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katedriscoll

Confirmation bias in the utilization of others' opinion strength | Nature Neuroscience - 0 views

www.nature.com/...s41593-019-0549-2

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Humans tend to discount information that undermines past choices and judgments. This
  • confirmation bias has significant impact on domains ranging from politics to science and education. Little is known about the mechanisms underlying this fundamental characteristic of belief formation. Here we report a mechanism underlying the confirmation bias. Specifically, we provide evidence for a failure to use the strength of others’ disconfirming opinions to alter confidence in judgments, but adequate use when opinions are confirmatory. This bias is related to reduced neural sensitivity to the strength of others’ opinions in the posterior medial prefrontal cortex when opinions are disconfirming. Our results demonstrate that existing judgments alter the neural representation of information strength, leaving the individual less likely to alter opinions in the face of disagreement.
Javier E

Opinion | Humans Are Animals. Let's Get Over It. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...humans-animals-philosophy.html

animal human nature philosophy human

shared by Javier E on 01 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The separation of people from, and the superiority of people to, members of other species is a good candidate for the originating idea of Western thought. And a good candidate for the worst.
  • Like Plato, Hobbes associates anarchy with animality and civilization with the state, which gives to our merely animal motion moral content for the first time and orders us into a definite hierarchy.
  • It is rationality that gives us dignity, that makes a claim to moral respect that no mere animal can deserve. “The moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality,” writes Immanuel Kant in “Critique of Practical Reason.” In this assertion, at least, the Western intellectual tradition has been remarkably consistent.
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  • the devaluation of animals and disconnection of us from them reflect a deeper devaluation of the material universe in general
  • In this scheme of things, we owe nature nothing; it is to yield us everything. This is the ideology of species annihilation and environmental destruction, and also of technological development.
  • Further trouble is caused when the distinctions between humans and animals are then used to draw distinctions among human beings
  • Some of us, in short, are animals — and some of us are better than that. This, it turns out, is a useful justification for colonialism, slavery and racism.
  • The classical source for this distinction is certainly Aristotle. In the “Politics,” he writes, “Where then there is such a difference as that between soul and body, or between men and animals (as in the case of those whose business is to use their body, and who can do nothing better), the lower sort are by nature slaves.
  • Every human hierarchy, insofar as it can be justified philosophically, is treated by Aristotle by analogy to the relation of people to animals.
  • One difficult thing to face about our animality is that it entails our deaths; being an animal is associated throughout philosophy with dying purposelessly, and so with living meaninglessly.
  • this line of thought also happens to justify colonizing or even extirpating the “savage,” the beast in human form.
  • Our supposed fundamental distinction from “beasts, “brutes” and “savages” is used to divide us from nature, from one another and, finally, from ourselves
  • In Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates divides the human soul into two parts. The soul of the thirsty person, he says, “wishes for nothing else than to drink.” But we can restrain ourselves. “That which inhibits such actions,” he concludes, “arises from the calculations of reason.” When we restrain or control ourselves, Plato argues, a rational being restrains an animal.
  • In this view, each of us is both a beast and a person — and the point of human life is to constrain our desires with rationality and purify ourselves of animality
  • These sorts of systematic self-divisions come to be refigured in Cartesian dualism, which separates the mind from the body, or in Sigmund Freud’s distinction between id and ego, or in the neurological contrast between the functions of the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.
  • I don’t know how to refute it, exactly, except to say that I don’t feel myself to be a logic program running on an animal body; I’d like to consider myself a lot more integrated than that.
  • And I’d like to repudiate every political and environmental conclusion ever drawn by our supposed transcendence of the order of nature
  • There is no doubt that human beings are distinct from other animals, though not necessarily more distinct than other animals are from one another. But maybe we’ve been too focused on the differences for too long. Maybe we should emphasize what all us animals have in common.
Javier E

America Is Flunking Math - Persuasion - 1 views

www.persuasion.community/...ica-is-flunking-math-education

STEM math education math education anti-racism Critical Theory research Science bias

shared by Javier E on 17 May 21 - No Cached
  • One can argue that the preeminence of each civilization was, in part, due to their sophisticated understanding and use of mathematics. This is particularly clear in the case of the West, which forged ahead in the 17th century with the discovery of calculus, one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time.
  • The United States became the dominant force in the mathematical sciences in the wake of World War II, largely due to the disastrous genocidal policies of the Third Reich. The Nazis’ obsession with purging German science of what it viewed as nefarious Jewish influence led to a massive exodus of Jewish mathematicians and scientists to America
  • Indeed, academic institutions in the United States have thrived largely because of their ability to attract talented individuals from around the world.
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  • The quality of mathematics research in the United States today is the envy of the scientific world. This is a direct result of the openness and inclusivity of the profession.
  • According to our own experiences at the universities where we teach, an overwhelming majority of American students with strong math backgrounds are either foreign-born or first-generation students who have additional support from their education-conscious families. At all levels, STEM disciplines are more and more dependent on a constant flow of foreign talent.
  • The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development compares mathematical proficiency among 15-year-olds by country worldwide. According to its 2018 report, America ranked 37th while China, America’s main competitor for world leadership, came in first.
  • This is despite the fact that the United States is the fifth-highest spender per pupil among the 37 developed OECD nations
  • This massive failure of our K-12 education system trickles through the STEM pipeline.
  • At the undergraduate level, too few American students are prepared for higher-level mathematics courses. These students are then unprepared for rigorous graduate-level work
  • Can Americans maintain this unmatched excellence in the future? There are worrisome signs that suggest not.
  • There are many reasons for this failure, but the way that we educate and prepare teachers is particularly influential. The vast majority of K-12 math teachers are graduates of teacher-preparation programs that teach very little substantive mathematics
  • This has led to a constant stream of ill-advised and dumbed-down reforms. One of the latest fads is anti-racist mathematics. Promoted in several states, the bizarre doctrine threatens to further degrade the teaching of mathematics.
  • Another major concern is the twisted interpretation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
  • Under the banner of DEI, universities are abandoning the use of standardized tests like the SAT and GRE in admissions, and cities are considering scrapping academic tracking and various gifted programs in schools, which they deem “inequitable.”
  • such programs are particularly effective, when properly implemented, at discovering and encouraging talented children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
  • This will only lead to a further widening of racial disparities in educational outcomes while lowering American children’s rankings in education internationally.
  • These measures will not only hinder the progress of the generations of our future STEM workforce but also contribute to structural inequalities, as they are uniquely detrimental to students whose parents cannot send them to private schools or effective enrichment programs.
  • These are just a few examples of an unprecedented fervor for revolutionary change in the name of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a doctrine that views the world as a fierce battleground for the narratives of various identity groups.
  • The new 2021 Mathematics Framework, currently under consideration by California’s Department of Education, does away “with all tracking, acceleration, gifted programs, or any instruction that involves clustering by individual differences, without expressing any awareness of the impact these drastic alterations would have in preparing STEM-ready candidates.”
  • Ill-conceived DEI policies, often informed by CRT, and the declining standards of K-12 math education feed each other in a vicious circle
  • Regarding minorities, in particular, public K-12 education all too often produces students unprepared to compete, thus leading to large disparities in admissions at universities, graduate programs, and faculty positions. This disparity is then condemned as a manifestation of structural racism, resulting in administrative measures to lower the evaluation criteria. Lowering standards at all levels leads eventually to even worse outcomes and larger disparities, and so on in a downward spiral.
  • A case in point is the recent report by the American Mathematical Society that accuses the entire mathematics community, with the thinnest of specific evidence, of systemic racial discrimination. A major justification put forward for such a grave accusation is the lack of sufficient representation of Black mathematicians in the professio
  • the report, while raising awareness of several ugly facts from the long-ago past, makes little effort to address the real reasons for this, mainly the catastrophic failure of the K-12 mathematical educational system.
  • The National Science Foundation, a federal institution meant to support fundamental research, is now diverting some of its limited funding to various DEI initiatives of questionable benefit.
  • Meanwhile, other countries, especially China, are doing precisely the opposite, following the model of our past dedication to objective measures of excellence. How long before we will see a reverse exodus, away from the United States?
  • The present crisis can still be reversed by focusing on a few concrete actions:
  • Improve schools in urban areas and inner-city neighborhoods by following the most promising education programs. These programs demonstrate that inner-city children benefit if they are challenged by high standards and a nurturing environment.
  • Follow the lead of other highly successful rigorous programs such as BASIS schools and Math for America, which focus on rigorous STEM curricula, combined with 21st-century teaching methods, and recruit talented teachers to help them build on their STEM knowledge and teaching methods.
  • Increase, rather than eliminate, tailored instruction, both for accelerated and remedial math courses.
  • Reject the soft bigotry of low expectations, that Black children cannot do well in competitive mathematics programs and need dumbed-down ethnocentric versions of mathematics.
  • Uphold the objective selection process based on merit at all levels of education and research.
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.
Javier E

Revisiting the prophetic work of Neil Postman about the media » MercatorNet - 1 views

mercatornet.com/...68239

postman media analysis social media psychology brain science technology education

shared by Javier E on 13 May 21 - No Cached
  • The NYU professor was surely prophetic. “Our own tribe is undergoing a vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to the magic of electronics,” he cautioned.
  • “We face the rapid dissolution of the assumptions of an education organised around the slow-moving printed word, and the equally rapid emergence of a new education based on the speed-of-light electronic message.”
  • What Postman perceived in television has been dramatically intensified by smartphones and social media
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  • Postman also recognised that technology was changing our mental processes and social habits.
  • Today corporations like Google and Amazon collect data on Internet users based on their browsing history, the things they purchase, and the apps they use
  • Yet all citizens are undergoing this same transformation. Our digital devices undermine social interactions by isolating us,
  • “Years from now, it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organisations, but have solved very little of importance to most people, and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.”
  • “Television has by its power to control the time, attention, and cognitive habits of our youth gained the power to control their education.”
  • As a student of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, Postman believed that the medium of information was critical to understanding its social and political effects. Every technology has its own agenda. Postman worried that the very nature of television undermined American democratic institutions.
  • Many Americans tuned in to the presidential debate looking for something substantial and meaty
  • It was simply another manifestation of the incoherence and vitriol of cable news
  • “When, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility,” warned Postman.
  • Technology Is Never Neutral
  • As for new problems, we have increased addictions (technological and pornographic); increased loneliness, anxiety, and distraction; and inhibited social and intellectual maturation.
  • The average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds, so that the eye never rests, always has something new to see. Moreover, television offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and is largely aimed at emotional gratification.
  • This is far truer of the Internet and social media, where more than a third of Americans, and almost half of young people, now get their news.
  • with smartphones now ubiquitous, the Internet has replaced television as the “background radiation of the social and intellectual universe.”
  • Is There Any Solution?
  • Reading news or commentary in print, in contrast, requires concentration, patience, and careful reflection, virtues that our digital age vitiates.
  • Politics as Entertainment
  • “How television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged,” observed Postman. In the case of politics, television fashions public discourse into yet another form of entertainment
  • In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial. The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. … They tell everything about the fears, fancies, and dreams of those who might buy them.
  • The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and towards making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.
  • Such is the case with the way politics is “advertised” to different subsets of the American electorate. The “consumer,” depending on his political leanings, may be manipulated by fears of either an impending white-nationalist, fascist dictatorship, or a radical, woke socialist takeover.
  • This paradigm is aggravated by the hypersiloing of media content, which explains why Americans who read left-leaning media view the Proud Boys as a legitimate, existential threat to national civil order, while those who read right-leaning media believe the real immediate enemies of our nation are Antifa
  • Regardless of whether either of these groups represents a real public menace, the loss of any national consensus over what constitutes objective news means that Americans effectively talk past one another: they use the Proud Boys or Antifa as rhetorical barbs to smear their ideological opponents as extremists.
  • Yet these technologies are far from neutral. They are, rather, “equipped with a program for social change.
  • Postman’s analysis of technology is prophetic and profound. He warned of the trivialising of our media, defined by “broken time and broken attention,” in which “facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.” He warned of “a neighborhood of strangers and pointless quantity.”
  • does Postman offer any solutions to this seemingly uncontrollable technological juggernaut?
  • Postman’s suggestions regarding education are certainly relevant. He unequivocally condemned education that mimics entertainment, and urged a return to learning that is hierarchical, meaning that it first gives students a foundation of essential knowledge before teaching “critical thinking.”
  • Postman also argued that education must avoid a lowest-common-denominator approach in favor of complexity and the perplexing: the latter method elicits in the student a desire to make sense of what perplexes him.
  • Finally, Postman promoted education of vigorous exposition, logic, and rhetoric, all being necessary for citizenship
  • Another course of action is to understand what these media, by their very nature, do to us and to public discourse.
  • We must, as Postman exhorts us, “demystify the data” and dominate our technology, lest it dominate us. We must identify and resist how television, social media, and smartphones manipulate our emotions, infantilise us, and weaken our ability to rebuild what 2020 has ravaged.
Javier E

Fight the Future - The Triad - 1 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...fight-the-future

tech social network social media disinformation extremism ch= psychology brain science bias friction

shared by Javier E on 22 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In large part because our major tech platforms reduced the coefficient of friction (μ for my mechanics nerd posse) to basically zero. QAnons crept out of the dark corners of the web—obscure boards like 4chan and 8kun—and got into the mainstream platforms YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
  • Why did QAnon spread like wildfire in America?
  • These platforms not only made it easy for conspiracy nuts to share their crazy, but they used algorithms that actually boosted the spread of crazy, acting as a force multiplier.
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  • So it sounds like a simple fix: Impose more friction at the major platform level and you’ll clean up the public square.
  • But it’s not actually that simple because friction runs counter to the very idea of the internet.
  • The fundamental precept of the internet is that it reduces marginal costs to zero. And this fact is why the design paradigm of the internet is to continually reduce friction experienced by users to zero, too. Because if the second unit of everything is free, then the internet has a vested interest in pushing that unit in front of your eyeballs as smoothly as possible.
  • the internet is “broken,” but rather it’s been functioning exactly as it was designed to:
  • Perhaps more than any other job in the world, you do not want the President of the United States to live in a frictionless state of posting. The Presidency is not meant to be a frictionless position, and the United States government is not a frictionless entity, much to the chagrin of many who have tried to change it. Prior to this administration, decisions were closely scrutinized for, at the very least, legality, along with the impact on diplomacy, general norms, and basic grammar. This kind of legal scrutiny and due diligence is also a kind of friction--one that we now see has a lot of benefits. 
  • The deep lesson here isn’t about Donald Trump. It’s about the collision between the digital world and the real world.
  • In the real world, marginal costs are not zero. And so friction is a desirable element in helping to get to the optimal state. You want people to pause before making decisions.
  • described friction this summer as: “anything that inhibits user action within a digital interface, particularly anything that requires an additional click or screen.” For much of my time in the technology sector, friction was almost always seen as the enemy, a force to be vanquished. A “frictionless” experience was generally held up as the ideal state, the optimal product state.
  • Trump was riding the ultimate frictionless optimized engagement Twitter experience: he rode it all the way to the presidency, and then he crashed the presidency into the ground.
  • From a metrics and user point of view, the abstract notion of the President himself tweeting was exactly what Twitter wanted in its original platonic ideal. Twitter has been built to incentivize someone like Trump to engage and post
  • The other day we talked a little bit about how fighting disinformation, extremism, and online cults is like fighting a virus: There is no “cure.” Instead, what you have to do is create enough friction that the rate of spread becomes slow.
  • Our challenge is that when human and digital design comes into conflict, the artificial constraints we impose should be on the digital world to become more in service to us. Instead, we’ve let the digital world do as it will and tried to reconcile ourselves to the havoc it wreaks.
  • And one of the lessons of the last four years is that when you prize the digital design imperatives—lack of friction—over the human design imperatives—a need for friction—then bad things can happen.
  • We have an ongoing conflict between the design precepts of humans and the design precepts of computers.
  • Anyone who works with computers learns to fear their capacity to forget. Like so many things with computers, memory is strictly binary. There is either perfect recall or total oblivion, with nothing in between. It doesn't matter how important or trivial the information is. The computer can forget anything in an instant. If it remembers, it remembers for keeps.
  • This doesn't map well onto human experience of memory, which is fuzzy. We don't remember anything with perfect fidelity, but we're also not at risk of waking up having forgotten our own name. Memories tend to fade with time, and we remember only the more salient events.
  • And because we live in a time when storage grows ever cheaper, we learn to save everything, log everything, and keep it forever. You never know what will come in useful. Deleting is dangerous.
  • Our lives have become split between two worlds with two very different norms around memory.
  • [A] lot of what's wrong with the Internet has to do with memory. The Internet somehow contrives to remember too much and too little at the same time, and it maps poorly on our concepts of how memory should work.
  • The digital world is designed to never forget anything. It has perfect memory. Forever. So that one time you made a crude joke 20 years ago? It can now ruin your life.
  • Memory in the carbon-based world is imperfect. People forget things. That can be annoying if you’re looking for your keys but helpful if you’re trying to broker peace between two cultures. Or simply become a better person than you were 20 years ago.
  • The digital and carbon-based worlds have different design parameters. Marginal cost is one of them. Memory is another.
  • 2. Forget Me Now
  • 1. Fix Tech, Fix America
caelengrubb

Why it's time to stop worrying about the decline of the English language | Language | T... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ecline-of-the-english-language

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Now imagine that something even more fundamental than electricity or money is at risk: a tool we have relied on since the dawn of human history, enabling the very foundations of civilisation to be laid
  • I’m talking about our ability to communicate – to put our thoughts into words, and to use those words to forge bonds, to deliver vital information, to learn from our mistakes and build on the work done by others.
  • “Their language is deteriorating. They are lowering the bar. Our language is flying off at all tangents, without the anchor of a solid foundation.
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  • Although it is at pains to point out that it does not believe language can be preserved unchanged, it worries that communication is at risk of becoming far less effective. “Some changes would be wholly unacceptable, as they would cause confusion and the language would lose shades of meaning
  • “Without grammar, we lose the agreed-upon standards about what means what. We lose the ability to communicate when respondents are not actually in the same room speaking to one another. Without grammar, we lose the precision required to be effective and purposeful in writing.”
  • At the same time, our laziness and imprecision are leading to unnecessary bloating of the language – “language obesity,”
  • That’s five writers, across a span of 400 years, all moaning about the same erosion of standards. And yet the period also encompasses some of the greatest works of English literature.
  • Since then, the English-speaking world has grown more prosperous, better educated and more efficiently governed, despite an increase in population. Most democratic freedoms have been preserved and intellectual achievement intensified.
  • Linguistic decline is the cultural equivalent of the boy who cried wolf, except the wolf never turns up
  • Our language will always be as flexible and sophisticated as it has been up to now. Those who warn about the deterioration of English haven’t learned about the history of the language, and don’t understand the nature of their own complaints – which are simply statements of preference for the way of doing things they have become used to.
  • But the problem is that writers at that time also felt they were speaking a degraded, faltering tongue
  • Seventy-odd years ago, people knew their grammar and knew how to talk clearly. And, if we follow the logic, they must also have been better at organising, finding things out and making things work.
  • Hand-wringing about standards is not restricted to English. The fate of every language in the world has been lamented by its speakers at some point or another.
  • “For more than 2,000 years, complaints about the decay of respective languages have been documented in literature, but no one has yet been able to name an example of a ‘decayed language’.” He has a point.
  • One common driver of linguistic change is a process called reanalysis.
  • Another form that linguistic change often takes is grammaticalisation: a process in which a common phrase is bleached of its independent meaning and made into a word with a solely grammatical function
  • One instance of this is the verb “to go”, when used for an action in the near future or an intention.
  • Human anatomy makes some changes to language more likely than others. The simple mechanics of moving from a nasal sound (m or n) to a non-nasal one can make a consonant pop up in between
  • The way our brain divides up words also drives change. We split them into phonemes (building blocks of sound that have special perceptual significance) and syllables (groups of phonemes).
  • ound changes can come about as a result of social pressures: certain ways of saying things are seen as having prestige, while others are stigmatised. We gravitate towards the prestigious, and make efforts to avoid saying things in a way that is associated with undesirable qualities – often just below the level of consciousnes
  • The problem arises when deciding what might be good or bad. There are, despite what many people feel, no objective criteria by which to judge what is better or worse in communication
  • Though we are all capable of adaptation, many aspects of the way we use language, including stylistic preferences, have solidified by our 20s. If you are in your 50s, you may identify with many aspects of the way people spoke 30-45 years ago.
  • The irony is, of course, that the pedants are the ones making the mistakes. To people who know how language works, pundits such as Douglas Rushkoff only end up sounding ignorant, having failed to really interrogate their views
caelengrubb

Does Language Influence Culture? - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...748703467304575383131592767868

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • These questions touch on all the major controversies in the study of mind, with important implications for politics, law and religion.
  • The idea that language might shape thought was for a long time considered untestable at best and more often simply crazy and wrong. Now, a flurry of new cognitive science research is showing that in fact, language does profoundly influence how we see the world.
  • Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a universal grammar for all human languages—essentially, that languages don't really differ from one another in significant ways. And because languages didn't differ from one another, the theory went, it made no sense to ask whether linguistic differences led to differences in thinking.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The search for linguistic universals yielded interesting data on languages, but after decades of work, not a single proposed universal has withstood scrutiny. Instead, as linguists probed deeper into the world's languages (7,000 or so, only a fraction of them analyzed), innumerable unpredictable differences emerged.
  • In the past decade, cognitive scientists have begun to measure not just how people talk, but also how they think, asking whether our understanding of even such fundamental domains of experience as space, time and causality could be constructed by language.
  • About a third of the world's languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space.
  • As a result of this constant linguistic training, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.
  • People rely on their spatial knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotions.
  • And many other ways to organize time exist in the world's languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.
  • Beyond space, time and causality, patterns in language have been shown to shape many other domains of thought. Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blues in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.
  • Patterns in language offer a window on a culture's dispositions and priorities.
  • Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs
  • Simply showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn't tell us whether it's language that shapes thought or the other way around. To demonstrate the causal role of language, what's needed are studies that directly manipulate language and look for effects in cognition.
lucieperloff

Federal Government Preps For A Million Workers To Return To Office : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-to-the-office-ask-the-governm

politics coronavirus government

shared by lucieperloff on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The nation's largest employer, the federal government, is beginning to plan for bringing many of its workers back into their offices,
  • the safe reentry of employees to the physical workplace" by July 19.
  • "It is not as easy as flipping a switch and just saying everybody back."
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Many, including TSA and Border Patrol officers, had no choice but to remain on site.
  • Neal said it's probably going to be a hybrid
  • I think ... you're probably going to see more people working remotely.
  • it is our hope that the federal government will follow the science and reopen facilities to taxpaying Americans."
  • managers have already been calling some employees back into the office on a voluntary basis.
  • We're nowhere near herd immunity. And we don't want the vulnerable populations that we serve exposed to packed lobbies where people are going to literally have to wait post-pandemic like they did pre-pandemic for hours just to turn in documents."
  • Neal said there are other concerns for managers, including employee morale.
  • "Lots of people connecting remotely probably presents far more risk of hacking than than a bunch of people connecting on a network in a government building," Neal added.
  • "It's an opportunity to fundamentally reimagine what it means to work for the federal government,
Javier E

Michio Kaku Says the Universe Is Simpler Than We Think - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-is-simpler-than-we-think.html

universe cosmology everything theory research knowledge

shared by Javier E on 01 May 21 - No Cached
  • As the title suggests, Kaku’s latest concern is with what he calls the “holy grail” of all science, the metaphorical “umbilical cord” of our infant universe, whenever it was (or wasn’t) born out of the alleged multiverse. He wanted to write a balanced account of the physics community’s quest to prove string theory — and thus to resolve the messy, imperfect Standard Model of subatomic particles into one elegant theory of everything
  • This book is like a State of the Union where the union is all of existence.
  • Right now the known laws of the universe — “the theory of almost everything,” he calls it — can be written on a single sheet of paper. There’s Einstein’s general relativity on one line, and then a couple more for the Standard Model. “The problem is that the two theories hate each other,” he said. “They’re based on different math, different principles. Every time you put them together it blows up in your face. Why should nature be so clumsy?”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Where in English departments, “hundreds of Ph.D. theses are created every year because we want to know what Hemingway really meant,” to him, “physics is the exact opposite.” The equations get “simpler and simpler, but more fundamental and more powerful, every year.”
  • When we “find the rules that govern the chess game,” Kaku said, “we then become grand masters. That’s our destiny, I think, as a species.”
tonycheng6

Anti-ageing effects of protein restriction unpacked - 0 views

www.nature.com/...d41586-020-03662-x

shared by tonycheng6 on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The idea that dietary restriction can be used as a tool to increase lifespan has been a centrepiece of ageing research for decades. But the mechanisms by which dietary restriction might act, and the specific nutritional components involved, remain unclear.
  • Both dietary protein restriction (which results in low levels of leucine and other BCAAs) and inhibition of mTOR can extend lifespan in animals
  • Flies that carry a mutation in this residue have lower mTOR activity than do controls. They are also longer-lived, and are protected against the negative lifespan-shortening effects of a high-protein diet.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • In contrast to a previous study6, they observed a robust lifespan extension in male mice fed a BCAA-restricted diet throughout life, equal to the benefits of dietary protein restriction.
  • Interestingly, female mice showed no lifespan extension from BCAA or dietary protein restriction, and if BCAA restriction was started during middle age, the benefits on males were greatly reduced. Thus, both studies collectively point to mTOR as a primary mediator of the benefits associated with BCAA restriction (Fig. 1).
  • A clear picture is emerging of how specific amino acids are sensed by sestrin to regulate mTOR signalling and autophagy and so preserve the function of intestinal stem cells during ageing.
  • Genetic background is crucial in the response to dietary restriction, with an identical low-calorie regimen increasing lifespan in some mouse strains but shortening it in others
  • There is also evidence that dietary restriction initiated later in life might have reduced benefits in rodents and, in some cases, result in premature death
  • Taken together, these observations suggest that although protein- and BCAA-restricted diets are a powerful research tool for exploring the fundamental mechanisms of ageing, it is premature to recommend adoption by the general population.
mshilling1

Republicans Wonder How, And If, They Can Pull The Party Back Together : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...n-pull-the-party-back-together

shared by mshilling1 on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In a matter of hours on Jan. 6, the Republican Party went from shrugging off its loss of the White House to a party in crisis.
  • making President Trump the first president since Herbert Hoover whose party lost the White House, the House and the Senate in one term.
  • Now, Trump leaves office as the only president to be impeached twice, and the House vote against Trump over the Capitol insurrection marked the most bipartisan impeachment in U.S. history.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • I don't know how you bring these people together.
  • "This isn't their Republican Party anymore," the president's son said. "This is Donald Trump's Republican Party."
  • He thinks the big divide is between authoritarians and those who believe in democracy.
  • It's a fundamental belief in whether or not you want to continue the American experiment.
  • You have a segment of American society that does not accept the election outcome and is going to continue to speak up, is going to continue to agitate. And that's going to make this a very unstable period for months and perhaps even years."
  • That means a long, unstable period not just for the Republican Party, but for the American political system as a whole.
  • Annie says it wasn't that long ago that she could talk politics with her mom without things getting heated. But when the pandemic started, she says their conversations were peppered with conspiracies.
  • And what I found were stories, mostly from family members of people who have gotten wrapped up in political conspiracy theories like QAnon. And many are adult children who say they can't really have a civil conversation with their parents anymore and that it wasn't always this way.
  • It kind of seems normal at first. And then all of a sudden, something will just be out of the blue that just seems so far from anything that could be true.
  • UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: She's spending 16 to 18 hours a day consuming this. CORNISH: And the result of all this is a detachment from the facts.
  • Q's stories range from false notions about COVID to a cabal running the U.S. government to the claim there's a secret world of satanic pedophiles. But what's relevant here is that this culminates in a belief that President Trump is a kind of savior figure, which leads to the next phase for these families - a breakdown.
  • Because these belief systems are not about the information within them, but about the identity and the emotions that are appealed to through them, the only thing that can actually combat them effectively are loving, trusting, emotional connections.
  • Do not mock. Do not use snark. All of the, you know, Twitter posts where people make fun of the crazy QAnon supporters, all that does is further reinforce their sense that they are disrespected and maligned.
  • No. 2 - using scientific evidence, argumentation, etc., that comes through the very institutions that they have been told not to trust, that is going to backfire because now they think that you are the dupe because you trust these institutions, etc.
cvanderloo

Uganda Election: President Yoweri Museveni Declared Winner As Bobi Wine Alleges Fraud :... - 1 views

www.npr.org/...-winner-as-bobi-wine-alleges-f

Uganda Fruaud Museveni Wine

shared by cvanderloo on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni has won a sixth term in office, fighting off a challenge by former singer Bobi Wine
  • Wine's run drew many young Ugandans to pay attention to politics.
  • Museveni received 58% of the vote to 34% for Wine
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Wine is alleging that votes were rigged
  • Ahead of the vote, Museveni's government shut down social media outlets in Uganda
  • Wine said that security forces were not allowing anyone in or out of his home, and he urged Ugandans to reject the results.
  • called Uganda's electoral process "fundamentally flawed," citing "authorities' denial of accreditation to election observers, violence and harassment of opposition figures" and the arrest of civil service organization workers.
  • The election has been closely watched because of Wine's appeal to younger voters — a crucial strength in a country with one of the youngest populations in the world, where more than two-thirds of the population is under age 30.
  • Wine sought to replace one of Africa's longest-tenured leaders with one of its youngest, hoping to make a generational shift that would be felt across the continent.
  • "Uganda has never witnessed a peaceful transfer of power since gaining its independence in 1962."
  • Wine himself was arrested in November, sparking large protests during which dozens of people died.
  • A recent Gallup poll found that only around a third of respondents in Uganda said they're confident in the honesty of their country's elections.
  • This week, Wine said the military had killed his driver and that his home was raided.
  • But Wine is alleging that the vote was rigged, as election officials face questions over how results were tallied amid an Internet blackout, according to the AP.
  • In an interview with NPR, Wine said security forces were not allowing anyone in or out of his home, and he urged Ugandans to reject the results.
  • Wine became a pop star with music that blends Afrobeat with sounds borrowed from reggae and dancehall.
  • He then turned toward politics, winning a seat in parliament.
  • Museveni recently told NPR that he views pro-Wine demonstrators as "agents of foreign schemes."
  • This week, as ballots were being counted and the outcome of the 2021 vote hung in the balance, there were worries about what a transition of leaders might look like in the former British colony.
colemorris

Sports' path to return to normal may not be clear - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...rus-vaccine-political-activism

covid sports

shared by colemorris on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • “It was the mental part. You want to get it right; you want to be fair; you want to be smart. It just felt like there was broken glass all around. And it wasn’t a matter of if you’re going to step on it but how deep is the cut going to be.”
  • “It was the mental part. You want to get it right; you want to be fair; you want to be smart. It just felt like there was broken glass all around. And it wasn’t a matter of if you’re going to step on it but how deep is the cut going to be.”
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      it is very interesting to hear how even though he is not the one playing the sports and is the broadcaster/ analysist he is so heavily affected by this
  • will sports be fun again — will they serve as the harmless distraction and social balm that once sustained so many?
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • In the past, sports have served as a welcome distraction through pain or trauma. But no game could blot out what was unfolding in 2020. It all blended together, the planet’s problems disrupting the sports world, along with everything else.
  • Even when the games returned, television ratings were down almost across the board. Sports hadn’t been able to offer a respite for everyone.
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      covid really put the entire economy in shambles no matter what the business.
  • “Think about it: We took all the fundamental building blocks out of sports this year,” he said. “Anticipation, social gathering, water cooler talk, the ability to play — we took everything out.
  • Utah Jazz player Rudy Gobert tested positive in March and the NBA swiftly halted its season,
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      I remember this and in the press conference right before we found out he had it he was seen mocking the disease and touching everything around him purposely.
  • A majority of fans, 56 percent, said people shouldn’t play indoor sports, according to a Marist poll this month. And 49 percent said fans shouldn’t be allowed to attend the Super Bowl.
  • McManus points out that nearly one in five sports fans, 18 percent, said they should be allowed to attend games right now and another 36 percent said they should be allowed to attend with restrictions in place.
  • “Americans, in particular, have very, very short memories,”
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      true
margogramiak

Study sheds new light on how the brain distinguishes speech from noise -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...201220103941.htm

shared by margogramiak on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • strongly influences sound processing in an important auditory region of the brain. The neuromodulator, acetylcholine, may even help the main auditory brain circuitry distinguish speech from noise.
  • strongly influences sound processing in an important auditory region of the brain. The neuromodulator, acetylcholine, may even help the main auditory brain circuitry distinguish speech from noise.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      This reminds me of a concept we covered in class. The brain searches for patterns in any type of sound, which is something we talked and read about. I'm assuming this article will have something to do with that idea.
  • it has rarely been studied at the more fundamental levels of the brain,
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      So, in a sense, they're going back to the basics.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • "This study will likely bring new attention in the field to the ways in which circuits like this, widely considered a 'simple' one, are in fact highly complex and subject to modulatory influence like higher regions of the brain,"
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Cool. I wonder how research like this applies to medicine, or if it does at all. I always think research has more value if it's able to impact someone's life in a medical sense.
  • Additionally, they describe novel anatomical projections that provide acetylcholine input to the MNTB.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      So, contrary to my previous belief, the science is more complicated than just pattens.
  • "You can think of this modulation as akin to shifting an antenna's position to eliminate static for your favorite radio station."
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I love when complex info or science is translated into simpler terms or analogies like this.
  • the researchers identified for the first time a set of completely unknown connections in the brain between the modulatory centers and this important area of the auditory system.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      First time finds is very exciting!
  • understanding how other sensory information is processed in the brain.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      cool!
margogramiak

Scientists uncover new path toward treating a rare but deadly neurologic condition: Com... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...210114180620.htm

shared by margogramiak on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Molybdenum cofactor (Moco) is a compound that is little known but is essential for life.
  • Molybdenum cofactor (Moco) is a compound that is little known but is essential for life.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Interested in learning more... how can something be essential but unknown?
  • Children born without the ability to synthesize Moco die young.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Oh wow, it really is important.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Studies with a popular laboratory model, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, have revealed a possible therapeutic avenue for a rare but deadly condition in which children are born without the ability to make molybdenum cofactor (Moco) on their own
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      How have I never heard of this?
  • Moco is essential for life
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      But what is it?
  • This suggests that such protein-Moco complexes could be used as a treatment for Moco deficiency in people.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Nice! Maybe we have a fix!
  • C. elegans
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      This seems really familiar... I think I had an ACT passage that talked about it.
  • The researchers found that the worms could take in Moco as a range of purified Moco-protein complexes. These included complexes with proteins from bacteria, bread mold, green algae and cow's milk. Ingesting these complexes saved the Moco-deficient worms.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      That's super interesting. I wonder how that figured that out.
  • "We do not want to overstate our findings, especially as they relate to patients, but we are extremely excited about the therapeutic and fundamental implications of this work."
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      That seems very promising! I'm glad I got to learn about something I was so uninformed about!
anonymous

Opinion | 2020 Taught Us How to Fix This - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cial-change-bias-training.html

shared by anonymous on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • So many of our hopes are based on the idea that the key to change is education.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      This whole articles lets us question the very education that we learn how to think about thoughts from too.
  • Second, some researchers argue that the training activates stereotypes in people’s minds rather than eliminates them.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      An interesting idea!
  • Fourth, the mandatory training makes many white participants feel left out, angry and resentful, actually decreasing their support for workplace diversity.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Fifth, people don’t like to be told what to think, and may rebel if they feel that they’re being pressured to think a certain way.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      We've talked about all this!
  • our training model of “teaching people to be good” is based on the illusion that you can change people’s minds and behaviors by presenting them with new information and new thoughts.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      I wonder what our class would say about this
  • If this were generally so, moral philosophers would behave better than the rest of us
  • People change when they are put in new environments, in permanent relationship with diverse groups of people. Their embodied minds adapt to the environments in a million different ways we will never understand or be able to plan
  • doing life together with people of other groups can reduce prejudice and change minds.
  • This points to a more fundamental vision of social change, but it is a hard-won lesson from a bitterly divisive year.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      Very true.
  • It turns out that if you tell someone their facts are wrong, you don’t usually win them over; you just entrench false belief.
  • Our current model of social change isn’t working.
  • impervious to evidence, willing to believe the most outlandish things if it suited their biases
  • this was the year that showed that our models for how we change minds or change behavior are deeply flawed.
  • The courses teach people about bias, they combat stereotypes and they encourage people to assume the perspectives of others in disadvantaged groups.
  • One of the most studied examples of this flawed model is racial diversity training
  • this was the year that called into question the very processes by which our society supposedly makes progress.
  • but the bulk of the evidence, though not all of it, suggests they don’t reduce discrimination.
  • One meta-analysis of 985 studies of anti-bias interventions found little evidence that these programs reduced bias. Other studies sometimes do find a short-term change in attitudes, but very few find a widespread change in actual behavior.
  • First, “short-term educational interventions in general do not change people.”
  • Third, training can make people complacent, thinking that because they went through the program they’ve solved the problem
Javier E

Does Your Language Shape How You Think? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...29language-t.html

language reality perception experience Whorf

shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 10 - Cached
  • it turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language.
  • some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie.
  • For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies.
  • Javier E on 28 Aug 10
     
    Fascinating follow-up to Sapir-Whorf.
Javier E

Opinion | Two visions of 'normal' collided in our abnormal pandemic year - The Washingt... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ded-our-abnormal-pandemic-year

pandemic bias normal cognitive bias emergency psychology

shared by Javier E on 31 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The date was Sept. 17, 2001. The rubble was still smoking. As silly as this sounds, I was hoping it would make me cry.
  • That didn’t happen. The truth is, it still looked like something on television, a surreal shot from a disaster movie. I was stunned but unmoved.
  • ADLater, trying to understand the difference between those two moments, I told people, “The rubble still didn’t feel real.”
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • now, after a year of pandemic, I realize that wasn’t the problem. The rubble was real, all right. It just wasn’t normal.
  • it always, somehow, came back to that essential human craving for things to be normal, and our inability to believe that they are not, even when presented with compelling evidence.
  • This phenomenon is well-known to cognitive scientists, who have dubbed it “normalcy bias.”
  • the greater risk is more often the opposite: People can’t quite believe. They ignore the fire alarm, defy the order to evacuate ahead of the hurricane, or pause to grab their luggage when exiting the crashed plane. Too often, they die.
  • Calling the quest for normalcy a bias makes it sound bad, but most of the time this tendency is a good thing. The world is full of aberrations, most of them meaningless. If we aimed for maximal reaction to every anomaly we encountered, we’d break down from sheer nervous exhaustion.
  • But when things go disastrously wrong, our optimal response is at war with the part of our brain that insists things are fine. We try to reoccupy the old normal even if it’s become radioactive and salted with mines. We still resist the new normal — even when it’s staring us in the face.
  • Nine months into our current disaster, I now see that our bitter divides over pandemic response were most fundamentally a contest between two ideas of what it meant to get “back to normal.”
  • One group wanted to feel as safe as they had before a virus invaded our shores; the other wanted to feel as unfettered
  • he disputes that followed weren’t just a fight to determine whose idea of normal would prevail. They were a battle against an unthinkable reality, which was that neither kind of normalcy was fully possible anymore.
  • I suspect we all might have been less willing to make war on our opponents if only we’d believed that we were fighting people not very different from how we were — exhausted by the whole thing and frantic to feel like themselves again
  • Some catastrophes are simply too big to be understood except in the smallest way, through their most ordinary human details
pier-paolo

Modern Science Didn't Appear Until the 17th Century. What Took So Long? - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-science-michael-strevens.html

carbon emissions

shared by pier-paolo on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • While modern science is built on the primacy of empirical data — appealing to the objectivity of facts — actual progress requires determined partisans to move it along.
  • Why wasn’t it the ancient Babylonians putting zero-gravity observatories into orbit around the earth,” Strevens asks, “the ancient Greeks engineering flu vaccines and transplanting hearts?”
  • transforming ordinary thinking humans into modern scientists entails “a morally and intellectually violent process.”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • So much scientific research takes place under conditions of “intellectual confinement” — painstaking, often tedious work that requires attention to minute details, accounting for fractions of an inch and slivers of a degree.
  • This kind of obsessiveness has made modern science enormously productive, but Strevens says there is something fundamentally irrational and even “inhuman” about it.
  • He points out that focusing so narrowly, for so long, on tedious work that may not come to anything is inherently unappealing for most people. Rich and learned cultures across the world pursued all kinds of erudition and scholarly traditions, but didn’t develop this “knowledge machine”
  • The same goes for brilliant, intellectually curious individuals like Aristotle, who generated his own theory about physics but never proposed anything like the scientific method.
  • but in order to communicate with one another, in scientific journals, they have to abide by this rule. The motto of England’s Royal Society, founded in 1660, is “Nullius in verba”: “Take nobody’s word for it.”
  • purged of all nonscientific curiosity by a “program of moralizing and miseducation.” The great scientists were exceptions because they escaped the “deadening effects” of this inculcation; the rest are just “the standard product of this system”: “an empiricist all the way down.”
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