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New York Launches First COVID-19 Vaccination, Test Result App For Event Attendance : Co... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...result-app-for-event-attendanc New York Covid-19
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Cuomo announced Friday that the state's health status certification, called the Excelsior Pass, will help New Yorkers voluntarily share vaccination and COVID-19 negative statuses with entertainment venues and other businesses to put the state state's economy back on track.
  • New Yorkers can always show alternate proof of vaccination or testing, like another mobile application or paper form, directly at a business or venue.
  • The pass could see New York's Broadway theaters, concert venues and sports arenas fill seats again after closures that started in March of 2020.
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  • Airlines and technology companies have been working on developing technology to do so, but New York's is the first pass being made widely available to residents.
  • The idea is similar to mobile airline boarding passes: they can be printed or stored on smartphones, and participating businesses and venues can use a companion app to confirm patrons' health status.
  • rather than boost the economy and encourage vaccination, efforts like the Excelsior Pass could wind up further spread of variants. It's also still not clear that vaccinated people cannot spread the virus to people who have not been vaccinated.
  • Some worry that the passes might encourage fraud and increase the spread of the virus by people who claim to be vaccinated or COVID-19 negative but aren't.
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When Christmas was cancelled: a lesson from history - 0 views

theconversation.com/d-a-lesson-from-history-149310 christmas covid pandemic england protestant reformation
shared by cvanderloo on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Back in 1647, Christmas was banned in the kingdoms of England (which at the time included Wales), Scotland and Ireland and it didn’t work out very well. Following a total ban on everything festive, from decorations to gatherings, rebellions broke out across the country. While some activity took the form of hanging holly in defiance, other action was far more radical and went on to have historical consequences.
  • The protestant reformation had restructured churches across the British Isles, and holy days, Christmas included, were abolished. The usual festivities during the 12 days of Christmas (December 25 to January 5) were deemed unacceptable.
  • Christmas Day, however, didn’t pass quietly. People across England, Scotland and Ireland flouted the rules.
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  • Taking up arms and breaking the rules weren’t just about experiencing the fun of the season. Fighting against the prohibition of Christmas was a political act. Things had changed and the Christmas rebellion was as much a protest against the “new normal” as it was against the banning of fun. People were fed up with a range of restrictions and financial difficulties that came with the Presbyterian system and the fallout of the civil war.
  • The aftermath of the Norwich Christmas riots was the most dramatic. The mayor was summoned to London in April 1648 to explain his failure to prohibit the Christmas parties, but a crowd closed the city gates to prevent him from being taken away. Armed forces were again deployed, and in the ensuing riots, the city ammunition magazine exploded, killing at least 40 people.
  • This Christmas, police across the country are ready to enforce COVID regulations and break up gatherings. While the pandemic does make things different, with rule breaking a matter of safety as much as anything else, politicians could learn from the fallout of the last time Christmas was cancelled.
  • Like in 1647, many people today are fed up with the government’s restrictions. Many have also suffered financial difficulties as a result of the COVID regulations. Some may rail against the idea of ending a miserable year under what they may regard as contradictory restrictions on family fun.
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Climatologist Michael E Mann: 'Good people fall victim to doomism. I do too sometimes' ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...omism-climate-crisis-interview climate response strategy solutions 2021 personal strategy activism
shared by Javier E on 04 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • the “inactivists”, as I call them, haven’t given up; they have simply shifted from hard denial to a new array of tactics that I describe in the book as the new climate war.
  • Who is the enemy in the new climate war?It is fossil fuel interests, climate change deniers, conservative media tycoons, working together with petrostate actors like Saudi Arabia and Russia. I call this the coalition of the unwilling.
  • Today Russia uses cyberware – bot armies and trolls – to get climate activists to fight one another and to seed arguments on social media. Russian trolls have attempted to undermine carbon pricing in Canada and Australia, and Russian fingerprints have been detected in the yellow-vest protests in France.
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  • I am optimistic about a favourable shift in the political wind. The youth climate movement has galvanised attention and re-centred the debate on intergenerational ethics. We are seeing a tipping point in public consciousness. That bodes well. There is still a viable way forward to avoid climate catastrophe.
  • You can see from the talking points of inactivists that they are really in retreat. Republican pollsters like Frank Luntz have advised clients in the fossil fuel industry and the politicians who carry water for them that you can’t get away with denying climate change any more.
  • Let’s dig into deniers’ tactics. One that you mention is deflection. What are the telltale signs?Any time you are told a problem is your fault because you are not behaving responsibly, there is a good chance that you are being deflected from systemic solutions and policies
  • Blaming the individual is a tried and trusted playbook that we have seen in the past with other industries. In the 1970s, Coca Cola and the beverage industry did this very effectively to convince us we don’t need regulations on waste disposal. Because of that we now have a global plastic crisis. The same tactics are evident in the gun lobby’s motto, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, which is classic deflection
  • look at BP, which gave us the world’s first individual carbon footprint calculator. Why did they do that? Because BP wanted us looking at our carbon footprint not theirs.
  • Of course lifestyle changes are necessary but they alone won’t get us where we need to be. They make us more healthy, save money and set a good example for others.
  • But we can’t allow the forces of inaction to convince us these actions alone are the solution and that we don’t need systemic changes
  • I don’t eat meat. We get power from renewable energy. I have a plug-in hybrid vehicle. I do those things and encourage others to do them. but i don’t think it is helpful to shame people people who are not as far along as you.
  • Instead, let’s help everybody to move in that direction. That is what policy and system change is about: creating incentives so even those who don’t think about their environmental footprint are still led in that direction.
  • Another new front in the new climate war is what you call “doomism”. What do you mean by that?Doom-mongering has overtaken denial as a threat and as a tactic. Inactivists know that if people believe there is nothing you can do, they are led down a path of disengagement
  • They unwittingly do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by giving up.What is so pernicious about this is that it seeks to weaponise environmental progressives who would otherwise be on the frontline demanding change. These are folk of good intentions and good will, but they become disillusioned or depressed and they fall into despair.
  • Many of the prominent doomist narratives – [Jonathan] Franzen, David Wallace-Wells, the Deep Adaptation movement – can be traced back to a false notion that an Arctic methane bomb will cause runaway warming and extinguish all life on earth within 10 years. This is completely wrong. There is no science to support that.
  • Good people fall victim to doomism. I do too sometimes. It can be enabling and empowering as long as you don’t get stuck there. It is up to others to help ensure that experience can be cathartic.
  • the entry of new participants. Bill Gates is perhaps the most prominent. His new book, How to Prevent a Climate Disaster, offers a systems analyst approach to the problem, a kind of operating system upgrade for the planet. What do you make of his take?I want to thank him for using his platform to raise awareness of the climate crisis
  • I disagree with him quite sharply on the prescription. His view is overly technocratic and premised on an underestimate of the role that renewable energy can play in decarbonising our civilisation
  • If you understate that potential, you are forced to make other risky choices, such as geoengineering and carbon capture and sequestration. Investment in those unproven options would crowd out investment in better solutions.
  • Gates writes that he doesn’t know the political solution to climate change. But the politics are the problem buddy. If you don’t have a prescription of how to solve that, then you don’t have a solution and perhaps your solution might be taking us down the wrong path.
  • What are the prospects for political change with Joe Biden in the White House?Breathtaking. Biden has surprised even the most ardent climate hawks in the boldness of his first 100 day agenda, which goes well beyond any previous president, including Obama when it comes to use of executive actions. He has incorporated climate policy into every single government agency and we have seen massive investments in renewable energy infrastructure, cuts in subsidies for fossil fuels, and the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline.
  • On the international front, the appointment of John Kerry, who helped negotiate the Paris Accord, has telegraphed to the rest of the world that the US is back and ready to lead again
  • That is huge and puts pressure on intransigent state actors like [Australian prime minister] Scott Morrison, who has been a friend of the fossil fuel industry in Australia. Morrison has changed his rhetoric dramatically since Biden became president. I think that creates an opportunity like no other.
  • Have the prospects for that been helped or hindered by Covid?I see a perfect storm of climate opportunity. Terrible as the pandemic has been, this tragedy can also provide lessons, particularly on the importance of listening to the word of science when facing risks
  • Out of this crisis can come a collective reconsideration of our priorities. How to live sustainably on a finite planet with finite space, food and water. A year from now, memories and impacts of coronavirus will still feel painful, but the crisis itself will be in the rear-view mirror thanks to vaccines. What will loom larger will be the greater crisis we face – the climate crisis.
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Where Do Prices Come From? - Econlib - 0 views

www.econlib.org/...Robertsprices.html
shared by caelengrubb on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • There’s a certain predictability to prices. An orderliness
  • What is the source of that order? Where do prices come from?
  • The seller sets the price. But if you’ve ever tried to sell anything, you know that it’s not really true
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  • Prices adjust to equate how much people want to buy with how much they want to sell.
  • And if people want to buy more than they did before, prices rise. If people want to sell more than they did before, prices fall.
  • Supply and demand. Buyers are competing with each other. Sellers are competing with each other.
  • The simple answer of supply and demand is a strange answer, for it presumes you can talk about a good of a particular quality
  • In the real world, every good has a unique mix of attributes. Even when two goods are physically identical, they almost always come bundled with differing levels of service attached to them.
  • It’s a strange answer because people’s desires and situations and income and alternatives are constantly changing, so the amount that people want to buy and sell of something can never be pinned down instantaneously.
  • It’s a strange answer because it seems to require lots of information.
  • The strangeness of supply and demand leads some to conclude that it only applies to special cases of a homogeneous good where there are a near-infinite number of sellers and where there is perfect information about the quality of the good and the alternatives and their prices.
  • Supply and demand is a way to see the relationship that strips away everything except the fact that what people are willing to pay and what they have to pay depends on the alternatives.
  • Prices adjust. They’re not fixed. Supply and demand helps us remember this.
  • Finally, supply and demand helps us see things in a totally different way. How bizarre it is that partisans credit or blame the president for the average level of wages or inequality in the United States.
  • The president no more controls wages in the United States than he does the average weight of Americans.
  • One of the simplest insights that comes from supply and demand is the availability of goods in the marketplace.
  • When people want more of something, the crowd of more enthusiastic buyers rarely exhausts the supply. Prices adjust to equate how much people want to buy with how much people want to sell. So if people suddenly want more of something, it doesn’t just disappear. The price rises inducing an increase in what is available.
  • Because prices can adjust, the shelves are rarely empty in a market economy
  • Supply and demand is a poor tool for predicting precisely the exact level of a price.
  • Supply and demand is a simple and powerful way to describe the ways that transactions across time and space are not independent of one another.
  • It is a powerful way to organize our thinking about the complexity that emerges out of the propensity to truck, barter and exchange, a complexity that is the result of human action but not of human design.
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A Life Spent Focused on What Computers Are Doing to Us - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...urkle-the-empathy-diaries.html
shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A Life Spent Focused on What Computers Are Doing to Us
  • We are, she fears, in danger of producing an emotionally sterile society more akin to that of the robots coming down the road.
  • Turkle was born in 1948 into a lower-middle-class family that raised her to assume she would ace every test she ever took and marry a nice Jewish boy with whom she would raise a brood of children to ensure the survival of the Jewish people.
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  • er parents divorced when she was a toddler, and she was raised in a crowded Brooklyn apartment by her mother, her mother’s sister and her grandparents, all of whom unstintingly adored her
  • “Four loving adults had made me the center of their lives
  • Always the smartest kid in the room (she was a remarkable test-taker), Turkle flourished early as an intellectually confident person, easily winning a scholarship to Radcliffe, support for graduate school at Harvard
  • Newly graduated from Radcliffe, she was in Paris during the May 1968 uprising and was shocked by the responses of most French thinkers to what was happening in the streets
  • Each in turn, she observed, filtered the originality of the scene through his own theories.
  • Few saw these galvanizing events as the demonstration they so clearly were of a hungry demand for new relations between the individual and society.
  • The anecdotes that illustrate this marriage encapsulate, in an inspired way, the dilemma Turkle has spent her whole life exploring:
  • My interests were moving from ideas in the abstract to the impact of ideas on personal identity. How did new political ideas change how people saw themselves? And what made some ideas more appealing than others?”
  • For the people around her, it embodied “the science of getting computers to do things that would be considered intelligent if done by people.” Nothing more exciting. Who could resist such a possibility? Who would resist it? No one, it turned out.
  • “The worst thing, to Seymour,” she writes, would have been “to give children a computer that presented them only with games or opaque applications. … A learning opportunity would be missed because you would have masked the intellectual power of the machine. Sadly, this is what has happened.”
  • In a memoir written by a person of accomplishment, the interwoven account of childhood and early influences is valuable only insofar as it sheds light on the evolution of the individual into the author of the memoir we are reading.
  • with Turkle’s story of her marriage to Seymour Papert her personal adventures struck gold.
  • “good conversation” was valued “more highly than common courtesy. … To be interesting, Seymour did not have to be kind. He had to be brilliant.” And if you weren’t the sort of brilliant that he was, you were something less than real to him.
  • electrified
  • the rupture in understanding between someone devoted to the old-fashioned practice of humanist values and someone who doesn’t know what the word “human” really means.
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Opinion | The Pandemic and the Future City - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cities-covid-remote-work.html
shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The Pandemic and the Future City
  • Lessons from Alexander Hamilton and the book trade.
  • In 1957 Isaac Asimov published “The Naked Sun,” a science-fiction novel about a society in which people live on isolated estates, their needs provided by robots and they interact only by video
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  • how will we live once the pandemic subsides?
  • First, it seems safe to predict that we won’t fully return to the way we used to live and work.
  • A year of isolation has, in effect, provided remote work with a classic case of infant industry protection, a concept usually associated with international trade policy that was first systematically laid out by none other than Alexander Hamilton.
  • never coming close to overtaking physical books
  • Given a break from competition, for example through temporary tariffs, these industries could acquire enough experience and technological sophistication to become competitive
  • the pandemic, by temporarily making our former work habits impossible, has clearly made us much better at exploiting the possibilities of remote work, and some of what we used to do — long commutes so we can sit in cubicles, constant flying to meetings of dubious value — won’t be coming back.
  • f history is any guide, however, much of our old way of working and living will, in fact, return.
  • what the internet did and didn’t do to the way we read books.
  • Hamilton asserted that there were many industries that could flourish in the young United States but couldn’t get off the ground in the face of imports.
  • And while big chains have suffered, independent bookstores have actually been flourishing.
  • for many readers this convenience is offset by subtler factors. The experience of reading a physical book is different and, for many, more enjoyable than reading e-ink.
  • what I find in a bookstore, especially a well-curated independent store, are books I wasn’t looking for but end up treasuring.
  • The remote work revolution will probably play out similarly, but on a much vaster scale.
  • The advantages of remote work — either from home or, possibly, in small offices located far from dense urban areas — are obvious.
  • Both living and work spaces are much cheaper; commutes are short or nonexistent; you no longer need to deal with the expense and discomfort of formal business wear, at least from the waist down.
  • The advantages of going back to in-person work will, by contrast, be relatively subtle — the payoffs from face-to-face communication, the serendipity that can come from unscheduled interactions, the amenities of urban life.
  • But these subtle advantages are, in fact, what drive the economies of modern cities
  • until Covid-19 struck these advantages were feeding a growing economic divergence between large, highly educated metropolitan areas and the rest of the country
  • We may commute to the office less than we used to; there may well be a glut of urban office space. But most of us won’t be able to stay very far from the madding crowd.
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The Happiness Course: Here What's Some Learned - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...happiness-course.html
shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Over 3 Million People Took This Course on Happiness. Here’s What Some Learned.
  • It may seem simple, but it bears repeating: sleep, gratitude and helping other people.
  • The Yale happiness class, formally known as Psyc 157: Psychology and the Good Life, is one of the most popular classes to be offered in the university’s 320-year history
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  • To date, over 3.3 million people have signed up, according to the website.
  • “Everyone knows what they need to do to protect their physical health: wash your hands, and social distance, and wear a mask,” she added. “People were struggling with what to do to protect their mental health.”
  • The Coursera curriculum, adapted from the one Dr. Santos taught at Yale, asks students to, among other things, track their sleep patterns, keep a gratitude journal, perform random acts of kindness, and take note of whether, over time, these behaviors correlate with a positive change in their general mood.
  • Ms. McIntire took the class. She called it “life-changing.”
  • A night owl, she had struggled with sleep and enforcing her own time boundaries.
  • “It’s hard to set those boundaries with yourself sometimes and say, ‘I know this book is really exciting, but it can wait till tomorrow, sleep is more important,’”
  • “That’s discipline, right? But I had never done it in that way, where it’s like, ‘It’s going to make you happier. It’s not just good for you; it’s going to actually legitimately make you happier.’”
  • has stuck with it even after finishing the class
  • Meditation also helped her to get off social media.
  • “I found myself looking inward. It helped me become more introspective,” she said. “Honestly, it was the best thing I ever did.”
  • “There’s no reason I shouldn’t be happy,” she said. “I have a wonderful marriage. I have two kids. I have a nice job and a nice house. And I just could never find happiness.
  • Since taking the course, Ms. Morgan, 52, has made a commitment to do three things every day: practice yoga for one hour, take a walk outside in nature no matter how cold it may be in Alberta, and write three to five entries in her gratitude journal before bed
  • “When you start writing down those things at the end of the day, you only think about it at the end of the day, but once you make it a routine, you start to think about it all throughout the day,”
  • some studies show that finding reasons to be grateful can increase your general sense of well-being.
  • “Somewhere along the second or third year, you do feel a bit burned out, and you need strategies for dealing with it,”
  • “I’m still feeling that happiness months later,”
  • Matt Nadel, 21, a Yale senior, was among the 1,200 students taking the class on campus in 2018. He said the rigors of Yale were a big adjustment when he started at the university in the fall of 2017.
  • “Did the class impact my life in a long term, tangible way? The answer is no.”
  • While the class wasn’t life-changing for him, Mr. Nadel said that he is more expressive now when he feels gratitude.
  • “I think I was struggling to reconcile, and to intellectually interrogate, my religion,” he said. “Also acknowledging that I just really like to hang out with this kind of community that I think made me who I am.”
  • Life-changing? No. But certainly life-affirming
  • “The class helped make me more secure and comfortable in my pre-existing religious beliefs,”
  • negative visualization. This entails thinking of a good thing in your life (like your gorgeous, reasonably affordable apartment) and then imagining the worst-case scenario (suddenly finding yourself homeless and without a safety net).
  • If gratitude is something that doesn’t come naturally, negative visualization can help you to get there.
  • “That’s something that I really keep in mind, especially when I feel like my mind is so trapped in thinking about future hurdles,
  • “I should be so grateful for everything that I have. Because you’re not built to notice these things.”
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My Mom Believes In QAnon. I've Been Trying To Get Her Out. - 0 views

www.buzzfeednews.com/...on-parents-millennial-children QAnon conspiracy theory language psychology
shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • An early adopter of the QAnon mass delusion, on board since 2018, she held firm to the claim that a Satan-worshipping cabal of child sex traffickers controlled the world and the only person standing in their way was Trump. She saw him not merely as a politician but a savior, and she expressed her devotion in stark terms.
  • “The prophets have said Trump is anointed,” she texted me once. “God is using him to finally end the evil doings of the cabal which has hurt humanity all these centuries… We are in a war between good & evil.”
  • By 2020, I’d pretty much given up on swaying my mom away from her preferred presidential candidate. We’d spent many hours arguing over basic facts I considered indisputable. Any information I cited to prove Trump’s cruelty, she cut down with a corresponding counterattack. My links to credible news sources disintegrated against a wall of outlets like One America News Network, Breitbart, and Before It’s News. Any cracks I could find in her positions were instantly undermined by the inconvenient fact that I was, in her words, a member of “the liberal media,” a brainwashed acolyte of the sprawling conspiracy trying to take down her heroic leader.
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  • The irony gnawed at me: My entire vocation as an investigative reporter was predicated on being able to reveal truths, and yet I could not even rustle up the evidence to convince my own mother that our 45th president was not, in fact, the hero she believed him to be. Or, for that matter, that John F. Kennedy Jr. was dead. Or that Tom Hanks had not been executed for drinking the blood of children.
  • The theories spun from Q’s messages seemed much easier to disprove. Oprah Winfrey couldn’t have been detained during a wave of deep state arrests because we could still see her conducting live interviews on television. Trump’s 4th of July speech at Mount Rushmore came to an end without John F. Kennedy Jr. revealing he was alive and stepping in as the president’s new running mate. The widespread blackouts that her Patriot friend’s “source from the Pentagon” had warned about failed to materialize. And I could testify firsthand that the CIA had no control over my newsroom’s editorial decisions.
  • “I believe the Holy Spirit led me to the QAnons to discover the truth which is being suppressed,” she texted me. “Otherwise, how would I be able to know the truth if the lamestream media suppresses the truth?”
  • Through the years, I’d battled against conspiracy theories my mom threw at me that were far more formidable than QAnon. I’d been stumped when she asked me to prove that Beyoncé wasn’t an Illuminati member, dumbfounded when research studies I sent her weren’t enough to reach an agreement on vaccine efficacy, and too worn down to say anything more than “that’s not true” when confronted with false allegations of murders committed by prominent politicians.
  • Eventually, I accepted the impasse. It didn’t seem healthy that every conversation we had would devolve into a circuitous debate about which one of us was on the side of the bad guys. So I tried to pick my battles.
  • But what I had dismissed as damaging inconsistencies turned out to be the core strength of the belief system: It was alive, flexible, sprouting more questions than answers, more clues to study, an investigation playing out in real time, with the fate of the world at stake.
  • With no overlap between our filters of reality, I was at a loss for any facts that would actually stick.
  • Meanwhile, she wondered where she’d gone wrong with me
  • She regretted not taking politics more seriously when I was younger. I’d grown up blinkered by American privilege, trained to ignore the dirty machinations securing my comforts. My mom had shed that luxury long ago.
  • The year my mom began falling down QAnon rabbit holes, I turned the age she was when she first arrived in the States. By then, I was no longer sure that America was worth the cost of her migration. When the real estate market collapsed under the weight of Wall Street speculation, she had to sell our house at a steep loss to avoid foreclosure and her budding career as a realtor evaporated. Her near–minimum wage jobs weren’t enough to cover her bills, so her credit card debts rose. She delayed retirement plans because she saw no path to breaking even anytime soon, though she was hopeful that a turnaround was on the horizon. Through the setbacks and detours, she drifted into the arms of the people and beliefs I held most responsible for her troubles.
  • With a fervor I knew was futile, I’d tell my mom she was missing the real conspiracy: The powerful people shaping policy to benefit their own interests, to maintain wealth and white predominance, through tax cuts and voter suppression, were commandeering her support solely by catering to her stance on the one issue she cared most about.
  • The voice my mom trusted most now was Trump’s. Our disagreements were no longer ideological to her but part of a celestial conflict.
  • “I love you but you have to be on the side of good,” she texted me. “Im sad cuz u have become part of the deep state. May God have mercy on you...I pray you will see the truth of the evil agenda and be on the side of Trump.”
  • She likened her fellow Patriots to the early Christians who spread the word of Jesus at the risk of persecution. She often sent me a meme with a caption about “ordinary people who spent countless hours researching, debating, meditating and praying” for the truth to be revealed to them. “Although they were mocked, dismissed and cast off, they knew their souls had agreed long ago to do this work.”
  • Last summer, as my mom marched in a pink MAGA hat amid maskless crowds, and armed extremists stalked racial justice protests, and a disputed election loomed like a time bomb, I entertained my darkest thoughts about the fate of our country. Was there any hope in a democracy without a shared set of basic facts? Had my elders fled one authoritarian regime only for their children to face another? Amid the gloom, I found only a single morsel of solace: My mom was as hopeful as she’d ever been.
  • I wish I could offer some evidence showing that the gulf between us might be narrowing, that my love, persistence, and collection of facts might be enough to draw her back into a reality we share, and that when our wager about the storm comes due in a few months, she’ll realize that the voices she trusts have been lying to her. But I don’t think that will happen
  • What can I do but try to limit the damage? Send my mom movie recommendations to occupy the free time she instead spends on conspiracy research. Shift our conversations to the common ground of cooking recipes and family gossip. Raise objections when her beliefs nudge her toward dangerous decisions.
  • I now understand our debates as marks of the very bond I thought was disintegrating. No matter how far she believes I’ve fallen into the deep state, how hard I fight for the forces of evil, how imminent the grand plan’s rapture, my mom will be there on the other side of the line putting in a good word for me with the angels and saints, trying to save me from damnation. And those are the two realities we live in. ●
  • understand
  • now understand our debates as marks of the very bond I thought was disintegrating. No matter how far she believes I’ve fallen into the deep state, how hard I fight for the forces of evil, how imminent the grand plan’s rapture, my mom will be there on the other side of the line putting in a good word for me with the angels and saints, trying to save me from damnation. And those are the two realities we live in. ●
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Opinion | Why Covid's Airborne Transmission Was Acknowledged So Late - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rus-airborne-transmission.html who cdc transmission Covid-19 Science research psychology bias
shared by Javier E on 08 May 21 - No Cached
  • A week ago, more than a year after the World Health Organization declared that we face a pandemic, a page on its website titled “Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19): How Is It Transmitted?” got a seemingly small update.
  • The revised response still emphasizes transmission in close contact but now says it may be via aerosols — smaller respiratory particles that can float — as well as droplets. It also adds a reason the virus can also be transmitted “in poorly ventilated and/or crowded indoor settings,” saying this is because “aerosols remain suspended in the air or travel farther than 1 meter.”
  • on Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also updated its guidance on Covid-19, clearly saying that inhalation of these smaller particles is a key way the virus is transmitted, even at close range, and put it on top of its list of how the disease spreads.
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  • But these latest shifts challenge key infection control assumptions that go back a century, putting a lot of what went wrong last year in context
  • They may also signal one of the most important advancements in public health during this pandemic.
  • If the importance of aerosol transmission had been accepted early, we would have been told from the beginning that it was much safer outdoors, where these small particles disperse more easily, as long as you avoid close, prolonged contact with others.
  • We would have tried to make sure indoor spaces were well ventilated, with air filtered as necessary.
  • Instead of blanket rules on gatherings, we would have targeted conditions that can produce superspreading events: people in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, especially if engaged over time in activities that increase aerosol production, like shouting and singing
  • We would have started using masks more quickly, and we would have paid more attention to their fit, too. And we would have been less obsessed with cleaning surfaces.
  • The implications of this were illustrated when I visited New York City in late April — my first trip there in more than a year.
  • A giant digital billboard greeted me at Times Square, with the message “Protecting yourself and others from Covid-19. Guidance from the World Health Organization.”
  • That billboard neglected the clearest epidemiological pattern of this pandemic: The vast majority of transmission has been indoors, sometimes beyond a range of three or even six feet. The superspreading events that play a major role in driving the pandemic occur overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, indoors.
  • The billboard had not a word about ventilation, nothing about opening windows or moving activities outdoors, where transmission has been rare and usually only during prolonged and close contact. (Ireland recently reported 0.1 percent of Covid-19 cases were traced to outdoor transmission.)
  • Mary-Louise McLaws, an epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and a member of the W.H.O. committees that craft infection prevention and control guidance, wanted all this examined but knew the stakes made it harder to overcome the resistance. She told The Times last year, “If we started revisiting airflow, we would have to be prepared to change a lot of what we do.” She said it was a very good idea, but she added, “It will cause an enormous shudder through the infection control society.”
  • In contrast, if the aerosols had been considered a major form of transmission, in addition to distancing and masks, advice would have centered on ventilation and airflow, as well as time spent indoors. Small particles can accumulate in enclosed spaces, since they can remain suspended in the air and travel along air currents. This means that indoors, three or even six feet, while helpful, is not completely protective, especially over time.
  • To see this misunderstanding in action, look at what’s still happening throughout the world. In India, where hospitals have run out of supplemental oxygen and people are dying in the streets, money is being spent on fleets of drones to spray anti-coronavirus disinfectant in outdoor spaces. Parks, beaches and outdoor areas keep getting closed around the world. This year and last, organizers canceled outdoor events for the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C. Cambodian customs officials advised spraying disinfectant outside vehicles imported from India. The examples are many.
  • Meanwhile, many countries allowed their indoor workplaces to open but with inadequate aerosol protections. There was no attention to ventilation, installing air filters as necessary or even opening windows when possible, more to having people just distancing three or six feet, sometimes not requiring masks beyond that distance, or spending money on hard plastic barriers, which may be useless at best
  • clear evidence doesn’t easily overturn tradition or overcome entrenched feelings and egos. John Snow, often credited as the first scientific epidemiologist, showed that a contaminated well was responsible for a 1854 London cholera epidemic by removing the suspected pump’s handle and documenting how the cases plummeted afterward. Many other scientists and officials wouldn’t believe him for 12 years, when the link to a water source showed up again and became harder to deny.
  • Along the way to modern public health shaped largely by the fight over germs, a theory of transmission promoted by the influential public health figure Charles Chapin took hold
  • Dr. Chapin asserted in the early 1900s that respiratory diseases were most likely spread at close range by people touching bodily fluids or ejecting respiratory droplets, and did not allow for the possibility that such close-range infection could occur by inhaling small floating particles others emitted
  • He was also concerned that belief in airborne transmission, which he associated with miasma theories, would make people feel helpless and drop their guard against contact transmission. This was a mistake that would haunt infection control for the next century and more.
  • It was in this context in early 2020 that the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. asserted that SARS-CoV-2 was transmitted primarily via these heavier, short-range droplets, and provided guidance accordingly
  • Amid the growing evidence, in July, hundreds of scientists signed an open letter urging the public health agencies, especially the W.H.O., to address airborne transmission of the coronavirus.
  • Last October, the C.D.C. published updated guidance acknowledging airborne transmission, but as a secondary route under some circumstances, until it acknowledged airborne transmission as crucial on Friday. And the W.H.O. kept inching forward in its public statements, most recently a week ago.
  • Linsey Marr, a professor of engineering at Virginia Tech who made important contributions to our understanding of airborne virus transmission before the pandemic, pointed to two key scientific errors — rooted in a lot of history — that explain the resistance, and also opened a fascinating sociological window into how science can get it wrong and why.
  • Dr. Marr said that if you inhale a particle from the air, it’s an aerosol.
  • biomechanically, she said, nasal transmission faces obstacles, since nostrils point downward and the physics of particles that large makes it difficult for them to move up the nose. And in lab measurements, people emit far more of the easier-to-inhale aerosols than the droplets, she said, and even the smallest particles can be virus laden, sometimes more so than the larger ones, seemingly because of how and where they are produced in the respiratory tract.
  • Second, she said, proximity is conducive to transmission of aerosols as well because aerosols are more concentrated near the person emitting them. In a twist of history, modern scientists have been acting like those who equated stinky air with disease, by equating close contact, a measure of distance, only with the larger droplets, a mechanism of transmission, without examination.
  • Since aerosols also infect at close range, measures to prevent droplet transmission — masks and distancing — can help dampen transmission for airborne diseases as well. However, this oversight led medical people to circularly assume that if such measures worked at all, droplets must have played a big role in their transmission.
  • Another dynamic we’ve seen is something that is not unheard-of in the history of science: setting a higher standard of proof for theories that challenge conventional wisdom than for those that support it.
  • Another key problem is that, understandably, we find it harder to walk things back. It is easier to keep adding exceptions and justifications to a belief than to admit that a challenger has a better explanation.
  • The ancients believed that all celestial objects revolved around the earth in circular orbits. When it became clear that the observed behavior of the celestial objects did not fit this assumption, those astronomers produced ever-more-complex charts by adding epicycles — intersecting arcs and circles — to fit the heavens to their beliefs.
  • In a contemporary example of this attitude, the initial public health report on the Mount Vernon choir case said that it may have been caused by people “sitting close to one another, sharing snacks and stacking chairs at the end of the practice,” even though almost 90 percent of the people there developed symptoms of Covid-19
  • So much of what we have done throughout the pandemic — the excessive hygiene theater and the failure to integrate ventilation and filters into our basic advice — has greatly hampered our response.
  • Some of it, like the way we underused or even shut down outdoor space, isn’t that different from the 19th-century Londoners who flushed the source of their foul air into the Thames and made the cholera epidemic worse.
  • Righting this ship cannot be a quiet process — updating a web page here, saying the right thing there. The proclamations that we now know are wrong were so persistent and so loud for so long.
  • the progress we’ve made might lead to an overhaul in our understanding of many other transmissible respiratory diseases that take a terrible toll around the world each year and could easily cause other pandemics.
  • So big proclamations require probably even bigger proclamations to correct, or the information void, unnecessary fears and misinformation will persist, damaging the W.H.O. now and in the future.
  • I’ve seen our paper used in India to try to reason through aerosol transmission and the necessary mitigations. I’ve heard of people in India closing their windows after hearing that the virus is airborne, likely because they were not being told how to respond
  • The W.H.O. needs to address these fears and concerns, treating it as a matter of profound change, so other public health agencies and governments, as well as ordinary people, can better adjust.
  • It needs to begin a campaign proportional to the importance of all this, announcing, “We’ve learned more, and here’s what’s changed, and here’s how we can make sure everyone understands how important this is.” That’s what credible leadership looks like. Otherwise, if a web page is updated in the forest without the requisite fanfare, how will it matter?
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'Here Is My Proof': Local Official Shows Scars To Demonstrate His Patriotism : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...y-scars-is-this-patriot-enough asian american patriotic race racism
shared by cvanderloo on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Ever since Lee Wong came to the U.S. after graduating from high school, he has faced questions about his patriotism.
  • Throughout his life, the discrimination continued — his application to be a police officer was immediately thrown into the trash, he says, as the officers laughed about the "Chinaman" who wants to be policeman.
  • Removing his tie and unbuttoning his shirt, the 69-year-old continued: "Here is my proof." He stood up, raising his undershirt, revealing a large dark scar across his chest. "This is sustained through my service in the U.S. military. Now is this patriot enough?"
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Several cities reported an increase in hate crimes against Asian people in 2020. One survey reported incidents of harassment and discrimination related to the coronavirus.
  • After showing his scars, Wong sat back down and buttoned up his shirt. "Prejudice is hate," he told the gathered crowd. "And that hate can be changed. We are human. We need to be kinder, gentler to one another. Because we are all the same. We are one human being on this earth."
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Why Study History? (1985) | AHA - 0 views

www.historians.org/...why-study-history-(1985) history study historiography learning teaching education
shared by Javier E on 17 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Isn't there quite enough to learn about the world today? Why add to the burden by looking at the past
  • Historical knowledge is no more and no less than carefully and critically constructed collective memory. As such it can both make us wiser in our public choices and more richly human in our private lives.
  • Without individual memory, a person literally loses his or her identity, and would not know how to act in encounters with others. Imagine waking up one morning unable to tell total strangers from family and friends!
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • Collective memory is similar, though its loss does not immediately paralyze everyday private activity. But ignorance of history-that is, absent or defective collective memory-does deprive us of the best available guide for public action, especially in encounters with outsider
  • Often it is enough for experts to know about outsiders, if their advice is listened to. But democratic citizenship and effective participation in the determination of public policy require citizens to share a collective memory, organized into historical knowledge and belief
  • This value of historical knowledge obviously justifies teaching and learning about what happened in recent times, for the way things are descends from the way they were yesterday and the day before that
  • in fact, institutions that govern a great deal of our everyday behavior took shape hundreds or even thousands of years ago
  • Only an acquaintance with the entire human adventure on earth allows us to understand these dimensions of contemporary reality.
  • it follows that study of history is essential for every young person.
  • Collective memory is quite the same. Historians are always at work reinterpreting the past, asking new questions, searching new sources and finding new meanings in old documents in order to bring the perspective of new knowledge and experience to bear on the task of understanding the past.
  • what we know and believe about history is always changing. In other words, our collective, codified memory alters with time just as personal memories do, and for the same reasons.
  • skeptics are likely to conclude that history has no right to take student time from other subjects. If what is taught today is not really true, how can it claim space in a crowded school curriculum?
  • what if the world is more complicated and diverse than words can ever tell? What if human minds are incapable of finding' neat pigeon holes into which everything that happens will fit?
  • What if we have to learn to live with uncertainty and probabilities, and act on the basis of the best guesswork we are capable of?
  • Then, surely, the changing perspectives of historical understanding are the very best introduction we can have to the practical problems of real life. Then, surely, a serious effort to understand the interplay of change and continuity in human affairs is the only adequate introduction human beings can have to the confusing flow of events that constitutes the actual, adult world.
  • Memory is not something fixed and forever. As time passes, remembered personal experiences take on new meanings.
  • Early in this century, teachers and academic administrators pretty well agreed that two sorts of history courses were needed: a survey of the national history of the United States and a survey of European history.
  • Memory, indeed, makes us human. History, our collective memory, carefully codified and critically revised, makes us social, sharing ideas and ideals with others so as to form all sorts of different human groups
  • The varieties of history are enormous; facts and probabilities about the past are far too numerous for anyone to comprehend them all. Every sort of human group has its own histor
  • Where to start? How bring some sort of order to the enormous variety of things known and believed about the past?
  • Systematic sciences are not enough. They discount time, and therefore oversimplify reality, especially human reality.
  • This second course was often broadened into a survey of Western civilization in the 1930s and 1940s
  • But by the 1960s and 1970s these courses were becoming outdated, left behind by the rise of new kinds social and quantitative history, especially the history of women, of Blacks, and of other formerly overlooked groups within the borders of the United States, and of peoples emerging from colonial status in the world beyond our borders.
  • much harder to combine old with new to make an inclusive, judiciously balanced (and far less novel) introductory course for high school or college students.
  • But abandoning the effort to present a meaningful portrait of the entire national and civilizational past destroyed the original justification for requiring students to study history
  • Competing subjects abounded, and no one could or would decide what mattered most and should take precedence. As this happened, studying history became only one among many possible ways of spending time in school.
  • The costs of this change are now becoming apparent, and many concerned persons agree that returning to a more structured curriculum, in which history ought to play a prominent part, is imperative.
  • three levels of generality seem likely to have the greatest importance for ordinary people.
  • First is family, local, neighborhood history
  • Second is national history, because that is where political power is concentrated in our time.
  • Last is global history, because intensified communications make encounters with all the other peoples of the earth increasingly important.
  • Other pasts are certainly worth attention, but are better studied in the context of a prior acquaintance with personal-local, national, and global history. That is because these three levels are the ones that affect most powerfully what all other groups and segments of society actually do.
  • National history that leaves out Blacks and women and other minorities is no longer acceptable; but American history that leaves out the Founding Fathers and the Constitution is not acceptable either. What is needed is a vision of the whole, warts and all.
  • the study of history does not lead to exact prediction of future events. Though it fosters practical wisdom, knowledge of the past does not permit anyone to know exactly what is going to happen
  • Consequently, the lessons of history, though supremely valuable when wisely formulated, become grossly misleading when oversimplifiers try to transfer them mechanically from one age to another, or from one place to another.
  • Predictable fixity is simply not the human way of behaving. Probabilities and possibilities-together with a few complete surprises-are what we live with and must learn to expect.
  • Second, as acquaintance with the past expands, delight in knowing more and more can and often does become an end in itself.
  • On the other hand, studying alien religious beliefs, strange customs, diverse family patterns and vanished social structures shows how differently various human groups have tried to cop
  • Broadening our humanity and extending our sensibilities by recognizing sameness and difference throughout the recorded past is therefore an important reason for studying history, and especially the history of peoples far away and long ago
  • For we can only know ourselves by knowing how we resemble and how we differ from others. Acquaintance with the human past is the only way to such self knowledge.
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The Linguistic Evolution of 'Like' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...507614
shared by caelengrubb on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In our mouths or in print, in villages or in cities, in buildings or in caves, a language doesn’t sit still. It can’t. Language change has preceded apace even in places known for preserving a language in amber
  • Because we think of like as meaning “akin to” or “similar to,” kids decorating every sentence or two with it seems like overuse. After all, how often should a coherently minded person need to note that something is similar to something rather than just being that something?
  • First, let’s take like in just its traditional, accepted forms. Even in its dictionary definition, like is the product of stark changes in meaning that no one would ever guess.
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  • To an Old English speaker, the word that later became like was the word for, of all things, “body.”
  • The word was lic, and lic was part of a word, gelic, that meant “with the body,” as in “with the body of,” which was a way of saying “similar to”—as in like
  • It was just that, step by step, the syllable lic, which to an Old English speaker meant “body,” came to mean, when uttered by people centuries later, “similar to”—and life went on.
  • Like has become a piece of grammar: It is the source of the suffix -ly.
  • Like has become a part of compounds. Likewise began as like plus a word, wise, which was different from the one meaning “smart when either a child or getting old.”
  • Dictionaries tell us it’s pronounced “like-MINE-did,” but I, for one, say “LIKE- minded” and have heard many others do so
  • Therefore, like is ever so much more than some isolated thing clinically described in a dictionary with a definition like “(preposition) ‘having the same characteristics or qualities as; similar to.’”
  • What we are seeing in like’s transformations today are just the latest chapters in a story that began with an ancient word that was supposed to mean “body.”
  • It’s under this view of language—as something becoming rather than being, a film rather than a photo, in motion rather than at rest—that we should consider the way young people use (drum roll, please) like
  • The new like, then, is associated with hesitation.
  • So today’s like did not spring mysteriously from a crowd on the margins of unusual mind-set and then somehow jump the rails from them into the general population.
  • The problem with the hesitation analysis is that this was a thoroughly confident speaker.
  • It’s real-life usage of this kind—to linguists it is data, just like climate patterns are to meteorologists—that suggests that the idea of like as the linguistic equivalent to slumped shoulders is off.
  • Understandably so, of course—the meaning of like suggests that people are claiming that everything is “like” itself rather than itself.
  • The new like acknowledges unspoken objection while underlining one’s own point (the factuality). Like grandparents translates here as “There were, despite what you might think, actually grandparents.”
  • Then there is a second new like, which is closer to what people tend to think of all its new uses: it is indeed a hedge.
  • Then, the two likes I have mentioned must be distinguished from yet a third usage, the quotative like—as in “And she was like, ‘I didn’t even invite him.’
  • This is yet another way that like has become grammar. The meaning “similar to” is as natural a source here as it was for -ly: mimicking people’s utterances is talking similarly to, as in “like,” them.
  • Thus the modern American English speaker has mastered not just two, but actually three different new usages of like.
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Hindu shrine desecration: Can Pakistan protect its religious minorities? - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-55545524 discrimination world religion
shared by colemorris on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • A century-old sacred Hindu shrine in Pakistan was destroyed by a Muslim mob in December - the second ransacking and desecration of the holy site.
  • Pakistan is overwhelmingly Muslim - the Hindu community makes up less than 2% of the population. Prejudice against Hindus is ingrained.
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      Honestly it is a bit odd to hear of racism in other countries.
  • The rally was convened on 30 December near the temple, and led by a local Muslim cleric, Maulvi Mohammad Sharif, who is affiliated with the religious party Jamiate Ulemae Islam and was the same cleric who led the attack on the temple in 1997.
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      will they not arrest him because of the majority muslim population and the embedded discrimination
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • According to witnesses, the cleric whipped up the crowd, inciting rally goers who then smashed in the walls of the temple with sledgehammers and set fire to it.
  • Police arrested 109 people in relation to the attack, including Maulvi Mohammad Sharif, and suspended 92 police officials, including the superintendent of police and deputy superintendent of police who were on duty at the time.
  • Members of the Hindu community say that restoration of a temple alone will not restore harmony. That would begin with changes to the education curriculum, which they say promotes apathy, even callousness towards non-Muslims.
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      amen. We need to do this in America as well
  • The destruction sparked a series of court cases that continued until 2015, when the Supreme Court finally ordered the restoration of the shrine, though on a much smaller piece of land inside one of the two houses.
  • Even then, the local government continued to delay funds for reconstruction.
  • "There were 92 police officials at the spot, but they showed cowardice and negligence,"
  • Just a week before the attack on the temple in December, a meeting of Pakistan's Commission for Minority Rights concluded that a "visible improvement in the treatment of minorities" was needed in Pakistan.
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Opinion | Everyone Knows Memory Fails as You Age. But Everyone Is Wrong. - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...age-memory.html
shared by ardenganse on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • This is widely understood to be a classic problem of aging. But as a neuroscientist, I know that the problem is not necessarily age-related.
  • But any distraction — a new thought, someone asking you a question, the telephone ringing — can disrupt short-term memory.
    • ardenganse
      ardenganse on 17 Jan 21
       
      I think this relates to our inability to multitask.
  • The relevant difference is not age but rather how we describe these events, the stories we tell ourselves about them. Twenty-year-olds don’t think, “Oh dear, this must be early-onset Alzheimer’s.” They think, “I’ve got a lot on my plate right now” or “I really need to get more than four hours of sleep.”
    • ardenganse
      ardenganse on 17 Jan 21
       
      I think this is very interesting reasoning to some of the stigmas surrounding age and memory loss.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This is not to say that Alzheimer’s- and dementia-related memory impairments are fiction — they are very real — but every lapse of short-term memory doesn’t necessarily indicate a biological disorder.
  • Some aspects of memory actually get better as we age. For instance, our ability to extract patterns, regularities and to make accurate predictions improves over time because we’ve had more experience.
    • ardenganse
      ardenganse on 17 Jan 21
       
      Another interesting parallel to pattern recognition.
  • Second, older adults have to search through more memories than do younger adults to find the fact or piece of information they’re looking for. Your brain becomes crowded with memories and information.
13More

Joe Biden wrests control of Donald Trump's spotlight and makes first big bet of preside... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html CNN.com research technology Biden Trump Covid-19
shared by aprossi on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Biden wrests control of Trump's spotlight and makes first big bet of presidency
  • a $1.9 trillion plan to end the pandemic, save the economy and revive the weakened heartbeat of a nation.
  • he will take the oath of office amid soaring fears of violence by pro-Trump extremists, which will mean the National Mall will be empty of its carnival crowds of thousands who traditionally witness the sacred transfer of presidential power.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • It also gave him the chance to set out the dire state of the nation he will lead in just five days and to establish a baseline from which to manage the expectations on which he will be judged.
  • The President-elect's initiative is packed with extended unemployment benefits, rental assistance, aid to small businesses and $1,400 more in stimulus payments, in addition to the $600 already appropriated. Biden wants billions of new spending to help schools open, $20 billion for a national vaccine plan and $50 billion for expanding coronavirus testing and plans to hire an army of 100,000 public health workers.
  • Biden proposes $1.9 trillion vaccination and economic rescue legislative package
  • Biden puts $2,000 stimulus payments back in play
  • Biden taps Lisa Monaco as homeland security adviser to inauguration amid rising threats
  • MAP: Full presidential election results
  • which has killed at least 387,000 Americans.
  • No new commander in chief since Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 has faced a tougher baptism of crises than Biden
  • The Trump administration had promised it would vaccinate some 20 million people by the end of 2020, but so far Operation Warp Speed has been able to get only about 10 million doses out to state and local governments
  • 100 million shots over his first 100 days.
10More

The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices - Derek ... - 4 views

www.theatlantic.com/...267255 rational choice rationality psychology consumer economics
shared by Javier E on 20 May 15 - No Cached
  • Atlantic.displayRandomElement('#header li.business .sponsored-dropdown-item'); Derek Thompson - Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage for the website. More Derek has also written for Slate, BusinessWeek, and the Daily Beast. He has appeared as a guest on radio and television networks, including NPR, the BBC, CNBC, and MSNBC. All Posts RSS feed Share Share on facebook Share on linkedin Share on twitter « Previous Thompson Email Print Close function plusOneCallback () { $(document).trigger('share'); } $(document).ready(function() { var iframeUrl = "\/ad\/thanks-iframe\/TheAtlanticOnline\/channel_business;src=blog;by=derek-thompson;title=the-irrational-consumer-why-economics-is-dead-wrong-about-how-we-make-choices;pos=sharing;sz=640x480,336x280,300x250"; var toolsClicked = false; $('#toolsTop').click(function() { toolsClicked = 'top'; }); $('#toolsBottom').click(function() { toolsClicked = 'bottom'; }); $('#thanksForSharing a.hide').click(function() { $('#thanksForSharing').hide(); }); var onShareClickHandler = function() { var top = parseInt($(this).css('top').replace(/px/, ''), 10); toolsClicked = (top > 600) ? 'bottom' : 'top'; }; var onIframeReady = function(iframe) { var win = iframe.contentWindow; // Don't show the box if there's no ad in it if (win.$('.ad').children().length == 1) { return; } var visibleAds = win.$('.ad').filter(function() { return !($(this).css('display') == 'none'); }); if (visibleAds.length == 0) { // Ad is hidden, so don't show return; } if (win.$('.ad').hasClass('adNotLoaded')) { // Ad failed to load so don't show return; } $('#thanksForSharing').css('display', 'block'); var top; if(toolsClicked == 'bottom' && $('#toolsBottom').length) { top = $('#toolsBottom')[0].offsetTop + $('#toolsBottom').height() - 310; } else { top = $('#toolsTop')[0].offsetTop + $('#toolsTop').height() + 10; } $('#thanksForSharing').css('left', (-$('#toolsTop').offset().left + 60) + 'px'); $('#thanksForSharing').css('top', top + 'px'); }; var onShare = function() { // Close "Share successful!" AddThis plugin popup if (window._atw && window._atw.clb && $('#at15s:visible').length) { _atw.clb(); } if (iframeUrl == null) { return; } $('#thanksForSharingIframe').attr('src', "\/ad\/thanks-iframe\/TheAtlanticOnline\/channel_business;src=blog;by=derek-thompson;title=the-irrational-consumer-why-economics-is-dead-wrong-about-how-we-make-choices;pos=sharing;sz=640x480,336x280,300x250"); $('#thanksForSharingIframe').load(function() { var iframe = this; var win = iframe.contentWindow; if (win.loaded) { onIframeReady(iframe); } else { win.$(iframe.contentDocument).ready(function() { onIframeReady(iframe); }) } }); }; if (window.addthis) { addthis.addEventListener('addthis.ready', function() { $('.articleTools .share').mouseover(function() { $('#at15s').unbind('click', onShareClickHandler); $('#at15s').bind('click', onShareClickHandler); }); }); addthis.addEventListener('addthis.menu.share', function(evt) { onShare(); }); } // This 'share' event is used for testing, so one can call // $(document).trigger('share') to get the thank you for // sharing box to appear. $(document).bind('share', function(event) { onShare(); }); if (!window.FB || (window.FB && !window.FB._apiKey)) { // Hook into the fbAsyncInit function and register our listener there var oldFbAsyncInit = (window.fbAsyncInit) ? window.fbAsyncInit : (function() { }); window.fbAsyncInit = function() { oldFbAsyncInit(); FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(response) { // to hide the facebook comments box $('#facebookLike span.fb_edge_comment_widget').hide(); onShare(); }); }; } else if (window.FB) { FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(response) { // to hide the facebook comments box $('#facebookLike span.fb_edge_comment_widget').hide(); onShare(); }); } }); The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices By Derek Thompson he
  • First, making a choice is physically exhausting, literally, so that somebody forced to make a number of decisions in a row is likely to get lazy and dumb.
  • Second, having too many choices can make us less likely to come to a conclusion. In a famous study of the so-called "paradox of choice", psychologists Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar found that customers presented with six jam varieties were more likely to buy one than customers offered a choice of 24.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Many of our mistakes stem from a central "availability bias." Our brains are computers, and we like to access recently opened files, even though many decisions require a deep body of information that might require some searching. Cheap example: We remember the first, last, and peak moments of certain experiences.
  • The third check against the theory of the rational consumer is the fact that we're social animals. We let our friends and family and tribes do our thinking for us
  • neurologists are finding that many of the biases behavioral economists perceive in decision-making start in our brains. "Brain studies indicate that organisms seem to be on a hedonic treadmill, quickly habituating to homeostasis," McFadden writes. In other words, perhaps our preference for the status quo isn't just figuratively our heads, but also literally sculpted by the hand of evolution inside of our brains.
  • The popular psychological theory of "hyperbolic discounting" says people don't properly evaluate rewards over time. The theory seeks to explain why many groups -- nappers, procrastinators, Congress -- take rewards now and pain later, over and over again. But neurology suggests that it hardly makes sense to speak of "the brain," in the singular, because it's two very different parts of the brain that process choices for now and later. The choice to delay gratification is mostly processed in the frontal system. But studies show that the choice to do something immediately gratifying is processed in a different system, the limbic system, which is more viscerally connected to our behavior, our "reward pathways," and our feelings of pain and pleasure.
  • the final message is that neither the physiology of pleasure nor the methods we use to make choices are as simple or as single-minded as the classical economists thought. A lot of behavior is consistent with pursuit of self-interest, but in novel or ambiguous decision-making environments there is a good chance that our habits will fail us and inconsistencies in the way we process information will undo us.
  • Our brains seem to operate like committees, assigning some tasks to the limbic system, others to the frontal system. The "switchboard" does not seem to achieve complete, consistent communication between different parts of the brain. Pleasure and pain are experienced in the limbic system, but not on one fixed "utility" or "self-interest" scale. Pleasure and pain have distinct neural pathways, and these pathways adapt quickly to homeostasis, with sensation coming from changes rather than levels
  • Social networks are sources of information, on what products are available, what their features are, and how your friends like them. If the information is accurate, this should help you make better choices. On the other hand, it also makes it easier for you to follow the crowd rather than engaging in the due diligence of collecting and evaluating your own information and playing it against your own preferences
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The Unfolding Of 'Home-Grown Fascism' In Capitol Assault | HuffPost - 1 views

www.huffpost.com/...ult_n_5ffc5542c5b65671988782cf
shared by anonymous on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Only days later is the extent of the danger from one of the darkest episodes in American democracy coming into focus. The sinister nature of the assault has become evident
  • This was not just a collection of Trump supporters with MAGA bling caught up in a wave.
  • McGovern told The Associated Press on Sunday. “Looking at their faces, it occurred to me, these aren’t protesters. These are people who want to do harm.”
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  • Pelosi said Sunday “the evidence is that it was a well-planned, organized group with leadership and guidance and direction. And the direction was to go get people.”
  • But with countless smartphone videos emerging from the scene, much of it from gloating insurrectionists themselves, and more lawmakers recounting the chaos that was around them, contours of the uprising are increasingly coming into relief.
  • Criminals pardoned by Trump, among them Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, came forward at rallies on the eve of the attack to tell the crowds they were fighting a battle between good and evil and they were on the side of good.
  • “If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral,”
  • Although the Capitol’s attackers had been sent with Trump’s exhortation to fight, they appeared in some cases to be surprised that they had actually made it in.
  • Within the hour, the Senate had resumed its work and the House followed, returning the People’s House to the control of the people’s representatives.
  • Said McGovern: “I was in such disbelief this could possibly happen. These domestic terrorists were in the People’s House, desecrating the People’s House, destroying the People’s House.”
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ON EDUCATION; A Failure of Logic And Logistics - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...re-of-logic-and-logistics.html
shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • THE federal No Child Left Behind law of 2002 may go down in history as the most unpopular piece of education legislation ever created. It has been criticized for setting impossibly high standards -- that every child in America must be proficient in reading and math by 2014
  • Now it turns out that about a third of the 8,000 transfers -- children often traveling over an hour to attend crowded schools -- have been moved from one school labeled failing under the law to another failing school.
  • Overcrowding breeds tension.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • How could they? As might be expected from a law that tries to create a single accountability formula for every American school, No Child Left Behind is replete with technicalities and split hairs.
  • Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg did not want to take on the Bush administration over the federal law. The chancellor denied this, saying ''nothing is served'' by turning a tough equity issue into politics.
  • Recently, Mr. Klein had his photo taken with Bill Gates, who presented the city with $51 million to create small high schools. But principals of small high schools, like Louis Delgado of Vanguard in Manhattan, say transfers have devastated them this year.
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Why Don't We Prepare Enough for Disasters? - 1 views

greatergood.berkeley.edu/...e_prepare_enough_for_disasters psychology disaster cognitive bias bias
shared by huffem4 on 23 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Why do so many of us hide our heads in the sand when faced with the possibility of a catastrophic future event?
  • we are governed by two cognitive systems: one that is more automated and drives instinctual decisions—like quickly moving away from danger—and another that involves more considered thought and drives deliberate decisions—like deciding what house to buy.
  • In these cases, we tend to rely on six biases that can lead us to misperceive our situation and potentially take wrong action (or avoid action altogether). These are nicely described in The Ostrich Paradox, as follows: Myopia: The tendency to focus more on the short-term costs than the future potential benefits of investments. Amnesia: The tendency to forget the lessons of past disasters. Optimism: The tendency to underestimate the likelihood of future hazards. Inertia: The tendency to maintain the status quo or adopt the default option when uncertain about the future benefits of investing now. Simplification: The tendency to selectively consider only certain factors when making choices involving risk. Herding: The tendency to follow the “wisdom” of the crowd.
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  • if taking action now to prevent a future disaster involves a difficult hurdle—such as bureaucratic red tape or high financial, social, or political costs—we will tend to focus on the immediate (avoiding public resistance to increased taxes) versus the future (preventing a catastrophe)
  • it’s best if decision makers don’t prepare for future consequences only by looking at objective risks and vulnerabilities. Instead, planners should be encouraged “to think first about how individuals in hazard-prone areas are likely to perceive risks and why they might not adopt different preparedness measures.
  • The challenge is how to get the public to adopt these principles
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Why the Brain is Resistant to Truth | Time.com - 1 views

time.com/...brain-resilient-truth social media amygdala brain truth
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • the agricultural age gave us easier access to nutrition, and the industrial age dramatically increased our quality of life, no other era has provided so much stimulation for our brains as the information age.
  • every day we produce approximately 2.5 billion gigabytes of data and perform 4 billion Google searches. In the short time it took you to read the last sentence, approximately 530,243 new ones were executed.
  • As information about the world became readily accessible, people were still inclined to argue about the facts
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  • in the face of a publicly available birth certificate of the 44th President of the United States, there are diverse opinions regarding his birthplace.
  • But what actually determines whether someone will be persuaded by our argument or whether we will be ignored?
  • In one study, for example, my colleague Micha Edelson and I, together with others, recorded people’s brain activity while we exposed them to misinformation. A week later we invited everyone back to our lab and told them that the information we gave them before was randomly generated. About half the time our volunteers were able to correct the false beliefs we induced in them, but about half the time they continued believing misinformation.
    • ilanaprincilus06
      ilanaprincilus06 on 02 Nov 20
       
      This manipulation has a great affect on our long term memory recollection which we will carry with us until we are able to be persuaded.
  • Science has shown that waiting just a couple of minutes before making judgments reduces the likelihood that they will be based solely on instinct.
  • good news was more likely to impact people’s beliefs than bad news. But that under stress, negative information, such as learning about unexpectedly high rates of disease and violent acts, is more likely to alter people’s beliefs.
    • ilanaprincilus06
      ilanaprincilus06 on 02 Nov 20
       
      When we are in a good mood, we don't want anything to ruin it. However, when we are in a bad mood, we surround ourselves with negative energy because we feel that our bad moods could not possible get worse.
  • Twitter is perfectly designed to engage our emotions because its features naturally call on our affective system; messages are fast, short and transferred within a social context.
  • information on Twitter (and other social platforms that use short and fast messages) is particularly likely to be evaluated based on emotional responses with little input from higher cognitive functions.
  • This structure is called the amygdala and it is important for producing emotional arousal. We found that if the amygdala was activated when people were first exposed to misinformation, it was less likely we would be able to correct their judgments later.
  • people’s feelings, hopes and fears that play a central role in whether a piece of evidence will influence their beliefs.
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