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Javier E

Thieves of experience: On the rise of surveillance capitalism - 1 views

www.roughtype.com/?p=8608

tech brain science knowledge memory distraction smartphone learning creativity reasoning problem-solving silicon valley elite surveillance capitalism psychology

shared by Javier E on 06 May 20 - No Cached
  • Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise—what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately-owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.
  • By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are perverting capitalism in a way that undermines personal freedom and corrodes democracy.
  • Under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption that prevailed for much of the twentieth century, industrial capitalism achieved a relatively benign balance among the contending interests of business owners, workers, and consumers. Enlightened executives understood that good pay and decent working conditions would ensure a prosperous middle class eager to buy the goods and services their companies produced. It was the product itself — made by workers, sold by companies, bought by consumers — that tied the interests of capitalism’s participants together. Economic and social equilibrium was negotiated through the product.
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  • By removing the tangible product from the center of commerce, surveillance capitalism upsets the equilibrium. Whenever we use free apps and online services, it’s often said, we become the products, our attention harvested and sold to advertisers
  • this truism gets it wrong. Surveillance capitalism’s real products, vaporous but immensely valuable, are predictions about our future behavior — what we’ll look at, where we’ll go, what we’ll buy, what opinions we’ll hold — that internet companies derive from our personal data and sell to businesses, political operatives, and other bidders.
  • Unlike financial derivatives, which they in some ways resemble, these new data derivatives draw their value, parasite-like, from human experience.To the Googles and Facebooks of the world, we are neither the customer nor the product. We are the source of what Silicon Valley technologists call “data exhaust” — the informational byproducts of online activity that become the inputs to prediction algorithms
  • Another 2015 study, appearing in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, showed that when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline.
  • The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015 Gallup survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn’t imagine life without the device.
  • So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?
  • Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.
  • he has seen mounting evidence that using a smartphone, or even hearing one ring or vibrate, produces a welter of distractions that makes it harder to concentrate on a difficult problem or job. The division of attention impedes reasoning and performance.
  • internet companies operate in what Zuboff terms “extreme structural independence from people.” When databases displace goods as the engine of the economy, our own interests, as consumers but also as citizens, cease to be part of the negotiation. We are no longer one of the forces guiding the market’s invisible hand. We are the objects of surveillance and control.
  • Social skills and relationships seem to suffer as well.
  • In both tests, the subjects whose phones were in view posted the worst scores, while those who left their phones in a different room did the best. The students who kept their phones in their pockets or bags came out in the middle. As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased.
  • In subsequent interviews, nearly all the participants said that their phones hadn’t been a distraction—that they hadn’t even thought about the devices during the experiment. They remained oblivious even as the phones disrupted their focus and thinking.
  • The researchers recruited 520 undergraduates at UCSD and gave them two standard tests of intellectual acuity. One test gauged “available working-memory capacity,” a measure of how fully a person’s mind can focus on a particular task. The second assessed “fluid intelligence,” a person’s ability to interpret and solve an unfamiliar problem. The only variable in the experiment was the location of the subjects’ smartphones. Some of the students were asked to place their phones in front of them on their desks; others were told to stow their phones in their pockets or handbags; still others were required to leave their phones in a different room.
  • the “integration of smartphones into daily life” appears to cause a “brain drain” that can diminish such vital mental skills as “learning, logical reasoning, abstract thought, problem solving, and creativity.”
  •  Smartphones have become so entangled with our existence that, even when we’re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check our phone, which we do routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking.
  • They found that students who didn’t bring their phones to the classroom scored a full letter-grade higher on a test of the material presented than those who brought their phones. It didn’t matter whether the students who had their phones used them or not: All of them scored equally poorly.
  • A study of nearly a hundred secondary schools in the U.K., published last year in the journal Labour Economics, found that when schools ban smartphones, students’ examination scores go up substantially, with the weakest students benefiting the most.
  • Data, the novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick once wrote, is “memory without history.” Her observation points to the problem with allowing smartphones to commandeer our brains
  • Because smartphones serve as constant reminders of all the friends we could be chatting with electronically, they pull at our minds when we’re talking with people in person, leaving our conversations shallower and less satisfying.
  • In a 2013 study conducted at the University of Essex in England, 142 participants were divided into pairs and asked to converse in private for ten minutes. Half talked with a phone in the room, half without a phone present. The subjects were then given tests of affinity, trust and empathy. “The mere presence of mobile phones,” the researchers reported in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, “inhibited the development of interpersonal closeness and trust” and diminished “the extent to which individuals felt empathy and understanding from their partners.”
  • The evidence that our phones can get inside our heads so forcefully is unsettling. It suggests that our thoughts and feelings, far from being sequestered in our skulls, can be skewed by external forces we’re not even aware o
  •  Scientists have long known that the brain is a monitoring system as well as a thinking system. Its attention is drawn toward any object that is new, intriguing or otherwise striking — that has, in the psychological jargon, “salience.”
  • even in the history of captivating media, the smartphone stands out. It is an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. Because the phone is packed with so many forms of information and so many useful and entertaining functions, it acts as what Dr. Ward calls a “supernormal stimulus,” one that can “hijack” attention whenever it is part of our surroundings — and it is always part of our surroundings.
  • Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone represents to us. No wonder we can’t take our minds off it.
  • The irony of the smartphone is that the qualities that make it so appealing to us — its constant connection to the net, its multiplicity of apps, its responsiveness, its portability — are the very ones that give it such sway over our minds.
  • Phone makers like Apple and Samsung and app writers like Facebook, Google and Snap design their products to consume as much of our attention as possible during every one of our waking hours
  • Social media apps were designed to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology,” former Facebook president Sean Parker said in a recent interview. “[We] understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”
  • A quarter-century ago, when we first started going online, we took it on faith that the web would make us smarter: More information would breed sharper thinking. We now know it’s not that simple.
  • As strange as it might seem, people’s knowledge and understanding may actually dwindle as gadgets grant them easier access to online data stores
  • In a seminal 2011 study published in Science, a team of researchers — led by the Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow and including the late Harvard memory expert Daniel Wegner — had a group of volunteers read forty brief, factual statements (such as “The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas in Feb. 2003”) and then type the statements into a computer. Half the people were told that the machine would save what they typed; half were told that the statements would be erased.
  • Afterward, the researchers asked the subjects to write down as many of the statements as they could remember. Those who believed that the facts had been recorded in the computer demonstrated much weaker recall than those who assumed the facts wouldn’t be stored. Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it
  • The researchers dubbed this phenomenon the “Google effect” and noted its broad implications: “Because search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.”
  • as the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James said in an 1892 lecture, “the art of remembering is the art of thinking.”
  • Only by encoding information in our biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.
  • As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific American article, when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel as though “their own mental capacities” had generated the information, not their devices. “The advent of the ‘information age’ seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before,” the scholars concluded, even though “they may know ever less about the world around them.”
  • That insight sheds light on society’s current gullibility crisis, in which people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.
  • A second experiment conducted by the researchers produced similar results, while also revealing that the more heavily students relied on their phones in their everyday lives, the greater the cognitive penalty they suffered.
  • When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning
  • We need to give our minds more room to think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.
  • Google’s once-patient investors grew restive, demanding that the founders figure out a way to make money, preferably lots of it.
  • nder pressure, Page and Brin authorized the launch of an auction system for selling advertisements tied to search queries. The system was designed so that the company would get paid by an advertiser only when a user clicked on an ad. This feature gave Google a huge financial incentive to make accurate predictions about how users would respond to ads and other online content. Even tiny increases in click rates would bring big gains in income. And so the company began deploying its stores of behavioral data not for the benefit of users but to aid advertisers — and to juice its own profits. Surveillance capitalism had arrived.
  • Google’s business now hinged on what Zuboff calls “the extraction imperative.” To improve its predictions, it had to mine as much information as possible from web users. It aggressively expanded its online services to widen the scope of its surveillance.
  • Through Gmail, it secured access to the contents of people’s emails and address books. Through Google Maps, it gained a bead on people’s whereabouts and movements. Through Google Calendar, it learned what people were doing at different moments during the day and whom they were doing it with. Through Google News, it got a readout of people’s interests and political leanings. Through Google Shopping, it opened a window onto people’s wish lists,
  • The company gave all these services away for free to ensure they’d be used by as many people as possible. It knew the money lay in the data.
  • the organization grew insular and secretive. Seeking to keep the true nature of its work from the public, it adopted what its CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, called a “hiding strategy” — a kind of corporate omerta backed up by stringent nondisclosure agreements.
  • Page and Brin further shielded themselves from outside oversight by establishing a stock structure that guaranteed their power could never be challenged, neither by investors nor by directors.
  • What’s most remarkable about the birth of surveillance capitalism is the speed and audacity with which Google overturned social conventions and norms about data and privacy. Without permission, without compensation, and with little in the way of resistance, the company seized and declared ownership over everyone’s information
  • The companies that followed Google presumed that they too had an unfettered right to collect, parse, and sell personal data in pretty much any way they pleased. In the smart homes being built today, it’s understood that any and all data will be beamed up to corporate clouds.
  • Google conducted its great data heist under the cover of novelty. The web was an exciting frontier — something new in the world — and few people understood or cared about what they were revealing as they searched and surfed. In those innocent days, data was there for the taking, and Google took it
  • Google also benefited from decisions made by lawmakers, regulators, and judges — decisions that granted internet companies free use of a vast taxpayer-funded communication infrastructure, relieved them of legal and ethical responsibility for the information and messages they distributed, and gave them carte blanche to collect and exploit user data.
  • Consider the terms-of-service agreements that govern the division of rights and the delegation of ownership online. Non-negotiable, subject to emendation and extension at the company’s whim, and requiring only a casual click to bind the user, TOS agreements are parodies of contracts, yet they have been granted legal legitimacy by the court
  • Law professors, writes Zuboff, “call these ‘contracts of adhesion’ because they impose take-it-or-leave-it conditions on users that stick to them whether they like it or not.” Fundamentally undemocratic, the ubiquitous agreements helped Google and other firms commandeer personal data as if by fiat.
  • n the choices we make as consumers and private citizens, we have always traded some of our autonomy to gain other rewards. Many people, it seems clear, experience surveillance capitalism less as a prison, where their agency is restricted in a noxious way, than as an all-inclusive resort, where their agency is restricted in a pleasing way
  • Zuboff makes a convincing case that this is a short-sighted and dangerous view — that the bargain we’ve struck with the internet giants is a Faustian one
  • but her case would have been stronger still had she more fully addressed the benefits side of the ledger.
  • there’s a piece missing. While Zuboff’s assessment of the costs that people incur under surveillance capitalism is exhaustive, she largely ignores the benefits people receive in return — convenience, customization, savings, entertainment, social connection, and so on
  • hat the industries of the future will seek to manufacture is the self.
  • Behavior modification is the thread that ties today’s search engines, social networks, and smartphone trackers to tomorrow’s facial-recognition systems, emotion-detection sensors, and artificial-intelligence bots.
  • All of Facebook’s information wrangling and algorithmic fine-tuning, she writes, “is aimed at solving one problem: how and when to intervene in the state of play that is your daily life in order to modify your behavior and thus sharply increase the predictability of your actions now, soon, and later.”
  • “The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale,” a top Silicon Valley data scientist told her in an interview. “We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us.”
  • This goal, she suggests, is not limited to Facebook. It is coming to guide much of the economy, as financial and social power shifts to the surveillance capitalists
  • Combining rich information on individuals’ behavioral triggers with the ability to deliver precisely tailored and timed messages turns out to be a recipe for behavior modification on an unprecedented scale.
  • it was Facebook, with its incredibly detailed data on people’s social lives, that grasped digital media’s full potential for behavior modification. By using what it called its “social graph” to map the intentions, desires, and interactions of literally billions of individuals, it saw that it could turn its network into a worldwide Skinner box, employing psychological triggers and rewards to program not only what people see but how they react.
  • spying on the populace is not the end game. The real prize lies in figuring out ways to use the data to shape how people think and act. “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the computer scientist Alan Kay once observed. And the best way to predict behavior is to script it.
  • competition for personal data intensified. It was no longer enough to monitor people online; making better predictions required that surveillance be extended into homes, stores, schools, workplaces, and the public squares of cities and towns. Much of the recent innovation in the tech industry has entailed the creation of products and services designed to vacuum up data from every corner of our lives
  • “The typical complaint is that privacy is eroded, but that is misleading,” Zuboff writes. “In the larger societal pattern, privacy is not eroded but redistributed . . . . Instead of people having the rights to decide how and what they will disclose, these rights are concentrated within the domain of surveillance capitalism.” The transfer of decision rights is also a transfer of autonomy and agency, from the citizen to the corporation.
  • What we lose under this regime is something more fundamental than privacy. It’s the right to make our own decisions about privacy — to draw our own lines between those aspects of our lives we are comfortable sharing and those we are not
  • Other possible ways of organizing online markets, such as through paid subscriptions for apps and services, never even got a chance to be tested.
  • Online surveillance came to be viewed as normal and even necessary by politicians, government bureaucrats, and the general public
  • Google and other Silicon Valley companies benefited directly from the government’s new stress on digital surveillance. They earned millions through contracts to share their data collection and analysis techniques with the National Security Agenc
  • As much as the dot-com crash, the horrors of 9/11 set the stage for the rise of surveillance capitalism. Zuboff notes that, in 2000, members of the Federal Trade Commission, frustrated by internet companies’ lack of progress in adopting privacy protections, began formulating legislation to secure people’s control over their online information and severely restrict the companies’ ability to collect and store it. It seemed obvious to the regulators that ownership of personal data should by default lie in the hands of private citizens, not corporations.
  • The 9/11 attacks changed the calculus. The centralized collection and analysis of online data, on a vast scale, came to be seen as essential to national security. “The privacy provisions debated just months earlier vanished from the conversation more or less overnight,”
Javier E

Opinion | The 1619 Chronicles - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-1619-project-criticisms.html

1619 history politics project racism 1776 Founding journalism

shared by Javier E on 21 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The 1619 Project introduced a date, previously obscure to most Americans, that ought always to have been thought of as seminal — and probably now will. It offered fresh reminders of the extent to which Black freedom was a victory gained by courageous Black Americans, and not just a gift obtained from benevolent whites.
  • in a point missed by many of the 1619 Project’s critics, it does not reject American values. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, its creator and leading voice, concluded in her essay for the project, “I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.” It’s an unabashedly patriotic thought.
  • ambition can be double-edged. Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded
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  • on these points — and for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize — the 1619 Project has failed.
  • That doesn’t mean that the project seeks to erase the Declaration of Independence from history. But it does mean that it seeks to dethrone the Fourth of July by treating American history as a story of Black struggle against white supremacy — of which the Declaration is, for all of its high-flown rhetoric, supposed to be merely a part.
  • he deleted assertions went to the core of the project’s most controversial goal, “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.”
  • She then challenged me to find any instance in which the project stated that “using 1776 as our country’s birth date is wrong,” that it “should not be taught to schoolchildren,” and that the only one “that should be taught” was 1619. “Good luck unearthing any of us arguing that,” she added.
  • I emailed her to ask if she could point to any instances before this controversy in which she had acknowledged that her claims about 1619 as “our true founding” had been merely metaphorical. Her answer was that the idea of treating the 1619 date metaphorically should have been so obvious that it went without saying.
  • “1619. It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?”
  • Here is an excerpt from the introductory essay to the project by The New York Times Magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, as it appeared in print in August 2019 (italics added):
  • In his introduction, Silverstein argues that America’s “defining contradictions” were born in August 1619, when a ship carrying 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from what is present-day Angola arrived in Point Comfort, in the English colony of Virginia. And the title page of Hannah-Jones’s essay for the project insists that “our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written.”
  • What was surprising was that in 1776 a politically formidable “defining contradiction” — “that all men are created equal” — came into existence through the Declaration of Independence. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1859, that foundational document would forever serve as a “rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.”
  • As for the notion that the Declaration’s principles were “false” in 1776, ideals aren’t false merely because they are unrealized, much less because many of the men who championed them, and the nation they created, hypocritically failed to live up to them.
  • These two flaws led to a third, conceptual, error. “Out of slavery — and the anti-Black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional,” writes Silverstein.
  • Nearly everything? What about, say, the ideas contained by the First Amendment? Or the spirit of openness that brought millions of immigrants through places like Ellis Island? Or the enlightened worldview of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift? Or the spirit of scientific genius and discovery exemplified by the polio vaccine and the moon landing?
  • On the opposite side of the moral ledger, to what extent does anti-Black racism figure in American disgraces such as the brutalization of Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act or the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II?
  • The world is complex. So are people and their motives. The job of journalism is to take account of that complexity, not simplify it out of existence through the adoption of some ideological orthodoxy.
  • This mistake goes far to explain the 1619 Project’s subsequent scholarly and journalistic entanglements. It should have been enough to make strong yet nuanced claims about the role of slavery and racism in American history. Instead, it issued categorical and totalizing assertions that are difficult to defend on close examination.
  • It should have been enough for the project to serve as curator for a range of erudite and interesting voices, with ample room for contrary takes. Instead, virtually every writer in the project seems to sing from the same song sheet, alienating other potential supporters of the project and polarizing national debate.
  • James McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Battle Cry of Freedom” and a past president of the American Historical Association. He was withering: “Almost from the outset,” McPherson told the World Socialist Web Site, “I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective.”
  • In particular, McPherson objected to Hannah-Jones’s suggestion that the struggle against slavery and racism and for civil rights and democracy was, if not exclusively then mostly, a Black one. As she wrote in her essay: “The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of Black resistance.”
  • McPherson demurs: “From the Quakers in the 18th century, on through the abolitionists in the antebellum, to the Radical Republicans in the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the N.A.A.C.P., which was an interracial organization founded in 1909, down through the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, there have been a lot of whites who have fought against slavery and racial discrimination, and against racism,” he said. “And that’s what’s missing from this perspective.”
  • Wilentz’s catalog of the project’s mistakes is extensive. Hannah-Jones’s essay claimed that by 1776 Britain was “deeply conflicted” over its role in slavery. But despite the landmark Somerset v. Stewart court ruling in 1772, which held that slavery was not supported by English common law, it remained deeply embedded in the practices of the British Empire. The essay claimed that, among Londoners, “there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade” by 1776. But the movement to abolish the British slave trade only began about a decade later — inspired, in part, Wilentz notes, by American antislavery agitation that had started in the 1760s and 1770s.
  • ie M. Harris, an expert on pre-Civil War African-American life and slavery. “On Aug. 19 of last year,” Harris wrote, “I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones … repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.”
  • The larger problem is that The Times’s editors, however much background reading they might have done, are not in a position to adjudicate historical disputes. That should have been an additional reason for the 1619 Project to seek input from, and include contributions by, an intellectually diverse range of scholarly voices. Yet not only does the project choose a side, it also brooks no doubt.
  • “It is finally time to tell our story truthfully,” the magazine declares on its 1619 cover page. Finally? Truthfully? Is The Times suggesting that distinguished historians, like the ones who have seriously disputed aspects of the project, had previously been telling half-truths or falsehoods?
  • unlike other dates, 1776 uniquely marries letter and spirit, politics and principle: The declaration that something new is born, combined with the expression of an ideal that — because we continue to believe in it even as we struggle to live up to it — binds us to the date.
  • On the other, the 1619 Project has become, partly by its design and partly because of avoidable mistakes, a focal point of the kind of intense national debate that columnists are supposed to cover, and that is being widely written about outside The Times. To avoid writing about it on account of the first scruple is to be derelict in our responsibility toward the second.
caelengrubb

Opinion | There Is No Scientific Method - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-is-no-scientific-method.html

shared by caelengrubb on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Maybe the method on which science relies exists wherever we find systematic investigation. In saying there is no scientific method, what I mean, more precisely, is that there is no distinctly scientific method.
  • Our knowledge separates into layers: Experience provides a base for a higher layer of more conceptual understanding. This is as true for poetry as for science.
  • Suppose you and I try to define courage. We would begin with the meaning that is familiar to both of us. This shared meaning will be used to check proposed definitions and provide typical examples of it. Commonly, we may not be able to explain what something is, but we know it when we see it
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  • Yet we wouldn’t accept such a definition even if it itemized every possible exception. Why? Because, from a different point of view, this definition is inadequate: not because it fails to bring the meaning of the definition closer to the actual meaning of courage, but because all it does is try to save the original definition by tacking on ad hoc exceptions.
  • When a scientist tests a hypothesis and finds that its predictions do not quite match available observations, there is always the option of forcing the hypothesis to fit the data.
  • One can resort to curve-fitting, in which a hypothesis is patched together from different independent pieces, each piece more or less fitting a different part of the data
  • The lesson is that it is not just the observed facts that drive a scientist’s theorizing
  • Science education, however, has persistently relied more on empirical fit as its trump card, perhaps partly to separate science from those dangerous seat-of-the-pants theorizings (including philosophy) that pretend to find their way apart from such evidence.
  • Yet in science, just as in defining a concept like courage, ad hoc exceptions are sometimes exactly what are needed
caelengrubb

I'm So Totally Over Newton's Laws of Motion | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...im-totally-newtons-laws-motion

shared by caelengrubb on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • We don't need to be stuck with the traditions of the past if we want students to understand physics.
  • Newton's First Law: An object in motion stays in motion unless acted on by a force. An object at rest, stays at rest unless acted on by a force.Newton's Second Law: The magnitude of an object's acceleration is proportional to the net force and inversely proportional to the mass of the object.Newton's Third Law: For every force there is an equal and opposite force. (I've already complained about the way most books talk about this one)
  • Newton's First Law Is Really About Aristotle
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  • Remember that before Galileo and Newton, people looked to Aristotle for ideas about physics
  • Yes, it's true that Aristotle wasn't a scientist since he didn't really do any experiments. However, that didn't stop him from become a huge influence on the way people think about physics
  • Since Newton's ideas are Laws, does that mean that they are true? No---there is no truth in science, there are just models. Some models work better than others, and some models are wrong but still useful
  • Let's write down Newton's Second Law in its common form as an equation:Although this is a very useful model, it doesn't always work. If you take a proton moving at half the speed of light and push on it with a force, you cannot use this to find the new velocity of the proton---but it's still a great model. So, maybe we shouldn't call it a Law.
  • Science is all about models. If there is one thing I've tried to be consistent about---it's that we build models in science. These models could be conceptual, physical, or mathematical
  • Do I think that we should ban Newton's Laws? No. There is still a place to talk about the historical development of the interaction between forces and matter and Newton played a large role here (but so did Aristotle and Galileo
  • Just because most physics textbooks (but not all) have been very explicit about Newton's Laws of Motion, this doesn't mean that is the best way for students to learn.
margogramiak

5 New Things We Learned About COVID-19 In October 2020 | HuffPost Life - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...020_l_5fa05e09c5b6b6b60e9299cb

shared by margogramiak on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • 47 million known cases
  • 47 million known cases
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      It's hard to even conceptualize that amount of people
  • The CDC previously defined close contact as being within 6 feet of someone infected with COVID-19 for at least 15 minutes or more.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      This is the OLD definition
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • what it means to have been in “close contact”
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      I definitely need clarity on this...
  • cumulative
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      NEW definition specifies that it's not just at a time, it's all together.
  • He wore a mask, but there were times during the day when he was with individuals who did not.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      Interesting
  • nd it will likely change how schools and offices handle positive cases. If, say, a child is exposed to a person with COVID-19 for five minutes at three points during the day, there may need to be considerations for quarantine
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      I can definitely see how this new definition could affect school exposure
  • virus twice
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      That's horrible. People get it once, then don't correct what they did wrong the first time and get it again.
  • his second round of illness was much more severe and required hospitalization.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      That's interesting
  • it appears to be extremely rare as of now.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      I guess that's good
  • five months
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      That's a long time!
  • Also, just because a person no longer has antibodies does not mean they’ve necessarily lost immunity
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      Wow, I'd like to hear more about the science behind that.
  • Researchers analyzed child care centers that stayed open throughout the pandemic and found that employees who watched those kids all day were not at any greater risk of contracting COVID-19 than they would have been otherwise.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      Wow that seems like very valuable information that could be applied to other situations
  • wear a mask.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      So simple, yet people don't.
  • There just has not been a lot of data so far.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      Why not?
  • under the age of 6
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      Okay, so maybe it doesn't apply to other situations so much...
  • Perhaps most importantly, day cares were generally very good about preventive measures, especially hand-washing and disinfecting frequently.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      I guess that proves effectiveness of those things...
  • the virus may be associated with significant mental decline in some cases.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      that's terrifying
  • They found that some test-takers who had had COVID-19 had an “equivalent to the average 10-year decline in global performance between the ages of 20 to 70,” the researchers said.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      Oh my gosh...
  • Still, the new research provides clues about COVID-19′s long-term effects, and it’s certainly something experts will be paying attention to moving forward.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      I hope information like this becomes wide-spread, because sometimes scaring people has positive effects.
knudsenlu

The History of Dice Reflects Beliefs in Fate and Chance - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...553742

dice beliefs fate chance history research

shared by knudsenlu on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Dice, in their standard six-sided form, seem like the simplest kind of device—almost a classic embodiment of chance. But a new study of more than 100 examples from the last 2,000 years or so unearthed in the Netherlands shows that they have not always looked exactly the way they do now. What’s more, the shifts in dice’s appearance may reflect people’s changing sense of what exactly is behind a roll—fate, or probability.
  • Did it matter to game players that these dice were not fair? “We don’t know for sure,” Eerkens says. The way Romans wrote about dice falls suggests they were regarded as signs of supernatural favor or of a player’s fortune, however. The archaeologist Ellen Swift, in her book Roman Artifacts and Society, writes that high rolls had associations of benevolence and felicity, and that rolling three sixes at the same time seems to have been called a Venus. “Dice potentially played an important role in conceptualizing divine action in the world,” she writes.
  • At the same time, dice tend to get smaller, perhaps to make them easier to hide, as gambling was not favored by the increasingly powerful religious authorities. Some of the study’s dice from this era, in fact, were found all together in a small hole in a garbage heap, including one cheater’s die with an extra three. Could it be someone saw the light and forswore dice?
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  • . In the 17th century, even Galileo writes about why, in a game with three dice, the number 10 should come up more than the number 9. It’s an observation that one would only be able to detect after thousands of rolls, but the reason behind it involves how many combinations of numbers can add up to each different option.
  • All these changes in dice come about, says Eerkens, “as different astronomers are coming up with new ideas about the world, and mathematicians are starting to understand numbers and probability.” Which came first: Did people begin to intuitively understand what true chance felt like, and adjusted dice accordingly, or did it trickle out from what would eventually become known as the scientific community?
  • And it does make you wonder: Would you know that fair dice should fall equally on each side, or that in a three-dice game, it’s better to bet on 10 than nine, if someone hadn’t told you?
manhefnawi

Scientists Successfully Create Brain-to-Brain Link | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...sfully-create-brain-brain-link

Technology Brain Science Thinking Brain Activity

shared by manhefnawi on 14 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Imagine a future where you could transmit a unique feeling, a hard-to-translate thought process, or precise motor movements via a neural pattern from your brain to someone else’s brain, sharing what can’t otherwise be easily communicated. This is the goal of new research conducted at the University of Washington (UW).
  • “We wanted to show that this brain-to-brain interface can be used to do something highly interactive and collaborative
  • The function of the experiment is conceptually simple, Stocco says. Two people sit apart in different buildings. One, the respondent, is wearing a cap connected to electroencephalography machine (EEG) that records electrical brain activity. A magnetic coil is placed behind the head of the other participant, the inquirer. The coil delivers “transcranial magnetic stimulation.” The respondent is given an object to think of, much like in the game Twenty Questions. Then the inquirer chooses questions to send to the respondent via the Internet. The respondent answers the questions using only their brainwaves, by thinking the answer “yes” or “no.”
Javier E

The Cancel Culture Checklist - Persuasion - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...e-cancel-culture-checklist-c63

psychology bias language social media cancel culture criticism

shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • a third of Americans say that they are personally worried about losing their jobs or missing out on career opportunities if they express their real political opinions.
  • Cancel culture now poses a real threat to intellectual freedom in the United States.
  • Americans in all walks of life have been publicly shamed, pressured into ritualistic apologies or summarily fired
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  • But critics of the critics of cancel culture make a powerful retort. Accusing others of canceling can, they claim, be a way to stigmatize legitimate criticism. As Hannah Giorgis writes in the Atlantic, “critical tweets are not censorship.”
  • So what, exactly, does a cancellation consist of? And how does it differ from the exercise of free speech and robust critical debate?
  • At a conceptual level, the difference is clear. Criticism marshals evidence and arguments in a rational effort to persuade.
  • Canceling, by contrast, seeks to organize and manipulate the social or media environment in order to isolate, deplatform or intimidate ideological opponents
  • its intent—or at least its predictable outcome—is to coerce conformity and reduce the scope for forms of criticism that are not sanctioned by the prevailing consensus of some local majority.
  • In practice, however, telling canceling apart from criticism can be difficult because both take the form of criticizing others.
  • The more signs you see, the more certain you can be that you are looking at a cancel campaign.
  • A better approach might therefore be diagnostic. Like the symptoms of cancer, the hallmarks of a cancellation are many. Though not all instances involve every single characteristic, they all involve some of its key attribute
  • Six warning signs make up my personal checklist for cancel culture.
  • Punitiveness
  • A critical culture seeks to correct rather than punish. In science, the penalty for being wrong is not that you lose your job or your friends. Normally, the only penalty is that you lose the argument
  • Canceling, by contrast, seeks to punish rather than correct—and often for a single misstep rather than a long track record of failure
  • Deplatforming
  • A critical culture tolerates dissent rather than silencing it. It understands that dissent can seem obnoxious, harmful, hateful and, yes, unsafe.
  • Canceling, by contrast, seeks to shut up and shout down its targets. Cancelers often define the mere act of disagreeing with them as a threat to their safety or even an act of violence
  • Organization
  • Critical culture relies on persuasion. The way to win an argument is to convince others that you are right.
  • By contrast, it’s common to see cancelers organize hundreds of petition-signers or thousands of social media users to dig up and prosecute an indictment.
  • Secondary Boycotts
  • With its commitments to exploring a wide range of ideas and correcting rather than coercing the errant, a critical culture sees no value in instilling a climate of fear
  • But instilling fear is what canceling is all about. By choosing targets unpredictably (almost anything can trigger a campaign), providing no safe harbors (even conformists can get hit), and implicitly threatening anyone who sides with those who are targeted, canceling sends the message: “you could be next.”
  • Moral Grandstanding
  • Precisely because speech can be hurtful, critical culture discourages extreme rhetoric. It encourages people to listen to each other, to use evidence and argumentation, to behave reasonably and to avoid personal attacks.
  • Cancel culture is much more invested in what philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke call “moral grandstanding”: the display of moral outrage to impress one’s peer group, dominate others, or both
  • Truthiness
  • Concern for accuracy is the north star of a critical culture. Not everyone gets every fact right, nor do people always agree on what is true; and yet people in a critical culture try to present their own and others’ viewpoints honestly and accurately.
  • canceling is not about seeking truth or persuading others; it is a form of information warfare, in which truthiness suffices if it serves the cause.
  • Those are my six warning signs. If you spot one or two, you should fear that a canceling may be happening; if you see five or six, you can be sure.
  • Though our critics like to claim that those of us who worry about cancel culture just don’t like being criticized on the internet, cancel culture is all too real. And though it may at times bear a superficial resemblance to critical culture, the two are diametrically opposed—and not so very difficult to tell apart.
Javier E

Opinion | Richard Powers on What We Can Learn From Trees - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...in-podcast-richard-powers.html

trees buddhism immanence nature stewardship science knowledge

shared by Javier E on 06 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • Theo and Robin have a nightly ritual where they say a prayer that Alyssa, the deceased wife and mother, taught them: May all sentient beings be free from needless suffering. That prayer itself comes from the four immeasurables in the Buddhist tradition.
  • When we enter into or recover this sense of kinship that was absolutely fundamental to so many indigenous cultures everywhere around the world at many, many different points in history, that there is no radical break between us and our kin, that even consciousness is shared, to some degree and to a large degree, with a lot of other creatures, then death stops seeming like the enemy and it starts seeming like one of the most ingenious kinds of design for keeping evolution circulating and keeping the experiment running and recombining.
  • Look, I’m 64 years old. I can remember sitting in psychology class as an undergraduate and having my professor declare that no, of course animals don’t have emotions because they don’t have an internal life. They don’t have conscious awareness. And so what looks to you like your dog being extremely happy or being extremely guilty, which dogs do so beautifully, is just your projection, your anthropomorphizing of those other creatures. And this prohibition against anthropomorphism created an artificial gulf between even those animals that are ridiculously near of kin to us, genetically.
  • ...62 more annotations...
  • I don’t know if that sounds too complicated. But the point is, it’s not just giving up domination. It’s giving up this sense of separateness in favor of a sense of kinship. And those people who do often wonder how they failed to see how much continuity there is in the more-than-human world with the human world.
  • to go from terror into being and into that sense that the experiment is sacred, not this one outcome of the experiment, is to immediately transform the way that you think even about very fundamental social and economic and cultural things. If the experiment is sacred, how can we possibly justify our food systems, for instance?
  • when I first went to the Smokies and hiked up into the old growth in the Southern Appalachians, it was like somebody threw a switch. There was some odd filter that had just been removed, and the world sounded different and smelled different.
  • richard powersYeah. In human exceptionalism, we may be completely aware of evolutionary continuity. We may understand that we have a literal kinship with the rest of creation, that all life on Earth employs the same genetic code, that there is a very small core of core genes and core proteins that is shared across all the kingdoms and phyla of life. But conceptually, we still have this demented idea that somehow consciousness creates a sanctity and a separation that almost nullifies the continuous elements of evolution and biology that we’ve come to understand.
  • if we want to begin this process of rehabilitation and transformation of consciousness that we are going to need in order to become part of the living Earth, it is going to be other kinds of minds that give us that clarity and strength and diversity and alternative way of thinking that could free us from this stranglehold of thought that looks only to the maximizing return on investment in very leverageable ways.
  • richard powersIt amazed me to get to the end of the first draft of “Bewilderment” and to realize how much Buddhism was in the book, from the simplest things.
  • I think there is nothing more science inflected than being out in the living world and the more-than-human world and trying to understand what’s happening.
  • And of course, we can combine this with what we were talking about earlier with death. If we see all of evolution as somehow leading up to us, all of human, cultural evolution leading up to neoliberalism and here we are just busily trying to accumulate and make meaning for ourselves, death becomes the enemy.
  • And you’re making the point in different ways throughout the book that it is the minds we think of as unusual, that we would diagnose as having some kind of problem or dysfunction that are, in some cases, are the only ones responding to the moment in the most common sense way it deserves. It is almost everybody else’s brain that has been broken.
  • it isn’t surprising. If you think of the characteristics of this dominant culture that we’ve been talking about — the fixation on control, the fixation on mastery, the fixation on management and accumulation and the resistance of decay — it isn’t surprising that that culture is also threatened by difference and divergence. It seeks out old, stable hierarchies — clear hierarchies — of control, and anything that’s not quite exploitable or leverageable in the way that the normal is terrifying and threatening.
  • And the more I looked for it, the more it pervaded the book.
  • ezra kleinI’ve heard you say that it has changed the way you measure a good day. Can you tell me about that?richard powersThat’s true.I suppose when I was still enthralled to commodity-mediated individualist market-driven human exceptionalism — we need a single word for this
  • And since moving to the Smokies and since publishing “The Overstory,” my days have been entirely inverted. I wake up, I go to the window, and I look outside. Or I step out onto the deck — if I haven’t been sleeping on the deck, which I try to do as much as I can in the course of the year — and see what’s in the air, gauge the temperature and the humidity and the wind and see what season it is and ask myself, you know, what’s happening out there now at 1,700 feet or 4,000 feet or 5,000 feet.
  • let me talk specifically about the work of a scientist who has herself just recently published a book. It’s Dr. Suzanne Simard, and the book is “Finding the Mother Tree.” Simard has been instrumental in a revolution in our way of thinking about what’s happening underground at the root level in a forest.
  • it was a moving moment for me, as an easterner, to stand up there and to say, this is what an eastern forest looks like. This is what a healthy, fully-functioning forest looks like. And I’m 56 years old, and I’d never seen it.
  • the other topics of that culture tend to circle back around these sorts of trends, human fascinations, ways of magnifying our throw weight and our ability and removing the last constraints to our desires and, in particular, to eliminate the single greatest enemy of meaning in the culture of the technological sublime that is, itself, such a strong instance of the culture of human separatism and commodity-mediated individualist capitalism— that is to say, the removal of death.
  • Why is it that we have known about the crisis of species extinction for at least half a century and longer? And I mean the lay public, not just scientists. But why has this been general knowledge for a long time without public will demanding some kind of action or change
  • And when you make kinship beyond yourself, your sense of meaning gravitates outwards into that reciprocal relationship, into that interdependence. And you know, it’s a little bit like scales falling off your eyes. When you do turn that corner, all of the sources of anxiety that are so present and so deeply internalized become much more identifiable. And my own sense of hope and fear gets a much larger frame of reference to operate in.
  • I think, for most of my life, until I did kind of wake up to forests and to trees, I shared — without really understanding this as a kind of concession or a kind of subscription — I did share this cultural consensus that meaning is a private thing that we do for ourselves and by ourselves and that our kind of general sense of the discoveries of the 19th and 20th century have left us feeling a bit unsponsored and adrift beyond the accident of human existence.
  • The largest single influence on any human being’s mode of thought is other human beings. So if you are surrounded by lots of terrified but wishful-thinking people who want to believe that somehow the cavalry is going to come at the last minute and that we don’t really have to look inwards and change our belief in where meaning comes from, that we will somehow be able to get over the finish line with all our stuff and that we’ll avert this disaster, as we have other kinds of disasters in the past.
  • I think what was happening to me at that time, as I was turning outward and starting to take the non-human world seriously, is my sense of meaning was shifting from something that was entirely about me and authored by me outward into this more collaborative, reciprocal, interdependent, exterior place that involved not just me but all of these other ways of being that I could make kinship with.
  • And I think I was right along with that sense that somehow we are a thing apart. We can make purpose and make meaning completely arbitrarily. It consists mostly of trying to be more in yourself, of accumulating in one form or another.
  • I can’t really be out for more than two or three miles before my head just fills with associations and ideas and scenes and character sketches. And I usually have to rush back home to keep it all in my head long enough to get it down on paper.
  • for my journey, the way to characterize this transition is from being fascinated with technologies of mastery and control and what they’re doing to us as human beings, how they’re changing what the capacities and affordances of humanity are and how we narrate ourselves, to being fascinated with technologies and sciences of interdependence and cooperation, of those sciences that increase our sense of kinship and being one of many, many neighbors.
  • And that’s an almost impossible persuasion to rouse yourself from if you don’t have allies. And I think the one hopeful thing about the present is the number of people trying to challenge that consensual understanding and break away into a new way of looking at human standing is growing.
  • And when you do subscribe to a culture like that and you are confronted with the reality of your own mortality, as I was when I was living in Stanford, that sense of stockpiling personal meaning starts to feel a little bit pointless.
  • And I just head out. I head out based on what the day has to offer. And to have that come first has really changed not only how I write, but what I’ve been writing. And I think it really shows in “Bewilderment.” It’s a totally different kind of book from my previous 12.
  • the marvelous thing about the work, which continues to get more sophisticated and continues to turn up newer and newer astonishments, is that there was odd kind of reciprocal interdependence and cooperation across the species barrier, that Douglas firs and birches were actually involved in these sharing back and forth of essential nutrients. And that’s a whole new way of looking at forest.
  • she began to see that the forests were actually wired up in very complex and identifiable ways and that there was an enormous system of resource sharing going on underground, that trees were sharing not only sugars and the hydrocarbons necessary for survival, but also secondary metabolites. And these were being passed back and forth, both symbiotically between the trees and the fungi, but also across the network to other trees so that there were actually trees in wired up, fungally-connected forests where large, dominant, healthy trees were subsidizing, as it were, trees that were injured or not in favorable positions or damaged in some way or just failing to thrive.
  • so when I was still pretty much a card-carrying member of that culture, I had this sense that to become a better person and to get ahead and to really make more of myself, I had to be as productive as possible. And that meant waking up every morning and getting 1,000 words that I was proud of. And it’s interesting that I would even settle on a quantitative target. That’s very typical for that kind of mindset that I’m talking about — 1,000 words and then you’re free, and then you can do what you want with the day.
  • there will be a threshold, as there have been for these other great social transformations that we’ve witnessed in the last couple of decades where somehow it goes from an outsider position to absolutely mainstream and common sense.
  • I am persuaded by those scholars who have showed the degree to which the concept of nature is itself an artificial construction that’s born of cultures of human separatism. I believe that everything that life does is part of the living enterprise, and that includes the construction of cities. And there is no question at all the warning that you just gave about nostalgia creating a false binary between the built world and the true natural world is itself a form of cultural isolation.
  • Religion is a technology to discipline, to discipline certain parts of the human impulse. A lot of the book revolves around the decoded neurofeedback machine, which is a very real literalization of a technology, of changing the way we think
  • one of the things I think that we have to take seriously is that we have created technologies to supercharge some parts of our natural impulse, the capitalism I think should be understood as a technology to supercharge the growth impulse, and it creates some wonders out of that and some horrors out of that.
  • richard powersSure. I base my machine on existing technology. Decoded neurofeedback is a kind of nascent field of exploration. You can read about it; it’s been publishing results for a decade. I first came across it in 2013. It involves using fMRI to record the brain activity of a human being who is learning a process, interacting with an object or engaged in a certain emotional state. That neural activity is recorded and stored as a data structure. A second subsequent human being is then also scanned in real time and fed kinds of feedback based on their own internal neural activity as determined by a kind of software analysis of their fMRI data structures.
  • And they are queued little by little to approximate, to learn how to approximate, the recorded states of the original subject. When I first read about this, I did get a little bit of a revelation. I did feel my skin pucker and think, if pushed far enough, this would be something like a telepathy conduit. It would be a first big step in answering that age-old question of what does it feel like to be something other than we are
  • in the book I simply take that basic concept and extend it, juke it up a little bit, blur the line between what the reader might think is possible right now and what they might wonder about, and maybe even introduce possibilities for this empathetic transference
  • ezra kleinOne thing I loved about the role this played in the book is that it’s highlighting its inverse. So a reader might look at this and say, wow, wouldn’t that be cool if we had a machine that could in real time change how we think and change our neural pathways and change our mental state in a particular direction? But of course, all of society is that machine,
  • Robin and Theo are in an airport. And you’ve got TVs everywhere playing the news which is to say playing a constant loop of outrage, and disaster, and calamity. And Robbie, who’s going through these neural feedback sessions during this period, turns to his dad and says, “Dad, you know how the training’s rewiring my brain? This is what is rewiring everybody else.”
  • ezra kleinI think Marshall McLuhan knew it all. I really do. Not exactly what it would look like, but his view and Postman’s view that we are creating a digital global nervous system is a way they put it, it was exactly right. A nervous system, it was such the exact right metaphor.
  • the great insight of McLuhan, to me, what now gets called the medium is the message is this idea that the way media acts upon us is not in the content it delivers. The point of Twitter is not the link that you click or even the tweet that you read; it is that the nature and structure of the Twitter system itself begins to act on your system, and you become more like it.If you watch a lot of TV, you become more like TV. If you watch a lot of Twitter, you become more like Twitter, Facebook more like Facebook. Your identities become more important to you — that the content is distraction from the medium, and the medium changes you
  • it is happening to all of us in ways that at least we are not engaging in intentionally, not at that level of how do we want to be transformed.
  • richard powersI believe that the digital neural system is now so comprehensive that the idea that you could escape it somewhere, certainly not in the Smokies, even more remotely, I think, becomes more and more laughable. Yeah, and to build on this idea of the medium being the message, not the way in which we become more like the forms and affordances of the medium is that we begin to expect that those affordances, the method in which those media are used, the physiological dependencies and castes of behavior and thought that are required to operate them and interact with them are actual — that they’re real somehow, and that we just take them into human nature and say no, this is what we’ve always wanted and we’ve simply been able to become more like our true selves.
  • Well, the warpage in our sense of time, the warpage in our sense of place, are profound. The ways in which digital feedback and the affordances of social media and all the rest have changed our expectations with regard to what we need to concentrate on, what we need to learn for ourselves, are changing profoundly.
  • If you look far enough back, you can find Socrates expressing great anxiety and suspicion about the ways in which writing is going to transform the human brain and human expectation. He was worried that somehow it was going to ruin our memories. Well, it did up to a point — nothing like the way the digital technologies have ruined our memories.
  • my tradition is Jewish, the Sabbath is a technology, is a technology to create a different relationship between the human being, and time, and growth, and productive society than you would have without the Sabbath which is framed in terms of godliness but is also a way of creating separation from the other impulses of the weak.
  • Governments are a technology, monogamy is a technology, a religiously driven technology, but now one that is culturally driven. And these things do good and they do bad. I’m not making an argument for any one of them in particular. But the idea that we would need to invent something wholly new to come up with a way to change the way human beings act is ridiculous
  • My view of the story of this era is that capitalism was one of many forces, and it has become, in many societies, functionally the only one that it was in relationship with religion, it was in relationship with more rooted communities.
  • it has become not just an economic system but a belief system, and it’s a little bit untrammeled. I’m not an anti-capitalist person, but I believe it needs countervailing forces. And my basic view is that it doesn’t have them anymore.
  • the book does introduce this kind of fable, this kind of thought experiment about the way the affordances that a new and slightly stronger technology of empathy might deflect. First of all, the story of a little boy and then the story of his father who’s scrambling to be a responsible single parent. And then, beyond that, the community of people who hear about this boy and become fascinated with him as a narrative, which again ripples outward through these digital technologies in ways that can’t be controlled or whose consequences can be foreseen.
  • I’ve talked about it before is something I’ve said is that I think a push against, functionally, materialism and want is an important weight in our society that we need. And when people say it is the way we’ll deal with climate change in the three to five year time frame, I become much more skeptical because to the point of things like the technology you have in the book with neural feedback, I do think one of the questions you have to ask is, socially and culturally, how do you move people’s minds so you can then move their politics?
  • You’re going to need something, it seems to me, outside of politics, that changes humans’ sense of themselves more fundamentally. And that takes a minute at the scale of billions.
  • richard powersWell, you are correct. And I don’t think it’s giving away any great reveal in the book to say that a reader who gets far enough into the story probably has this moment of recursive awareness where they, he or she comes to understand that what Robin is doing in this gradual training on the cast of mind of some other person is precisely what they’re doing in the act of reading the novel “Bewilderment” — by living this act of active empathy for these two characters, they are undergoing their own kind of neurofeedback.
  • The more we understand about the complexities of living systems, of organisms and the evolution of organisms, the more capable it is to feel a kind of spiritual awe. And that certainly makes it easier to have reverence for the experiment beyond me and beyond my species. I don’t think those are incommensurable or incompatible ways of knowing the world. In fact, I think to invoke one last time that Buddhist precept of interbeing, I think there is a kind of interbeing between the desire, the true selfless desire to understand the world out there through presence, care, measurement, attention, reproduction of experiment and the desire to have a spiritual affinity and shared fate with the world out there. They’re really the same project.
  • richard powersWell, sure. If we turn back to the new forestry again and researchers like Suzanne Simard who were showing the literal interconnectivity across species boundaries and the cooperation of resource sharing between different species in a forest, that is rigorous science, rigorous reproducible science. And it does participate in that central principle of practice, or collection of practices, which always requires the renunciation of personal wish and ego and prior belief in favor of empirical reproduction.
  • I’ve begun to see people beginning to build out of the humbling sciences a worldview that seems quite spiritual. And as you’re somebody who seems to me to have done that and it has changed your life, would you reflect on that a bit?
  • So much of the book is about the possibility of life beyond Earth. Tell me a bit about the role that’s playing. Why did you make the possibility of alien life in the way it might look and feel and evolve and act so central in a book about protecting and cherishing life here?
  • richard powersI’m glad that we’re slipping this in at the end because yes this framing of the book around this question of are we alone or does the universe want life it’s really important. Theo, Robin’s father, is an astrobiologist.
  • Imagine that everything happens just right so that every square inch of this place is colonized by new forms of experiments, new kinds of life. And the father trying to entertain his son with the story of this remarkable place in the sun just stopping him and saying, Dad, come on, that’s asking too much. Get real, that’s science fiction. That’s the vision that I had when I finished the book, an absolutely limitless sense of just how lucky we’ve had it here.
  • one thing I kept thinking about that didn’t make it into the final book but exists as a kind of parallel story in my own head is the father and son on some very distant planet in some very distant star, many light years from here, playing that same game. And the father saying, OK, now imagine a world that’s just the right size, and it has plate tectonics, and it has water, and it has a nearby moon to stabilize its rotation, and it has incredible security and safety from asteroids because of other large planets in the solar system.
  • they make this journey across the universe through all kinds of incubators, all kinds of petri dishes for life and the possibilities of life. And rather than answer the question — so where is everybody? — it keeps deferring the question, it keeps making that question more subtle and stranger
  • For the purposes of the book, Robin, who desperately believes in the sanctity of life beyond himself, begs his father for these nighttime, bedtime stories, and Theo gives him easy travel to other planets. Father and son going to a new planet based on the kinds of planets that Theo’s science is turning up and asking this question, what would life look like if it was able to get started here?
Javier E

Opinion | What's Ripping American Families Apart? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tranged-american-families.html

parenting psychology education trauma family

shared by Javier E on 30 Jul 21 - No Cached
  • At least 27 percent of Americans are estranged from a member of their own family, and research suggests about 40 percent of Americans have experienced estrangement at some point.
  • The most common form of estrangement is between adult children and one or both parents — a cut usually initiated by the child. A study published in 2010 found that parents in the U.S. are about twice as likely to be in a contentious relationship with their adult children as parents in Israel, Germany, England and Spain.
  • the children in these cases often cite harsh parenting, parental favoritism, divorce and poor and increasingly hostile communication often culminating in a volcanic event
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The parents in these cases are often completely bewildered by the accusations. They often remember a totally different childhood home and accuse their children of rewriting what happened.
  • a more individualistic culture has meant that the function of family has changed. Once it was seen as a bond of mutual duty and obligation, and now it is often seen as a launchpad for personal fulfillment. There’s more permission to cut off people who seem toxic in your life.
  • There’s a lot of real emotional abuse out there, but as Coleman put it in an essay in The Atlantic, “My recent research — and my clinical work over the past four decades — has shown me that you can be a conscientious parent and your kid may still want nothing to do with you when they’re older.”
  • Either way, there’s a lot of agony for all concerned. The children feel they have to live with the legacy of an abusive childhood. The parents feel rejected by the person they love most in the world, their own child, and they are powerless to do anything about it. There’s anger, grief and depression on all sides — painful holidays and birthdays — plus, the next generation often grows up without knowing their grandparents.
  • there seems to be a generational shift in what constitutes abuse. Practices that seemed like normal parenting to one generation are conceptualized as abusive, overbearing and traumatizing to another.
  • Becca Bland, founder of the British support and advocacy group Stand Alone, told the BBC: “Now I can put my needs first rather than trying to fix things beyond my control. But, yes, I’m angry I didn’t get the mother I wanted.”
  • A 2012 survey from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture found that almost three-quarters of parents of school-age kids said they eventually want to become their children’s best friend.
  • Some kids seem to think they need to cut off their parents just to have their own life. “My mom is really needy and I just don’t need that in my life,
  • In other cases, children may be blaming their parents for the fact that they are not succeeding as they had hoped — it’s Mom and Dad who screwed me up.
  • it feels like a piece of what seems to be the psychological unraveling of America
  • Terrible trends are everywhere. Major depression rates among youths aged 12 to 17 rose by almost 63 percent between 2013 and 2016. American suicide rates increased by 33 percent between 1999 and 2019. The percentage of Americans who say they have no close friends has quadrupled since 1990,
  • Fifty-four percent of Americans report sometimes or always feeling that no one knows them well, according to a 2018 Ipsos survey.
  • political tribalism becomes a mechanism with which people can shore themselves up, vanquish shame, fight for righteousness and find a sense of belonging.
  • if we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.
Javier E

The War in Ukraine Has Unleashed a New Word - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...uscism-ukraine-russia-war.html

ukraine language code code-switching russia russian

shared by Javier E on 24 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • As I read about Irpin, about Bucha, about Trostyanets, of the bodies crushed by tanks, of the bicyclists shot on the street, of the desecrated corpses, there it was, “рашизм,” again and again
  • Grasping its meaning requires crossing differences in alphabet and pronunciation, thinking our way into the experience of a bilingual society at war with a fascist empire.
  • “Pашизм” sounds like “fascism,” but with an “r” sound instead of an “f” at the beginning; it means, roughly, “Russian fascism.”
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  • The aggressor in this war keeps trying to push back toward a past as it never happened, toward nonsensical and necrophiliac accounts of history. Russia must conquer Ukraine, Vladimir Putin says, because of a baptism a thousand years ago, or because of bloodshed during World War II.
  • The new word “рашизм” is a useful conceptualization of Putin’s worldview. Far more than Western analysts, Ukrainians have noticed the Russian tilt toward fascism in the last decade.
  • Undistracted by Putin’s operational deployment of genocide talk, they have seen fascist practices in Russia: the cults of the leader and of the dead, the corporatist state, the mythical past, the censorship, the conspiracy theories, the centralized propaganda and now the war of destruction
  • we have tended to overlook the central example of fascism’s revival, which is the Putin regime in the Russian Federation.
  • A bilingual nation like Ukraine is not just a collection of bilingual individuals; it is an unending set of encounters in which people habitually adjust the language they use to other people and new settings, manipulating language in ways that are foreign to monolingual nations
  • I have gone on Ukrainian television and radio, taken questions in Russian and answered them in Ukrainian, without anyone for a moment finding that switch worthy of mention.
  • Ukrainians change languages effortlessly — not just as situations change, but also to make situations change, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, or even in the middle of a word.
  • “Pашизм” is a word built up from the inside, from several languages, as a complex of puns and references that reveal a bilingual society thinking out its predicament and communicating to itself.
  • Putin’s ethnic imperialism insists that Ukrainians must be Russians because they speak Russian. They do — and they speak Ukrainian. But Ukrainian identity has as much to do with an ability to live between languages than it does with the use of any one of them
  • Those six Cyrillic letters contain references to Italian, Russian and English, all of which a mechanical, letter-by-letter transliteration would block
  • The best (if imperfect) way I have found to render “рашизм” from Ukrainian into English is “ruscism”
  • When we see “ruscism” we might guess this word has to do with Russia (“rus”), with politics (“ism”) and with the extreme right (“ascism”) — as, indeed, it does
  • I have had to spell “рашизм” as “ruscism” in English because we need “rus,” with a “u,” to see the reference to Russia. In losing the original Ukrainian “a,” though, we weaken a multilayered reference — because the “a” in “рашизм,” conveniently, allows the Ukrainian word to associate Russia and fascism in a way English cannot.
  • If you don’t know either language, you might think that Russian and Ukrainian are very similar. They are pretty close — much as, say, Spanish and Italian are.
  • the semantics are not that close
  • From a Russian perspective, the false friends are legion. There is an elegant four-syllable Ukrainian word that simply means “soon” or “without delay,” but to a Russian it sounds like “not behind the bar.” The Ukrainian word for “cat” sounds like the Russian for “whale,” while the Ukrainian for “female cats” sounds like Russian for “intestines.”
  • Russians do not understand Ukrainian, because they have not learned it. Ukrainians do understand Russian, because they have learned it.
  • Ukrainian soldiers often speak Russian, though they are instructed to use Ukrainian to spot infiltrators and spies. This is a drastic example of a general practice of code-switching.
  • Ukrainians are perfectly capable of writing Russian correctly, but during the war some internet commentators have spelled the occasional Russian word using the Ukrainian writing system, leaving it looking unmoored and pitiable. Writing in Ukrainian, you might spell “oсвобождение” as “aсвобaждениe,” the way it is pronounced — a bit of lexicographic alchemy that makes it (and, by extension, Russians) look silly, and mocks the political concepts being used to justify a war. In a larger sense, such efforts are a means of displacing Russia from its central position in regional culture.
marvelgr

THE BASES OF THE MIND:THE RELATIONSHIP OF LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT | by Koç Unive... - 0 views

medium.com/...guage-and-thought-a0bf30375528

shared by marvelgr on 13 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • We can talk about three different interactions when we investigate the complex relationships between language and thinking. First, the existence of language as a cognitive process affects the system of thinking. Second, thinking comes before language, and the learning of a language interacts with the conceptual process that is formed before language use. Third, each language spoken may affect the system of thinking. Here we will discuss these three interactions under these subsections: “thinking without language,” “thinking before language,” and “thinking with language.”
  • Babies can categorize objects and actions, understand the cause and effect relationship between events, and see the goals in a movement. Recent studies on action representation and spatial concepts have shown that babies’ universal and language-general action representation productively changes with the learning of the mother tongue. For example, languages use prepositions to express the relationship between objects, i.e., in, on, under. However, languages also vary how they use these relations. One of the most significant studies suggests that babies can differentiate between concepts expressed with prepositions such as containment (in) and support (on). The Korean language specifies the nature of these containment and support relationships using the tightness of the relationship between objects: tight or loose. For example, a pencil in a pencil-size box represents a tight relationship, while a pencil in a big basket represents a loose relationship.
  • In the late 1800s, anthropologist Franz Boas laid the foundations of cultural relativity. According to this point of view, individuals see and perceive the world within the boundaries of their cultures. The role of anthropology is to investigate how people are conditioned by their culture and how they interact with the world in different ways. To understand such mechanisms, it suggests, implications in culture and language should be studied. The reflection of this view in the relationship between language and thought is the linguistic determinism hypothesis advanced by Eric Safir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. This hypothesis suggests that thought emerges only with the effect of language and concepts that are believed to exist even in infancy fade away due to the language learned.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In conclusion, there is a nested relationship between language and thought. In the interaction processes mentioned above, the role of language changes. Even though the limits of our language are different from the limits of our thinking, it is inevitable that people prioritize concepts in their languages. This, however, does not mean that they cannot comprehend or think about concepts that do not exist in their language.
peterconnelly

Your Bosses Could Have a File on You, and They May Misinterpret It - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-threat-private-companies.html

new york times

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The company you work for may want to know. Some corporate employers fear that employees could leak information, allow access to confidential files, contact clients inappropriately or, in the extreme, bring a gun to the office.
  • at times using behavioral science tools like psychology.
  • But in spite of worries that workers might be, reasonably, put off by a feeling that technology and surveillance are invading yet another sphere of their lives, employers want to know which clock-punchers may harm their organizations.
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  • “There is so much technology out there that employers are experimenting with or investing in,” said Edgar Ndjatou
  • Software can watch for suspicious computer behavior or it can dig into an employee’s credit reports, arrest records and marital-status updates. It can check to see if Cheryl is downloading bulk cloud data or run a sentiment analysis on Tom’s emails to see if he’s getting testier over time. Analysis of this data, say the companies that monitor insider risk, can point to potential problems in the workplace.
  • Organizations that produce monitoring software and behavioral analysis for the feds also may offer conceptually similar tools to private companies, either independently or packaged with broader cybersecurity tools.
  • But corporations are moving forward with their own software-enhanced surveillance. While private-sector workers may not be subjected to the rigors of a 136-page clearance form, private companies help build these “continuous vetting” technologies for the federal government, said Lindy Kyzer of ClearanceJobs. Then, she adds, “Any solution would have private-sector applications.”
  • “Can we build a system that checks on somebody and keeps checking on them and is aware of that person’s disposition as they exist in the legal systems and the public record systems on a continuous basis?” said Chris Grijalva
  • But the interest in anticipating insider threats in the private sector raises ethical questions about what level of monitoring nongovernmental employees should be subject to.
  • “People are starting to understand that the insider threat is a business problem and should be handled accordingly,” said Mr. Grijalva.
  • The linguistic software package they developed, called SCOUT, uses psycholinguistic analysis to seek flags that, among other things, indicate feelings of disgruntlement, like victimization, anger and blame.
  • “The language changes in subtle ways that you’re not aware of,” Mr. Stroz said.
  • There’s not enough information, in other words, to construct algorithms about trustworthiness from the ground up. And that would hold in either the private or the public sector.
  • Even if all that dystopian data did exist, it would still be tricky to draw individual — rather than simply aggregate — conclusions about which behavioral indicators potentially presaged ill actions.
  • “Depending too heavily on personal factors identified using software solutions is a mistake, as we are unable to determine how much they influence future likelihood of engaging in malicious behaviors,” Dr. Cunningham said.
  • “I have focused very heavily on identifying indicators that you can actually measure, versus those that require a lot of interpretation,” Dr. Cunningham said. “Especially those indicators that require interpretation by expert psychologists or expert so-and-sos. Because I find that it’s a little bit too dangerous, and I don’t know that it’s always ethical.”
Javier E

Opinion | David Brooks: I Was Wrong About Capitalism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...david-brooks-capitalism.html

error bias causes personal misjudgment capitalism psychology knowledge

shared by Javier E on 22 Jul 22 - No Cached
  • sometimes I’m just slow. I suffer an intellectual lag.
  • Reality has changed, but my mental frameworks just sit there. Worse, they prevent me from even seeing the change that is already underway — what the experts call “conceptual blindness.”
  • For a while this bet on free-market economic dynamism seemed to be paying off. It was the late 1980s and 1990s
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  • In the early 1990s, The Journal sent me on many reporting trips to the U.S.S.R.
  • I saw but did not see the enormous amount of corruption that was going on. I saw but did not see that property rights alone do not spontaneously make a decent society. The primary problem in all societies is order — moral, legal and social order.
  • By the time I came to this job, in 2003, I was having qualms about the free-market education I’d received — but not fast enough. It took me a while to see that the postindustrial capitalism machine — while innovative, dynamic and wonderful in many respects — had some fundamental flaws.
  • The most educated Americans were amassing more and more wealth, dominating the best living areas, pouring advantages into their kids. A highly unequal caste system was forming. Bit by bit it dawned on me that the government would have to get much more active if every child was going to have an open field and a fair chance.
  • the financial crisis hit, the flaws in modern capitalism were blindingly obvious, but my mental frames still didn’t shift fast enough.
  • Sometimes in life you should stick to your worldview and defend it against criticism. But sometimes the world is genuinely different than it was before. At those moments the crucial skills are the ones nobody teaches you: how to reorganize your mind, how to see with new eyes.
Javier E

The "missing law" of nature was here all along | Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...w-of-nature-was-here-all-along

salon science communication evolution natural selection convergence stories information

shared by Javier E on 05 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • recently published scientific article proposes a sweeping new law of nature, approaching the matter with dry, clinical efficiency that still reads like poetry.
  • “Evolving systems are asymmetrical with respect to time; they display temporal increases in diversity, distribution, and/or patterned behavior,” they continue, mounting their case from the shoulders of Charles Darwin, extending it toward all things living and not. 
  • To join the known physics laws of thermodynamics, electromagnetism and Newton’s laws of motion and gravity, the nine scientists and philosophers behind the paper propose their “law of increasing functional information.”
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  • In short, a complex and evolving system — whether that’s a flock of gold finches or a nebula or the English language — will produce ever more diverse and intricately detailed states and configurations of itself.
  • Some of these more diverse and intricate configurations, the scientists write, are shed and forgotten over time. The configurations that persist are ones that find some utility or novel function in a process akin to natural selection, but a selection process driven by the passing-on of information rather than just the sowing of biological genes
  • Have they finally glimpsed, I wonder, the connectedness and symbiotic co-evolution of their own scientific ideas with those of the world’s writers
  • Have they learned to describe in their own quantifying language that cradle from which both our disciplines have emerged and the firmament on which they both stand — the hearing and telling of stories in order to exist?
  • Have they quantified the quality of all existent matter, living and not: that all things inherit a story in data to tell, and that our stories are told by the very forms we take to tell them? 
  • “Is there a universal basis for selection? Is there a more quantitative formalism underlying this conjectured conceptual equivalence—a formalism rooted in the transfer of information?,” they ask of the world’s disparate phenomena. “The answer to both questions is yes.”
  • Yes. They’ve glimpsed it, whether they know it or not. Sing to me, O Muse, of functional information and its complex diversity.
  • The principle of complexity evolving at its own pace when left to its own devices, independent of time but certainly in a dance with it, is nothing new. Not in science, nor in its closest humanities kin, science and nature writing. Give things time and nourishing environs, protect them from your own intrusions and — living organisms or not — they will produce abundant enlacement of forms.
  • This is how poetry was born from the same larynxes and phalanges that tendered nuclear equations: We featherless bipeds gave language our time and delighted attendance until its forms were so multivariate that they overflowed with inevitable utility.
  • In her Pulitzer-winning “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” nature writer Annie Dillard explains plainly that evolution is the vehicle of such intricacy in the natural world, as much as it is in our own thoughts and actions. 
  • “The stability of simple forms is the sturdy base from which more complex, stable forms might arise, forming in turn more complex forms,” she explains, drawing on the undercap frills of mushrooms and filament-fine filtering tubes inside human kidneys to illustrate her point. 
  • “Utility to the creature is evolution’s only aesthetic consideration. Form follows function in the created world, so far as I know, and the creature that functions, however bizarre, survives to perpetuate its form,” writes Dillard.
  • “Of the multiplicity of forms, I know nothing. Except that, apparently, anything goes. This holds for forms of behavior as well as design — the mantis munching her mate, the frog wintering in mud.” 
  • She notes that, of all forms of life we’ve ever known to exist, only about 10% are still alive. What extravagant multiplicity. 
  • “Intricacy is that which is given from the beginning, the birthright, and in the intricacy is the hardiness of complexity that ensures against the failures of all life,” Dillard writes. “The wonder is — given the errant nature of freedom and the burgeoning texture of time — the wonder is that all the forms are not monsters, that there is beauty at all, grace gratuitous.”
  • “This paper, and the reason why I'm so proud of it, is because it really represents a connection between science and the philosophy of science that perhaps offers a new lens into why we see everything that we see in the universe,” lead scientist Michael Wong told Motherboard in a recent interview. 
  • Wong is an astrobiologist and planetary scientist at the Carnegie Institute for Science. In his team’s paper, that bridge toward scientific philosophy is not only preceded by a long history of literary creativity but directly theorizes about the creative act itself.  
  • “The creation of art and music may seem to have very little to do with the maintenance of society, but their origins may stem from the need to transmit information and create bonds among communities, and to this day, they enrich life in innumerable ways,” Wong’s team writes.  
  • “Perhaps, like eddies swirling off of a primary flow field, selection pressures for ancillary functions can become so distant from the core functions of their host systems that they can effectively be treated as independently evolving systems,” the authors add, pointing toward the elaborate mating dance culture observed in birds of paradise.
  • “Perhaps it will be humanity’s ability to learn, invent, and adopt new collective modes of being that will lead to its long-term persistence as a planetary phenomenon. In light of these considerations, we suspect that the general principles of selection and function discussed here may also apply to the evolution of symbolic and social systems.”
  • The Mekhilta teaches that all Ten Commandments were pronounced in a single utterance. Similarly, the Maharsha says the Torah’s 613 mitzvoth are only perceived as a plurality because we’re time-bound humans, even though they together form a singular truth which is indivisible from He who expressed it. 
  • Or, as the Mishna would have it, “the creations were all made in generic form, and they gradually expanded.” 
  • Like swirling eddies off of a primary flow field.
  • “O Lord, how manifold are thy works!,” cried out David in his psalm. “In wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts.” 
  • In all things, then — from poetic inventions, to rare biodiverse ecosystems, to the charted history of our interstellar equations — it is best if we conserve our world’s intellectual and physical diversity, for both the study and testimony of its immeasurable multiplicity.
  • Because, whether wittingly or not, science is singing the tune of the humanities. And whether expressed in algebraic logic or ancient Greek hymn, its chorus is the same throughout the universe: Be fruitful and multiply. 
  • Both intricate configurations of art and matter arise and fade according to their shared characteristic, long-known by students of the humanities: each have been graced with enough time to attend to the necessary affairs of their most enduring pleasures. 
karenmcgregor

Interview with a Packet Tracer Assignment Writing Help Expert - 0 views

Welcome, everyone! Today, we have the privilege of gaining insights from an expert in the field of Packet Tracer assignments. Our distinguished guest from https://www.computernetworkassignmenthelp....

#professionalpackettracerassignmenthelp #assignmenthelpservice #packettracer #packettracerassignmenthelp

started by karenmcgregor on 29 Dec 23 no follow-up yet
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