How the Disney Animated Film 'Frozen' Took Over the World : The New Yorker - 1 views
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In the end, though, Litman concluded, the findings were complicated: these factors could largely tell a dog from a general success, but they couldn’t predict the true runaway sensations.
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few things continued to stand out: story and social influence. The most important figure in determining ultimate creative success, Simonton found, was the writer. “We can learn a great deal about what makes a successful film just by focusing on the quality of the screenplay,” he declared. Still, as he’d found earlier, quality did not always translate to quantity
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And the thing that could potentially be even more, or at least equally, predictive wasn’t easy to quantify: so-called information cascades (basically, a snowball effect) that result from word-of-mouth dynamics.
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Knowledge Isn't Power - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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It usually turns out that there is much less professional controversy about an issue than the cacophony in the news media might have led you to expect.
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This was certainly true of the most recent poll, which asked whether the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — the Obama “stimulus” — reduced unemployment. All but one of those who responded said that it did, a vote of 36 to 1. A follow-up question on whether the stimulus was worth it produced a slightly weaker but still overwhelming 25 to 2 consensus.
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Let me ask, instead, whether you knew that the pro-stimulus consensus among experts was this strong, or whether you even knew that such a consensus existed.
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History of Lynchings in the South Documents Nearly 4,000 Names - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The authors of the report compiled an inventory of 3,959 victims of “racial terror lynchings” in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950.
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Next comes the process of selecting lynching sites where the organization plans to erect markers and memorials, which will involve significant fund-raising, negotiations with distrustful landowners and, almost undoubtedly, intense controversy.The process is intended, Mr. Stevenson said, to force people to reckon with the narrative through-line of the country’s vicious racial history, rather than thinking of that history in a short-range, piecemeal way.
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Around the country, there are only a few markers noting the sites of lynchings. In several of those places, like Newnan, Ga., attempts to erect markers were met with local resistance. But in most places, no one has tried to put up a marker.
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Departing Leader of CERN Ponders Uncertainties That Lie Ahead - 0 views
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Dr. Heuer, born in Bad Boll in southern Germany in 1948, has spent his career in the trenches of particle physics, in which scientists emulate 3-year-olds by smashing bits of matter together to see what comes out.
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He had an opportunity to put that philosophy to the test early in his term at CERN, when physicists reported in a seminar there that they had measured subatomic particles known as neutrinos streaming from Geneva to their detector in Italy faster than the speed of light, contrary to the laws of physics then known.
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The neutrino controversy helped set a sort of dubious stage for the main event in particle physics so far this century: the Higgs boson.
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Minds and Computers: An Introduction to AI by Matt Carter | Issue 68 | Philosophy Now - 0 views
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his main concern is to outline and defend the possibility of a computational theory of mind.
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there can be systems which display (and so have) mentality simply in virtue of instantiating certain computer programs – but that on the other hand, our best available programs are ‘woefully inadequate’ to that task.
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For students of artificial intelligence (AI), the book explains very clearly why the whole artificial intelligence project presupposes substantive and controversial answers to some traditional philosophical questions.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates defines a new race beat - Columbia Journalism Review - 0 views
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“The Case for Reparations,” Coates’ 16,000-word cover story for The Atlantic, where he is a national correspondent. Published online in May, it was a close look at housing discrimination, such as redlining, that was really about the need for America to take a brutally honest look in the mirror and acknowledge its deep racial divisions.
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The story broke a single-day traffic record for a magazine story on The Atlantic’s website, and in its wake, Politico named him to its list of 50 thinkers changing American politics
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Coates believes that if there is an answer to contemporary racism, it lies in confronting the pas
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The Wisdom Deficit in Schools - The Atlantic - 0 views
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When I was in high school, I chose to major in English in college because I wanted to be wiser. That’s the word I used. If I ended up making lots of money or writing a book, great; but really, I liked the prospect of being exposed to great thoughts and deep advice, and the opportunity to apply them to my own life in my own clumsy way. I wanted to live more thoughtfully and purposefully
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Now I’m a veteran English teacher, reflecting on what’s slowly changed at the typical American public high school—and the word wisdom keeps haunting me. I don’t teach it as much anymore, and I wonder who is.
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how teachers are now being informed by the Common Core State Standards—the controversial math and English benchmarks that have been adopted in most states—and the writers and thought leaders who shape the assessments matched to those standards. It all amounts to an alphabet soup of bureaucratic expectations and what can feel like soul-less instruction. The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium—referred to in education circles simply as "SBAC"—is the association that writes a Common Core-aligned assessment used in 25 states
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BBC - Future - The man who studies the spread of ignorance - 0 views
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is the study of wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favour.
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Interesting data point on the irrationality of words: individuals invent words all the time, purposefully or not. Additionally, this word is USEFUL, as it reveals a clear deficiency in public understanding of, say, the tobacco industry. So, why have I not been able to find any dictionary recognizing its existence?
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Ignorance is power
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Agnotology is as important today as it was back when Proctor studied
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Bile, venom and lies: How I was trolled on the Internet - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Thomas Jefferson often argued that an educated public was crucial for the survival of self-government
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We now live in an age in which that education takes place mostly through relatively new platforms. Social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. — are the main mechanisms by which people receive and share facts, ideas and opinions. But what if they encourage misinformation, rumors and lies?
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In a comprehensive new study of Facebook that analyzed posts made between 2010 and 2014, a group of scholars found that people mainly shared information that confirmed their prejudices, paying little attention to facts and veracity. (Hat tip to Cass Sunstein, the leading expert on this topic.) The result, the report says, is the “proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumors, mistrust and paranoia.
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How Not to Explain Success - The New York Times - 0 views
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DO you remember the controversy two years ago, when the Yale law professors Amy Chua (author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”) and Jed Rubenfeld published “The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America”?We sure do. As psychologists, we found the book intriguing, because its topic — why some people succeed and others don’t — has long been a basic research question in social science, and its authors were advancing a novel argument. They contended that certain ethnic and religious minority groups (among them, Cubans, Jews and Indians) had achieved disproportionate success in America because their individual members possessed a combination of three specific traits: a belief that their group was inherently superior to others; a sense of personal insecurity; and a high degree of impulse control.
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it offered no rigorous quantitative evidence to support its theory. This, of course, didn’t stop people from attacking or defending the book. But it meant that the debate consisted largely of arguments based on circumstantial evidence.
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we took the time to empirically test the triple package hypothesis directly. Our results have just been published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. We found scant evidence for Professors Chua and Rubenfeld’s theory.
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Jordan Peterson Comes to Aspen - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Peterson is traveling the English-speaking world in order to spread the message of this core conviction: that the way to fix what ails Western societies is a psychological project, targeted at helping individuals to get their lives in order, not a sociological project that seeks to improve society through politics, or popular culture, or by focusing on class, racial, or gender identity.
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the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-sponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, was an anomaly in this series of public appearances: a gathering largely populated by people—Democrats and centrist Republicans, corporate leaders, academics, millionaire philanthropists, journalists—invested in the contrary proposition, that the way to fix what ails society is a sociological project, one that effects change by focusing on politics, or changing popular culture, or spurring technological advances, or investing more in diversity and inclusiveness.
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Many of its attendees, like many journalists, are most interested in Peterson as a political figure at the center of controversies
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Bile, venom and lies: How I was trolled on the Internet - The Washington Post - 1 views
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In a comprehensive new study of Facebook that analyzed posts made between 2010 and 2014, a group of scholars found that people mainly shared information that confirmed their prejudices, paying little attention to facts and veracity. (Hat tip to Cass Sunstein, the leading expert on this topic.) The result, the report says, is the “proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumors, mistrust and paranoia.”
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The authors specifically studied trolling — the creation of highly provocative, often false information, with the hope of spreading it widely. The report says that “many mechanisms cause false information to gain acceptance, which in turn generate false beliefs that, once adopted by an individual, are highly resistant to correction.”
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in recent weeks I was the target of a trolling campaign and saw exactly how it works. It started when an obscure website published a post titled “CNN host Fareed Zakaria calls for jihad rape of white women.
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Opinion | How to Serve a Deranged Tyrant, Stoically - The New York Times - 0 views
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In A.D. 49, the well-known writer and Stoic philosopher was recalled from exile to tutor the successor of the emperor Claudius, a promising teenager named Nero. Like many people today, Seneca entered public service with ideals mitigated by a pragmatic understanding of the reality of the politics of his time.
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To the Stoics, contributing to public affairs was a critical duty of the philosopher. Could Seneca decline to serve because he disagreed with the emperor? Could he leave a deranged Nero unsupervised? In time, Seneca would also come to the conclusion that when “the state is so rotten as to be past helping, if evil has entire dominion over it, the wise man will not labor in vain or waste his strength in unprofitable efforts.”
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Though Nero had good qualities, he was obsessed with fame and had an endless need for validation. He was also unstable and paranoid, and began to eliminate his rivals — including murdering his own mother. Was Seneca personally involved in these decisions? We don’t know. But he helped legitimize the regime with his presence, and profited from it as well, becoming one of Rome’s richest men through his 13 years of service.
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How Calls for Privacy May Upend Business for Facebook and Google - The New York Times - 0 views
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People detailed their interests and obsessions on Facebook and Google, generating a river of data that could be collected and harnessed for advertising. The companies became very rich. Users seemed happy. Privacy was deemed obsolete, like bloodletting and milkmen
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It has been many months of allegations and arguments that the internet in general and social media in particular are pulling society down instead of lifting it up.
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That has inspired a good deal of debate about more restrictive futures for Facebook and Google. At the furthest extreme, some dream of the companies becoming public utilities.
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Lawmakers hope to use Facebook's 'oil spill' privacy mishap to usher in sweeping new la... - 0 views
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Zuckerberg’s early, broad support for greater regulation in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica controversy contrasts with the years of lobbying by Facebook and its tech peers in D.C. to stave off any new rules that would restrict the information they collect — the lifeblood of their business models.
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And Facebook joined with Google, Comcast and others this year in fighting a ballot measure in California that would allow consumers to opt out from having their information shared with advertisers while opening the companies to new lawsuits if they suffer data breaches. Facebook so far has spent about $200,000 to try to defeat the idea, state ethics records reflect.
Why Trump's 'animals' remark should make everyone angry - The Washington Post - 0 views
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why did so many people get so angry when President Trump said “These are animals” in response to a remark about a gang called MS-13?
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Obviously, because he wasn’t just stating a simple fact; he was using those words to demote those people from the human race.
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And by the transitive property, to demote immigrants from the empathy and consideration that decent people extend to other human beings.
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What Does Quantum Physics Actually Tell Us About the World? - The New York Times - 2 views
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The physics of atoms and their ever-smaller constituents and cousins is, as Adam Becker reminds us more than once in his new book, “What Is Real?,” “the most successful theory in all of science.” Its predictions are stunningly accurate, and its power to grasp the unseen ultramicroscopic world has brought us modern marvels.
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But there is a problem: Quantum theory is, in a profound way, weird. It defies our common-sense intuition about what things are and what they can do.
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Indeed, Heisenberg said that quantum particles “are not as real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”
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The Shame Culture - The New York Times - 5 views
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Some sort of moral system is coming into place. Some new criteria now exist, which people use to define correct and incorrect action. The big question is: What is the nature of this new moral system?
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The ultimate sin today, Crouch argues, is to criticize a group, especially on moral grounds. Talk of good and bad has to defer to talk about respect and recognition.
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the omnipresence of social media has created a new sort of shame culture. The world of Facebook, Instagram and the rest is a world of constant display and observation. The desire to be embraced and praised by the community is intense. People dread being exiled and condemned. Moral life is not built on the continuum of right and wrong; it’s built on the continuum of inclusion and exclusion.
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Bilingual brain boost: Two tongues, two minds | New Scientist - 0 views
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Speaking a second language can change everything from problem-solving skills to personality – almost as if you are two people
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Cognitive enhancement is just the start. According to some studies, my memories, values, even my personality, may change depending on which language I happen to be speaking. It is almost as if the bilingual brain houses two separate minds. All of which highlights the fundamental role of language in human thought
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The view of bilingualism has not always been this rosy. For many parents like mine, the decision to raise children speaking two languages was controversial. Since at least the 19th century, educators warned that it would confuse the child, making them unable to learn either language properly. At best, they thought the child would become a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. At worst, they suspected it might hinder other aspects of development, resulting in a lower IQ
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