—genres that possess their own particular traditions, conventions, and expectation
  • one needs to recognize that facts themselves have a history.
  • Facts are not just any sort of knowledge, such as also existed in the ancient and medieval worlds. A fact is a unit of information that has been established through uniquely modern methods
  • Fact, etymologically, means “something done”—that is, an act or deed
  • It was only in the 16th century—an age that saw the dawning of a new empirical spirit, one that would issue not only in modern science, but also in modern historiography, journalism, and scholarship—that the word began to signify our current sense of “real state of things.”
  • It was at this exact time, and in this exact spirit, that the essay was born. What distinguished Montaigne’s new form—his “essays” or attempts to discover and publish the truth about himself—was not that it was personal (precursors like Seneca also wrote personally), but that it was scrupulously investigative. Montaigne was conducting research into his soul, and he was determined to get it right.
  • His famous motto, Que sais-je?—“What do I know?”—was an expression not of radical doubt but of the kind of skepticism that fueled the modern revolution in knowledge.
  • It is no coincidence that the first English essayist, Galileo’s contemporary Francis Bacon, was also the first great theorist of science.
  • That knowledge is problematic—difficult to establish, labile once created, often imprecise and always subject to the limitations of the human mind—is not the discovery of postmodernism. It is a foundational insight of the age of science, of fact and information, itself.
  • The point is not that facts do not exist, but that they are unstable (and are becoming more so as the pace of science quickens). Knowledge is always an attempt. Every fact was established by an argument—by observation and interpretation—and is susceptible to being overturned by a different one
  • A fact, you might say, is nothing more than a frozen argument, the place where a given line of investigation has come temporarily to rest.
  • Sometimes those arguments are scientific papers. Sometimes they are news reports, which are arguments with everything except the conclusions left out (the legwork, the notes, the triangulation of sources—the research and the reasoning).
  • When it comes to essays, though, we don’t refer to those conclusions as facts. We refer to them as wisdom, or ideas
  • the essay draws its strength not from separating reason and imagination but from putting them in conversation. A good essay moves fluidly between thought and feeling. It subjects the personal to the rigors of the intellect and the discipline of external reality. The truths it finds are more than just emotional.
markfrankel18

Does This Ad Make Me Fat? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...does-this-ad-make-me-fat.html

science knowledge reason

shared by markfrankel18 on 10 Mar 13 - Cached
  • A team of researchers walked every street in 228 census tracts around Los Angeles and New Orleans and recorded every outdoor ad they saw. Another group surveyed 2,881 residents of the same census tracts by telephone, paying them to report their height, weight and other information. After analyzing this hard-won data, the authors conclude: “For every 10 percent increase in food advertisements, the odds of being obese increased by 5 percent.” That is, areas with more outdoor food ads have a higher proportion of obese people than ones with fewer ads.
  • The problem is that their policy recommendations rest on a crucial but unjustified assumption: that any link between obesity and advertising occurs because more advertising causes higher rates of obesity. But the study at hand showed only an association: people living in areas with more food ads were more likely to be obese than people living in areas with fewer food ads. To be fair, the researchers correctly note that additional steps would be needed to prove that food ads cause obesity. But until those steps are taken, talk of restricting ads is premature. In fact, it is easy to imagine how the causation could run the opposite way (something the article did not mention): If food vendors believe obese people are more likely than non-obese people to buy their products, they will place more ads in areas where obese people already live. Suppose we counted ads for fitness-oriented products like bicycles and bottled water, and found more of those ads in places with less obesity. Would it then be wise anti-obesity policy to subsidize such ads? Or would the smarter conclusion be that the fitness companies suspect that the obese are less likely than the fit to buy their products?
  • When we seek to base policy on evidence, we must remember that not all “evidence” is created equal. Taken at face value, the study on ads and obesity provides some indication that the two are linked, but no evidence that food ads cause obesity. The fact that the causal conclusion may coincide with a moral belief — that it is wrong to tempt people who overeat by showing them ads for food — does not make it valid.
carolinewren

Playing Dumb on Climate Change - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ng-dumb-on-climate-change.html

nytimes com climate change science global warming

shared by carolinewren on 24 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • SCIENTISTS have often been accused of exaggerating the threat of climate change,
  • The year just concluded is about to be declared the hottest one on record,
  • Science is conservative, and new claims of knowledge are greeted with high degrees of skepticism.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • if there’s more than even a scant 5 percent possibility that an event occurred by chance, scientists will reject the causal claim.
  • correlation is not necessarily causation, because we need to rule out the possibility that we are just observing a coincidence.
  • . In the 18th and 19th centuries, this conservatism generally took the form of a demand for a large amount of evidence; in the 20th century, it took on the form of a demand for statistical significance
  • The 95 percent confidence level is generally credited to the British statistician R. A. Fisher, who was interested in the problem of how to be sure an observed effect of an experiment was not just the result of chance.
  • the 95 percent level has no actual basis in nature. It is a convention, a value judgment.
  • scientists place the burden of proof on the person making an affirmative claim.
  • It places the burden of proof on the victim rather than, for example, on the manufacturer of a harmful product.
  • it might be reasonable to accept a lower statistical threshold when examining effects in people, because you already have reason to believe that the observed effect is not just chance.
  • WHY don’t scientists pick the standard that is appropriate to the case at hand, instead of adhering to an absolutist one?
  • the history of science in relation to religion.
  • long tradition in the history of science that valorizes skepticism as an antidote to religious faith
  • scientists consciously rejected religion as a basis of natural knowledge, they held on to certain cultural presumptions about what kind of person had access to reliable knowledge.
  • they do practice a form of self-denial, denying themselves the right to believe anything that has not passed very high intellectual hurdles.
  • vigorously denying its relation to religion, modern science retains symbolic vestiges of prophetic tradition, so many scientists bend over backward to avoid these associations.
sissij

What Michelle Obama Wore and Why It Mattered - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-obama-first-lady-fashion.html

new york times social media psychology

shared by sissij on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • it had just been revealed that the campaign clothes budget for Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, was $150,000
  • And thus was an eight-year obsession born. Not to mention a new approach to the story of dress and power.
  • it set in motion a strategic rethink about the use of clothes that not only helped define her tenure as first lady, but also started a conversation that went far beyond the label or look that she wore and that is only now, maybe, reaching its end.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • If you know everyone is going to see what you wear and judge it, then what you wear becomes fraught with meaning.
  • She realized very early on that everything she did had ramifications
  • Just because something appears trivial does not mean it is any less powerful as a means of persuasion and outreach. In some ways its very triviality — the fact that everyone could talk about it, dissect it, imitate it — makes fashion the most potentially viral item in the subliminal political toolbox.
  • as she said to Vogue in her third cover story, the most of any first lady, one of the factors in choosing a garment always has to be, “Is it cute?”
  • she saw it as a way to frame her own independence and points of difference, add to her portfolio and amplify her husband’s agenda.
  • Mrs. Obama seemed to work with them all.
  • We all tend to gravitate toward certain designers in part because of sheer laziness: We know what suits us, what we like, and so we go there first. To have been so, well, evenhanded in her choices could have happened only with careful calculation.
  • Especially because Mrs. Obama not only wore their clothes, she also took their business seriously, framing fashion as a credible, covetable job choice during her education initiatives.
  • If you think that was an accident, there’s a bridge I can sell you — just as the fact she wore Jason Wu to her husband’s farewell address in Chicago, a designer she also wore at both inaugural balls, was no coincidence. It was closure.
  • But above all, her wardrobe was representative of the country her husband wanted to lead.
  • It may be because the point of what Mrs. Obama wore was never simply that it was good to mix up your wardrobe among a group of designers, but rather that clothes were most resonant when they were an expression of commitment to an idea, or an ideal, that had resonance.
  • sissij on 16 Jan 17
     
    This article takes a close look to Mrs. Obama's wardrobe, which I found to be very interesting. Even clothes can represent what a person is think about. There is a quote in this article that I really like: "Just because something appears trial does not mean it is any less powerful as a means of persuasion and outreach." Especial that it is the era of internet and you can find literally every detail online. People always like to assign meanings to things they see, though sometimes others don't mean it. Also, people are very easily influenced by social medias. For example, when I finish reading this article, the clothes Mrs. Obama chose suddenly become meaningful. Twenty-first century is an era of information. Even the smallest thing such as clothing can be a delivery of information
Javier E

What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right' | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump

post-truth disinformation fascism rationality far right social media manipulation press alt-right psychology

shared by Javier E on 02 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Gamergate
  • The 2014 hashtag campaign, ostensibly founded to protest about perceived ethical failures in games journalism, clearly thrived on hate – even though many of those who aligned themselves with the movement either denied there was a problem with harassment, or wrote it off as an unfortunate side effect
  • ure, women, minorities and progressive voices within the industry were suddenly living in fear. Sure, those who spoke out in their defence were quickly silenced through exhausting bursts of online abuse. But that wasn’t why people supported it, right? They were disenfranchised, felt ignored, and wanted to see a systematic change.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Is this all sounding rather familiar now? Does it remind you of something?
  • it quickly became clear that the GamerGate movement was a mess – an undefined mission to Make Video Games Great Again via undecided means.
  • fter all, the culture war that began in games now has a senior representative in The White House. As a founder member and former executive chair of Brietbart News, Steve Bannon had a hand in creating media monster Milo Yiannopoulos, who built his fame and Twitter following by supporting and cheerleading Gamergate. This hashtag was the canary in the coalmine, and we ignored it.
  • Gamergate was an online movement that effectively began because a man wanted to punish his ex girlfriend. Its most notable achievement was harassing a large number of progressive figures - mostly women – to the point where they felt unsafe or considered leaving the industry
  • The similarities between Gamergate and the far-right online movement, the “alt-right”, are huge, startling and in no way a coincidence
  • These figures gave Gamergate a new sense of direction – generalising the rhetoric: this was now a wider war between “Social Justice Warriors” (SJWs) and everyday, normal, decent people. Games were simply the tip of the iceberg – progressive values, went the argument, were destroying everything
  • In 2016, new wave conservative media outlets like Breitbart have gained trust with their audience by painting traditional news sources as snooty and aloof. In 2014, video game YouTube stars, seeking to appear in touch with online gaming communities, unscrupulously proclaimed that traditional old-media sources were corrupt. Everything we’re seeing now, had its precedent two years ago.
  • With 2014’s Gamergate, Breitbart seized the opportunity to harness the pre-existing ignorance and anger among disaffected young white dudes. With Trump’s movement in 2016, the outlet was effectively running his campaign: Steve Bannon took leave of his role at the company in August 2016 when he was hired as chief executive of Trump’s presidential campaign
  • young men converted via 2014’s Gamergate, are being more widely courted now. By leveraging distrust and resentment towards women, minorities and progressives, many of Gamergate’s most prominent voices – characters like Mike Cernovich, Adam Baldwin, and Milo Yiannopoulos – drew power and influence from its chaos
  • no one in the movement was willing to be associated with the abuse being carried out in its name. Prominent supporters on Twitter, in subreddits and on forums like 8Chan, developed a range of pernicious rhetorical devices and defences to distance themselves from threats to women and minorities in the industry: the targets were lying or exaggerating, they were too precious; a language of dismissal and belittlement was formed against them. Safe spaces, snowflakes, unicorns, cry bullies. Even when abuse was proven, the usual response was that people on their side were being abused too. These techniques, forged in Gamergate, have become the standard toolset of far-right voices online
  • The majority of people who voted for Trump will never take responsibility for his racist, totalitarian policies, but they’ll provide useful cover and legitimacy for those who demand the very worst from the President Elect. Trump himself may have disavowed the “alt-right”, but his rhetoric has led to them feeling legitimised. As with Gamergate, the press risks being manipulated into a position where it has to tread a respectful middle ground that doesn’t really exist.
  • Using 4chan (and then the more sympathetic offshoot 8Chan) to plan their subversions and attacks made Gamergate a terribly sloppy operation, leaving a trail of evidence that made it quite clear the whole thing was purposefully, plainly nasty. But the video game industry didn’t have the spine to react, and allowed the movement to coagulate – forming a mass of spiteful disappointment that Breitbart was only more than happy to coddle
  • Historically, that seems to be Breitbart’s trick - strongly represent a single issue in order to earn trust, and then gradually indoctrinate to suit wider purposes. With Gamergate, they purposefully went fishing for anti-feminists. 2016’s batch of fresh converts – the white extremists – came from enticing conspiracy theories about the global neoliberal elite secretly controlling the world.
  • The greatest strength of Gamergate, though, was that it actually appeared to represent many left-leaning ideals: stamping out corruption in the press, pushing for better ethical practices, battling for openness.
  • There are similarities here with many who support Trump because of his promises to put an end to broken neo-liberalism, to “drain the swamp” of establishment corruption. Many left-leaning supporters of Gamergate sought to intellectualise their alignment with the hashtag, adopting familiar and acceptable labels of dissent – identifying as libertarian, egalitarian, humanist.
  • At best they unknowingly facilitated abuse, defending their own freedom of expression while those who actually needed support were threatened and attacked.
  • Genuine discussions over criticism, identity and censorship were paralysed and waylaid by Twitter voices obsessed with rhetorical fallacies and pedantic debating practices. While the core of these movements make people’s lives hell, the outer shell – knowingly or otherwise – protect abusers by insisting that the real problem is that you don’t want to talk, or won’t provide the ever-shifting evidence they politely require.
  • In 2017, the tactics used to discredit progressive game critics and developers will be used to discredit Trump and Bannon’s critics. There will be gaslighting, there will be attempts to make victims look as though they are losing their grip on reality, to the point that they gradually even start to believe it. The “post-truth” reality is not simply an accident – it is a concerted assault on the rational psyche.
  • The strangest aspect of Gamergate is that it consistently didn’t make any sense: people chose to align with it, and yet refused responsibility. It was constantly demanded that we debate the issues, but explanations and facts were treated with scorn. Attempts to find common ground saw the specifics of the demands being shifted: we want you to listen to us; we want you to change your ways; we want you to close your publication down. This movement that ostensibly wanted to protect free speech from cry bully SJWs simultaneously did what it could to endanger sites it disagreed with, encouraging advertisers to abandon support for media outlets that published stories critical of the hashtag. The petulance of that movement is disturbingly echoed in Trump’s own Twitter feed.
  • Looking back, Gamergate really only made sense in one way: as an exemplar of what Umberto Eco called “eternal fascism”, a form of extremism he believed could flourish at any point in, in any place – a fascism that would extol traditional values, rally against diversity and cultural critics, believe in the value of action above thought and encourage a distrust of intellectuals or experts – a fascism built on frustration and machismo. The requirement of this formless fascism would – above all else – be to remain in an endless state of conflict, a fight against a foe who must always be portrayed as impossibly strong and laughably weak
  • 2016 has presented us with a world in which our reality is being wilfully manipulated. Fake news, divisive algorithms, misleading social media campaigns.
  • The same voices moved into other geek communities, especially comics, where Marvel and DC were criticised for progressive storylines and decisions. They moved into science fiction with the controversy over the Hugo awards. They moved into cinema with the revolting kickback against the all-female Ghostbusters reboot.
  • Perhaps the true lesson of Gamergate was that the media is culturally unequipped to deal with the forces actively driving these online movements. The situation was horrifying enough two years ago, it is many times more dangerous now.
Javier E

Donald Trump will win in a landslide. *The mind behind 'Dilbert' explains why. - The Wa... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...nd-behind-dilbert-explains-why

landslide demagogue campaign psychology TOK election 2016

shared by Javier E on 01 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • What the Bay Area-based cartoonist recognizes, he says, is the careful art behind Trump’s rhetorical techniques.
  • Adams believes Trump will win because he’s “a master persuader.”
  • His stated credentials in this arena, says Adams — who holds an MBA from UC Berkeley — largely involve being a certified hypnotist and, as a writer and business author, an eternal student in the techniques of persuasive rhetoric.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • “The most important thing when you study hypnosis is that you learn that humans are irrational,
  • what Trump is doing? He is acknowledging the suffering of some, Adams says, and then appealing emotionally to that.
  • 2. Knowing that people are irrational, Trump aims to appeal on an emotional level.
  • Having nothing to lose essentially then increases his chance of winning, because it opens up his field of rhetorical play.
  • Within that context, here is what Candidate Trump is doing to win campaign hearts and minds
  • 1. Trump knows people are basically irrational.
  • he bolsters that approach, Adams says, by “exploiting the business model” like an entrepreneur. In this model, which “the news industry doesn’t have the ability to change … the media doesn’t really have the option of ignoring the most interesting story,” says Adams, contending that Trump “can always be the most interesting story if he has nothing to fear and nothing to lose.”
  • “The evidence is that Trump completely ignores reality and rational thinking in favor of emotional appeal,” Adams writes. “Sure, much of what Trump says makes sense to his supporters, but I assure you that is coincidence. Trump says whatever gets him the result he wants. He understands humans as 90-percent irrational and acts accordingly.”
  • 3. By running on emotion, facts don’t matter.
  • “There are plenty of important facts Trump does not know. But the reason he doesn’t know those facts is – in part – because he knows facts don’t matter. They never have and they never will. So he ignores them.
  • 4. If facts don’t matter, you can’t really be “wrong.”
  • “If you understand persuasion, Trump is pitch-perfect most of the time. He ignores unnecessary rational thought and objective data and incessantly hammers on what matters (emotions).”
  • “Did Trump’s involvement in the birther thing confuse you?” Adams goes on to ask. “Were you wondering how Trump could believe Obama was not a citizen? The answer is that Trump never believed anything about Obama’s place of birth. The facts were irrelevant, so he ignored them while finding a place in the hearts of conservatives.
  • 5. With fewer facts in play, it’s easier to bend reality.
  • Among the persuasive techniques that Trump uses to help bend reality, Adams says, are repetition of phrases; “thinking past the sale” so the initial part of his premise is stated as a given; and knowing the appeal of the simplest answer, which relates to the concept of Occam’s razor.
  • 6. To bend reality, Trump is a master of identity politics — and identity is the strongest persuader.
  • “The best Trump linguistic kill shots,” Adams writes,”have the following qualities: 1. Fresh word that is not generally used in politics; 2. Relates to the physicality of the subject (so you are always reminded).”
  • : “Identity is always the strongest level of persuasion. The only way to beat it is with dirty tricks or a stronger identity play. … [And] Trump is well on his way to owning the identities of American, Alpha Males, and Women Who Like Alpha Males. Clinton is well on her way to owning the identities of angry women, beta males, immigrants, and disenfranchised minorities.
Javier E

Googling Is Believing: Trumping the Informed Citizen - The New York Times - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...-trumping-the-informed-citizen

psychology social media facts sources informed citizenry bias google democ

shared by Javier E on 09 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Rubio’s Google gambit and Trump’s (non)reaction to it, reveals an interesting, and troubling, new change in attitude about a philosophical foundation of democracy: the ideal of an informed citizenry.
  • The idea is obvious: If citizens are going to make even indirect decisions about policy, we need to know the facts about the problem the policy is meant to rectify, and to be able to gain some understanding about how effective that policy would be.
  • Noam Chomsky argued in the 1980s that consent was being “manufactured” by Big Media — large consolidated content-delivery companies (like this newspaper) that could cause opinions to sway one way or the other at their whim.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • searching the Internet can get you to information that would back up almost any claim of fact, no matter how unfounded. It is both the world’s best fact-checker and the world’s best bias confirmer — often at the same time.
  • Nor is it a coincidence that people are increasingly following the election on social media, using it both as the source of their information and as the way to get their view out. Consent is still being manufactured, but the manufacturing is being done willingly by us, usually intended for consumption by other people with whom we already agree, facts or no facts.
  • It really isn’t a surprise that Rubio would ask us to Google for certain facts; that’s how you and I know almost everything we know nowadays — it is a way of knowing that is so embedded into the very fabric of our lives that we don’t even notice it
  • The problem of course is that having more information available, even more accurate information, isn’t what is required by the ideal.
  • What is required is that people actually know and understand that information, and there are reasons to think we are no closer to an informed citizenry understood in that way than we ever have been. Indeed, we might be further away.
  • The worry is no longer about who controls content. It is about who controls the flow of that content.
  • the flow of digital information is just as prone to manipulation as its content
  • No wonder Trump and his followers on Twitter immediately shrugged off Rubio’s inconvenient truths; there is nothing to fear from information when counterinformation is just as plentiful.
  • The real worry concerns our faith in the ideal of an informed citizenry itself. That worry, as I see it, has two faces.
  • First, as Jason Stanley and others have emphasized recently, appeals to ideals can be used to undermine those very ideals.
  • The very availability of information can make us think that the ideal of the informed citizen is more realized than it is — and that, in turn, can actually undermine the ideal, making us less informed, simply because we think we know all we need to know already.
  • Second, the danger is that increasing recognition of the fact that Googling can get you wherever you want to go can make us deeply cynical about the ideal of an informed citizenry — for the simple reason that what counts as an “informed” citizen is a matter of dispute. We no longer disagree just over values. Nor do we disagree just over the facts. We disagree over whose source — whose fountain of facts — is the right one.
  • And once disagreement reaches that far down, the daylight of reason seems very far away indeed.
oliviaodon

The Cult of Coincidence | The Huffington Post - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...t-of-coincidence_b_892785.html

shared by oliviaodon on 09 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Most people readily believe that they themselves are essentially fully independent thinkers, and that closed-mindedness, intellectual inflexibility and an irrational commitment to pre-conceived thinking dwells only in the feeble minds of others. Think about it: When was the last time in the course of discussion that someone admitted to you something like, “You’re right, I have just blindly swallowed all of the positions and cultural mores of my milieu” or, “Yes, I agree that no amount of oppositional information will ever dissuade me from the beliefs I hold?” No one is immune from this state of affairs, and it requires courage and perpetual vigilance to even venture outside of the intellectual echo chamber that most of us inhabit.
  • There are those who believe that the scientific community is uniquely positioned to avoid these pitfalls. They suggest that the system of peer review is inherently self-critical, and as such is structurally quarantined from bias. Some scientists think otherwise and note that science, in as much as it is conducted by human beings, is subject to the same partiality as every other endeavor.
  • like the communist party under Lenin, science is [in its own eyes] infallible because its judgments are collective. Critics are unneeded, and since they are unneeded, they are not welcome.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • A classic example of this endemic bias at work is illustrated through Einstein. He was disturbed by the implications of an expanding universe. For thousands of years it was assumed — outside of some theological circles — that matter was eternal. The notion that it came into being at a discreet point in time naturally implied that something had caused it and quite possibly that that something had done it on purpose. Not willing to accept this new information, Einstein added a now famous “fudge factor” to his equations to maintain the solid state universe that he was comfortable with — something he would later describe as “the greatest blunder of my career.”
  • If there is great resistance to notions of design and causality in science, it is exponentially greater when it comes to theology.
anonymous

The Birthday Problem - 0 views

www.buzzfeed.com/...the-birthday-problem

math intuition

shared by anonymous on 16 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Suppose I told you that there are a number of people gathered in a room next door, and that there’s better than a 1-in-2 chance that two of them share the same birthday. How many people would you think are in that room? The number is in fact quite small — just 23.
  • This is what’s known as the birthday problem. More specifically, it refers to the chances that any two people in a given group share a birthday. The reason it is a “problem” is that most people — puzzle lovers and math majors excepted — tend to underestimate its likelihood.
  • As math professor Steven Strogatz mentions in this New York Times post, the birthday problem highlights how wrong our intuition can be when it comes to coincidences and chance. We often don’t consider the question carefully enough to conceive such a high number of potential birthday matches.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Instead we start comparing how small one number is to the other: “Well… my birthday is Oct. 6… and there are 22 other birthdays in the room… and 22 divided by 365 is pretty small…”
  • But this question isn’t just about you — it’s about every person in the room, and the chance that anyone might find a match
  • Maybe because birthdays are so intensely personal, it’s easy to turn a question about finding any birthday matches into one about finding my birthday match.
Javier E

Conspiracy theory psychology: People who claim to know the truth about JFK, UFOs, and 9... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...he_truth_about_jfk.single.html

conspiracy theory psychology skepticism alienation

shared by Javier E on 24 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • people who suspect conspiracies aren’t really skeptics. Like the rest of us, they’re selective doubters. They favor a worldview, which they uncritically defend. But their worldview isn’t about God, values, freedom, or equality. It’s about the omnipotence of elites.
  • the prevalence of such belief, documented in surveys, has forced scholars to take it more seriously. Conspiracy theory psychology is becoming an empirical field with a broader mission: to understand why so many people embrace this way of interpreting history.
  • “People low in trust of others are likely to believe that others are colluding against them,” the authors proposed. This sort of distrust, in other words, favors a certain kind of belief. It makes you more susceptible, not less, to claims of conspiracy.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The more you see the world this way—full of malice and planning instead of circumstance and coincidence—the more likely you are to accept conspiracy theories of all kinds. Once you buy into the first theory, with its premises of coordination, efficacy, and secrecy, the next seems that much more plausible.
  • The common thread between distrust and cynicism, as defined in these experiments, is a perception of bad character. More broadly, it’s a tendency to focus on intention and agency, rather than randomness or causal complexity. In extreme form, it can become paranoia
  • In mild form, it’s a common weakness known as the fundamental attribution error—ascribing others’ behavior to personality traits and objectives, forgetting the importance of situational factors and chance
  • Clearly, susceptibility to conspiracy theories isn’t a matter of objectively evaluating evidence. It’s more about alienation. People who fall for such theories don’t trust the government or the media. They aim their scrutiny at the official narrative, not at the alternative explanations
  • Conspiracy believers are the ultimate motivated skeptics. Their curse is that they apply this selective scrutiny not to the left or right, but to the mainstream. They tell themselves that they’re the ones who see the lies, and the rest of us are sheep. But believing that everybody’s lying is just another kind of gullibility.
Ellie McGinnis

The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel - James Fallows - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...309536

science technology

shared by Ellie McGinnis on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Some questions you ask because you want the right answer. Others are valuable because no answer is right; the payoff comes from the range of attempts.
  • That is the diversity of views about the types of historical breakthroughs that matter, with a striking consensus on whether the long trail of innovation recorded here is now nearing its end.
  • The clearest example of consensus was the first item on the final compilation, the printing press
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • Leslie Berlin, a historian of business at Stanford, organized her nominations not as an overall list but grouped into functional categories.
  • Innovations that expand the human intellect and its creative, expressive, and even moral possibilities.
  • Innovations that are integral to the physical and operating infrastructure of the modern world
  • Innovations that enabled the Industrial Revolution and its successive waves of expanded material output
  • Innovations extending life, to use Leslie Berlin’s term
  • Innovations that allowed real-time communication beyond the range of a single human voice
  • Innovations in the physical movement of people and goods.
  • Organizational breakthroughs that provide the software for people working and living together in increasingly efficient and modern ways
  • Finally, and less prominently than we might have found in 1950 or 1920—and less prominently than I initially expected—we have innovations in killing,
  • Any collection of 50 breakthroughs must exclude 50,000 more.
  • We learn, finally, why technology breeds optimism, which may be the most significant part of this exercise.
  • Popular culture often lionizes the stars of discovery and invention
  • For our era, the major problems that technology has helped cause, and that faster innovation may or may not correct, are environmental, demographic, and socioeconomic.
  • people who have thought deeply about innovation’s sources and effects, like our panelists, were aware of the harm it has done along with the good.
  • “Does innovation raise the wealth of the planet? I believe it does,” John Doerr, who has helped launch Google, Amazon, and other giants of today’s technology, said. “But technology left to its own devices widens rather than narrows the gap between the rich and the poor.”
  • Are today’s statesmen an improvement over those of our grandparents’ era? Today’s level of public debate? Music, architecture, literature, the fine arts—these and other manifestations of world culture continually change, without necessarily improving. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, versus whoever is the best-selling author in Moscow right now?
  • The argument that a slowdown might happen, and that it would be harmful if it did, takes three main forms.
  • Some societies have closed themselves off and stopped inventing altogether:
  • By failing to move forward, they inevitably moved backward relative to their rivals and to the environmental and economic threats they faced. If the social and intellectual climate for innovation sours, what has happened before can happen again.
  • visible slowdown in the pace of solutions that technology offers to fundamental problems.
  • a slowdown in, say, crop yields or travel time is part of a general pattern of what economists call diminishing marginal returns. The easy improvements are, quite naturally, the first to be made; whatever comes later is slower and harder.
  • America’s history as a nation happens to coincide with a rare moment in technological history now nearing its end. “There was virtually no economic growth before 1750,” he writes in a recent paper.
  • “We can be concerned about the last 1 percent of an environment for innovation, but that is because we take everything else for granted,” Leslie Berlin told me.
  • This reduction in cost, he says, means that the next decade should be a time of “amazing advances in understanding the genetic basis of disease, with especially powerful implications for cancer.”
  • the very concept of an end to innovation defied everything they understood about human inquiry. “If you look just at the 20th century, the odds against there being any improvement in living standards are enormous,”
  • “Two catastrophic world wars, the Cold War, the Depression, the rise of totalitarianism—it’s been one disaster after another, a sequence that could have been enough to sink us back into barbarism. And yet this past half century has been the fastest-ever time of technological growth. I see no reason why that should be slowing down.”
  • “I am a technological evolutionist,” he said. “I view the universe as a phase-space of things that are possible, and we’re doing a random walk among them. Eventually we are going to fill the space of everything that is possible.”
catbclark

Does Geography Influence How a Language Sounds? - 2 views

news.nationalgeographic.com/...-ejective-language-linguistics

language geography knowledge coincidences

shared by catbclark on 28 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • These regions are the North American Cordillera, the Andes and the Andean altiplano, the southern African plateau, the plateau of the East African Rift and the Ethiopian highlands, and the Caucasus range and Javakheti plateau.
    • catbclark
      catbclark on 28 Oct 14
       
      This is interesting because these are in different areas that probably had no contact with each another when the languages were developing, yet they have simular sounds in the language. 
  • "I don't endorse [their] hypothesis but believe they were onto something."
    • catbclark
      catbclark on 28 Oct 14
       
      As cool as this article is, it does not seem to have very solid informations. This article seems to be based on assumptions. 
  • "I had this hypothesis that [certain sounds] might be more common at high altitudes,"
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Moreover, most of the languages containing ejectives were spoken in, or near, five out of six high-altitude regions around the world.
    • catbclark
      catbclark on 28 Oct 14
       
      How does altitude affect what sounds people say?
catbclark

Is Most of Our DNA Garbage? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-most-of-our-dna-garbage.html

dna science misconceptions

shared by catbclark on 07 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Is Most of Our DNA Garbage?
  • Gregory believes that while some noncoding DNA is essential, most probably does nothing for us at all, and until recently, most biologists agreed with him.
  • Recent studies have revealed a wealth of new pieces of noncoding DNA that do seem to be as important to our survival as our more familiar genes.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Large-scale surveys of the genome have led a number of researchers to expect that the human genome will turn out to be even more full of activity than previously thought.
  • “It was pretty much a case of hubris to imagine that we could dispense with any part of the genome — as if we knew enough to say it wasn’t functional.”
  • If every piece of the genome were essential, then many of those mutations would lead to significant birth defects, with the defects only multiplying over the course of generations; in less than a century, the species would become extinct.
  • “Much of what has been called ‘junk DNA’ in the human genome is actually a massive control panel with millions of switches regulating the activity of our genes.”
  • It’s no coincidence, researchers like Gregory argue, that bona fide creationists have used recent changes in the thinking about junk DNA to try to turn back the clock to the days before Darwin. (The recent studies on noncoding DNA “clearly demonstrate we are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ by our Creator God,” declared the Institute for Creation Research.)
  • Over millions of years, the human genome has spontaneously gotten bigger, swelling with useless copies of genes and new transposable elements.
Javier E

Ann Coulter Is Right to Fear the World Cup - Peter Beinart - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...373680

soccer US history exceptionalism sports identity integration immigration politics youth attitudes

shared by Javier E on 01 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Ann Coulter penned a column explaining why soccer is un-American. First, it’s collectivist. (“Individual achievement is not a big factor…blame is dispersed.”) Second, it’s effeminate. (“It’s a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys.”) Third, it’s culturally elitist. (“The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO’s “Girls,” light-rail, Beyoncé and Hillary Clinton.”) Fourth, and most importantly, “It’s foreign…Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it’s European.”
  • Soccer hatred, in other words, exemplifies American exceptionalism.
  • For Coulter and many contemporary conservatives, by contrast, part of what makes America exceptional is its individualism, manliness and populism
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Coulter’s deeper point is that for America to truly be America, it must stand apart
  • The core problem with embracing soccer is that in so doing, America would become more like the rest of the world.
  • America’s own league, Major League Soccer, draws as many fans to its stadiums as do the NHL and NBA.
  • I wrote an essay entitled “The End of American Exceptionalism,” which argued that on subjects where the United States has long been seen as different, attitudes in America increasingly resemble those in Europe. Soccer is one of the best examples yet.
  • “Soccer,” Markovits and Hellerman argue, “was perceived by both native-born Americans and immigrants as a non-American activity at a time in American history when nativism and nationalism emerged to create a distinctly American self-image … if one liked soccer, one was viewed as at least resisting—if not outright rejecting—integration into America.”
  • The average age of Americans who call baseball their favorite sport is 53. Among Americans who like football best, it’s 46. Among Americans who prefer soccer, by contrast, the average age is only 37.
  • Old-stock Americans, in other words, were elevating baseball, football, and basketball into symbols of America’s distinct identity. Immigrants realized that embracing those sports offered a way to claim that identity for themselves. Clinging to soccer, by contrast, was a declaration that you would not melt.
  • why is interest in soccer rising now? Partly, because the United States is yet again witnessing mass immigration from soccer-mad nations.
  • the key shift is that America’s sports culture is less nativist. More native-born Americans now accept that a game invented overseas can become authentically American, and that the immigrants who love it can become authentically American too. Fewer believe that to have merit, something must be invented in the United States.
  • why didn’t soccer gain a foothold in the U.S. in the decades between the Civil War and World War I, when it was gaining dominance in Europe? Precisely because it was gaining dominance in Europe. The arbiters of taste in late 19th and early 20th century America wanted its national pastimes to be exceptional.
  • Americans over the age of 50 were 15 points more likely to say “our culture is superior” than were people over 50 in Germany, Spain, Britain, and France
  • Americans under 30, by contrast, were actually less likely to say “our culture is superior” than their counterparts in Germany, Spain, and Britain.
  • Americans today are less likely to insist that America’s way of doing things is always best. In 2002, 60 percent of Americans told the Pew Research Center that, “our culture is superior to others.” By 2011, it was down to 49 percent.
  • the third major pro-soccer constituency is liberals. They’re willing to embrace a European sport for the same reason they’re willing to embrace a European-style health care system: because they see no inherent value in America being an exception to the global rule
  • When the real-estate website Estately created a seven part index to determine a state’s love of soccer, it found that Washington State, Maryland, the District of Columbia, New York, and New Jersey—all bright blue—loved soccer best, while Alabama, Arkansas, North Dakota, Mississippi and Montana—all bright red—liked it least.
  • the soccer coalition—immigrants, liberals and the young—looks a lot like the Obama coalition.
  • Sports-wise, therefore, Democrats constitute an alliance between soccer and basketball fans while Republicans disproportionately follow baseball, golf, and NASCAR. Football, by far America’s most popular sport, crosses the aisle.)
  • The willingness of growing numbers of Americans to embrace soccer bespeaks their willingness to imagine a different relationship with the world. Historically, conservative foreign policy has oscillated between isolationism and imperialism. America must either retreat from the world or master it. It cannot be one among equals, bound by the same rules as everyone else
  • Exceptionalists view sports the same way. Coulter likes football, baseball, and basketball because America either plays them by itself, or—when other countries play against us—we dominate them.
  • Embracing soccer, by contrast, means embracing America’s role as merely one nation among many, without special privileges. It’s no coincidence that young Americans, in addition to liking soccer, also like the United Nations. In 2013, Pew found that Americans under 30 were 24 points more favorable to the U.N. than Americans over 50.
  • Millennials were also 23 points more likely than the elderly to say America should take its allies’ opinion into account even if means compromising our desires.
  • In embracing soccer, Americans are learning to take something we neither invented nor control, and nonetheless make it our own. It’s a skill we’re going to need in the years to come.
Javier E

Physicists in Europe Find Tantalizing Hints of a Mysterious New Particle - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-mysterious-new-particle.html

physics discovery particle research science

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Two teams of physicists working independently at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, reported on Tuesday that they had seen traces of what could be a new fundamental particle of nature.
  • One possibility, out of a gaggle of wild and not-so-wild ideas springing to life as the day went on, is that the particle — assuming it is real — is a heavier version of the Higgs boson, a particle that explains why other particles have mass. Another is that it is a graviton, the supposed quantum carrier of gravity, whose discovery could imply the existence of extra dimensions of space-time.
  • At the end of a long chain of “ifs” could be a revolution, the first clues to a theory of nature that goes beyond the so-called Standard Model, which has ruled physics for the last quarter-century.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The Higgs boson was the last missing piece of the Standard Model, which explains all we know about subatomic particles and forces. But there are questions this model does not answer, such as what happens at the bottom of a black hole, the identity of the dark matter and dark energy that rule the cosmos, or why the universe is matter and not antimatter.
  • When physicists announced in 2012 that they had indeed discovered the Higgs boson, it was not the end of physics. It was not even, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, the beginning of the end.
  • A coincidence is the most probable explanation for the surprising bumps in data from the collider, physicists from the experiments cautioned, saying that a lot more data was needed and would in fact soon be available
  • The Large Hadron Collider was built at a cost of some $10 billion, to speed protons around an 18-mile underground track at more than 99 percent of the speed of light and smash them together in search of new particles and forces of nature. By virtue of Einstein’s equivalence of mass and energy, the more energy poured into these collisions, the more massive particles can come out of them. And by the logic of quantum microscopy, the more energy they have to spend, the smaller and more intimate details of nature physicists can see.
  • Since June, after a two-year shutdown, CERN physicists have been running their collider at nearly twice the energy with which they discovered the Higgs, firing twin beams of protons with 6.5 trillion electron volts of energy at each other in search of new particles to help point them to deeper laws.
  • The most intriguing result so far, reported on Tuesday, is an excess of pairs of gamma rays corresponding to an energy of about 750 billion electron volts. The gamma rays, the physicists said, could be produced by the radioactive decay of a new particle, in this case perhaps a cousin of the Higgs boson, which itself was first noticed because it decayed into an abundance of gamma rays.
  • Or it could be a more massive particle that has decayed in steps down to a pair of photons. Nobody knows. No model predicted this, which is how some scientists like it.
  • “We are barely coming to terms with the power and the glory” of the CERN collider’s ability to operate at 13 trillion electron volts, Dr. Spiropulu said in a text message. “We are now entering the era of taking a shot in the dark!”
kushnerha

BBC - Future - Why does it feel like I'm falling as I go to sleep? - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...ke-im-falling-as-i-fall-asleep

bbc sleep brain science dreams

shared by kushnerha on 23 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • experienced sudden, jerky body movements as you drift into sleep. The sensation is common, and if paired with a dream, can feel like you’ve suddenly moved or fallen.
  • this is called dream incorporation, and reveals our mind’s amazing capacity to improvise
  • The experience is known as a ‘hypnic jerk’ and it sheds light onto the conflict in our brains as we shut down for sleep.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In sleep our bodies are paralysed, and we become oblivious to events in the outside world. But our muscle control isn’t flicked off like a switch.
  • reticular activating system controls our basic functions, like breathing, and tells us whether we feel alert. In contrast, the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus, located near the optic nerve, dictates tiredness. As we descend into sleep, the reticular activating system releases control of our body and the venterolateral preoptic nucleus takes over. The process is like a slow fade
  • Random bursts of our remaining wakeful energy occasionally surface in the form of jerky movements
  • unpleasant phenomenon called ‘exploding head syndrome’ follows a similar pattern of behaviour – our wakeful and sleeping minds attempting to wrest control from each other – and results in the sensation of seeing flashing lights and hearing loud bangs
  • feeling is nothing to worry about; it’s just a funny coincidence of falling asleep
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