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Javier E

The Problem With History Classes - The Atlantic - 3 views

www.theatlantic.com/...387823

history historiography teaching memory AP myth American idea bias

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The passion and urgency with which these battles are fought reflect the misguided way history is taught in schools. Currently, most students learn history as a set narrative—a process that reinforces the mistaken idea that the past can be synthesized into a single, standardized chronicle of several hundred pages. This teaching pretends that there is a uniform collective story, which is akin to saying everyone remembers events the same.
  • Yet, history is anything but agreeable. It is not a collection of facts deemed to be "official" by scholars on high. It is a collection of historians exchanging different, often conflicting analyses.
  • rather than vainly seeking to transcend the inevitable clash of memories, American students would be better served by descending into the bog of conflict and learning the many "histories" that compose the American national story.
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  • Perhaps Fisher offers the nation an opportunity to divorce, once and for all, memory from history. History may be an attempt to memorialize and preserve the past, but it is not memory; memories can serve as primary sources, but they do not stand alone as history. A history is essentially a collection of memories, analyzed and reduced into meaningful conclusions—but that collection depends on the memories chosen.
  • Memories make for a risky foundation: As events recede further into the past, the facts are distorted or augmented by entirely new details
  • people construct unique memories while informing perfectly valid histories. Just as there is a plurality of memories, so, too, is there a plurality of histories.
  • Scholars who read a diverse set of historians who are all focused on the same specific period or event are engaging in historiography
  • This approach exposes textbooks as nothing more than a compilation of histories that the authors deemed to be most relevant and useful.
  • In historiography, the barrier between historian and student is dropped, exposing a conflict-ridden landscape. A diplomatic historian approaches an event from the perspective of the most influential statesmen (who are most often white males), analyzing the context, motives, and consequences of their decisions. A cultural historian peels back the objects, sights, and sounds of a period to uncover humanity’s underlying emotions and anxieties. A Marxist historian adopts the lens of class conflict to explain the progression of events. There are intellectual historians, social historians, and gender historians, among many others. Historians studying the same topic will draw different interpretations—sometimes radically so, depending on the sources they draw from
  • Jacoba Urist points out that history is "about explaining and interpreting past events analytically." If students are really to learn and master these analytical tools, then it is absolutely essential that they read a diverse set of historians and learn how brilliant men and women who are scrutinizing the same topic can reach different conclusions
  • Rather than constructing a curriculum based on the muddled consensus of boards, legislatures, and think tanks, schools should teach students history through historiography. The shortcomings of one historian become apparent after reading the work of another one on the list.
  • Although, as Urist notes, the AP course is "designed to teach students to think like historians," my own experience in that class suggests that it fails to achieve that goal.
  • The course’s framework has always served as an outline of important concepts aiming to allow educators flexibility in how to teach; it makes no reference to historiographical conflicts. Historiography was an epiphany for me because I had never before come face-to-face with how historians think and reason
  • When I took AP U.S. History, I jumbled these diverse histories into one indistinct narrative. Although the test involved open-ended essay questions, I was taught that graders were looking for a firm thesis—forcing students to adopt a side. The AP test also, unsurprisingly, rewards students who cite a wealth of supporting details
  • By the time I took the test in 2009, I was a master at "checking boxes," weighing political factors equally against those involving socioeconomics and ensuring that previously neglected populations like women and ethnic minorities received their due. I did not know that I was pulling ideas from different historiographical traditions. I still subscribed to the idea of a prevailing national narrative and served as an unwitting sponsor of synthesis, oblivious to the academic battles that made such synthesis impossible.
  • Although there may be an inclination to seek to establish order where there is chaos, that urge must be resisted in teaching history. Public controversies over memory are hardly new. Students must be prepared to confront divisiveness, not conditioned to shoehorn agreement into situations where none is possible
  • When conflict is accepted rather than resisted, it becomes possible for different conceptions of American history to co-exist. There is no longer a need to appoint a victor.
  • More importantly, the historiographical approach avoids pursuing truth for the sake of satisfying a national myth
  • The country’s founding fathers crafted some of the finest expressions of personal liberty and representative government the world has ever seen; many of them also held fellow humans in bondage. This paradox is only a problem if the goal is to view the founding fathers as faultless, perfect individuals. If multiple histories are embraced, no one needs to fear that one history will be lost.
  • History is not indoctrination. It is a wrestling match. For too long, the emphasis has been on pinning the opponent. It is time to shift the focus to the struggle itself
  • There is no better way to use the past to inform the present than by accepting the impossibility of a definitive history—and by ensuring that current students are equipped to grapple with the contested memories in their midst.
katedriscoll

Cognitive Bias: Understanding How It Affects Your Decisions - 0 views

www.healthline.com/...cognitive-bias

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A cognitive bias is a flaw in your reasoning that leads you to misinterpret information from the world around you and to come to an inaccurate conclusion. Because you are flooded with information from millions of sources throughout the day, your brain develops ranking systems to decide which information deserves your attention and which information is important enough to store in memory. It also creates shortcuts meant to cut down on the time it takes for you to process information. The problem is that the shortcuts and ranking systems aren’t always perfectly objective because their architecture is uniquely adapted to your life experiences
  • Anchoring bias is the tendency to rely heavily on the first information you learn when you are evaluating something. In other words, what you learn early in an investigation often has a greater impact on your judgment than information you learn later. In one study, for example, researchers gave two groups of study participants some written background information about a person in a photograph. Then they asked them to describe how they thought the people in the photos were feeling. People who read more negative background information tended to infer more negative feelings, and people who read positive background information tended to infer more positive feelings. Their first impressions heavily influenced their ability to infer emotions in others.
  • Another common bias is the tendency to give greater credence to ideas that come to mind easily. If you can immediately think of several facts that support a judgment, you may be inclined to think that judgment is correct. For example, if a person sees multiple headlines about shark attacks in a coastal area, that person might form a belief that the risk of shark attacks is higher than it is.The American Psychological Association points out that when information is readily available around you, you’re more likely to remember it. Information that is easy to access in your memory seems more reliable.
katedriscoll

Frontiers | A Neural Network Framework for Cognitive Bias | Psychology - 0 views

www.frontiersin.org/...full

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Human decision-making shows systematic simplifications and deviations from the tenets of rationality (‘heuristics’) that may lead to suboptimal decisional outcomes (‘cognitive biases’). There are currently three prevailing theoretical perspectives on the origin of heuristics and cognitive biases: a cognitive-psychological, an ecological and an evolutionary perspective. However, these perspectives are mainly descriptive and none of them provides an overall explanatory framework for
  • the underlying mechanisms of cognitive biases. To enhance our understanding of cognitive heuristics and biases we propose a neural network framework for cognitive biases, which explains why our brain systematically tends to default to heuristic (‘Type 1’) decision making. We argue that many cognitive biases arise from intrinsic brain mechanisms that are fundamental for the working of biological neural networks. To substantiate our viewpoint, we discern and explain four basic neural network principles: (1) Association, (2) Compatibility, (3) Retainment, and (4) Focus. These principles are inherent to (all) neural networks which were originally optimized to perform concrete biological, perceptual, and motor functions. They form the basis for our inclinations to associate and combine (unrelated) information, to prioritize information that is compatible with our present state (such as knowledge, opinions, and expectations), to retain given information that sometimes could better be ignored, and to focus on dominant information while ignoring relevant information that is not directly activated. The supposed mechanisms are complementary and not mutually exclusive. For different cognitive biases they may all contribute in varying degrees to distortion of information. The present viewpoint not only complements the earlier three viewpoints, but also provides a unifying and binding framework for many cognitive bias phenomena.
  • The cognitive-psychological (or heuristics and biases) perspective (Evans, 2008; Kahneman and Klein, 2009) attributes cognitive biases to limitations in the available data and in the human information processing capacity (Simon, 1955; Broadbent, 1958; Kahneman, 1973, 2003; Norman and Bobrow, 1975)
Javier E

FaceApp helped a middle-aged man become a popular younger woman. His fan base has never... - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ker-faceapp-soya-azusagakuyuki

identity authenticity social media fake avatar Japan psychology

shared by Javier E on 12 May 21 - No Cached
  • Soya’s fame illustrated a simple truth: that social media is less a reflection of who we are, and more a performance of who we want to be.
  • It also seemed to herald a darker future where our fundamental senses of reality are under siege: The AI that allows anyone to fabricate a face can also be used to harass women with “deepfake” pornography, invent fraudulent LinkedIn personas and digitally impersonate political enemies.
  • As the photos began receiving hundreds of likes, Soya’s personality and style began to come through. She was relentlessly upbeat. She never sneered or bickered or trolled. She explored small towns, savored scenic vistas, celebrated roadside restaurants’ simple meals.
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  • She took pride in the basic things, like cleaning engine parts. And she only hinted at the truth: When one fan told her in October, “It’s great to be young,” Soya replied, “Youth does not mean a certain period of life, but how to hold your heart.”
  • She seemed, well, happy, and FaceApp had made her that way. Creating the lifelike impostor had taken only a few taps: He changed the “Gender” setting to “Female,” the “Age” setting to “Teen,” and the “Impression” setting — a mix of makeup filters — to a glamorous look the app calls “Hollywood.”
  • Users in the Internet’s early days rarely had any presumptions of authenticity, said Melanie C. Green, a University of Buffalo professor who studies technology and social trust. Most people assumed everyone else was playing a character clearly distinguished from their real life.
  • Nakajima grew his shimmering hair below his shoulders and raided his local convenience store for beauty supplies he thought would make the FaceApp images more convincing: blushes, eyeliners, concealers, shampoos.
  • “When I compare how I feel when I started to tweet as a woman and now, I do feel that I’m gradually gravitating toward this persona … this fantasy world that I created,” Nakajima said. “When I see photos of what I tweeted, I feel like, ‘Oh. That’s me.’ ”
  • The sensation Nakajima was feeling is so common that there’s a term for it: the Proteus effect, named for the shape-shifting Greek god. Stanford University researchers first coined it in 2007 to describe how people inhabiting the body of a digital avatar began to act the part
  • People made to appear taller in virtual-reality simulations acted more assertively, even after the experience ended. Prettier characters began to flirt.
  • What is it about online disguises? Why are they so good at bending people’s sense of self-perception?
  • they tap into this “very human impulse to play with identity and pretend to be someone you’re not.”
  • Soya pouted and scowled on rare occasions when Nakajima himself felt frustrated. But her baseline expression was an extra-wide smile, activated with a single tap.
  • “This identity play was considered one of the huge advantages of being online,” Green said. “You could switch your gender and try on all of these different personas. It was a playground for people to explore.”
  • But wasn’t this all just a big con? Nakajima had tricked people with a “cool girl” stereotype to boost his Twitter numbers. He hadn’t elevated the role of women in motorcycling; if anything, he’d supplanted them. And the character he’d created was paper thin: Soya had no internal complexity outside of what Nakajima had projected, just that eternally superimposed smile.
  • The Web’s big shift from text to visuals — the rise of photo-sharing apps, live streams and video calls — seemed at first to make that unspoken rule of real identities concrete. It seemed too difficult to fake one’s appearance when everyone’s face was on constant display.
  • Now, researchers argue, advances in image-editing artificial intelligence have done for the modern Internet what online pseudonyms did for the world’s first chat rooms. Facial filters have allowed anyone to mold themselves into the character they want to play.
  • researchers fear these augmented reality tools could end up distorting the beauty standards and expectations of actual reality.
  • Some political and tech theorists worry this new world of synthetic media threatens to detonate our concept of truth, eroding our shared experiences and infusing every online relationship with suspicion and self-doubt.
  • Deceptive political memes, conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine hoaxes and other scams have torn the fabric of our democracy, culture and public health.
  • But she also thinks about her kids, who assume “that everything online is fabricated,” and wonders whether the rules of online identity require a bit more nuance — and whether that generational shift is already underway.
  • “Bots pretending to be people, automated representations of humanity — that, they perceive as exploitative,” she said. “But if it’s just someone engaging in identity experimentation, they’re like: ‘Yeah, that’s what we’re all doing.'
  • To their generation, “authenticity is not about: ‘Does your profile picture match your real face?’ Authenticity is: ‘Is your voice your voice?’
  • “Their feeling is: ‘The ideas are mine. The voice is mine. The content is mine. I’m just looking for you to receive it without all the assumptions and baggage that comes with it.’ That’s the essence of a person’s identity. That’s who they really are.”
  • It wasn’t until the rise of giant social networks like Facebook — which used real identities to, among other things, supercharge targeted advertising — that this big game of pretend gained an air of duplicity. Spaces for playful performance shrank, and the biggest Internet watering holes began demanding proof of authenticity as a way to block out malicious intent.
  • Perhaps he should have accepted his irrelevance and faded into the digital sunset, sharing his life for few to see. But some of Soya’s followers have said they never felt deceived: It was Nakajima — his enthusiasm, his attitude about life — they’d been charmed by all along. “His personality,” as one Twitter follower said, “shined through.”
  • In Nakajima’s mind, he’d used the tools of a superficial medium to craft genuine connections. He had not felt real until he had become noticed for being fake.
  • Nakajima said he doesn’t know how long he’ll keep Soya alive. But he said he’s grateful for the way she helped him feel: carefree, adventurous, seen.
katedriscoll

Frontiers | A Digital Nudge to Counter Confirmation Bias | Big Data - 1 views

www.frontiersin.org/...full

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Information disorder in current information ecosystems arises not only from the publication of “fake news,” but also from individuals' subjective reading of news and from their propagating news to others. Sometimes the difference between real and fake information is apparent. However, often a message is written to evoke certain emotions and opinions by taking partially true base stories and injecting false statements such that the information looks realistic. In addition, the perception of the trustworthiness of news is often influenced by confirmation bias. As a result, people often believe distorted or outright incorrect news and spread such misinformation further. For example, it was shown that in the months preceding the 2016 American presidential election, organizations from both Russia and Iran ran organized efforts to create such stories and spread them on Twitter and Facebook (Cohen, 2018). It is therefore important to raise internet users' awareness of such practices. Key to this is providing users with means to understand whether information should be trusted or not.
  • In this section, we discuss how social networks increase the spread of biased news and misinformation. We discuss confirmation bias, echo chambers and other factors that may subconsciously influence a person's opinion. We show how these processes can interact to form a vicious circle that favors the rise of untrustworthy sources. Often, when an individual thinks they know something, they are satisfied by an explanation that confirms their belief, without necessarily considering all possible other explanations, and regardless of the veracity of this information. This is confirmation bias in action. Nickerson (1998) defined it as the tendency of people to both seek and interpret evidence that supports an already-held belief.
caelengrubb

Lockdown has affected your memory - here's why - BBC Future - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...1113-covid-19-affecting-memory

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • But in a survey conducted by the Alzheimer’s Society, half of relatives said that their loved ones’ memories had got worse after they began living more isolated lives.   
  • The most obvious factor is isolation. We know that a lack of social contact can affect the brain negatively and that the effect is most serious in those already experiencing memory difficulties.
  • Of course, not everyone has felt lonely during the pandemic, and the results of some studies have shown that levels of loneliness have plateaued over time.
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  • Meanwhile, the Office of National Statistics in the UK has found that rates of depression have doubled. Both depression and anxiety are known to have an impact on memory.
  • Although levels of anxiety peaked when lockdown started and have gradually reduced, average levels have remained higher than in usual times, especially in people who are young, living alone, living with children, living on a low income or in urban areas
  • Repetition of stories helps us to consolidate our memories of what happened to us – so-called episodic memories. If we can’t socialise as much, perhaps it’s not surprising that those memories don’t feel as crystal clear as usual.
  • This is all made more difficult by a lack of cues to aid our memories. If you go out to work then your journey, the change of scenery and breaks you take punctuate the day, giving you time points to anchor your memorie
  • Then there’s a general fatigue, which also doesn’t help our memories. Zoom meetings are tiring, some work is much harder from home and holidays are getting cancelled. A lack of routine and anxiety about the pandemic can disturb our sleep. Put all that together – basically we’re consistently tired.
  • So with the combination of fatigue, anxiety, a lack of cues, and fewer social interactions, it’s no wonder that some of us feel our memories are letting us down.
  • The good news is that there are things we can do about it. Going for a walk, especially along unfamiliar streets, will bring your brain back to attention
  • Making sure the weekdays and the weekends are different enough not to merge into one can help with the distortions our new life can have on our perception of time.
kaylynfreeman

Opinion | How Fear Distorts Our Thinking About the Coronavirus - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-fear.html

psychology science research knowledge brain science language bias social media technology education

shared by kaylynfreeman on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • When it comes to making decisions that involve risks, we humans can be irrational in quite systematic ways — a fact that the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman famously demonstrated with the help of a hypothetical situation, eerily apropos of today’s coronavirus epidemic, that has come to be known as the Asian disease problem.
  • This is irrational because the two questions don’t differ mathematically. In both cases, choosing the first option means accepting the certainty that 200 people live, and choosing the second means embracing a one-third chance that all could be saved with an accompanying two-thirds chance that all will die. Yet in our minds, Professors Tversky and Kahneman explained, losses loom larger than gains, and so when the options are framed in terms of deaths rather than cures, we’ll accept more risks to try to avoid deaths.
  • Our decision making is bad enough when the disease is hypothetical. But when the disease is real — when we see actual death tolls climbing daily, as we do with the coronavirus — another factor besides our sensitivity to losses comes into play: fear.
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  • The brain states we call emotions exist for one reason: to help us decide what to do next. They reflect our mind’s predictions for what’s likely to happen in the world and therefore serve as an efficient way to prepare us for it. But when the emotions we feel aren’t correctly calibrated for the threat or when we’re making judgments in domains where we have little knowledge or relevant information, our feelings become more likely to lead us astray.
Javier E

Want the Good Life? This Philosopher Suggests Learning From Cats. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...meaning-of-life-john-gray.html

cats philosopher philosophy human supremacy species

shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • On the face of it, “Feline Philosophy” would seem like a departure for Gray — a playful exploration of what cats might have to teach humans in our never-ending quest to understand ourselves. But the book, in true Gray fashion, suggests that this very quest may itself be doomed. “Consciousness,” he writes, “has been overrated.”
  • We get worried, anxious and miserable. Our vaunted capacity for abstract thought often gets us (or others) into trouble. We may be the only species to pursue scientific inquiry, but we’re also the only species that has consciously perpetrated genocides. Cats, unlike humans, don’t trick themselves into believing they are saviors, wreaking havoc in the process.
  • Humans like to think of themselves as special, in other words, but what makes us special also, not infrequently, makes us worse
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  • In “The Silence of Animals” (2013), he connected a belief in progress, which he ascribes to both the left and the right, to the hubris that denies our animal nature
  • We are human supremacists whose vanity and moralism and tortured ambivalence make us uniquely unhappy and destructive.
  • Gray, who has been critiquing the follies of humanity and humanism for some time now. “Humans are like any other plague animal,” he wrote in “Straw Dogs” (2002). “They cannot destroy the Earth, but they can easily wreck the environment that sustains them.”
  • A recent profile of Gray in The Guardian remarked on his unusual political journey — from a working-class upbringing in Northern England; to support for Thatcherism in the 1980s; to a dalliance with New Labour in the ’90s before he abandoned that, too, after it became yet another “universal project” he considered in thrall to a distorted view of human possibility
  • He was in favor of Brexit, and has written sympathetically of those who voted Leave, deeming the European Union another grand scheme shot through with arrogant idealism. In its place, Gray wants to see … well, something that’s never fully defined.
pier-paolo

Opinion | How Fear Distorts Our Thinking About the Coronavirus - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-fear.html

shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • When it comes to making decisions that involve risks, we humans can be irrational in quite systematic ways
  • when the emotions we feel aren’t correctly calibrated for the threat or when we’re making judgments in domains where we have little knowledge or relevant information, our feelings become more likely to lead us astray.
  • when Professors Tversky and Kahneman framed the question differently, such that the first option would ensure that only 400 people would die and the second option offered a 33 percent chance that nobody would perish and a 67 percent chance that all 600 would die, people’s preferences reversed. Seventy-eight percent now favored the second option.
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  • But when the disease is real — when we see actual death tolls climbing daily, as we do with the coronavirus — another factor besides our sensitivity to losses comes into play: fear.
  • asked people to imagine that the United States was preparing for an outbreak of an unusual Asian disease that was expected to kill 600 citizens. To combat the disease, people could choose between two options: a treatment that would ensure 200 people would be saved or one that had a 33 percent chance of saving all 600 but a 67 percent chance of saving none. Here, a clear favorite emerged: Seventy-two percent chose the former.
  • Using a nationally representative sample in the months following Sept. 11, 2001, the decision scientist Jennifer Lerner showed that feeling fear led people to believe that certain anxiety-provoking possibilities (for example, a terrorist strike) were more likely to occur.
  • we presented sad, angry or emotionally neutral people with a government proposal to raise taxes. In one version of the proposal, we said the increased revenue would be used to reduce “depressing” problems (like poor conditions in nursing homes). In the other, we focused on “angering” problems (like increasing crime because of a shortage of police officers).
  • when the emotions people felt matched the emotion of the rationales for the tax increase, their attitudes toward the proposal became more positive. But the more effort they put into considering the proposal didn’t turn out to reduce this bias; it made it stronger.
pier-paolo

SCIENCE WATCH; Clouded Perceptions - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...watch-clouded-perceptions.html

shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • experiments showed that fog could make a driver think he had dropped to a safe speed when he was actually hurtling along at, say, 70 miles per hour, thinking he was doing 50.
  • Evidence suggests that when people look at a pattern like moving stripes, they think that the stripes move more slowly when it becomes hard to see where one stops and another begins.
  • To find out if a similar distortion affects drivers in fog, the Cardiff researchers studied nine people who had been taught to drive in a computer-controlled simulated environment.
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  • with feedback,'' Dr. Snowden said, ''we could teach them to be accurate and drive at a consistent speed.''
  • drivers were often reluctant to drag their eyes from a foggy road and tended to judge their speed by feel.
  • ''We can't change our visual systems,'' Dr. Snowden said, ''so even when visibility is poor, it's worth having a look down to check your speed.'
adonahue011

Twitter is Showing That People Are Anxious and Depressed - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...social-media-.html

new york times people psychology research technology social media

shared by adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • the lab offers this answer: Sunday, May 31. That day was not only the saddest day of 2020 so far, it was also the saddest day recorded by the lab in the last 13 years. Or at least, the saddest day on Twitter.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      The lab is offering the idea that May 31st was the saddest day of 2020, and the saddest in the last 13 years. The toll 2020 has put on all of us mentally is probably something at times we cannot even recognize.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      The lab is offering the idea that May 31st was the saddest day of 2020, and the saddest in the last 13 years. The toll 2020 has put on all of us mentally is probably something at times we cannot even recognize.
  • measuring word choices across millions of tweets, every day, the world over, to come up with a moving measure of well-being.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      They use a machine to track the words people are using on twitter specifically to measure the well-being of people
  • the main finding to emerge was our tendency toward relentless positivity on social media.
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  • “Happiness is hard to know. It’s hard to measure,”
  • “We don’t have a lot of great data about how people are doing.”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      This is an interesting statement because it is so true. Yet it is so important to know how people are doing. Often times I think we personally miss some of the feelings we have, which is something we talked about in TOK. We cut out certain memories or feelings to make the narrative we want
  • to parse our national mental health through the prism of our online life.
  • that stockpile of information towered as high as it does now, in the summer of 2020
  • , Twitter reported a 34 percent increase in daily average user growth.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Important statistic because we all took part in this
  • has gathered a random 10 percent of all public tweets, every day, across a dozen languages.
  • Twitter included “terrorist,” “violence” and “racist.” This was about a week after George Floyd was killed, near the start of the protests that would last all summe
  • the pandemic, the Hedonometer’s sadness readings have set multiple records. This year, “there was a full month — and we never see this — there was a full month of days that the Hedonometer was reading sadder than the Boston Marathon day,”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      This is saddening because it is the reality we have all had to learn how to deal with.
  • “These digital traces are markers that we’re not aware of, but they leave marks that tell us the degree to which you are avoiding things, the degree to which you are connected to people,”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      I agree with this statement because it is so similar to what we discussed in TOK with the idea that our brain lets us avoid things when we don't feel like we can deal with them.
  • one of the challenges of this line of research is that language itself is always evolving — and algorithms are notoriously bad at discerning context.
  • they were able to help predict which ones might develop postpartum depression, based on their posts before the birth of their babies.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      This type of research seems like a positive way to utilize social media. Not that the saddening posts are good but the way we can perceive this information is important
  • Using data from social media for the study of mental health also helps address the WEIRD problem:
  • psychology research is often exclusively composed of subjects who are Western, Educated, and from Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      I never thought of this but it is so true! Using social media means that the stats are global.
  • We’re now able to look at a much more diverse variety of mental health experiences.”
  • but also anxiety, depression, stress and suicidal thoughts. Unsurprisingly, she found that all these levels were significantly higher than during the same months of 2019.
  • is really a representative place to check the state of the general population’s mental health.
  • argues that in the rush to embrace data, many researchers ignore the distorting effects of the platforms themselves.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Contrasting opinion from the rest of the article
  • emotionally invested in the content we are presented with, coaxed toward remaining in a certain mental state.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Interesting idea though I tend to think more in the opposite direction that social media is a pretty solid reflection.
  • The closest we get to looking at national mental health otherwise is through surveys like the one Gallup performs
  • the lowest rates of life satisfaction this year in over a decade, including during the 2008 recession
  • I have never been more exhausted at the end of the day than I am now,” said Michael Garfinkle, a psychoanalyst in New York.
  • There are so many contenders to consider: was it Thursday, March 12, the day after Tom Hanks announced he was sick and the N.B.A. announced it was canceled? Was it Monday, June 1, the day peaceful protesters were tear gassed so that President Trump could comfortably stroll to his Bible-wielding photo op?
adonahue011

Our brains on coronavirus (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

brain science cnn brains opinion education

shared by adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • We constantly weigh costs and benefits with thought experiments to imagine what the consequences of different choices might be, and emotion experiments to imagine how different outcomes would feel.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      This is all very true, but after learning about the way we as humans make decisions often times we don't have much control on the way our brain makes decisions.
  • And this makes relevant a crucial neurobiological factor -- during times of stress, we tend to make lousy decisions.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      So similar to what we learned in TOK this is a great example of the brain and decisions.
  • n cognition and rationality (the cortex)
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • the parts mediating emotion (the limbic system
  • there's endless cross-talk between the two regions
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      This is also something we learned, there is so much interconnection in our brains.
  • "I wouldn't do that if I were you," hopefully convincing it not to do something idiotic. But it turns out that the limbic system influences the cortex as well.
  • lamenting how we'd be so much better off in our decision-making if our emotions played no role
  • of the limbic system to talk to the cortex and you get what we'd almost universally view as bad decisions.
  • unrecognizably utilitarian; they have no emotional conflict in choosing to advocate sacrificing the life of a stranger (or, equally so, a loved one) in order to save five others
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      Also a very good example, that could be used for discussion in class.
  • the balancing act between cognition and emotion is pretty complex.
  • (and become more at risk for stress-related diseases)
  • we lack control, predictability, outlets for our frustrations, or social support
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      Idea that humans like control, we like simple things that we can control. A pandemic, not being something we have complete, simple control over.
  • "We just don't know yet." And in this time, when we need social support the most, the crucially important catchphrase has become "social distancing."
  • he most rational decision-making part of your cortex is the pre-frontal cortex (PFC), while the most frothing-at-the-mouth emotional part of your limbic system is arguably the amygdala, a region central to fear, anxiety and aggression.
  • class of stress hormones causes the PFC to become sluggish, less capable of sending a "let's not do something hasty" signal to the amygdala
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      Interesting to know the science behind the feeling I think we are all dealing with right now.
  • Extensive research has explored the consequences of this skewed neurobiology, showing that stress distorts our decisions in consistent ways
  • up having tunnel vision when it comes to making choices and it becomes harder to consider extraneous factors that may actually not be extraneous, or harder to factor future consequences into present considerations.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      "tunnel vision" meaning it is harder to consider outside factors in our choices.
  • We fall back into a usual solution, and instead of trying something different when it doesn't work, the pull is to stick with the usual,
  • . And our decision-making narrows in another sense, in that we contract our circle of who counts as "us," and who merits empathy and consideration. Our moral decisions become more egoistic
anonymous

Can you trust your earliest childhood memories? - BBC Future - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...ur-earliest-childhood-memories

shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The moments we remember from the first years of our lives are often our most treasured because we have carried them longest. The chances are, they are also completely made up.
  • Around four out of every 10 of us have fabricated our first memory, according to researchers. This is thought to be because our brains do not develop the ability to store autobiographical memories at least until we reach two years old.
  • Yet a surprising number of us have some flicker of memory from before that age
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • But carrying around false memories from your childhood could be having a far greater impact on you than you may realise too. The events, emotions and experiences we remember from our early years can help to shape who we are as adults, determining our likes, dislikes, fears and even our behaviour.
  • “People have a life story, particularly as they get older and for some people it needs to stretch back to the very early stage of life,”
  • The prevailing account of how we come to believe and remember things is based around the concept of source monitoring. “Every time a thought comes to mind we have to make a decision – have we experienced it [an event], imagined it or have we talked about it with other people,” says Kimberley Wade
  • Most of the time we make that decision correctly and can identify where these mental experiences come from, but sometimes we get it wrong.
  • Wade admits she has spent a lot of time recalling an event that was actually something her brother experienced rather than herself, but despite this, it is rich in detail and provokes emotion
  • Memory researchers have shown it is possible to induce fictional autobiographical memories in volunteers, including accounts of getting lost in a shopping mall and even having tea with a member of the Royal Family
  • Based on my research, everybody is capable of forming complex false memories, given the right circumstances – Julia Shaw
  • In some situations, such as after looking at pictures or a video, children are more susceptible to forming false memories than adults. People with certain personality types are also thought to be more prone.
  • Experts have managed to turn people off all sorts of foods by convincing them it had made them ill when they were a child
  • Memories before the age of three are more than likely to be false. Any that appear very fluid and detailed, as if you were playing back a home video and experiencing a chronological account of a memory, could well also be made up. It is more likely that fuzzy fragments, or snapshots of moments are real, as long as they are not from too early in your life.
  • While this may seem like a bit of fun, many scientists believe the “false memory diet” could be used to tackle obesity and encourage people to reach for healthier options like asparagus, or even help cut people’s alcohol consumption.
  • Interestingly, scientists have also found positive suggestions, such as “you loved asparagus the first time you ate it” tend to be more effective than negative suggestions like “you got sick drinking vodka”
  • “Miscarriage of justice, incarceration, loss of reputation, job and status, and family breakdown occur,
  • One of the major problems with legal cases involving false memories, is that it is currently impossible to distinguish between true and fictional recollections
  • Efforts have been made to analyse minor false memories in a brain scanner (fMRI) and detect different neurological patterns, but there is nothing as yet to indicate that this technology can be used to detect whether recollections have become distorted.
  • the most extreme case of memory implantation involves a controversial technique called “regression therapy”, where patients confront childhood traumas, supposedly buried in their subconscious
  • “Memories are malleable and tend to change slightly each time we revisit them, in the same way that spoken stories do,”
  • “Therefore at each recollection, new elements can easily be integrated while existing elements can be altered or lost.”
  • This is not to say that all evidence that relies on memory should be discarded or regarded as unreliable – they often provide the most compelling testimony in criminal cases. But it has led to rules and guidelines about how witnesses and victims should be questioned to ensure their recollections of an event or perpetrator are not contaminated by investigators or prosecutors.
  • Any memories that appear very fluid and detailed, as if you were playing back a home video, could well also be made up
  • We crave a cohesive narrative of our own existence and will even invent stories to give us a more complete picture
  • Children are more susceptible to forming false memories than adults, especially after looking at photographs or films
  • And we may not want to rid ourselves of these memories. Our memories, whether fictional or not, can help to bring us closer together.
  • anonymous on 04 Nov 20
     
    This is a great and very detailed article about memory and how we change our own memories and are impacted by this change.
mmckenziejr01

The Most Egregious Straw Men of 2016 | Inverse - 0 views

www.inverse.com/...aw-men-arguments-politics-2016

straw man fallacy cognitive biases politics

shared by mmckenziejr01 on 24 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Fallacies are illicit shortcuts in reasoning, bad arguments that sound good but don’t actually make logical sense. Politicians and other public figures use them all the time ad nauseam in speeches and debates in order to better capture the hearts and minds of their audience.
  • But of all the logical fallacies out there, one stands out as being particularly powerful and popular, especially in politics: the straw man.
  • But that’s the truth, and the truth is irrelevant when it comes to fallacies. Just the fact that Clinton mentioned the term open borders, combined with her more liberal stance on immigration, was enough for Trump to say that she’s in favor of totally open borders
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  • The straw man fallacy involves the construction of a second argument that to some degree resembles, in a simplified or exaggerated way, the argument that your opponent is really making. It is much easier for you to attack that perverted point than it is to address the original point being made.
  • Clinton did not say she wanted to get rid of the Second Amendment in any sense. She had expressed support for expanding background checks and a possible assault weapons ban. Those things are reasonable (moderate, even), so it’s much simpler for Trump to ignore her argument and make one up for her
  • What are in large part reasonable measures taken to avoid unnecessary offences are recast by these Republicans to be softness or attacks on people’s freedom of speech. By connoting political correctness with these attributes, Republican politicians can ensure that their constituent remains hostile to the idea. Then, when they come across an argument in need of simplification, they can call back to that already-crafted association.
  • Sanders’s healthcare plan would have ended Medicare and the ACA as we know them, but only to replace them with a universal healthcare system. No one stood to lose their coverage, but the way Clinton was arguing, it looked like people might. By essentially leaving out half of Sanders’s argument, Clinton made a case against a fictional version of Sanders that seemed just real enough to fool the average voter.
  • Still, mostly everyone today understands that the Earth isn’t flat. They recognize that, as Scaramucci said, “science” got one wrong there. By equating these two concepts, he assumes any argument that recognizes climate change to also be one that claims the Earth is flat. For that reason, this particular brand of climate change denial wins the award for best (or maybe worst) straw man of 2016.
  • mmckenziejr01 on 24 Nov 17
     
    Here are a few examples of candidates using straw man fallacies to try to win over voters during the 2016 election. This shows just how prevalent cognitive biases are in our everyday lives without us even noticing them.
tongoscar

Why Do Emotions Influence Us More Than Reason? - Exploring your mind - 0 views

exploringyourmind.com/emotions-influence-us-reason

shared by tongoscar on 03 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Our mind is extremely powerful and skillful in directing our behavior, both for good and for evil.
  • We have the choice to follow our “heart” or to listen to the list of pros and cons.
  • Most of the studies that have analyzed this process of decision-making affirm that, usually, emotions win.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Emotions: as ethereal as air and as dangerous as sulfur 
  • Emotions are subjective experiences that induce you to act. They emerge basically from our perceptions of the world, instead of from an actual reasoning.
  • Many human behaviors depend on emotions. Emotions have a great effect on the decisions we make. In fact, usually, they are crucial.
  • In theory, emotions are not decisive, but in reality they can be very decisive. They are intrinsic to human beings and seep into all our judgments and deliberations in life. It is not about denying them, but rather about identifying them and learning to channel them for our own good.
  • Emotions usually obey unknown causes.
  • Emotions give way to certain thoughts, and thoughts, in turn, give birth to emotions.
  • Emotions that have barely been thought out lead to a distorted perception of reality.
  • In the same way, imagining purely emotional actions, without even a pinch of reason, is more or less absurd.
  • Emotions are not prancing and runaway horses that we should “take the reins of.” They make us who we are as human beings. They help give meaning to our world. They do not have to be “eradicated,” nor denied or undervalued. Quite the contrary: being able to feel means being able to be human. Only on the basis of emotions can love, sacrifice, big dreams and great deeds be built.
krystalxu

'I Knew It All Along…Didn't I?' - Understanding Hindsight Bias - Association ... - 0 views

www.psychologicalscience.org/...erstanding-hindsight-bias.html

science psychology knowledge brain science bias

shared by krystalxu on 22 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • “I knew it all along.”
  • we actually didn’t know it all along,
  • The first level of hindsight bias, memory distortion, involves misremembering an earlier opinion or judgment (“I said it would happen”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • . The second level, inevitability, centers on our belief that the event was inevitable (“It had to happen”)
  • Hindsight bias can also make us overconfident in how certain we are about our own judgments
  • the third level, foreseeability, involves the belief that we personally could have foreseen the event (“I knew it would happen”).
  • Research shows that we selectively recall information that confirms what we know to be true and we try to create a narrative that makes sense out of the information we have.
  • Research shows that we selectively recall information that confirms what we know to be true and we try to create a narrative that makes sense out of the information we have.
  • , it can have important consequences for the legal system, especially in cases of negligence, product liability, and medical malpractice. Studies have shown, for example, that hindsight bias routinely afflicts judgments about a defendant’s past conduct.
  • When we are encouraged to consider and explain how outcomes that didn’t happen could have happened, we counteract our usual inclination to throw out information that doesn’t fit with our narrative.
johnsonel7

Sensory perception | Science Features | Naked Scientists - 0 views

www.thenakedscientists.com/...derstanding-sensory-perception

sense perception brain science

shared by johnsonel7 on 01 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Deciphering how the brain processes sight and hearing could have implications for how we understand and treat conditions such as dyslexia, autism and schizophrenia.
  • schizophrenia
  • Through a project called SENSOCOM, she is exploring how sensory perception affects communication, focusing on the brain’s deep subcortical structures.By doing this, she and her team are exploring a part of the brain traditionally excluded by research trying to understand communication impairments found in autism spectrum disorder and dyslexia, conditions which affect around 53 million people in Europe.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • To do this they have been focusing on the sensory pathways linked to these deep structures. She and her group discovered that adults with dyslexia have weaker pathway connections between a visual subcortical structure (the left visual thalamus) with an area of the cortex called V5/MT, which is critical for the perception of visual motion. In the auditory mode, there was a similar finding. The team discovered weaker connections between the left auditory thalamus and a cortex structure linked to auditory motion, which is important for speech perception. These connections could therefore be important for reading and for predicting reading skill, according to Dr von Kriegstein.
  • So how might this translate into helping people with dyslexia? This is basic science, says Prof. von Kriegstein, so first it’s crucial to understand the mechanisms behind communications disorders before developing therapy training tools, although she is optimistic these could lie within reach.
  • The way the brain encodes information and in turn directs perception of that sensory experience is a highly variable process.
  • The sensory overload or distorted and heightened perceptions described by schizophrenia patients, for instance, could relate to these deficits. Sensory dysfunction has also been linked to delusions and hallucinations as well as difficulties with attention and reading the emotions or tone of others – all of which can affect social interaction.
  • According to Dr Fellin, decreased connectivity between nerve cells (neurons) appears to play an important role in the progression of schizophrenia. So far, Dr Fellin and his group have identified which specific neurons influence sensory responses in mouse studies, but not yet in animal models of schizophrenia, with similar investigations in glial cells  - the supporting cells of the nervous system.
honordearlove

6 Cognitive Biases That Make Politics Irrational - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.ca/...e-bias-politics_b_3077740.html

bias politics psychology

shared by honordearlove on 07 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • In turn, these seemingly irrational flaws in judgement can lead to perpetual distortion, inaccurate judgement, and illogical interpretation -- all of which are key ingredients in the widening of cultural rifts, the deepening of global disparity gaps, and the general intensifying of political upheavals.
  • forming culturally cohesive social circles based upon similar viewpoints, and unconsciously referencing only those perspectives which reaffirm our deeply entrenched beliefs
  • innate tribal desire to be socially accepted, we tend to favour the thoughts, ideals, and sentiments of those with whom we racially, culturally, and ethnocentrically identify with most.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The repercussions of this bias confines us to the same routines, political parties, and economic strategies
  • our cognitive selective attention processes identify negative news as inherently important or profound
  • This is the sort of groupthink that convinces religious and political radicals they have greater support
  • This lack of self-control, where most of us would rather exchange serious pains in the not-to-distant future for menial pleasures in the moment, personifies the impulsive decision-making that has led to the financial meltdown, urban saturation, political corruption, and general slighting of imminent environmental cataclysms.
  • So while the majority of us may be prone to these errors in rational judgement, we can also be more aware of them. And who knows, if we can manage to re-rationalise how we think, act, and treat one another, perhaps our politics will follow suit.
johnsonel7

Expect Trump to fight as if his life depends on it (Opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump perception reality language

shared by johnsonel7 on 24 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Over the decades, Trump constructed and then inhabited a public persona that is powerful but unnatural. As a businessman and TV personality, Trump was, perhaps, the greatest illusionist of our time. He has repeated, ad nauseum, his unverified claims of wealth, sexual magnetism, and brilliance -- a "very stable genius" -- in an effort to produce the image of a great man.
  • But the theatrical dynamic of the Trump presidency was threatened every time real life collided with Trump's cartoon. His failures have often come at moments when he should be guided by a moral compass. But no one who is so devoted to a false persona could possess this kind of ethical reflex
  • Then, on Monday, Trump seemed to yet again try and regain his power by implying the Ukraine scandal couldn't be significant because it revolved around a "perfect" letter he wrote to Zelensky. It's the sort of distortion of the facts one would expect from a man whose comforting false reality is falling apart. As analysts have pointed out, Trump's contact with Zelensky involved not a letter, but a telephone call which was far from perfect. Indeed it was only "perfect" if one was looking for an example of a president abusing his office.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The Russian connection echoes a long-running theme of the Trump presidency, which has cast doubt on his ability to lead the nation -- from Trump's criticism of the NATO alliance to his request for Russia to be admitted to the G7 economic summit countries, to his withdrawal of American troops from Syria. Indeed, last week Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi noted that "all roads lead" to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
  • When we hear the gears of the Trump machine grind and see the decorative pieces of chrome loosen and fall, we are witnessing the results of a confrontation between reality and fantasy. This observation doesn't diminish the power of Trump's marketing method. It does, however, suggest its limits.
Javier E

He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ics-greece-rome-whiteness.html

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Padilla laid out an indictment of his field. “If one were intentionally to design a discipline whose institutional organs and gatekeeping protocols were explicitly aimed at disavowing the legitimate status of scholars of color,” he said, “one could not do better than what classics has done.”
  • Padilla believes that classics is so entangled with white supremacy as to be inseparable from it. “Far from being extrinsic to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity,” he has written, “the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of classics.”
  • Rather than kowtowing to criticism, Williams said, “maybe we should start defending our discipline.” She protested that it was imperative to stand up for the classics as the political, literary and philosophical foundation of European and American culture: “It’s Western civilization. It matters because it’s the West.” Hadn’t classics given us the concepts of liberty, equality and democracy?
  • ...46 more annotations...
  • “I believe in merit. I don’t look at the color of the author.” She pointed a finger in Padilla’s direction. “You may have got your job because you’re Black,” Williams said, “but I would prefer to think you got your job because of merit.”
  • Williams ceded the microphone, and Padilla was able to speak. “Here’s what I have to say about the vision of classics that you outlined,” he said. “I want nothing to do with it. I hope the field dies that you’ve outlined, and that it dies as swiftly as possible.”
  • What he did find was a slim blue-and-white textbook titled “How People Lived in Ancient Greece and Rome.” “Western civilization was formed from the union of early Greek wisdom and the highly organized legal minds of early Rome,” the book began. “The Greek belief in a person’s ability to use his powers of reason, coupled with Roman faith in military strength, produced a result that has come to us as a legacy, or gift from the past.” Thirty years later, Padilla can still recite those opening lines.
  • In 2017, he published a paper in the journal Classical Antiquity that compared evidence from antiquity and the Black Atlantic to draw a more coherent picture of the religious life of the Roman enslaved. “It will not do merely to adopt a pose of ‘righteous indignation’ at the distortions and gaps in the archive,” he wrote. “There are tools available for the effective recovery of the religious experiences of the enslaved, provided we work with these tools carefully and honestly.”
  • Padilla sensed that his pursuit of classics had displaced other parts of his identity, just as classics and “Western civilization” had displaced other cultures and forms of knowledge. Recovering them would be essential to dismantling the white-supremacist framework in which both he and classics had become trapped. “I had to actively engage in the decolonization of my mind,” he told me.
  • He also gravitated toward contemporary scholars like José Esteban Muñoz, Lorgia García Peña and Saidiya Hartman, who speak of race not as a physical fact but as a ghostly system o
  • In response to rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and the United States, Mary Beard, perhaps the most famous classicist alive, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the Romans “would have been puzzled by our modern problems with migration and asylum,” because the empire was founded on the “principles of incorporation and of the free movement of people.”
  • In November 2015, he wrote an essay for Eidolon, an online classics journal, clarifying that in Rome, as in the United States, paeans to multiculturalism coexisted with hatred of foreigners. Defending a client in court, Cicero argued that “denying foreigners access to our city is patently inhumane,” but ancient authors also recount the expulsions of whole “suspect” populations, including a roundup of Jews in 139 B.C., who were not considered “suitable enough to live alongside Romans.”
  • The job of classicists is not to “point out the howlers,” he said on a 2017 panel. “To simply take the position of the teacher, the qualified classicist who knows things and can point to these mistakes, is not sufficient.”
  • Dismantling structures of power that have been shored up by the classical tradition will require more than fact-checking; it will require writing an entirely new story about antiquity, and about who we are today
  • To find that story, Padilla is advocating reforms that would “explode the canon” and “overhaul the discipline from nuts to bolts,” including doing away with the label “classics” altogether.
  • . “What I want to be thinking about in the next few weeks,” he told them, “is how we can be telling the story of the early Roman Empire not just through a variety of sources but through a variety of persons.” He asked the students to consider the lives behind the identities he had assigned them, and the way those lives had been shaped by the machinery of empire, which, through military conquest, enslavement and trade, creates the conditions for the large-scale movement of human beings.
  • ultimately, he decided that leaving enslaved characters out of the role play was an act of care. “I’m not yet ready to turn to a student and say, ‘You are going to be a slave.’”
  • Privately, even some sympathetic classicists worry that Padilla’s approach will only hasten the field’s decline. “I’ve spoken to undergrad majors who say that they feel ashamed to tell their friends they’re studying classics,”
  • “I very much admire Dan-el’s work, and like him, I deplore the lack of diversity in the classical profession,” Mary Beard told me via email. But “to ‘condemn’ classical culture would be as simplistic as to offer it unconditional admiration.”
  • In a 2019 talk, Beard argued that “although classics may become politicized, it doesn’t actually have a politics,” meaning that, like the Bible, the classical tradition is a language of authority — a vocabulary that can be used for good or ill by would-be emancipators and oppressors alike.
  • Over the centuries, classical civilization has acted as a model for people of many backgrounds, who turned it into a matrix through which they formed and debated ideas about beauty, ethics, power, nature, selfhood, citizenship and, of course, race
  • Anthony Grafton, the great Renaissance scholar, put it this way in his preface to “The Classical Tradition”: “An exhaustive exposition of the ways in which the world has defined itself with regard to Greco-Roman antiquity would be nothing less than a comprehensive history of the world.”
  • Classics as we know it today is a creation of the 18th and 19th centuries. During that period, as European universities emancipated themselves from the control of the church, the study of Greece and Rome gave the Continent its new, secular origin story. Greek and Latin writings emerged as a competitor to the Bible’s moral authority, which lent them a liberatory power
  • Historians stress that such ideas cannot be separated from the discourses of nationalism, colorism and progress that were taking shape during the modern colonial period, as Europeans came into contact with other peoples and their traditions. “The whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is,” Winkelmann wrote.
  • While Renaissance scholars were fascinated by the multiplicity of cultures in the ancient world, Enlightenment thinkers created a hierarchy with Greece and Rome, coded as white, on top, and everything else below.
  • Jefferson, along with most wealthy young men of his time, studied classics at college, where students often spent half their time reading and translating Greek and Roman texts. “Next to Christianity,” writes Caroline Winterer, a historian at Stanford, “the central intellectual project in America before the late 19th century was classicism.
  • Of the 2.5 million people living in America in 1776, perhaps only 3,000 had gone to college, but that number included many of the founders
  • They saw classical civilization as uniquely educative — a “lamp of experience,” in the words of Patrick Henry, that could light the path to a more perfect union. However true it was, subsequent generations would come to believe, as Hannah Arendt wrote in “On Revolution,” that “without the classical example … none of the men of the Revolution on either side of the Atlantic would have possessed the courage for what then turned out to be unprecedented action.”
  • Comparisons between the United States and the Roman Empire became popular as the country emerged as a global power. Even after Latin and Greek were struck from college-entrance exams, the proliferation of courses on “great books” and Western civilization, in which classical texts were read in translation, helped create a coherent national story after the shocks of industrialization and global warfare.
  • even as the classics were pulled apart, laughed at and transformed, they continued to form the raw material with which many artists shaped their visions of modernity.
  • Over the centuries, thinkers as disparate as John Adams and Simone Weil have likened classical antiquity to a mirror. Generations of intellectuals, among them feminist, queer and Black scholars, have seen something of themselves in classical texts, flashes of recognition that held a kind of liberatory promise
  • The language that is used to describe the presence of classical antiquity in the world today — the classical tradition, legacy or heritage — contains within it the idea of a special, quasi-genetic relationship. In his lecture “There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilization,” Kwame Anthony Appiah (this magazine’s Ethicist columnist) mockingly describes the belief in such a kinship as the belief in a “golden nugget” of insight — a precious birthright and shimmering sign of greatness — that white Americans and Europeans imagine has been passed down to them from the ancients.
  • To see classics the way Padilla sees it means breaking the mirror; it means condemning the classical legacy as one of the most harmful stories we’ve told ourselves
  • Padilla is wary of colleagues who cite the radical uses of classics as a way to forestall change; he believes that such examples have been outmatched by the field’s long alliance with the forces of dominance and oppression.
  • Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together. Classics deserves to survive only if it can become “a site of contestation” for the communities who have been denigrated by it in the past.
  • if classics fails his test, Padilla and others are ready to give it up. “I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.”
  • One way to get rid of classics would be to dissolve its faculties and reassign their members to history, archaeology and language departments.
  • many classicists are advocating softer approaches to reforming the discipline, placing the emphasis on expanding its borders. Schools including Howard and Emory have integrated classics with Ancient Mediterranean studies, turning to look across the sea at Egypt, Anatolia, the Levant and North Africa. The change is a declaration of purpose: to leave behind the hierarchies of the Enlightenment and to move back toward the Renaissance model of the ancient world as a place of diversity and mixture.
  • Ian Morris put it more bluntly. “Classics is a Euro-American foundation myth,” Morris said to me. “Do we really want that sort of thing?”
  • There’s a more interesting story to be told about the history of what we call the West, the history of humanity, without valorizing particular cultures in it,” said Josephine Quinn, a professor of ancient history at Oxford. “It seems to me the really crucial mover in history is always the relationship between people, between cultures.”
  • “In some moods, I feel that this is just a moment of despair, and people are trying to find significance even if it only comes from self-accusation,” he told me. “I’m not sure that there is a discipline that is exempt from the fact that it is part of the history of this country. How distinctly wicked is classics? I don’t know that it is.”
  • “One of the dubious successes of my generation is that it did break the canon,” Richlin told me. “I don’t think we could believe at the time that we would be putting ourselves out of business, but we did.” She added: “If they blew up the classics departments, that would really be the end.”
  • Padilla, like Douglass, now sees the moment of absorption into the classical, literary tradition as simultaneous with his apprehension of racial difference; he can no longer find pride or comfort in having used it to bring himself out of poverty.
  • “Claiming dignity within this system of structural oppression,” Padilla has said, “requires full buy-in into its logic of valuation.” He refuses to “praise the architects of that trauma as having done right by you at the end.”
  • Last June, as racial-justice protests unfolded across the nation, Padilla turned his attention to arenas beyond classics. He and his co-authors — the astrophysicist Jenny Greene, the literary theorist Andrew Cole and the poet Tracy K. Smith — began writing their open letter to Princeton with 48 proposals for reform. “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America,” the letter began. “Indifference to the effects of racism on this campus has allowed legitimate demands for institutional support and redress in the face of microaggression and outright racist incidents to go long unmet.”
  • Padilla believes that the uproar over free speech is misguided. “I don’t see things like free speech or the exchange of ideas as ends in themselves,” he told me. “I have to be honest about that. I see them as a means to the end of human flourishing.”
  • “There is a certain kind of classicist who will look on what transpired and say, ‘Oh, that’s not us,’” Padilla said when we spoke recently. “What is of interest to me is why is it so imperative for classicists of a certain stripe to make this discursive move? ‘This is not us.’
  • Joel Christensen, the Brandeis professor, now feels that it is his “moral and ethical and intellectual responsibility” to teach classics in a way that exposes its racist history. “Otherwise we’re just participating in propaganda,”
  • Christensen, who is 42, was in graduate school before he had his “crisis of faith,” and he understands the fear that many classicists may experience at being asked to rewrite the narrative of their life’s work. But, he warned, “that future is coming, with or without Dan-el.”
  • On Jan. 6, Padilla turned on the television minutes after the windows of the Capitol were broken. In the crowd, he saw a man in a Greek helmet with TRUMP 2020 painted in white. He saw a man in a T-shirt bearing a golden eagle on a fasces — symbols of Roman law and governance — below the logo 6MWE, which stands for “Six Million Wasn’t Enough,
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