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Javier E

The End of Courtship? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-end-of-courtship.html

courtship romance dating

shared by Javier E on 13 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • “The word ‘date’ should almost be stricken from the dictionary,” Ms. Silver said. “Dating culture has evolved to a cycle of text messages, each one requiring the code-breaking skills of a cold war spy to interpret.”
  • Raised in the age of so-called “hookup culture,” millennials — who are reaching an age where they are starting to think about settling down — are subverting the rules of courtship.
  • Instead of dinner-and-a-movie, which seems as obsolete as a rotary phone, they rendezvous over phone texts, Facebook posts, instant messages and other “non-dates” that are leaving a generation confused about how to land a boyfriend or girlfriend.
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  • Blame the much-documented rise of the “hookup culture” among young people, characterized by spontaneous, commitment-free (and often, alcohol-fueled) romantic flings. Many students today have never been on a traditional date,
  • Hookups may be fine for college students, but what about after, when they start to build an adult life? The problem is that “young people today don’t know how to get out of hookup culture,”
  • In interviews with students, many graduating seniors did not know the first thing about the basic mechanics of a traditional date. “They’re wondering, ‘If you like someone, how would you walk up to them? What would you say? What words would you use?’ ”
  • Traditional courtship — picking up the telephone and asking someone on a date — required courage, strategic planning and a considerable investment of ego (by telephone, rejection stings). Not so with texting, e-mail, Twitter or other forms of “asynchronous communication,” as techies call it. In the context of dating, it removes much of the need for charm; it’s more like dropping a line in the water and hoping for a nibble.
  • “I’ve seen men put more effort into finding a movie to watch on Netflix Instant than composing a coherent message to ask a woman out,” said Anna Goldfarb, 34, an author and blogger in Moorestown, N.J. A typical, annoying query is the last-minute: “Is anything fun going on tonight?” More annoying still are the men who simply ping, “Hey” or “ ’sup.”
  • Online dating services, which have gained mainstream acceptance, reinforce the hyper-casual approach by greatly expanding the number of potential dates. Faced with a never-ending stream of singles to choose from, many feel a sense of “FOMO” (fear of missing out), so they opt for a speed-dating approach — cycle through lots of suitors quickly.
  • The mass-mailer approach necessitates “cost-cutting, going to bars, meeting for coffee the first time,” he added, “because you only want to invest in a mate you’re going to get more out of.”
  • in  a world where “courtship” is quickly being redefined, women must recognize a flirtatious exchange of tweets, or a lingering glance at a company softball game, as legitimate opportunities for romance, too.
  • THERE’S another reason Web-enabled singles are rendering traditional dates obsolete. If the purpose of the first date was to learn about someone’s background, education, politics and cultural tastes, Google and Facebook have taken care of that.
  • Dodgy economic prospects facing millennials also help torpedo the old, formal dating rituals. Faced with a lingering recession, a stagnant job market, and mountains of student debt, many young people — particularly victims of the “mancession” — simply cannot afford to invest a fancy dinner or show in someone they may or may not click with.
  • “Maybe there’s still a sense of a man taking care of a woman, but our ideology is aligning with the reality of our finances,” Ms. Rosin said. As a man, you might “convince yourself that dating is passé, a relic of a paternalistic era, because you can’t afford to take a woman to a restaurant.”
  • “A lot of men in their 20s are reluctant to take the girl to the French restaurant, or buy them jewelry, because those steps tend to lead to ‘eventually, we’re going to get married,’ ” Mr. Edness, 27, said. In a tight economy, where everyone is grinding away to build a career, most men cannot fathom supporting a family until at least 30 or 35, he said.
  • Even in an era of ingrained ambivalence about gender roles, however, some women keep the old dating traditions alive by refusing to accept anything less. Cheryl Yeoh, a tech entrepreneur in San Francisco, said that she has been on many formal dates of late — plays, fancy restaurants. One suitor even presented her with red roses. For her, the old traditions are alive simply because she refuses to put up with anything less. She generally refuses to go on any date that is not set up a week in advance, involving a degree of forethought. “If he really wants you,” Ms. Yeoh, 29, said, “he has to put in some effort.”
Javier E

A Million First Dates - Dan Slater - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...309195

relations commitment marriage monogamy dating romance online dating social mating love social media

shared by Javier E on 04 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • The positive aspects of online dating are clear: the Internet makes it easier for single people to meet other single people with whom they might be compatible, raising the bar for what they consider a good relationship. But what if online dating makes it too easy to meet someone new? What if it raises the bar for a good relationship too high? What if the prospect of finding an ever-more-compatible mate with the click of a mouse means a future of relationship instability, in which we keep chasing the elusive rabbit around the dating track?
  • the rise of online dating will mean an overall decrease in commitment.
  • I often wonder whether matching you up with great people is getting so efficient, and the process so enjoyable, that marriage will become obsolete.”
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  • “Historically,” says Greg Blatt, the CEO of Match.com’s parent company, “relationships have been billed as ‘hard’ because, historically, commitment has been the goal. You could say online dating is simply changing people’s ideas about whether commitment itself is a life value.” Mate scarcity also plays an important role in people’s relationship decisions. “Look, if I lived in Iowa, I’d be married with four children by now,” says Blatt, a 40‑something bachelor in Manhattan. “That’s just how it is.”
  • “I think divorce rates will increase as life in general becomes more real-time,” says Niccolò Formai, the head of social-media marketing at Badoo, a meeting-and-dating app with about 25 million active users worldwide. “Think about the evolution of other kinds of content on the Web—stock quotes, news. The goal has always been to make it faster. The same thing will happen with meeting. It’s exhilarating to connect with new people, not to mention beneficial for reasons having nothing to do with romance. You network for a job. You find a flatmate. Over time you’ll expect that constant flow. People always said that the need for stability would keep commitment alive. But that thinking was based on a world in which you didn’t meet that many people.”
  • “You could say online dating allows people to get into relationships, learn things, and ultimately make a better selection,” says Gonzaga. “But you could also easily see a world in which online dating leads to people leaving relationships the moment they’re not working—an overall weakening of commitment.”
  • Explaining the mentality of a typical dating-site executive, Justin Parfitt, a dating entrepreneur based in San Francisco, puts the matter bluntly: “They’re thinking, Let’s keep this fucker coming back to the site as often as we can.” For instance, long after their accounts become inactive on Match.com and some other sites, lapsed users receive notifications informing them that wonderful people are browsing their profiles and are eager to chat. “Most of our users are return customers,” says Match.com’s Blatt.
  • The market is hugely more efficient … People expect to—and this will be increasingly the case over time—access people anywhere, anytime, based on complex search requests … Such a feeling of access affects our pursuit of love … the whole world (versus, say, the city we live in) will, increasingly, feel like the market for our partner(s). Our pickiness will probably increase.” “Above all, Internet dating has helped people of all ages realize that there’s no need to settle for a mediocre relationship.”
Javier E

Dating Study: At What Age Are Men, Women Most Desirable? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...567083

dating matchmaking Psychology social media

shared by Javier E on 11 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • “Three-quarters, or more, of people are dating aspirationally,” she says. And according to a new study, users of online-dating sites spend most of their time trying to contact people “out of their league.”In fact, most online-dating users tend to message people exactly 25 percent more desirable than they are.
  • “There’s so much folk wisdom about dating and courtship, and very little scientific evidence,” she told me recently. “My research comes out of realizing that with these large-scale data sets, we can shed light on a lot of these old dating aphorisms
  • Bruch and her colleagues analyzed thousands of messages exchanged on a “popular, free online-dating service” between more than 186,000 straight men and women. They looked only at four metro areas—New York, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle—and only at messages from January 2014.
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  • imagine that you are a very desirable user. Your specific desirability rank would have been generated by two figures: whether other desirable people contacted you, and whether other desirable people responded when you contacted them. If you contacted a much less desirable person, their desirability score would rise; if they contacted you and you replied, then your score would fall.
  • The team had to analyze both first messages and first replies, because, well, men usually make the first move. “A defining feature of heterosexual online dating is that, in the vast majority of cases, it is men who establish the first contact—more than 80 percent of first messages are from men in our data set,” the study says. But “women reply very selectively to the messages they receive from men—their average reply rate is less than 20 percent—so women’s replies … can give us significant insight about who they are interested in.”
  • It found that—insofar as dating “leagues” are not different tiers of hotness, but a single ascending hierarchy of desirability—then they do seem to exist in the data. But people do not seem universally locked into them—and they can occasionally find success escaping from theirs.
  • “I mean, everybody knows—and as a sociologist, it’s been shown—that older women have a harder time in the dating market. But I hadn’t expected to see their desirability drop off from the time they’re 18 to the time they’re 65,”
  • Across the four cities and the thousands of users, consistent patterns around age, race, and education level emerge. White men and Asian women are consistently more desired than other users, while black women rank anomalously lower.
  • “what we are seeing is overwhelmingly the effect of white preferences,” she cautioned. “This site is predominantly white, 70 percent white. If this was a site that was 20 percent white, we may see a totally different desirability hierarchy.”
  • And Bruch emphasized that the hierarchy did not just depend on race, age, and education level: Because it is derived from user behavior, it “captures whatever traits people are responding to when they pursue partners. This will include traits like wittiness, genetic factors, or whatever else drives people to message,” she said.
  • Here are seven other not entirely happy takeaways from Bruch’s study:- In the study, men’s desirability peaks at age 50. But women’s desirability starts high at age 18 and falls throughout their lifespan.
  • The key, Bruch said, is that “persistence pays off.”“Reply rates [to the average message] are between zero percent and 10 percent,” she told me. Her advice: People should note those extremely low reply rates and send out more greetings.
  • I was also surprised to see how flat men’s desirability was over the age distribution,” she said. “For men, it peaks around age 40 or 50. Especially in New York.”
  • “New York is a special case for men,” Bruch told me. “It’s the market with the highest fraction of women. But it’s also about it being an incredibly dense market.”
  • “Seattle presents the most unfavorable dating climate for men, with as many as two men for every woman in some segments,” the study says
  • Across all four cities, men and women generally tended to send longer messages to people who were more desirable than them. Women, especially, deployed this strategy.
  • But the only place it paid off—and the only people for whom it worked with statistically significant success—were men in Seattle. The longest messages in the study were sent by Seattle men, the study says,“and only Seattle men experience a payoff to writing longer messages.”
  • A more educated man is almost always more desirable, on average: Men with postgraduate degrees outperform men with bachelor’s degrees; men with bachelor’s degrees beat high-school graduates.
  • “But for women, an undergraduate degree is most desirable,” the study says. “Postgraduate education is associated with decreased desirability among women.
  • men tended to use less positive language when messaging more desirable women. They may have stumbled upon this strategy through trial and error because “in all four cities, men experience slightly lower reply rates when they write more positively worded messages.”
  • “The most common behavior for both men and women is to contact members of the opposite sex who on average have roughly the same ranking as themselves,
  • “The most popular individual in our four cities, a 30-year-old woman living in New York, received 1504 messages during the period of observation,” the study says. This is “equivalent to one message every 30 min, day and night, for the entire month.”
Javier E

A Million First Dates - Dan Slater - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...2

relations commitment marriage monogamy online dating

shared by Javier E on 04 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • . In his 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice, the psychologist Barry Schwartz indicts a society that “sanctifies freedom of choice so profoundly that the benefits of infinite options seem self-evident.” On the contrary, he argues, “a large array of options may diminish the attractiveness of what people actually choose, the reason being that thinking about the attractions of some of the unchosen options detracts from the pleasure derived from the chosen one.”
  • Psychologists who study relationships say that three ingredients generally determine the strength of commitment: overall satisfaction with the relationship; the investment one has put into it (time and effort, shared experiences and emotions, etc.); and the quality of perceived alternatives. Two of the three—satisfaction and quality of alternatives—could be directly affected by the larger mating pool that the Internet offers.
  • as the range of options grows larger, mate-seekers are liable to become “cognitively overwhelmed,” and deal with the overload by adopting lazy comparison strategies and examining fewer cues. As a result, they are more likely to make careless decisions than they would be if they had fewer options,
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  • research elsewhere has found that people are less satisfied when choosing from a larger group: in one study, for example, subjects who selected a chocolate from an array of six options believed it tasted better than those who selected the same chocolate from an array of 30.
  • evidence shows that the perception that one has appealing alternatives to a current romantic partner is a strong predictor of low commitment to that partner.
  • But the pace of technology is upending these rules and assumptions. Relationships that begin online, Jacob finds, move quickly. He chalks this up to a few things. First, familiarity is established during the messaging process, which also often involves a phone call. By the time two people meet face-to-face, they already have a level of intimacy. Second, if the woman is on a dating site, there’s a good chance she’s eager to connect. But for Jacob, the most crucial difference between online dating and meeting people in the “real” world is the sense of urgency. Occasionally, he has an acquaintance in common with a woman he meets online, but by and large she comes from a different social pool. “It’s not like we’re just going to run into each other again,” he says. “So you can’t afford to be too casual. It’s either ‘Let’s explore this’ or ‘See you later.’ ”
  • he phenomenon extends beyond dating sites to the Internet more generally. “I’ve seen a dramatic increase in cases where something on the computer triggered the breakup,” he says. “People are more likely to leave relationships, because they’re emboldened by the knowledge that it’s no longer as hard as it was to meet new people. But whether it’s dating sites, social media, e‑mail—it’s all related to the fact that the Internet has made it possible for people to communicate and connect, anywhere in the world, in ways that have never before been seen.”
  • eople seeking commitment—particularly women—have developed strategies to detect deception and guard against it. A woman might withhold sex so she can assess a man’s intentions. Theoretically, her withholding sends a message: I’m not just going to sleep with any guy that comes along. Theoretically, his willingness to wait sends a message back: I’m interested in more than sex.
  • people who are in marriages that are either bad or average might be at increased risk of divorce, because of increased access to new partners. Third, it’s unknown whether that’s good or bad for society. On one hand, it’s good if fewer people feel like they’re stuck in relationships. On the other, evidence is pretty solid that having a stable romantic partner means all kinds of health and wellness benefits.” And that’s even before one takes into account the ancillary effects of such a decrease in commitment—on children, for example, or even society more broadly.
  • As online dating becomes increasingly pervasive, the old costs of a short-term mating strategy will give way to new ones. Jacob, for instance, notices he’s seeing his friends less often. Their wives get tired of befriending his latest girlfriend only to see her go when he moves on to someone else. Also, Jacob has noticed that, over time, he feels less excitement before each new date. “Is that about getting older,” he muses, “or about dating online?” How much of the enchantment associated with romantic love has to do with scarcity (this person is exclusively for me), and how will that enchantment hold up in a marketplace of abundance (this person could be exclusively for me, but so could the other two people I’m meeting this week)?
Javier E

Sexual Freelancing in the Gig Economy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ancing-in-the-gig-economy.html

dating couples marriage courtship love economic

shared by Javier E on 15 May 16 - No Cached
  • We constantly use economic metaphors to describe romantic and sexual relations. Few people today refer to women as “damaged goods” or wonder why a man would “buy the cow when he can get the milk for free,” but we have “friends with benefits” and “invest in relationships.” An ex may be “on” or “off the market.” Online dating makes “shopping around” explicit. Blog after blog strategizes about how to maximize your “return on investment” on OkCupid.
  • he ways that people date — who contacts whom, where they meet and what happens next — have always been tied to the economy. Dating applies the logic of capitalism to courtship. On the dating market, everyone competes for him or herself.
  • If you want to understand why “Netflix and chill” has replaced dinner and a movie, you need to look at how people work.
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  • Today, people are constantly told that we must be flexible and adaptable in order to succeed. Is it surprising that these values are reshaping how many of us approach sex and love?
  • part-timers, contractors and other contingent workers — who constitute some 40 percent of the American work force — are more inclined to text one another “u still up?” than to make plans in advance
  • Smartphones have altered expectations about when we are “on” and “off,” and working from home or from cafes has blurred the lines between labor and leisure.
  • The 2013 and 2014 Work and Education Poll conducted by Gallup found that the average full-time American worker reported working 47 hours per week. Moreover, 21 percent of the people surveyed reported working 50 to 59 hours per week; and another 18 percent said they worked 60 or more hours a week.
  • marriage rates have declined significantly since 1960. The median age of first marriage has risen to a record high: 27 for women and 29 for men.
  • “Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America” observed that young adults have gone from seeing marriage as a “cornerstone” of adult life to its “capstone,” something you enter only after you complete your education and attain professional stability
  • DATING itself is a recent invention. It developed when young people began moving to cities and women began working outside private homes. By 1900, 44 percent of single American women worked. Previously, courtship had taken place under adult supervision, in private places: a parlor, a factory dance or church social. But once women started going out and earning wages, they had more freedom over where and how they met prospective mates. Because men vastly out-earned women, they typically paid for entertainment.
  • In the 1920s and ‘30s, as more and more middle-class women started going to college, parents and faculty panicked over the “rating and dating” culture, which led kids to participate in “petting parties” and take “joy rides” with members of the opposite sex.
  • By the 1950s, a new kind of dating took over: “going steady.
  • by the post-war era of full employment, this form of courtship made perfect sense. The booming economy, which was targeting the newly flush “teen” demographic, dictated that in order for everyone to partake in new consumer pleasures — for everyone to go out for a burger and root beer float on the weekends — young people had to pair off
  • The generation of Americans that came of age around the time of the 2008 financial crisis has been told constantly that we must be “flexible” and “adaptable.” Is it so surprising that we have turned into sexual freelancers? Many of us treat relationships like unpaid internships: We cannot expect them to lead to anything long-term, so we use them to get experience. If we look sharp, we might get a free lunch.
  • this kind of dating isn’t any more transactional than it was back when suitors paid women family-supervised visits or parents sought out a yenta to introduce their children at a synagogue mixer.
  • Courtship has always been dictated by changes in the market. The good news is that dating is not the same thing as love. And as anyone who has ever been in love can attest, the laws of supply and demand do not control our feelings.
Javier E

Tinder, the Fast-Growing Dating App, Taps an Age-Old Truth - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...app-taps-an-age-old-truth.html

dating matchmaking app attractiveness research social media psychology

shared by Javier E on 30 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • In the two years since Tinder was released, the smartphone app has exploded, processing more than a billion swipes left and right each day
  • it is fast approaching 50 million active users.
  • Tinder’s engagement is staggering. The company said that, on average, people log into the app 11 times a day. Women spend as much as 8.5 minutes swiping left and right during a single session; men spend 7.2 minutes. All of this can add up to 90 minutes each day.While conventional online dating sites have been around lo
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  • On Tinder, there are no questionnaires to fill out. No discussion of your favorite hiking trail, star sign or sexual proclivities. You simply log in through Facebook, pick a few photos that best describe “you” and start swiping.It may seem that what happens next is predictable (the best-looking people draw the most likes, the rest are quickly dismissed), but relationships experts for Tinder say there is something entirely different going on.
  • “Research shows when people are evaluating photos of others, they are trying to access compatibility on not just a physical level, but a social level,” said Jessica Carbino, Tinder’s in-house dating and relationship expert. “They are trying to understand, ‘Do I have things in common with this person?' ”
  • She discovered that Tinder users decoded an array of subtle and not-so-subtle traits before deciding which way to swipe. For example, the style of clothing, the pucker of the lips and even the posture, Ms. Carbino said, tell us a lot about their social circle, if they like to party and their level of confidence.
  • Men also judge attractiveness on factors beyond just anatomy, though in general, men are nearly three times as likely to swipe “like” (in 46 percent of cases) than woman (14 percent).
  • “There is this idea that attraction stems from a very superficial outlook on people, which is false,” Mr. Rad said. “Everyone is able to pick up thousands of signals in these photos. A photo of a guy at a bar with friends around him sends a very different message than a photo of a guy with a dog on the beach.”
  • while computers have become incalculably smarter, the ability of machines and algorithms to match people has remained just as clueless in the view of independent scientists.
  • dating sites like eHarmony and Match.com are more like modern snake oil. “They are a joke, and there is no relationship scientist that takes them seriously as relationship science.”
  • Mr. Finkel worked for more than a year with a group of researchers trying to understand how these algorithm-based dating services could match people, as they claim to do. The team poured through more than 80 years of scientific research about dating and attraction, and was unable to prove that computers can indeed match people together.
  • some dating sites are starting to acknowledge that the only thing that matters when matching lovers is someone’s picture. Earlier this year, OKCupid examined its data and found that a person’s profile picture is, said a post on its Oktrends blog, “worth that fabled thousand words, but your actual words are worth... almost nothing.”
  • this doesn’t mean that the most attractive people are the only ones who find true love. Indeed, in many respects, it can be the other way around.
  • a graduate student, published a paper noting that a person’s unique looks are what is most important when trying to find a mate.
  • “There isn’t a consensus about who is attractive and who isn’t,” Mr. Eastwick said in an interview. “Someone that you think is especially attractive might not be to me. That’s true with photos, too.” Tinder’s data team echoed this, noting that there isn’t a cliquey, high school mentality on the site, where one group of users get the share of “like” swipes.
Javier E

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

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

1619 history politics project racism 1776 Founding journalism

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

Andrew Sullivan: Trump's Mindless Nihilism - 2 views

nymag.com/...n-trump-mindless-nihilism.html

matchmaking interracial dating social free speech campus gop conservatism reactionary

shared by Javier E on 14 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The trouble with reactionary politics is that it is fundamentally a feeling, an impulse, a reflex. It’s not a workable program. You can see that in the word itself: it’s a reaction, an emotional response to change. Sure, it can include valuable insights into past mistakes, but it can’t undo them, without massive disruption
  • I mention this as a way to see more clearly why the right in Britain and America is either unraveling quickly into chaos, or about to inflict probably irreparable damage on a massive scale to their respective countries. Brexit and Trump are the history of Thatcher and Reagan repeating as dangerous farce, a confident, intelligent conservatism reduced to nihilist, mindless reactionism.
  • But it’s the impossible reactionary agenda that is the core problem. And the reason we have a president increasingly isolated, ever more deranged, legislatively impotent, diplomatically catastrophic, and constitutionally dangerous, is not just because he is a fucking moron requiring an adult day-care center to avoid catastrophe daily.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • It’s because he’s a reactionary fantasist, whose policies stir the emotions but are stalled in the headwinds of reality
  • These are not conservative reforms, thought-through, possible to implement, strategically planned. They are the unhinged fantasies of a 71-year-old Fox News viewer imagining he can reconstruct the late 1950s. They cannot actually be implemented, without huge damage.
  • In Britain, meanwhile, Brexit is in exactly the same place — a reactionary policy that is close to impossible to implement without economic and diplomatic catastrophe
  • Brexit too was built on Trump-like lies, and a Trump-like fantasy that 50 years of integration with the E.U. could be magically abolished overnight, and that the Britain of the early 1970s could be instantly re-conjured. No actual conservative can possibly believe that such radical, sudden change won’t end in tears.
  • “The researchers start by simulating what happens when extra links are introduced into a social network. Their network consists of men and women from different races who are randomly distributed. In this model, everyone wants to marry a person of the opposite sex but can only marry someone with whom a connection exists. This leads to a society with a relatively low level of interracial marriage. But if the researchers add random links between people from different ethnic groups, the level of interracial marriage changes dramatically.”
  • the line to draw, it seems to me, is when a speech is actually shut down or rendered impossible by disruption. A fiery protest that initially prevents an event from starting is one thing; a disruption that prevents the speech taking place at all is another.
  • Maybe a college could set a time limit for protest — say, ten or fifteen minutes — after which the speaker must be heard, or penalties will be imposed. Heckling — that doesn’t prevent a speech — should also be tolerated to a reasonable extent. There’s a balance here that protects everyone’s free speech
  • dating apps are changing our society, by becoming the second-most common way straights meet partners, and by expanding the range of people we can meet.
  • here’s what’s intriguing: Correlated with that is a sustained, and hard-to-explain, rise in interracial marriage.
  • “It is intriguing that shortly after the introduction of the first dating websites in 1995, like Match.com, the percentage of new marriages created by interracial couples increased rapidly,” say the researchers. “The increase became steeper in the 2000s, when online dating became even more popular. Then, in 2014, the proportion of interracial marriages jumped again.” That was when Tinder took off.
  • Disruptions of events are, to my mind, integral to the exercise of free speech. Hecklers are part of the contentious and messy world of open debate. To suspend or, after three offenses, expel students for merely disrupting events is not so much to chill the possibility of dissent, but to freeze it altogether.
  • Even more encouraging, the marriages begun online seem to last longer than others.
  • I wonder if online dating doesn’t just expand your ability to meet more people of another race, by eliminating geography and the subtle grouping effect of race and class and education. Maybe it lowers some of the social inhibitions against interracial dating.
  • It’s always seemed to me that racism is deeply ingrained in human nature, and always will be, simply because our primate in-group aversion to members of an out-group expresses itself in racism, unless you actively fight it. You can try every law or custom to mitigate this, but it will only go so far.
Javier E

Buying stock in love - Great Recession | Economic Recession, Economic Crisis - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...love_money

romance sex mating research results age beauty

shared by Javier E on 24 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • people seem to be increasingly casting a cynical, calculating eye toward romance. The past few years have seen the explosion of "sugar daddy" dating sites
  • "In the past, you didn't see as much as you do now of shows like 'Millionaire Matchmaker' and 'The Real Housewives' -- all showing off their bling-bling. You begin to absorb the same kind of values that you see on TV."
  • WhatsYourPrice.com, which lets "generous" men and "beautiful" young women "buy and sell first dates." The Econ 101 concept behind it is that for a beautiful and in-demand woman, there is an opportunity cost associated with a first date (or, more simply, time is money). So, men evaluate how much a particular woman is worth in their mind and place a bid; then the woman has to weigh her options, consider the competition, and decide whether that's what her time is truly worth.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • all you're guaranteed is a chance to make the woman fall for you.
  • Based on a six-month study of dates successfully brokered through the site, they found that "men who want to date women over 10 years younger than themselves have to pay approximately 13% more than the average to close every year of age gap." A man 40 years older than his object of affection "will have to pay approximately 400% (or 4 times) more than a man who is only 10 years older to attract the interest of the same woman,"
Javier E

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...534198

smartphone generation social media psychology teen

shared by Javier E on 03 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”
  • . I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.
  • Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.
  • ...54 more annotations...
  • the trends persisted, across several years and a series of national surveys. The changes weren’t just in degree, but in kind.
  • The biggest difference between the Millennials and their predecessors was in how they viewed the world; teens today differ from the Millennials not just in their views but in how they spend their time. The experiences they have every day are radically different from those of the generation that came of age just a few years before them.
  • it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.
  • theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen
  • Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet.
  • iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone.
  • The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household
  • More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.
  • Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.
  • the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.
  • But the allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents. The shift is stunning: 12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.
  • Today’s teens are also less likely to date. The initial stage of courtship, which Gen Xers called “liking” (as in “Ooh, he likes you!”), kids now call “talking”—an ironic choice for a generation that prefers texting to actual conversation. After two teens have “talked” for a while, they might start dating.
  • only about 56 percent of high-school seniors in 2015 went out on dates; for Boomers and Gen Xers, the number was about 85 percent.
  • The decline in dating tracks with a decline in sexual activity. The drop is the sharpest for ninth-graders, among whom the number of sexually active teens has been cut by almost 40 percent since 1991. The average teen now has had sex for the first time by the spring of 11th grade, a full year later than the average Gen Xer
  • The teen birth rate hit an all-time low in 2016, down 67 percent since its modern peak, in 1991.
  • Nearly all Boomer high-school students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year; more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school.
  • In conversation after conversation, teens described getting their license as something to be nagged into by their parents—a notion that would have been unthinkable to previous generations.
  • In the late 1970s, 77 percent of high-school seniors worked for pay during the school year; by the mid-2010s, only 55 percent did. The number of eighth-graders who work for pay has been cut in half.
  • Beginning with Millennials and continuing with iGen, adolescence is contracting again—but only because its onset is being delayed. Across a range of behaviors—drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised— 18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into high school.
  • In an information economy that rewards higher education more than early work history, parents may be inclined to encourage their kids to stay home and study rather than to get a part-time job. Teens, in turn, seem to be content with this homebody arrangement—not because they’re so studious, but because their social life is lived on their phone. They don’t need to leave home to spend time with their friends.
  • eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders in the 2010s actually spend less time on homework than Gen X teens did in the early 1990s.
  • The time that seniors spend on activities such as student clubs and sports and exercise has changed little in recent years. Combined with the decline in working for pay, this means iGen teens have more leisure time than Gen X teens did, not less.
  • So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room, alone and often distressed.
  • despite spending far more time under the same roof as their parents, today’s teens can hardly be said to be closer to their mothers and fathers than their predecessors were. “I’ve seen my friends with their families—they don’t talk to them,” Athena told me. “They just say ‘Okay, okay, whatever’ while they’re on their phones. They don’t pay attention to their family.” Like her peers, Athena is an expert at tuning out her parents so she can focus on her phone.
  • The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently.
  • It’s not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out
  • The roller rink, the basketball court, the town pool, the local necking spot—they’ve all been replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web.
  • The results could not be clearer: Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.
  • There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness
  • Eighth-graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they’re unhappy than those who devote less time to social media
  • If you were going to give advice for a happy adolescence based on this survey, it would be straightforward: Put down the phone, turn off the laptop, and do something—anything—that does not involve a screen
  • Social-networking sites like Facebook promise to connect us to friends. But the portrait of iGen teens emerging from the data is one of a lonely, dislocated generation. Teens who visit social-networking sites every day but see their friends in person less frequently are the most likely to agree with the statements “A lot of times I feel lonely,” “I often feel left out of things,” and “I often wish I had more good friends.” Teens’ feelings of loneliness spiked in 2013 and have remained high since.
  • This doesn’t always mean that, on an individual level, kids who spend more time online are lonelier than kids who spend less time online.
  • Teens who spend more time on social media also spend more time with their friends in person, on average—highly social teens are more social in both venues, and less social teens are less so.
  • The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression.
  • Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly.
  • Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan. (That’s much more than the risk related to, say, watching TV.)
  • Since 2007, the homicide rate among teens has declined, but the suicide rate has increased. As teens have started spending less time together, they have become less likely to kill one another, and more likely to kill themselves. In 2011, for the first time in 24 years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide rate.
  • For all their power to link kids day and night, social media also exacerbate the age-old teen concern about being left out.
  • Today’s teens may go to fewer parties and spend less time together in person, but when they do congregate, they document their hangouts relentlessly—on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Those not invited to come along are keenly aware of it. Accordingly, the number of teens who feel left out has reached all-time highs across age groups.
  • Forty-eight percent more girls said they often felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared with 27 percent more boys. Girls use social media more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them.
  • Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well, as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes. When Athena posts pictures to Instagram, she told me, “I’m nervous about what people think and are going to say. It sometimes bugs me when I don’t get a certain amount of likes on a picture.”
  • Girls have also borne the brunt of the rise in depressive symptoms among today’s teens. Boys’ depressive symptoms increased by 21 percent from 2012 to 2015, while girls’ increased by 50 percent—more than twice as much
  • The rise in suicide, too, is more pronounced among girls. Although the rate increased for both sexes, three times as many 12-to-14-year-old girls killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007, compared with twice as many boys
  • Social media give middle- and high-school girls a platform on which to carry out the style of aggression they favor, ostracizing and excluding other girls around the clock.
  • What’s at stake isn’t just how kids experience adolescence. The constant presence of smartphones is likely to affect them well into adulthood. Among people who suffer an episode of depression, at least half become depressed again later in life. Adolescence is a key time for developing social skills; as teens spend less time with their friends face-to-face, they have fewer opportunities to practice them
  • the smartphone is cutting into teens’ sleep: Many now sleep less than seven hours most nights. Sleep experts say that teens should get about nine hours of sleep a night; a teen who is getting less than seven hours a night is significantly sleep deprived
  • Fifty-seven percent more teens were sleep deprived in 2015 than in 1991. In just the four years from 2012 to 2015, 22 percent more teens failed to get seven hours of sleep.
  • Two national surveys show that teens who spend three or more hours a day on electronic devices are 28 percent more likely to get less than seven hours of sleep than those who spend fewer than three hours, and teens who visit social-media sites every day are 19 percent more likely to be sleep deprived.
  • Teens who read books and magazines more often than the average are actually slightly less likely to be sleep deprived—either reading lulls them to sleep, or they can put the book down at bedtime.
  • Sleep deprivation is linked to myriad issues, including compromised thinking and reasoning, susceptibility to illness, weight gain, and high blood pressure. It also affects mood: People who don’t sleep enough are prone to depression and anxiety.
  • correlations between depression and smartphone use are strong enough to suggest that more parents should be telling their kids to put down their phone.
  • I asked my undergraduate students at San Diego State University what they do with their phone while they sleep. Their answers were a profile in obsession. Nearly all slept with their phone, putting it under their pillow, on the mattress, or at the very least within arm’s reach of the bed. They checked social media right before they went to sleep, and reached for their phone as soon as they woke up in the morning
  • Significant effects on both mental health and sleep time appear after two or more hours a day on electronic devices. The average teen spends about two and a half hours a day on electronic devices. Some mild boundary-setting could keep kids from falling into harmful habits.
Javier E

Darwin Was Wrong About Dating - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...in-was-wrong-about-dating.html

mating behavior gender sex evolution biology darwinism psychology

shared by Javier E on 14 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • no fossilized record can really tell us how people behaved or thought back then, much less why they behaved or thought as they did. Nonetheless, something funny happens when social scientists claim that a behavior is rooted in our evolutionary past. Assumptions about that behavior take on the immutability of a physical trait — they come to seem as biologically rooted as opposable thumbs or ejaculation.
  • a new batch of scientists began applying Darwinian doctrine to the conduct of mating, and specifically to three assumptions that endure to this day: men are less selective about whom they’ll sleep with; men like casual sex more than women; and men have more sexual partners over a lifetime.
  • In 1972, Robert L. Trivers, a graduate student at Harvard, addressed that first assumption in one of evolutionary psychology’s landmark studies, “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection.” He argued that women are more selective about whom they mate with because they’re biologically obliged to invest more in offspring. Given the relative paucity of ova and plenitude of sperm, as well as the unequal feeding duties that fall to women, men invest less in children. Therefore, men should be expected to be less discriminating and more aggressive in competing for females.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • if evolution didn’t determine human behavior, what did? The most common explanation is the effect of cultural norms. That, for instance, society tends to view promiscuous men as normal and promiscuous women as troubled outliers, or that our “social script” requires men to approach women while the pickier women do the selecting. Over the past decade, sociocultural explanations have gained steam.
  • In her study, when men and women considered offers of casual sex from famous people, or offers from close friends whom they were told were good in bed, the gender differences in acceptance of casual-sex proposals evaporated nearly to zero.
  • Everyone has always assumed — and early research had shown — that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men.
  • In 2009, another long-assumed gender difference in mating — that women are choosier than men — also came under siege
  • in 2003, two behavioral psychologists, Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher, published the results of a study that used a “bogus pipeline” — a fake lie detector. When asked about actual sexual partners, rather than just theoretical desires, the participants who were not attached to the fake lie detector displayed typical gender differences. Men reported having had more sexual partners than women. But when participants believed that lies about their sexual history would be revealed by the fake lie detector, gender differences in reported sexual partners vanished. In fact, women reported slightly more sexual partners (a mean of 4.4) than did men (a mean of 4.0).
  • the fact that some gender differences can be manipulated, if not eliminated, by controlling for cultural norms suggests that the explanatory power of evolution can’t sustain itself when applied to mating behavior.
  • “Some sexual features are deeply rooted in evolutionary heritage, such as the sex response and how quickly it takes men and women to become aroused,” said Paul Eastwick, a co-author of the speed-dating study. “However, if you’re looking at features such as how men and women regulate themselves in society to achieve specific goals, I believe those features are unlikely to have evolved sex differences. I consider myself an evolutionary psychologist. But many evolutionary psychologists don’t think this way. They think these features are getting shaped and honed by natural selection all the time.” How far does Darwin go in explaining human behavior?
Javier E

Wine-tasting: it's junk science | Life and style | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-tasting-junk-science-analysis

taste sense perception research

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • google_ad_client = 'ca-guardian_js'; google_ad_channel = 'lifeandstyle'; google_max_num_ads = '3'; // Comments Click here to join the discussion. We can't load the discussion on guardian.co.uk because you don't have JavaScript enabled. if (!!window.postMessage) { jQuery.getScript('http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/embed.js') } else { jQuery('#d2-root').removeClass('hd').html( '' + 'Comments' + 'Click here to join the discussion.We can\'t load the ' + 'discussion on guardian.co.uk ' + 'because your web browser does not support all the features that we ' + 'need. If you cannot upgrade your browser to a newer version, you can ' + 'access the discussion ' + 'here.' ); } Wor
  • Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.
  • Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine."The results are disturbing," says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. "Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year."Chance has a great deal to do with the awards that wines win."
  • French academic Frédéric Brochet tested the effect of labels in 2001. He presented the same Bordeaux superior wine to 57 volunteers a week apart and in two different bottles – one for a table wine, the other for a grand cru.The tasters were fooled.When tasting a supposedly superior wine, their language was more positive – describing it as complex, balanced, long and woody. When the same wine was presented as plonk, the critics were more likely to use negatives such as weak, light and flat.
  • In 2011 Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist (and former professional magician) at Hertfordshire University invited 578 people to comment on a range of red and white wines, varying from £3.49 for a claret to £30 for champagne, and tasted blind.People could tell the difference between wines under £5 and those above £10 only 53% of the time for whites and only 47% of the time for reds. Overall they would have been just as a successful flipping a coin to guess.
  • why are ordinary drinkers and the experts so poor at tasting blind? Part of the answer lies in the sheer complexity of wine.For a drink made by fermenting fruit juice, wine is a remarkably sophisticated chemical cocktail. Dr Bryce Rankine, an Australian wine scientist, identified 27 distinct organic acids in wine, 23 varieties of alcohol in addition to the common ethanol, more than 80 esters and aldehydes, 16 sugars, plus a long list of assorted vitamins and minerals that wouldn't look out of place on the ingredients list of a cereal pack. There are even harmless traces of lead and arsenic that come from the soil.
  • "People underestimate how clever the olfactory system is at detecting aromas and our brain is at interpreting them," says Hutchinson."The olfactory system has the complexity in terms of its protein receptors to detect all the different aromas, but the brain response isn't always up to it. But I'm a believer that everyone has the same equipment and it comes down to learning how to interpret it." Within eight tastings, most people can learn to detect and name a reasonable range of aromas in wine
  • People struggle with assessing wine because the brain's interpretation of aroma and bouquet is based on far more than the chemicals found in the drink. Temperature plays a big part. Volatiles in wine are more active when wine is warmer. Serve a New World chardonnay too cold and you'll only taste the overpowering oak. Serve a red too warm and the heady boozy qualities will be overpowering.
  • Colour affects our perceptions too. In 2001 Frédérick Brochet of the University of Bordeaux asked 54 wine experts to test two glasses of wine – one red, one white. Using the typical language of tasters, the panel described the red as "jammy' and commented on its crushed red fruit.The critics failed to spot that both wines were from the same bottle. The only difference was that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye
  • Other environmental factors play a role. A judge's palate is affected by what she or he had earlier, the time of day, their tiredness, their health – even the weather.
  • Robert Hodgson is determined to improve the quality of judging. He has developed a test that will determine whether a judge's assessment of a blind-tasted glass in a medal competition is better than chance. The research will be presented at a conference in Cape Town this year. But the early findings are not promising."So far I've yet to find someone who passes," he says.
Javier E

Couples and Dating | Men's Health - 0 views

www.menshealth.com/...she-your-one

online matchmaking service love sex appeal couples

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 12 - Cached
  • in the world of online dating, frivolous similarities really do matter. When researchers at MIT tracked 65,000 online daters for a 2005 study, they observed "significant homophily." Translation: You're typically interested in someone just like you, who likes the same things you do.
  • Finding a decent signal amid all this noise takes work. This is one of the market failures of window-shopping for soul mates, writes behavioral economist Dan Ariely, Ph.D., author of The Upside of Irrationality. He cites this finding from University of Chicago research: A typical online dater spends an average of 12 hours a week screening but only 2 hours dating. Not a good return.
  • All my wife's likes and dislikes—the ones I've had to learn over time—are right there on the screen for some other guy to capitalize on. To make her short list, all he has to do is declare, "Me too!"
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Not surprisingly, the perception of financial security is a big deal for online Juliets. In one study, Ariely and his colleagues calculated that a man who's 5'9" must outearn a 5'10" suitor by at least $35,000 a year just to be seen as equally attractive.
B Mannke

Oldest Human Footprints In North America Identified, Said To Date Back 10,500 Years (PH... - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...s-north-america_n_4421231.html

shared by B Mannke on 11 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Footprints found in the soft limestone of the Mexican desert have been identified as the oldest in North America. The prints, recently dated to about 10,500 years ago, were found during highway construction in northeastern Mexico in 1961. At the time, the section of rock containing the prints was taken to the Museo del Desierto in Saltillo, Mexico, and put in storage, archaeology site Western Digs reported.
  • "identifiable as human footprints because of the definable footprint shape and visible mud rims around the heel, balls of the feet and toes (areas of most pressure),"
  • The detailed dating is significant because it means the prints "prove that humans were living in what now is a desert, since 10,500 years ago, utilizing the resources available at the time," researcher Silvia Gonzalez, of Liverpool John Moores University, told HuffPost Science.
carolinewren

Whoops! A creationist museum supporter stumbled upon a major fossil find. - The Washing... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...mbled-upon-a-major-fossil-find

evolution

shared by carolinewren on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Adhering to the most extreme form of religious creationism, the exhibits "prove" that the Earth is only around 6,000 years old, and that humans and dinosaurs co-existed.
  • Unfortunately, Nernberg just dug up a 60-million-year-old fish
  • Local outlets report that the man is far from shaken by the bony fish, which he found while excavating a basement in Calgary.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • He just doesn't believe they're that old. And he's quite the fossil lover.
  • We all have the same evidence, and it’s just a matter of how you interpret it,”
  • “There’s no dates stamped on these things."
  • Just, you know, isotopic dating, basic geology, really shoddy stuff like that.
  • the science of dating fossils is not shaky -- at least not on the order of tens of millions of years of error -- so this fossil and the rocks around it really do give new earth creationism the boot.
  • But this can go down as one of the best examples ever of why it's downright impossible to convince someone who's "opposed" to evolution that it's a basic fact: If you think the very tenets of science are misguided, pretty much any evidence presented to you can be written off as fabricated or misinterpreted.
  • scientific community is thrilled and grateful for the find, and the University of Calgary will unveil the five fossils on Thursday.
  • It's an important point in Earth's evolutionary history, because new species were popping up all over to make up for the ecological niches dinos left behind.
  • Ironically, Nernberg's contributions at the Creation Science Museum are almost certainly what scientists have to thank for the find
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