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Javier E

Why Does a Governor Want Expensive Status Symbols? | Ten Miles Square | The Washington ... - 0 views

www.washingtonmonthly.com/..._governor_want_expen048730.php

inequality wealth corruption manners consumption

shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • I won’t pretend to be sad about the indictment of former VA Governor Bob McDonnell on corruption charges. If I have any compassion to spare, I’ll use it on the children of poor families in Virginia denied medical coverage by McDonnell’s refusal to accept Federal money to expand Medicaid
  • But there’s one deeply, deeply twisted element to the story that ought to worry all of us. McDonnell was the Governor of Virginia, the successor of Jefferson. And he wanted a Rolex watch.
  • One of the many problems that flows from increasing inequality of income and wealth is that the standards of the rich become the ruling standards. Mrs. McDonnell obviously felt that she would be disgraced if she appeared at her husband’s inaugural ball in the sort of dress an honest public servant’s wife could afford, when all the fundraisers’ wives - to say nothing of the female fundraisers - would be wearing a large fraction of the median annual household income. Does that excuse her committing extortion to get an Oscar de la Renta dress? Of course not. But it testifies to a corruption of manners that goes far deeper than corruption in office.
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  • The extreme wealth of the rich is as great a public menace as the poverty of the poor, and great wealth is a greater problem than high income. Some of the way that money is made is destructive, and much of the way it is spent is even more destructive.
  • My $15 wristwatch from Target keeps excellent time, and - to my eye - looks pretty damned elegant. But if I were a surgeon or an investment banker, I couldn’t afford to wear it. That, I submit, is a problem.
Javier E

Quote For The Day II « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...quote-for-the-day-ii-93

obama morality niebuhr tragedy

shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • I think I’m pretty good at keeping my moral compass while recognizing that I am a product of original sin. And every morning and every night I’m taking measure of my actions against the options and possibilities available to me, understanding that there are going to be mistakes that I make
  • and that there’s going to be tragedy out there and, by occupying this office, I am part of that tragedy
  • I think we are born into this world and inherit all the grudges and rivalries and hatreds and sins of the past. But we also inherit the beauty and the joy and goodness of our forebears. And we’re on this planet a pretty short time, so that we cannot remake the world entirely during this little stretch that we have,” – president Barack Obama,
Javier E

Untier Of Knots « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...untier-of-knots

Pope Francis Christianity St Francis religion faith skepticism

shared by Javier E on 18 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Benedict XVI and John Paul II focused on restoring dogmatic certainty as the counterpart to papal authority. Francis is arguing that both, if taken too far, can be sirens leading us away from God, not ensuring our orthodoxy but sealing us off in calcified positions and rituals that can come to mean nothing outside themselves
  • In this quest to seek and find God in all things there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of uncertainty, then this is not good. For me, this is an important key. If one has the answers to all the questions – that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself. The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt. You must leave room for the Lord, not for our certainties; we must be humble.
  • If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God.
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  • In the end, you realize your only real option – against almost every fiber in your irate being – is to take each knot in turn, patiently and gently undo it, loosen a little, see what happens, and move on to the next. You will never know exactly when all the knots will resolve themselves – it can happen quite quickly after a while or seemingly never. But you do know that patience, and concern with the here and now, is the only way to “solve” the “problem.” You don’t look forward with a plan; you look down with a practice.
  • we can say what God is not, we can speak of his attributes, but we cannot say what He is. That apophatic dimension, which reveals how I speak about God, is critical to our theology
  • I would also classify as arrogant those theologies that not only attempted to define with certainty and exactness God’s attributes, but also had the pretense of saying who He was.
  • It is only in living that we achieve hints and guesses – and only hints and guesses – of what the Divine truly is. And because the Divine is found and lost by humans in time and history, there is no reachable truth for humans outside that time and history.
  • We are part of an unfolding drama in which the Christian, far from clinging to some distant, pristine Truth he cannot fully understand, will seek to understand and discern the “signs of the times” as one clue as to how to live now, in the footsteps of Jesus. Or in the words of T.S. Eliot, There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
  • Ratzinger’s Augustinian notion of divine revelation: it is always a radical gift; it must always be accepted without question; it comes from above to those utterly unworthy below; and we are too flawed, too sinful, too human to question it in even the slightest respect. And if we ever compromise an iota on that absolute, authentic, top-down truth, then we can know nothing as true. We are, in fact, lost for ever.
  • A Christian life is about patience, about the present and about trust that God is there for us. It does not seek certainty or finality to life’s endless ordeals and puzzles. It seeks through prayer and action in the world to listen to God’s plan and follow its always-unfolding intimations. It requires waiting. It requires diligence
  • We may never know why exactly Benedict resigned as he did. But I suspect mere exhaustion of the body and mind was not the whole of it. He had to see, because his remains such a first-rate mind, that his project had failed, that the levers he continued to pull – more and more insistent doctrinal orthodoxy, more political conflict with almost every aspect of the modern world, more fastidious control of liturgy – simply had no impact any more.
  • The Pope must accompany those challenging existing ways of doing things! Others may know better than he does. Or, to feminize away the patriarchy: I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess. The church’s ministers must be merciful, take responsibility for the people, and accompany them like the good Samaritan, who washes, cleans, and raises up his neighbor. This is pure Gospel.
  • the key to Francis’ expression of faith is an openness to the future, a firm place in the present, and a willingness to entertain doubt, to discern new truths and directions, and to grow. Think of Benedict’s insistence on submission of intellect and will to the only authentic truth (the Pope’s), and then read this: Within the Church countless issues are being studied and reflected upon with great freedom. Differing currents of thought in philosophy, theology, and pastoral practice, if open to being reconciled by the Spirit in respect and love, can enable the Church to grow, since all of them help to express more clearly the immense riches of God’s word. For those who long for a monolithic body of doctrine guarded by all and leaving no room for nuance, this might appear as undesirable and leading to confusion. But in fact such variety serves to bring out and develop different facets of the inexhaustible riches of the Gospel.
  • Francis, like Jesus, has had such an impact in such a short period of time simply because of the way he seems to be. His being does not rely on any claims to inherited, ecclesiastical authority; his very way of life is the only moral authority he wants to claim.
  • faith is, for Francis, a way of life, not a set of propositions. It is a way of life in community with others, lived in the present yet always, deeply, insistently aware of eternity.
  • Father Howard Gray S.J. has put it simply enough: Ultimately, Ignatian spirituality trusts the world as a place where God dwells and labors and gathers all to himself in an act of forgiveness where that is needed, and in an act of blessing where that is prayed for.
  • Underlying all this is a profound shift away from an idea of religion as doctrine and toward an idea of religion as a way of life. Faith is a constantly growing garden, not a permanently finished masterpiece
  • Some have suggested that much of what Francis did is compatible with PTSD. He disowned his father and family business, and he chose to live homeless, and close to naked, in the neighboring countryside, among the sick and the animals. From being the dashing man of society he had once been, he became a homeless person with what many of us today would call, at first blush, obvious mental illness.
  • these actions – of humility, of kindness, of compassion, and of service – are integral to Francis’ resuscitation of Christian moral authority. He is telling us that Christianity, before it is anything else, is a way of life, an orientation toward the whole, a living commitment to God through others. And he is telling us that nothing – nothing – is more powerful than this.
  • I would not speak about, not even for those who believe, an “absolute” truth, in the sense that absolute is something detached, something lacking any relationship. Now, the truth is a relationship! This is so true that each of us sees the truth and expresses it, starting from oneself: from one’s history and culture, from the situation in which one lives, etc. This does not mean that the truth is variable and subjective. It means that it is given to us only as a way and a life. Was it not Jesus himself who said: “I am the way, the truth, the life”? In other words, the truth is one with love, it requires humbleness and the willingness to be sought, listened to and expressed.
  • “proselytism is solemn nonsense.” That phrase – deployed by the Pope in dialogue with the Italian atheist Eugenio Scalfari (as reported by Scalfari) – may seem shocking at first. But it is not about denying the revelation of Jesus. It is about how that revelation is expressed and lived. Evangelism, for Francis, is emphatically not about informing others about the superiority of your own worldview and converting them to it. That kind of proselytism rests on a form of disrespect for another human being. Something else is needed:
  • nstead of seeming to impose new obligations, Christians should appear as people who wish to share their joy, who point to a horizon of beauty and who invite others to a delicious banquet. It is not by proselytizing that the Church grows, but “by attraction.”
  • what you see in the life of Saint Francis is a turn from extreme violence to extreme poverty, as if only the latter could fully compensate for the reality of the former. This was not merely an injunction to serve the poor. It is the belief that it is only by being poor or becoming poor that we can come close to God
  • Pope Francis insists – and has insisted throughout his long career in the church – that poverty is a key to salvation. And in choosing the name Francis, he explained last March in Assisi, this was the central reason why:
  • Saint Francis. His conversion came after he had gone off to war in defense of his hometown, and, after witnessing horrifying carnage, became a prisoner of war. After his release from captivity, his strange, mystical journey began.
  • the priority of practice over theory, of life over dogma. Evangelization is about sitting down with anyone anywhere and listening and sharing and being together. A Christian need not be afraid of this encounter. Neither should an atheist. We are in this together, in the same journey of life, with the same ultimate mystery beyond us. When we start from that place – of radical humility and radical epistemological doubt – proselytism does indeed seem like nonsense, a form of arrogance and detachment, reaching for power, not freedom. And evangelization is not about getting others to submit their intellect and will to some new set of truths; it is about an infectious joy for a new way of living in the world. All it requires – apart from joy and faith – is patience.
  • “Preach the Gospel always. If necessary, with words.”
  • But there is little sense that a political or economic system can somehow end the problem of poverty in Francis’ worldview. And there is the discomfiting idea that poverty itself is not an unmitigated evil. There is, indeed, a deep and mysterious view, enunciated by Jesus, and held most tenaciously by Saint Francis, that all wealth, all comfort, and all material goods are suspect and that poverty itself is a kind of holy state to which we should all aspire.
  • Not only was Saint Francis to become homeless and give up his patrimony, he was to travel on foot, wearing nothing but a rough tunic held together with rope. Whatever else it is, this is not progressivism. It sees no structural, human-devised system as a permanent improver of our material lot. It does not envision a world without poverty, but instead a church of the poor and for the poor. The only material thing it asks of the world, or of God, is daily bread – and only for today, never for tomorrow.
  • From this perspective, the idea that a society should be judged by the amount of things it can distribute to as many people as possible is anathema. The idea that there is a serious social and political crisis if we cannot keep our wealth growing every year above a certain rate is an absurdity.
  • this is a 21st-century heresy. Which means, I think, that this Pope is already emerging and will likely only further emerge as the most potent critic of the newly empowered global capitalist project.
  • Now, the only dominant ideology in the world is the ideology of material gain – either through the relatively free markets of the West or the state-controlled markets of the East. And so the church’s message is now harder to obscure. It stands squarely against the entire dominant ethos of our age. It is the final resistance.
  • For Francis, history has not come to an end, and capitalism, in as much as it is a global ideology that reduces all of human activity to the cold currency of wealth, is simply another “ism” to be toppled in humankind’s unfolding journey toward salvation on earth.
  • Francis will grow as the church reacts to him; it will be a dynamic, not a dogma; and it will be marked less by the revelation of new things than by the new recognition of old things, in a new language. It will be, if its propitious beginnings are any sign, a patient untying of our collective, life-denying knots.
Javier E

Have Compassion for Yourself - Judith Ohikuare - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...361859

self-knowledge self-image

shared by Javier E on 11 May 14 - No Cached
  • we make ourselves hard to love. There's a certain negative narcissism aspect to having low self-esteem. People who totally adore themselves are hard to love because they only see themselves and it's hard for them to care about you. But people who hate themselves are also hard to love because they, too, are so self-absorbed that their own needs and miseries obstruct their view of another person.
Emily Freilich

All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines - Nicholas ... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...309516

automation knowledge technology psychology

shared by Emily Freilich on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • We rely on computers to fly our planes, find our cancers, design our buildings, audit our businesses. That's all well and good. But what happens when the computer fails?
  • On the evening of February 12, 2009, a Continental Connection commuter flight made its way through blustery weather between Newark, New Jersey, and Buffalo, New York.
  • The Q400 was well into its approach to the Buffalo airport, its landing gear down, its wing flaps out, when the pilot’s control yoke began to shudder noisily, a signal that the plane was losing lift and risked going into an aerodynamic stall. The autopilot disconnected, and the captain took over the controls. He reacted quickly, but he did precisely the wrong thing: he jerked back on the yoke, lifting the plane’s nose and reducing its airspeed, instead of pushing the yoke forward to gain velocity.
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  • The crash, which killed all 49 people on board as well as one person on the ground, should never have happened.
  • aptain’s response to the stall warning, the investigators reported, “should have been automatic, but his improper flight control inputs were inconsistent with his training” and instead revealed “startle and confusion.
  • Automation has become so sophisticated that on a typical passenger flight, a human pilot holds the controls for a grand total of just three minutes.
  • We humans have been handing off chores, both physical and mental, to tools since the invention of the lever, the wheel, and the counting bead.
  • And that, many aviation and automation experts have concluded, is a problem. Overuse of automation erodes pilots’ expertise and dulls their reflexes,
  • No one doubts that autopilot has contributed to improvements in flight safety over the years. It reduces pilot fatigue and provides advance warnings of problems, and it can keep a plane airborne should the crew become disabled. But the steady overall decline in plane crashes masks the recent arrival of “a spectacularly new type of accident,”
  • “We’re forgetting how to fly.”
  • The experience of airlines should give us pause. It reveals that automation, for all its benefits, can take a toll on the performance and talents of those who rely on it. The implications go well beyond safety. Because automation alters how we act, how we learn, and what we know, it has an ethical dimension. The choices we make, or fail to make, about which tasks we hand off to machines shape our lives and the place we make for ourselves in the world.
  • What pilots spend a lot of time doing is monitoring screens and keying in data. They’ve become, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say, computer operators.
  • Examples of complacency and bias have been well documented in high-risk situations—on flight decks and battlefields, in factory control rooms—but recent studies suggest that the problems can bedevil anyone working with a computer
  • That may leave the person operating the computer to play the role of a high-tech clerk—entering data, monitoring outputs, and watching for failures. Rather than opening new frontiers of thought and action, software ends up narrowing our focus.
  • A labor-saving device doesn’t just provide a substitute for some isolated component of a job or other activity. It alters the character of the entire task, including the roles, attitudes, and skills of the people taking part.
  • when we work with computers, we often fall victim to two cognitive ailments—complacency and bias—that can undercut our performance and lead to mistakes. Automation complacency occurs when a computer lulls us into a false sense of security. Confident that the machine will work flawlessly and handle any problem that crops up, we allow our attention to drift.
  • Automation bias occurs when we place too much faith in the accuracy of the information coming through our monitors. Our trust in the software becomes so strong that we ignore or discount other information sources, including our own eyes and ears
  • Automation is different now. Computers can be programmed to perform complex activities in which a succession of tightly coordinated tasks is carried out through an evaluation of many variables. Many software programs take on intellectual work—observing and sensing, analyzing and judging, even making decisions—that until recently was considered the preserve of humans.
  • Automation turns us from actors into observers. Instead of manipulating the yoke, we watch the screen. That shift may make our lives easier, but it can also inhibit the development of expertise.
  • Since the late 1970s, psychologists have been documenting a phenomenon called the “generation effect.” It was first observed in studies of vocabulary, which revealed that people remember words much better when they actively call them to mind—when they generate them—than when they simply read them.
  • When you engage actively in a task, you set off intricate mental processes that allow you to retain more knowledge. You learn more and remember more. When you repeat the same task over a long period, your brain constructs specialized neural circuits dedicated to the activit
  • What looks like instinct is hard-won skill, skill that requires exactly the kind of struggle that modern software seeks to alleviate.
  • In many businesses, managers and other professionals have come to depend on decision-support systems to analyze information and suggest courses of action. Accountants, for example, use the systems in corporate audits. The applications speed the work, but some signs suggest that as the software becomes more capable, the accountants become less so.
  • You can put limits on the scope of automation, making sure that people working with computers perform challenging tasks rather than merely observing.
  • Experts used to assume that there were limits to the ability of programmers to automate complicated tasks, particularly those involving sensory perception, pattern recognition, and conceptual knowledge
  • Who needs humans, anyway? That question, in one rhetorical form or another, comes up frequently in discussions of automation. If computers’ abilities are expanding so quickly and if people, by comparison, seem slow, clumsy, and error-prone, why not build immaculately self-contained systems that perform flawlessly without any human oversight or intervention? Why not take the human factor out of the equation?
  • The cure for imperfect automation is total automation.
  • That idea is seductive, but no machine is infallible. Sooner or later, even the most advanced technology will break down, misfire, or, in the case of a computerized system, encounter circumstances that its designers never anticipated. As automation technologies become more complex, relying on interdependencies among algorithms, databases, sensors, and mechanical parts, the potential sources of failure multiply. They also become harder to detect.
  • conundrum of computer automation.
  • Because many system designers assume that human operators are “unreliable and inefficient,” at least when compared with a computer, they strive to give the operators as small a role as possible.
  • People end up functioning as mere monitors, passive watchers of screens. That’s a job that humans, with our notoriously wandering minds, are especially bad at
  • people have trouble maintaining their attention on a stable display of information for more than half an hour. “This means,” Bainbridge observed, “that it is humanly impossible to carry out the basic function of monitoring for unlikely abnormalities.”
  • a person’s skills “deteriorate when they are not used,” even an experienced operator will eventually begin to act like an inexperienced one if restricted to just watching.
  • You can program software to shift control back to human operators at frequent but irregular intervals; knowing that they may need to take command at any moment keeps people engaged, promoting situational awareness and learning.
  • What’s most astonishing, and unsettling, about computer automation is that it’s still in its early stages.
  • most software applications don’t foster learning and engagement. In fact, they have the opposite effect. That’s because taking the steps necessary to promote the development and maintenance of expertise almost always entails a sacrifice of speed and productivity.
  • Learning requires inefficiency. Businesses, which seek to maximize productivity and profit, would rarely accept such a trade-off. Individuals, too, almost always seek efficiency and convenience.
  • Abstract concerns about the fate of human talent can’t compete with the allure of saving time and money.
  • The small island of Igloolik, off the coast of the Melville Peninsula in the Nunavut territory of northern Canada, is a bewildering place in the winter.
  • , Inuit hunters have for some 4,000 years ventured out from their homes on the island and traveled across miles of ice and tundra to search for game. The hunters’ ability to navigate vast stretches of the barren Arctic terrain, where landmarks are few, snow formations are in constant flux, and trails disappear overnight, has amazed explorers and scientists for centuries. The Inuit’s extraordinary way-finding skills are born not of technological prowess—they long eschewed maps and compasses—but of a profound understanding of winds, snowdrift patterns, animal behavior, stars, and tides.
  • The Igloolik hunters have begun to rely on computer-generated maps to get around. Adoption of GPS technology has been particularly strong among younger Inuit, and it’s not hard to understand why.
  • But as GPS devices have proliferated on Igloolik, reports of serious accidents during hunts have spread. A hunter who hasn’t developed way-finding skills can easily become lost, particularly if his GPS receiver fails.
  • The routes so meticulously plotted on satellite maps can also give hunters tunnel vision, leading them onto thin ice or into other hazards a skilled navigator would avoid.
  • An Inuit on a GPS-equipped snowmobile is not so different from a suburban commuter in a GPS-equipped SUV: as he devotes his attention to the instructions coming from the computer, he loses sight of his surroundings. He travels “blindfolded,” as Aporta puts it
  • A unique talent that has distinguished a people for centuries may evaporate in a generation.
  • Computer automation severs the ends from the means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing. As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face an existential question: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want?
  • Emily Freilich on 01 Nov 13
     
    Automation increases efficiency and speed of tasks, but decreases the individual's knowledge of a task and decrease's a human's ability to learn. 
Javier E

Report: Whites More Likely To Be Named CEOs Than Equally Sociopathic Black Candidates |... - 1 views

www.theonion.com/...to-be-named-ceos-than-eq,38184

business career racism morality satire ethics

shared by Javier E on 14 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • “These are heartless sadists who have put in countless hours of backstabbing and forsaken all ethical constraints in order to bolster their own power, and yet time and time again they are denied a place at the top of the corporate ladder simply because of the color of their skin,” she continued.According to the report, even when companies were presented with numerous highly qualified minority candidates with no moral compass and a history of increasing earnings by knowingly rushing an unsafe product to market or outsourcing thousands of manufacturing jobs to overseas sweatshops, the top-tier positions still tended to be awarded almost exclusively to deceitful, empathy-devoid whites.
Javier E

Op-Ed: Why Jewish educators need to teach the Palestinian perspective | Jewish Telegrap... - 1 views

www.jta.org/...ch-the-palestinian-perspective

jews education palestine history conflict critical thinking perspective

shared by Javier E on 30 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • I was shocked that no one had ever helped me understand that while the creation of Israel was a magnificent event for the Jewish people, it devastated Palestinian life. I had never considered the impact of war and displacement — as well as occupation and settlement expansion — on Palestinian communities. Learning about Palestinian culture was a transformative experience for me
  • Jews must grapple with Palestinian perspectives because we can’t wish Palestinians away or pretend they don’t exist. We have a moral obligation to listen carefully to their stories and try to comprehend what they have endured as a result of war and displacement. If we want a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we must engage directly with Palestinians – not by criticizing or attacking them, but by genuinely trying to understand their experiences.
  • Educators should also help their students cultivate understanding, respect and compassion for both Israelis and Palestinians. Often we don’t teach our children about the Palestinians because we don’t see them as central to our people’s stories. Yet Jews and Palestinians are linked together through a complex history, present conflict and unknown future.
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  • Jewish educators often shy away from teaching subjects that they deem too political, arguing that politics do not belong in the classroom. They believe that their role is solely to teach about Israel and to impress upon young Jews that Israel is core to their Jewish identities. Yet educators have a responsibility to teach not only about the vision or dream of Israel but also the reality of Israel — and it’s impossible to do this without political discussions.
  • The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central to Jewish life. It’s as important to Jewish identity as prayer and the weekly Torah portion. While American Jews can certainly live rich Jewish lives without ever thinking about Israel, it’s the epicenter of Jewish politics. Involving middle- and high-school students in the debates around the conflict allows them to grapple with Jewish history, explore the many variations of Zionism and understand religious and political differences within the Jewish community.
Javier E

Surveying religious knowledge « The Immanent Frame - 0 views

blogs.ssrc.org/...religious-knowledge

faith knowledge religion science literacy survey Pew Charitable Trust

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Instead of concluding that Americans lack “religious knowledge” because they don’t know what social scientists think they should, we might want to ask what, if anything, the study reveals about lived religion. If, for example, 45 percent of U.S. Catholics “do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ,” then perhaps it is a mistake simply to identify Catholicism with what Catholic bishops say it is. To conclude that Americans are “uninformed” about “their own traditions” betrays a subtle bias in favor of elites and begs the question of what constitutes one’s “own” religion: are we “illiterate,” or do we simply disagree about what belongs in the “canon”?
  • Is ‘having correct beliefs’ the main point of religion? There may be socially useful reasons to play that down in favor of encouraging shared values: compassion, service, and social justice.
  • People do not know who Maimonides was, I think, for the same reason they do not know the origin of “devil’s advocate.” Our culture has become more pluralistic, and people draw upon its elements in the way of the bricoleur to construct a web of meanings that is flexible, contextually activated, and what we would call “post-modern”
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  • Perhaps more fundamental, the rules that shape how the bricoleur selects the various elements have also changed. Religion is far less formative of our public discourse and culture in the deep, constitutive way that it was even as recently as the postwar period, due in large part to the rise of neo-liberalism.
  • if we ask Americans a range of questions about matters that extend beyond their immediate horizons, we would be somewhat amazed by the blind spots in our thinking. Ignorance about religion might very well extend to ignorance about geopolitical concerns or about other cultures generally. What is striking, and simultaneously disturbing, is the degree to which our comfort and certainty about ourselves as Americans and about the world we inhabit enable us to settle into a kind of willful ignorance. So I am not inclined to single out religion in this regard; something more fundamental has been revealed
  • To take seriously the results of the Pew quiz leads us to question the substance of our national commitment to religious tolerance and pluralism. If our knowledge of other religions (even our own) is shoddy, then what constitutes the substance of our toleration of others? Is it simply a procedural concern? And, more importantly, if we fail to know basic facts about others, do we make it easier to retreat into the comfort of insular spaces, deaf to the claims of others? Do we expect, at the end of the day, no matter our public announcements to the contrary, that all others should sound and believe as the majority of Americans do?
  • The Pew Forum’s Religious Knowledge Survey examines one type of religious knowledge: knowledge-that. Respondents were asked whether certain propositions about world religions were true. But it is an open question whether this really is the sort of knowledge that we have in mind when we are talking about religious knowledge. At least sometimes, it seems like we mean knowledge-how.
  • The unwritten premise of the survey is that belief ought to be individual, considered, and fully-informed. But that premise fits neither religious experience nor human subjectivity over the long term. Thus to ask these questions in this way is to presume a particular kind of religious subject that is largely nonexistent, then to take pleasure in clucking over its nonexistence.
  • what if religion is not primarily about knowledge? What if the defining core of religion is more like a way of life, a nexus of action? What if, as per Charles Taylor, a religious orientation is more akin to a “social imaginary,” which functions as an “understanding” on a register that is somewhat inarticulable? Indeed, I think Taylor’s corpus offers multiple resources for criticizing what he would describe as the “intellectualism” of such approaches to religion—methodologies that treat human persons as “thinking things,” and thus reduce religious phenomena to a set of ideas, beliefs, and propositions. Taylor’s account of social imaginaries reminds us of a kind of understanding that is “carried” in practices, implicit in rituals and routines, and can never be adequately articulated or made explicit. If we begin to think about religion more like a social imaginary than a set of propositions and beliefs, then the methodologies of surveys of religious “knowledge” are going to look problematic.
  • I’m reminded of an observation Wittgenstein makes in the Philosophical Investigations: One could be a master of a game without being able to articulate the rules.
  • belief, faith and knowledge, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, religion and science, religion in the U.S., religious literacy, surveys, U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey
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

Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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science research knowledge brain science technology education computers learning experience

shared by julia rhodes on 29 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Computers have entered the age when they are able to learn from their own mistakes, a development that is about to turn the digital world on its head.
  • Not only can it automate tasks that now require painstaking programming — for example, moving a robot’s arm smoothly and efficiently — but it can also sidestep and even tolerate errors, potentially making the term “computer crash” obsolete.
  • The new computing approach, already in use by some large technology companies, is based on the biological nervous system, specifically on how neurons react to stimuli and connect with other neurons to interpret information.
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  • In coming years, the approach will make possible a new generation of artificial intelligence systems that will perform some functions that humans do with ease: see, speak, listen, navigate, manipulate and control.
  • “We’re moving from engineering computing systems to something that has many of the characteristics of biological computing,” said Larry Smarr
  • The new approach, used in both hardware and software, is being driven by the explosion of scientific knowledge about the brain. Kwabena Boahen, a computer scientist who leads Stanford’s Brains in Silicon research program, said that is also its limitation, as scientists are far from fully understanding how brains function.
  • They are not “programmed.” Rather the connections between the circuits are “weighted” according to correlations in data that the processor has already “learned.” Those weights are then altered as data flows in to the chip, causing them to change their values and to “spike.” That generates a signal that travels to other components and, in reaction, changes the neural network, in essence programming the next actions much the same way that information alters human thoughts and actions.
  • Traditional computers are also remarkably energy inefficient, especially when compared to actual brains, which the new neurons are built to mimic. I.B.M. announced last year that it had built a supercomputer simulation of the brain that encompassed roughly 10 billion neurons — more than 10 percent of a human brain. It ran about 1,500 times more slowly than an actual brain. Further, it required several megawatts of power, compared with just 20 watts of power used by the biological brain.
  • Running the program, known as Compass, which attempts to simulate a brain, at the speed of a human brain would require a flow of electricity in a conventional computer that is equivalent to what is needed to power both San Francisco and New York, Dr. Modha said.
Javier E

The Problem With Meaning - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-the-problem-with-meaning.html

meaning morality compass moral lifestyle spiritual emotion pluralism framework

shared by Javier E on 08 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • meaning” has become the stand-in concept for everything the soul yearns for and seeks. It is one of the few phrases acceptable in modern parlance to describe a fundamentally spiritual need.
  • what do we mean when we use the word meaning?
  • as commonly used today, the word is flabby and vacuous, the product of a culture that has grown inarticulate about inner life.
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  • meaning is an uplifting state of consciousness. It’s what you feel when you’re serving things beyond self.
  • Meaningfulness tries to replace structures, standards and disciplines with self-regarding emotion. The ultimate authority of meaningful is the warm tingling we get when we feel significant and meaningful.
  • They subscribed to moral systems — whether secular or religious — that recommended specific ways of being, and had specific structures of what is right and wrong, and had specific disciplines about how you might get better over time.
  • If we look at the people in history who achieved great things — like Nelson Mandela or Albert Schweitzer or Abraham Lincoln — it wasn’t because they wanted to bathe luxuriously in their own sense of meaningfulness. They had objective and eternally true standards of justice and injustice. They were indignant when those eternal standards were violated.
  • Meaningfulness tries to replace moral systems with the emotional corona that surrounds acts of charity.
  • Because meaningfulness is built solely on an emotion, it is contentless and irreducible. Because it is built solely on emotion, it’s subjective and relativistic. You get meaning one way. I get meaning another way. Who is any of us to judge another’s emotion?
  • Because it’s based solely on sentiment, it is useless. There are no criteria to determine what kind of meaningfulness is higher. There’s no practical manual that would help guide each of us as we move from shallower forms of service to deeper ones. There is no hierarchy of values that would help us select, from among all the things we might do, that activity which is highest and best to do.
  • Because it’s based solely on emotion, it’s fleeting. When the sensations of meaningful go away then the cause that once aroused them gets dropped, too. Ennui floods in. Personal crisis follows. There’s no reliable ground.
  • The philosophy of meaningfulness emerges in a culture in which there is no common moral vocabulary or framework. It emerges amid radical pluralism, when people don’t want to judge each other. Meaningfulness emerges when the fundamental question is, do we feel good?
  • Real moral systems are based on a balance of intellectual rigor and aroused moral sentiments.
Javier E

Raising a Moral Child - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...raising-a-moral-child.html

moral education example guilt shame character action praise psychology

shared by Javier E on 18 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Surveys reveal that in the United States, parents from European, Asian, Hispanic and African ethnic groups all place far greater importance on caring than achievement. These patterns hold around the world:
  • teaching children to care about others is no simple task. In an Israeli study of nearly 600 families, parents who valued kindness and compassion frequently failed to raise children who shared those values.
  • For the past decade, I’ve been studying the surprising success of people who frequently help others without any strings attached.
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  • Genetic twin studies suggest that anywhere from a quarter to more than half of our propensity to be giving and caring is inherited. That leaves a lot of room for nurture, and the evidence on how parents raise kind and compassionate c
  • By age 2, children experience some moral emotions — feelings triggered by right and wrong. To reinforce caring as the right behavior, research indicates, praise is more effective than rewards.
  • when faced with more opportunities to give and share, the children were much more generous after their character had been praised than after their actions had been. Praising their character helped them internalize it as part of their identities.
  • Cheating was cut in half when instead of, “Please don’t cheat,” participants were told, “Please don’t be a cheater.” When our actions become a reflection of our character, we lean more heavily toward the moral and generous choices. Over time it can become part of us.
  • Tying generosity to character appears to matter most around age 8, when children may be starting to crystallize notions of identity.
  • When children cause harm, they typically feel one of two moral emotions: shame or guilt. Despite the common belief that these emotions are interchangeable, research led by the psychologist June Price Tangney reveals that they have very different causes and consequences.
  • Shame is a negative judgment about the core self, which is devastating: Shame makes children feel small and worthless, and they respond either by lashing out at the target or escaping the situation
  • Shame is the feeling that I am a bad person, whereas guilt is the feeling that I have done a bad thing
  • In contrast, guilt is a negative judgment about an action, which can be repaired by good behavior. When children feel guilt, they tend to experience remorse and regret, empathize with the person they have harmed, and aim to make it right.
  • If we want our children to care about others, we need to teach them to feel guilt rather than shame when they misbehave.
  • shame emerges when parents express anger, withdraw their love, or try to assert their power through threats of punishment
  • The most effective response to bad behavior is to express disappointment.
  • parents raise caring children by expressing disappointment and explaining why the behavior was wrong, how it affected others, and how they can rectify the situation. This enables children to develop standards for judging their actions, feelings of empathy and responsibility for others, and a sense of moral identity, which are conducive to becoming a helpful person.
  • As parents, we want to be proactive in communicating our values to our children. Yet many of us do this the wrong way.
  • When the adult acted generously, students gave the same amount whether generosity was preached or not — they donated 85 percent more than the norm in both cases. When the adult preached selfishness, even after the adult acted generously, the students still gave 49 percent more than the norm. Children learn generosity not by listening to what their role models say, but by observing what they do.
  • in the long run, preaching is less effective than giving while saying nothing at all.
  • As the psychologist Karl Weick is fond of asking, “How can I know who I am until I see what I do? How can I know what I value until I see where I walk?”
Javier E

The Moral Bucket List - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oks-the-moral-bucket-list.html

morality role model humility vocation suffering individualism conscience self character virtue

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • ABOUT once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These people can be in any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They make you feel funny and valued. You often catch them looking after other people and as they do so their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude. They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all.
  • two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?
  • our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light.
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  • But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K
  • I set out to discover how those deeply good people got that way.
  • I came to the conclusion that wonderful people are made, not born — that the people I admired had achieved an unfakeable inner virtue, built slowly from specific moral and spiritual accomplishments.
  • THE HUMILITY SHIFT We live in the culture of the Big Me. The meritocracy wants you to promote yourself. Social media wants you to broadcast a highlight reel of your life
  • But all the people I’ve ever deeply admired are profoundly honest about their own weaknesses. They have identified their core sin, whether it is selfishness, the desperate need for approval, cowardice, hardheartedness or whatever. They have traced how that core sin leads to the behavior that makes them feel ashamed. They have achieved a profound humility, which has best been defined as an intense self-awareness from a position of other-centeredness.
  • SELF-DEFEAT External success is achieved through competition with others. But character is built during the confrontation with your own weakness. Dwight Eisenhower, for example, realized early on that his core sin was his temper. He developed a moderate, cheerful exterior because he knew he needed to project optimism and confidence to lead.
  • THE DEPENDENCY LEAP Many people give away the book “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” as a graduation gift. This book suggests that life is an autonomous journey
  • people on the road to character understand that no person can achieve self-mastery on his or her own. Individual will, reason and compassion are not strong enough to consistently defeat selfishness, pride and self-deception. We all need redemptive assistance from outside.
  • People on this road see life as a process of commitment making. Character is defined by how deeply rooted you are. Have you developed deep connections that hold you up in times of challenge and push you toward the good? In the realm of the intellect, a person of character has achieved a settled philosophy about fundamental things. In the realm of emotion, she is embedded in a web of unconditional loves. In the realm of action, she is committed to tasks that can’t be completed in a single lifetime.
  • The stumbler doesn’t build her life by being better than others, but by being better than she used to be. Unexpectedly, there are transcendent moments of deep tranquillity. For most of their lives their inner and outer ambitions are strong and in balance. But eventually, at moments of rare joy, career ambitions pause, the ego rests, the stumbler looks out at a picnic or dinner or a valley and is overwhelmed by a feeling of limitless gratitude, and an acceptance of the fact that life has treated her much better than she deserves.
  • That kind of love decenters the self. It reminds you that your true riches are in another. Most of all, this love electrifies. It puts you in a state of need and makes it delightful to serve what you love. Day’s love for her daughter spilled outward and upward. As she wrote, “No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore.”
  • She made unshakable commitments in all directions. She became a Catholic, started a radical newspaper, opened settlement houses for the poor and lived among the poor, embracing shared poverty as a way to build community, to not only do good, but be good
  • THE CALL WITHIN THE CALL We all go into professions for many reasons: money, status, security. But some people have experiences that turn a career into a calling. These experiences quiet the self. All that matters is living up to the standard of excellence inherent in their craft.
  • THE CONSCIENCE LEAP In most lives there’s a moment when people strip away all the branding and status symbols, all the prestige that goes with having gone to a certain school or been born into a certain family. They leap out beyond the utilitarian logic and crash through the barriers of their fears.
  • Commencement speakers are always telling young people to follow their passions. Be true to yourself. This is a vision of life that begins with self and ends with self. But people on the road to inner light do not find their vocations by asking, what do I want from life? They ask, what is life asking of me? How can I match my intrinsic talent with one of the world’s deep needs?
  • Their lives often follow a pattern of defeat, recognition, redemption. They have moments of pain and suffering. But they turn those moments into occasions of radical self-understanding — by keeping a journal or making art. As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were
  • The people on this road see the moments of suffering as pieces of a larger narrative. They are not really living for happiness, as it is conventionally defined. They see life as a moral drama and feel fulfilled only when they are enmeshed in a struggle on behalf of some ideal.
  • This is a philosophy for stumblers. The stumbler scuffs through life, a little off balance. But the stumbler faces her imperfect nature with unvarnished honesty, with the opposite of squeamishness. Recognizing her limitations, the stumbler at least has a serious foe to overcome and transcend. The stumbler has an outstretched arm, ready to receive and offer assistance. Her friends are there for deep conversation, comfort and advice.
  • External ambitions are never satisfied because there’s always something more to achieve. But the stumblers occasionally experience moments of joy. There’s joy in freely chosen obedience to organizations, ideas and people. There’s joy in mutual stumbling. There’s an aesthetic joy we feel when we see morally good action, when we run across someone who is quiet and humble and good, when we see that however old we are, there’s lots to do ahead.
  • ENERGIZING LOVE
  • Those are the people we want to be.
Javier E

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

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

language thinking

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - Cached
  • languages that rely primarily on geographical coordinates are scattered around the world, from Polynesia to Mexico, from Namibia to Bali.
  • even if a language doesn’t have a word for “behind,” this doesn’t necessarily mean that its speakers wouldn’t be able to understand this concept. Instead, we should look for the possible consequences of what geographic languages oblige their speakers to convey. In particular, we should be on the lookout for what habits of mind might develop because of the necessity of specifying geographic directions all the time.
  • In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night,
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  • Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation.
  • The convention of communicating with geographic coordinates compels speakers from the youngest age to pay attention to the clues from the physical environment (the position of the sun, wind and so on) every second of their lives, and to develop an accurate memory of their own changing orientations at any given moment. So everyday communication in a geographic language provides the most intense imaginable drilling in geographic orientation
qkirkpatrick

Stanford psychologist: People from different cultures express sympathy differently - 0 views

news.stanford.edu/...fferences-sympathy-032525.html

emotion sympathy science psychology

shared by qkirkpatrick on 31 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Sympathy is influenced by cultural differences, new Stanford research shows.
  • The research showed that how much people wanted to avoid negative emotion influenced their expressions of sympathy more than how negative they actually felt, wrote Stanford psychology
  • American sympathy cards contain less negative and more positive content than German sympathy cards.
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  • Americans want to avoid negative states of mind more than Germans do.
  • Cultural differences in how much people want to avoid negative emotions play a key role in how Americans and Germans feel about focusing on the negative rather than the positive when expressing sympathy.
  • When people desire to avoid negative emotions, they focus less on the negative and more on the positive when responding to another person's suffering.
  • suffering, according to the researchers. However, until now, Tsai said, no studies have specifically examined how culture shapes "different ways in which sympathy, compassion or other feelings of concern for another's suffering might be expressed."
  • Unlike when Americans talk about illness, Germans primarily focus on the negative, Tsai and Koopmann-Holm wrote. For example, the "Sturm und Drang" ("Storm and Drive") literary and musical movement in 18th-century Germany went beyond merely accepting negative emotions to actually glorifying them.
  • qkirkpatrick on 31 Mar 15
     
    How Culture affects someones willingness to express the negatives in a situation rather than the positives.
kushnerha

The Words That Killed Medieval Jews - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...that-killed-medieval-jews.html

new york time language religion violence history

shared by kushnerha on 11 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • DO harsh words lead to violent acts? At a moment when hate speech seems to be proliferating, it’s a question worth asking.
  • worry that heated anti-Muslim political rhetoric would spark an increase in attacks against Muslims.
  • Some claim that last month’s mass shooting in Colorado Springs was provoked by Carly Fiorina’s assertion that Planned Parenthood was “harvesting baby parts”; Mrs. Fiorina countered that language could not be held responsible for the deeds of a “deranged” man.
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  • beating of a homeless Hispanic man in Boston, allegedly inspired by Donald J. Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric, and by the shooting deaths of police officers in California, Texas and Illinois, which some have attributed to anti-police sentiment expressed at Black Lives Matter protests.
  • history does show that a heightening of rhetoric against a certain group can incite violence against that group, even when no violence is called for. When a group is labeled hostile and brutal, its members are more likely to be treated with hostility and brutality. Visual images are particularly powerful, spurring actions that may well be unintended by the images’ creators.
  • Official Christian theology and policy toward Jews remained largely unchanged in the Middle Ages. Over roughly 1,000 years, Christianity condemned the major tenets of Judaism and held “the Jews” responsible for the death of Jesus. But the terms in which these ideas were expressed changed radically.
  • Before about 1100, Christian devotions focused on Christ’s divine nature and triumph over death. Images of the crucifixion showed Jesus alive and healthy on the cross. For this reason, his killers were not major focuses in Christian thought. No anti-Jewish polemics were composed during these centuries
  • In an effort to spur compassion among Christian worshipers, preachers and artists began to dwell in vivid detail on Christ’s pain. Christ morphed from triumphant divine judge to suffering human savior. A parallel tactic, designed to foster a sense of Christian unity, was to emphasize the cruelty of his supposed tormentors, the Jews.
  • The “Goad of Love,” a retelling of the crucifixion that is considered the first anti-Jewish Passion treatise, was written around 1155-80. It describes Jews as consumed with sadism and blood lust. They were seen as enemies not only of Christ, but also of living Christians; it was at this time that Jews began to be accused of ritually sacrificing Christian children.
  • Ferocious anti-Jewish rhetoric began to permeate sermons, plays and polemical texts. Jews were labeled demonic and greedy. In one diatribe, the head of the most influential monastery in Christendom thundered at the Jews: “Why are you not called brute animals? Why not beasts?” Images began to portray Jews as hooknosed caricatures of evil.
  • the First Crusade had called only for an “armed pilgrimage” to retake Jerusalem from Muslims, the first victims of the Crusade were not the Turkish rulers of Jerusalem but Jewish residents of the German Rhineland. Contemporary accounts record the crusaders asking why, if they were traveling to a distant land to “kill and to subjugate all those kingdoms that do not believe in the Crucified,” they should not also attack “the Jews, who killed and crucified him?”
  • At no point did Christian authorities promote or consent to the violence. Christian theology, which applied the Psalm verse “Slay them not” to Jews, and insisted that Jews were not to be killed for their religion, had not changed. Clerics were at a loss to explain the attacks. A churchman from a nearby town attributed the massacres to “some error of mind.”
  • But not all the Rhineland killers were crazy. The crusaders set out in the Easter season. Both crusade and Easter preaching stirred up rage about the crucifixion and fear of hostile and threatening enemies.
  • Sometimes the perpetrators were zealous holy warriors, sometimes they were opportunistic business rivals, sometimes they were parents grieving for children lost to accident or crime, or fearful of the ravages of a new disease.
  • Some may well have been insane. But sane or deranged, they did not pick their victims in a vacuum. It was repeated and dehumanizing excoriation that led those medieval Christians to attack people who had long been their neighbors.
kushnerha

The Rise of Hate Search - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-rise-of-hate-search.html

new york times islamophobia terrorism language

shared by kushnerha on 13 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • after the media first reported that at least one of the shooters had a Muslim-sounding name, a disturbing number of Californians had decided what they wanted to do with Muslims: kill them.
  • the rest of America searched for the phrase “kill Muslims” with about the same frequency that they searched for “martini recipe,” “migraine symptoms” and “Cowboys roster.”
  • People often have vicious thoughts. Sometimes they share them on Google. Do these thoughts matter?Yes. Using weekly data from 2004 to 2013, we found a direct correlation between anti-Muslim searches and anti-Muslim hate crimes.
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  • In 2014, according to the F.B.I., anti-Muslim hate crimes represented 16.3 percent of the total of 1,092 reported offenses. Anti-Semitism still led the way as a motive for hate crimes, at 58.2 percent.
  • Hate crimes may seem chaotic and unpredictable, a consequence of random neurons that happen to fire in the brains of a few angry young men. But we can explain some of the rise and fall of anti-Muslim hate crimes just based on what people are Googling about Muslims.
  • If our model is right, Islamophobia and thus anti-Muslim hate crimes are currently higher than at any time since the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
  • How can these Google searches track Islamophobia so well? Who searches for “I hate Muslims” anyway?We often think of Google as a source from which we seek information directly, on topics like the weather, who won last night’s game or how to make apple pie. But sometimes we type our uncensored thoughts into Google, without much hope that Google will be able to help us. The search window can serve as a kind of confessional.
  • It is not just that hatred against Muslims is extremely high today. It’s that it’s exceptional compared with prejudice against every other group in the United States.
  • “If someone is willing to say ‘I hate them’ or ‘they disgust me,’ we know that those emotions are as good a predictor of behavior as actual intent,” said Susan Fiske, a social psychologist at Princeton
  • Google searches seem to suffer from selection bias: Instead of asking a random sample of Americans how they feel, you just get information from those who are motivated to search. But this restriction may actually help search data predict hate crimes.
  • “Google searches answer a different question: What do people excited enough by an issue to comment on it think and believe about it? The answer to this question, just because it is unrepresentative of the public as a whole, may be a better bet to predict hate crimes.”
  • While the vast majority of Muslim Americans won’t be victims of hate crimes, few escape the “constant sense of fear and paranoia” that they or their loved ones might be next, said Rana Ibrahem
  • What about the other side of the coin — compassion and understanding? Do they stand a chance against hate?Searches for information about Islam and Muslims did rise after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. Yet they rose far less than searches for hate did. “Who is Muhammad?” “what do Muslims believe?” and “what does the Quran say?” for instance, were no match for intolerance.
  • Google searches expressing moods, rather than looking for information, represent a tiny sample of everyone who is actually thinking those thoughts.
  • The search data also tells us that changes in Americans’ policy concerns have been dramatic. They happened, quite literally, within minutes of the terror attacks.Before the Paris attacks, 60 percent of Americans’ searches that took an obvious view of Syrian refugees saw them positively, asking how they could “help,” “volunteer” or “aid.” The other 40 percent were negative and mostly expressed skepticism about security. After Paris, however, the share of people opposed to refugees rose to 80 percent.
  • One idea might be to increase cultural integration. This is based on the “contact hypothesis”: If more Americans have Muslim neighbors, they will learn not to harbor irrational hate. We did not find support for this in the data — in fact, we found evidence for the opposite.
  • That’s evidence for the dominance of the “racial threat” hypothesis, which predicts that proximity breeds tension, not trust.
  • Another solution might be for leaders to talk about the importance of tolerance and the irrationality of hatred, as President Obama did in his Oval Office speech last Sunday night. He asked Americans to reject discrimination and religious tests for immigration. The reactions to his speech offer an excellent opportunity to see what works and what doesn’t work.
  • There was one line, however, that did trigger the type of response Mr. Obama might have wanted. He said, “Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes and yes, they are our men and women in uniform, who are willing to die in defense of our country.”After this line, for the first time in more than a year, the top Googled noun after “Muslim” was not “terrorists,” “extremists” or “refugees.” It was “athletes,” followed by “soldiers.” And, in fact, “athletes” kept the top spot for a full day afterward.
  • On the whole, though, the response to the president’s speech shows that appealing to the better angels of an angry mob will most likely just backfire.
anonymous

The Science of Older and Wiser - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cience-of-older-and-wiser.html

wisdom research knowledge

shared by anonymous on 22 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • The question remains compelling: What is wisdom, and how does it play out in individual lives?
  • Most psychologists agree that if you define wisdom as maintaining positive well-being and kindness in the face of challenges, it is one of the most important qualities one can possess to age successfully — and to face physical decline and death.
  • Based on an analysis of their answers, she determined that wisdom consists of three key components: cognition, reflection and compassion.
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  • While younger people were faster in tests of cognitive performance, older people showed “greater sensitivity to fine-grained differences,” the study found.
  • one must take time to gain insights and perspectives from one’s cognitive knowledge to be wise (the reflective dimension). Then one can use those insights to understand and help others (the compassionate dimension).
  • Wisdom, she has found, is the ace in the hole that can help even severely impaired people find meaning, contentment and acceptance in later life.
  • “Wise people are able to accept reality as it is, with equanimity,” Professor Ardelt said.
  • True personal wisdom involves five elements, said Professor Staudinger, now a life span psychologist and professor at Columbia University. They are self-insight; the ability to demonstrate personal growth; self-awareness in terms of your historical era and your family history; understanding that priorities and values, including your own, are not absolute; and an awareness of life’s ambiguities.
  • True wisdom involves recognizing the negative both within and outside ourselves and trying to learn from it, she said.
  • If you are wise, she said, “You’re not only regulating your emotional state, you’re also attending to another person’s emotional state.” She added: “You’re not focusing so much on what you need and deserve, but on what you can contribute.”
  • Continuing education can be an important way to cultivate wisdom in the later years, researchers say, for one thing because it combats isolation.
  • Reflecting on the meaning and structure of their lives, she said, can help people thrive after the balance shifts and there is much less time left than has gone before.
Javier E

The Middle-Age Surge - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-middle-age-surge.html

middle-age psychology

shared by Javier E on 22 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Hopefully you’ve built up some wisdom, which, as the psychologists define it, means seeing the world with more compassion, grasping opposing ideas at the same time, tolerating ambiguity and reacting with equanimity to the small setbacks of life.
  • By middle age you might begin to see, retrospectively, the dominant motifs that have been running through your various decisions. You might begin to see how all your different commitments can be integrated into one meaning and purpose
  • You might see the social problem your past has made you uniquely equipped to tackle. You might have enough clarity by now to orient your life around a true north on some ultimate horizon.
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  • with a little maturity, they’re less likely by middle age to be blinded by ego, more likely to know what it is they actually desire, more likely to get out of their own way, and maybe a little less likely, given all the judgments that have been made, to care about what other people think.
  • They achieve a kind of tranquillity, not because they’ve decided to do nothing, but because they’ve achieved focus and purity of will. They have enough self-confidence, and impatience, to say no to some things so they can say yes to others.
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