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Javier E

Do You Know What You Don't Know? - Art Markman - Harvard Business Review - 0 views

  • You probably don't know as much as you think you do. When put to the test, most people find they can't explain the workings of everyday things they think they understand.
  • Find an object you use daily (a zipper, a toilet, a stereo speaker) and try to describe the particulars of how it works. You're likely to discover unexpected gaps in your knowledge. In psychology, we call this cognitive barrier the illusion of explanatory depth. It means you think you fully understand something that you actually don't.
  • We see this every day in buzz words. Though we often use these words, their meanings are usually unclear. They mask gaps in our knowledge, serving as placeholders that gloss concepts we don't fully understand.
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  • an upsetting instance of knowledge gaps in the last decade was the profound misunderstanding of complex financial products that contributed to the market collapse of 2007. Investment banks were unable to protect themselves from exposure to these products, because only a few people (either buyers or sellers) understood exactly what was being sold. Those individuals who did comprehend these product structures ultimately made huge bets against the market using credit-default swaps. The willingness of companies like AIG to sell large quantities of credit-default swaps reflected a gap in their knowledge about the riskiness of products they were insuring.
  • To discover the things you can't explain, take a lesson from teachers. When you instruct someone else, you have to fill the gaps in your own knowledge
  • Explain concepts to yourself as you learn them. Get in the habit of self-teaching. Your explanations will reveal your own knowledge gaps and identify words and concepts whose meanings aren't clear.
  • Engage others in collaborative learning. Help identify the knowledge gaps of the people around you. Ask them to explain difficult concepts, even if you think everyone understands them
  • When you do uncover these gaps, treat them as learning opportunities, not signs of weakness.
mcginnisca

Why Sexism at the Office Makes Women Love Hillary Clinton - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Younger Democratic women are mostly for Bernie Sanders; older women lean more toward Hillary Clinton.
  • The idealistic but ungrateful naïfs who think sexism is a thing of the past and believe, as Mr. Sanders recently said, that “people should not be voting for candidates based on their gender” are seemingly battling the pantsuited old scolds prattling on about feminism
  • More time in a sexist world, and particularly in the workplace, radicalizes women.
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  • It’s not that young women aren’t feminists, or don’t care about sexism. For college-age women — Mr. Sanders’s female base — sexism tends to be linked to sex.
  • Young women are neither ungrateful to their feminist foremothers nor complacent; rather, they are activists for feminist causes that reflect their needs.
  • College-educated women see only a tiny pay gap in their early- and mid-20s, making 97 cents for every dollar earned by their male colleagues.
  • That experience starts to change a few more years into the work force. By 35, those same college-educated women are making 15 percent less than their male peers. Women’s earnings peak between ages 35 and 44 and then plateau, while men’s continue to rise.
  • When women have children, they’re penalized: They’re considered less competent, they’re less likely to be hired for a new job and they’re paid less
  • one of the few female partners always seemed to be in charge of ordering lunch
  • For the many women who live at the center of that time crush, Mrs. Clinton’s emphasis on the wage gap, paid family leave and universal prekindergarten may be particularly appealing. Mr. Sanders, who also supports paid leave and universal pre-K, takes a different rhetorical tone, usually stressing affordable higher education and universal health care.
  • I watched as men with little or irrelevant experience were hired and promoted, because they had such great ideas, or they fit in better. “We want a woman,” the conclusion seemed to be, “just not this woman.”
  • in the now-common refrain about Hillary Clinton: “I want a woman president, just not this woman president.”
  • a 19-year-old aspiring lawyer who is volunteering for Mr. Sanders today will work for firms with more female partners and live in a world where the wage gap has shrunk. But the trends show that her experience in a decade is unlikely to be that different from mine.
  • Many more women over 25 are in the work force than those under, and women over 25 also do about twice as much unpaid domestic work as their younger counterparts.
  • I listened as some of my male colleagues opined on the need to marry a woman who would stay home with the children — that wasn’t sexist, they insisted, because it wasn’t that they thought only women should stay home; it was just that somebody had to, and the years in which they planned on having children would be crucial ones for their own careers.
  • Child care is just as expensive in many places as sending a kid to public university, but a college kid can get a part-time job. A toddler can’t.”
  • There are many other reasons women in the 30-and-over cohort may lean toward Mrs. Clinton. They’ve already seen promises of revolutionary change fall short. They may prefer a candidate with a progressive ideology but a more restrained, and potentially more effective, strategy for putting that ideology in place.
  • If it’s not this woman, this year, then who and when?
katrinaskibicki

One paragraph that puts the white-black life expectancy gap in (horrifying) context - Vox - 0 views

  • It is generally well-reported that there is a life expectancy gap between white and black Americans of about four years. But it can be hard to visualize exactly what this number means. In a recent conversation, David Williams, public health researcher at Harvard, described the racial gap to me in stark terms: One of the ways to think of the racial gap in health is to think of how many black people die prematurely every year who wouldn't die if there were no racial differences in health. The answer to that from a carefully done [2001] scientific study is 96,800 black people die prematurely every year. Divide it by 365 [days], that's 265 people dying prematurely every day. Imagine a jumbo jet — with 265 passengers and crew — crashing at Reagan Washington Airport today, and the same thing happening tomorrow and every day next week and every day next month. That's what we're talking about when we say there are racial disparities in health.
  • I asked Williams why there is such a tremendous gap in black and white life expectancy. He said there's no single issue to blame; it instead comes down to many factors, largely related to where people live.
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    Again, this isn't just because of one single variable. It's a mix of issues, including how walkable a neighborhood is, how clean the air, water, and soil are, the availability of healthy foods, public health policies that push people away from bad habits or foods, and so on. Geographic location just reflects the place all those ideas come together - often in a way that affects certain groups more than others. And it shows why it's important to take a comprehensive view toward public health policy, tackling a variety of issues at once, instead of focusing solely on just one or two problems in a community.
Javier E

Achievement gaps: Revenge of the tiger mother | The Economist - 2 views

  • WHEN measured in terms of academic achievement, Asian Americans are a successful bunch. Forty-nine percent have a bachelor's degree or higher. This compares favourably against white Americans (30%), African-Americans (19%) and Latinos (13%).
  • Amy Chua, a self-declared "tiger mother" who became famous for promoting the benefits of harsh parenting, would put this down to culture. She has argued that Chinese-American children statistically out-perform their peers because they are pushed harder at home.
  • she ascribes the success of different cultures in America to a "triple package" comprised of a superiority complex, insecurity and good impulse control. In other words, certain groups tell themselves they are better than other groups, but learn that they have to work hard to succeed, and must resist temptation and distraction in proving themselves.
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  • sociologists at City University of New York and the University of Michigan, wanted to try to find out why it exists. In a new paper in the journal PNAS, they looked at whether it could be explained by socio-demographic factors (such as family income and parental education), cognitive ability (were these children simply more intelligent?), or work ethic. 
  • socio-demographic factors could not explain the achievement gap between Asians and whites. This is because recently arrived Asian immigrants with little formal education and low incomes have children that do better in school than their white peers.
  • Being brainier isn't the answer either. When the pair looked at cognitive ability as measured by standardised tests, Asian-Americans were not different from their white peers
  •  Instead Dr Hsin and Dr Xie find that the achievement gap can be explained through harder work—as measured by teacher assessments of student work habits and motivation.
  • What might explain harder work? The authors point to the fact Asian-Americans are likely to be immigrants or children of immigrants who, as a group, tend to be more optimistic. These are people who have made a big move in search of better opportunities. Immigration is a "manifestation of that optimism through effort, that you can have a better life"
  • Added to this mix is a general cultural belief among Asian-Americans that achievement comes with effort. We know that children who believe ability is innate are more inclined to give up if something doesn't come naturally. An understanding that success requires hard work—not merely an aptitude—is therefore useful.
  • “Tiger” parenting clearly has its place, but it is not everything, according to this study. Dr Hsin says that Asian-Americans also have some unique social and ethnic capital, such as good access to tutors and social networks that offer information about schools and college-admission routes. They also benefit from positive stereotypes which lead to wider expectations of success.
  • Should Ms Chua’s approach to child-rearing replace the American standard, which seems to emphasise self-esteem over test scores? Not necessarily. The report’s researchers point out that Asian-American children also suffer from poorer self-images and more conflicted relationships with their parents. Dr Hsin wonders if this may be the result of pressure to meet narrowly defined and high standards for success. Children who fail to meet these expectations end up feeling like failures, while those who succeed fail to feel satisfied because they are simply achieving what is expected.
clairemann

Wealthy, Male and American Students More Likely to BS | Time - 0 views

  • Students who are wealthier and male are more likely than others to claim that they know more than they actually do, says a new study.
  • The study, which reviewed surveys of 40,000 15-year-old students from across nine English-speaking countries, found that boys and people from wealthier families are more likely to be “bullshitters,” which it defines as “individuals who claim knowledge or expertise in an area where they actually have little experience at all.”
  • “You’re claiming expertise in things you have absolutely no knowledge of,” says Shure. “You couldn’t. These things don’t exist.”
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  • The countries where students were guilty of the most BS? The U.S. and Canada. Students in the two counties had scores that were .25 and .3 above average on the study’s “bullshit scale.” However, the two counties also had the narrowest gap between boys and girls, with a gap of .25 and .34 between the genders. In England and Ireland, the gap was much wider – .48 and .46 points.
  • Shure says that she is interested in determining whether a person’s ability to BS has a major impact on economic inequality between men and women, and how the ability plays out across socioeconomic lines.
  • “You can imagine that the people that score high on this bullshit index are good at certain things that might be rewarded,” says Shure. “It might be an interview to get into college. It could be an interview for a job, or an internship. It could be those skills end up helping exacerbate the gap that we observe between people from rich backgrounds and poor backgrounds, and even men and women.”
  • However, Shure says that it’s conceivable that “bullshitters” may have an advantage when it comes to getting ahead: “They clearly have very high opinions of themselves. And that could be associated with becoming leaders in the future.”
Duncan H

Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Show - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “Early life conditions and how children are stimulated play a very important role,” he said. “The danger is we will revert back to the mindset of the war on poverty, when poverty was just a matter of income, and giving families more would improve the prospects of their children. If people conclude that, it’s a mistake.”
  • hat affluent children spend 1,300 more hours than low-income children before age 6 in places other than their homes, their day care centers, or schools (anywhere from museums to shopping malls). By the time high-income children start school, they have spent about 400 hours more than poor children in literacy activities, she found.
  • There are no easy answers, in part because the problem is so complex, said Douglas J. Besharov, a fellow at the Atlantic Council. Blaming the problem on the richest of the rich ignores an equally important driver, he said: two-earner household wealth, which has lifted the upper middle class ever further from less educated Americans, who tend to be single parents.
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    What do you think can be done to solve this problem?
Javier E

Our Dangerous Inability to Agree on What is TRUE | Risk: Reason and Reality | Big Think - 1 views

  • Given that human cognition is never the product of pure dispassionate reason, but a subjective interpretation of the facts based on our feelings and biases and instincts, when can we ever say that we know who is right and who is wrong, about anything? When can we declare a fact so established that it’s fair to say, without being called arrogant, that those who deny this truth don’t just disagree…that they’re just plain wrong
  • This isn’t about matters of faith, or questions of ultimately unknowable things which by definition can not be established by fact. This is a question about what is knowable, and provable by careful objective scientific inquiry, a process which includes challenging skepticism rigorously applied precisely to establish what, beyond any reasonable doubt, is in fact true. The way evolution has been established
  • With enough careful investigation and scrupulously challenged evidence, we can establish knowable truths that are not just the product of our subjective motivated reasoning. We can apply our powers of reason and our ability to objectively analyze the facts and get beyond the point where what we 'know' is just an interpretation of the evidence through the subconscious filters of who we trust and our biases and instincts. We can get to the point where if someone wants to continue believe that the sun revolves around the earth, or that vaccines cause autism, or that evolution is a deceit, it is no longer arrogant - though it may still be provocative - to call those people wrong.
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  • here is a truth with which I hope we can all agree. Our subjective system of cognition can be dangerous. It can produce perceptions that conflict with the evidence, what I call The Perception Gap, which can in turn produce profound harm.
  • The Perception Gap can lead to disagreements that create destructive and violent social conflict, to dangerous personal choices that feel safe but aren’t, and to policies more consistent with how we feel than what is in fact in our best interest. The Perception Gap may in fact be potentially more dangerous than any individual risk we face.
  • We need to recognize the greater threat that our subjective system of cognition can pose, and in the name of our own safety and the welfare of the society on which we depend, do our very best to rise above it or, when we can’t, account for this very real danger in the policies we adopt.
  • we have an obligation to confront our own ideological priors. We have an obligation to challenge ourselves, to push ourselves, to be suspicious of conclusions that are too convenient, to be sure that we're getting it right.
  • subjective cognition is built-in, subconscious, beyond free will, and unavoidably leads to different interpretations of the same facts.
  • Views that have more to do with competing tribal biases than objective interpretations of the evidence create destructive and violent conflict.
Javier E

Rich People Just Care Less - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Turning a blind eye. Giving someone the cold shoulder. Looking down on people. Seeing right through them. These metaphors for condescending or dismissive behavior are more than just descriptive. They suggest, to a surprisingly accurate extent, the social distance between those with greater power and those with less
  • A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker.
  • A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain. In 2008, social psychologists from the University of Amsterdam and the University of California, Berkeley, studied pairs of strangers telling one another about difficulties they had been through, like a divorce or death of a loved one. The researchers found that the differential expressed itself in the playing down of suffering. The more powerful were less compassionate toward the hardships described by the less powerful.
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  • research finds that the poor, compared with the wealthy, have keenly attuned interpersonal attention in all directions, in general, those with the most power in society seem to pay particularly little attention to those with the least power. To be sure, high-status people do attend to those of equal rank — but not as well as those low of status do.
  • This has profound implications for societal behavior and government policy. Tuning in to the needs and feelings of another person is a prerequisite to empathy, which in turn can lead to understanding, concern and, if the circumstances are right, compassionate action.
  • In politics, readily dismissing inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing inconvenient truths about them. The insistence by some House Republicans in Congress on cutting financing for food stamps and impeding the implementation of Obamacare, which would allow patients, including those with pre-existing health conditions, to obtain and pay for insurance coverage, may stem in part from the empathy gap.
  • redistricting and gerrymandering have led to the creation of more and more safe districts, in which elected officials don’t even have to encounter many voters from the rival party, much less empathize with them.
  • Social distance makes it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put a negative spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our own. Freud called this “the narcissism of minor differences,”
  • Since the 1970s, the gap between the rich and everyone else has skyrocketed. Income inequality is at its highest level in a century.
  • Apart from the financial inequities, I fear the expansion of an entirely different gap, caused by the inability to see oneself in a less advantaged person’s shoes.
Javier E

The Fortnightly Review › Death to the Reading Class. - 0 views

  • most people don’t want to read and, therefore, don’t read. The evidence on this score is clear: the average American reads for about fifteen minutes a day and almost never reads a book for pleasure.
  • we have tried to solve the reading “problem” by removing the most obvious impediments to reading: we taught everyone to read; we printed millions upon millions of books; and we made those books practically free in libraries. And so the barriers fell: now nearly everyone in the developed world is literate, there is plenty to read, and reading material is dirt cheap. But still people don’t read. Why? The obvious answer—though one that is difficult for us to admit—is that most people don’t like to read.
  • Humans achieved their modern form about 180,000 years ago; for 175,000 of those years they never wrote or read anything. About 40,000 years ago, humans began to make symbols,
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  • Most people successfully avoided reading until about 300 years ago. It was about then that Western European priests and princes decided that everyone should be taught to read. These literacy-loving types tried various schemes to make common folks literate; the most effective of these, however, was naked coercion. By the nineteenth century, churches and states all over Europe and North America were forcing parents to send their kids to school to learn to read
  • So it happened that by the early twentieth century most people in Western Europe and North America could read. They had no choice in the matter. They still don’t.
  • Why don’t most people like to read? The answer is surprisingly simple: humans weren’t evolved to read. Note that we have no reading organs: our eyes and brains were made for watching, not for decoding tiny symbols on mulch sheets. To prepare our eyes and brains for reading, we must rewire them. This process takes years of hard work to accomplish, and some people never accomplish it all. Moreover, even after you’ve learned to read, you probably won’t find reading to be very much fun. It consumes all of your attention, requires active thought, and makes your eyes hurt. For most people, then, reading is naturally hard and, therefore, something to be avoided if at all possible.
  • we have misidentified the “problem” facing us: it is not the much-bemoaned reading gap, but rather a seldom-mentioned knowledge gap. Though it is immodest to say, we readers genuinely know more than those who do not read. Thus we are usually able to make better-informed decisions than non-readers can.
  • If we lived in an aristocracy of readers, this maldistribution of knowledge might be acceptable. But we don’t; rather, we live in a democracy (if we are lucky). In a democracy, the people – readers and non-readers alike – decide. Thus we would like all citizens to be knowledgeable so that they can make well-informed decisions about our common affairs. This has been a central goal of the Reading Class since the literacy-loving Enlightenment.
  • If we in the Reading Class want to teach the the reading-averse public more effectively than we have in the past, we must rid ourselves of our reading fetish and admit that we’ve been falling down on the job. Once we take this painful step, then a number of interesting options for closing the knowledge gap become available. The most promising of these options is using audio and video to share what we know with the public at large.
  • We have to laboriously learn to read, but we are born with the ability to watch and listen. We don’t find reading terribly pleasant, but we do find watching and listening generally enjoyable.
  • The results of this “natural experiment” are in: people would much rather watch/listen than read. This is why Americans sit in front of the television for three hours a day, while they read for only a tiny fraction of that time.
  • Our task, then, is to give them something serious to watch and listen to, something that conveys the richness and complexity of our written work in pictures and sounds. The good news is that we can easily do this.
  • Today any lecturer can produce and distribute high quality audio and video programs. Most scholars have the equipment on their desks (that is, a PC). The software is dead simple and inexpensive. And the shows themselves can be distributed the world over on the Internet for almost nothing.
  • I’ve done it. Here are two examples. The first is New Books in History, an author-interview podcast featuring historians with new books. Aside from the computer, the total hardware and software start-up costs were roughly $300. It took me no time to learn the software thanks to some handy on-line tutorials available on Lynda.com. Today New Books in History has a large international audience.
  • The “new books” podcasts are not about serious books; they are about the ideas trapped in those serious, and seriously un-read, books. Books imprison ideas; the “new books” podcasts set them free.)
Javier E

How to Remember Everything You Want From Non-Fiction Books | by Eva Keiffenheim, MSc | ... - 0 views

  • A Bachelor’s degree taught me how to learn to ace exams. But it didn’t teach me how to learn to remember.
  • 65% to 80% of students answered “no” to the question “Do you study the way you do because somebody taught you to study that way?”
  • the most-popular Coursera course of all time: Dr. Barabara Oakley’s free course on “Learning how to Learn.” So did I. And while this course taught me about chunking, recalling, and interleaving
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  • I learned something more useful: the existence of non-fiction literature that can teach you anything.
  • something felt odd. Whenever a conversation revolved around a serious non-fiction book I read, such as ‘Sapiens’ or ‘Thinking Fast and Slow,’ I could never remember much. Turns out, I hadn’t absorbed as much information as I’d believed. Since I couldn’t remember much, I felt as though reading wasn’t an investment in knowledge but mere entertainment.
  • When I opened up about my struggles, many others confessed they also can’t remember most of what they read, as if forgetting is a character flaw. But it isn’t.
  • It’s the way we work with books that’s flawed.
  • there’s a better way to read. Most people rely on techniques like highlighting, rereading, or, worst of all, completely passive reading, which are highly ineffective.
  • Since I started applying evidence-based learning strategies to reading non-fiction books, many things have changed. I can explain complex ideas during dinner conversations. I can recall interesting concepts and link them in my writing or podcasts. As a result, people come to me for all kinds of advice.
  • What’s the Architecture of Human Learning and Memory?
  • Human brains don’t work like recording devices. We don’t absorb information and knowledge by reading sentences.
  • we store new information in terms of its meaning to our existing memory
  • we give new information meaning by actively participating in the learning process — we interpret, connect, interrelate, or elaborate
  • To remember new information, we not only need to know it but also to know how it relates to what we already know.
  • Learning is dependent on memory processes because previously-stored knowledge functions as a framework in which newly learned information can be linked.”
  • Human memory works in three stages: acquisition, retention, and retrieval. In the acquisition phase, we link new information to existing knowledge; in the retention phase, we store it, and in the retrieval phase, we get information out of our memory.
  • Retrieval, the third stage, is cue dependent. This means the more mental links you’re generating during stage one, the acquisition phase, the easier you can access and use your knowledge.
  • we need to understand that the three phases interrelate
  • creating durable and flexible access to to-be-learned information is partly a matter of achieving a meaningful encoding of that information and partly a matter of exercising the retrieval process.”
  • Next, we’ll look at the learning strategies that work best for our brains (elaboration, retrieval, spaced repetition, interleaving, self-testing) and see how we can apply those insights to reading non-fiction books.
  • The strategies that follow are rooted in research from professors of Psychological & Brain Science around Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel. Both scientists spent ten years bridging the gap between cognitive psychology and education fields. Harvard University Press published their findings in the book ‘Make It Stick.
  • #1 Elaboration
  • “Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know.”
  • Why elaboration works: Elaborative rehearsal encodes information into your long-term memory more effectively. The more details and the stronger you connect new knowledge to what you already know, the better because you’ll be generating more cues. And the more cues they have, the easier you can retrieve your knowledge.
  • How I apply elaboration: Whenever I read an interesting section, I pause and ask myself about the real-life connection and potential application. The process is invisible, and my inner monologues sound like: “This idea reminds me of…, This insight conflicts with…, I don’t really understand how…, ” etc.
  • For example, when I learned about A/B testing in ‘The Lean Startup,’ I thought about applying this method to my startup. I added a note on the site stating we should try it in user testing next Wednesday. Thereby the book had an immediate application benefit to my life, and I will always remember how the methodology works.
  • How you can apply elaboration: Elaborate while you read by asking yourself meta-learning questions like “How does this relate to my life? In which situation will I make use of this knowledge? How does it relate to other insights I have on the topic?”
  • While pausing and asking yourself these questions, you’re generating important memory cues. If you take some notes, don’t transcribe the author’s words but try to summarize, synthesize, and analyze.
  • #2 Retrieval
  • With retrieval, you try to recall something you’ve learned in the past from your memory. While retrieval practice can take many forms — take a test, write an essay, do a multiple-choice test, practice with flashcards
  • the authors of ‘Make It Stick’ state: “While any kind of retrieval practice generally benefits learning, the implication seems to be that where more cognitive effort is required for retrieval, greater retention results.”
  • Whatever you settle for, be careful not to copy/paste the words from the author. If you don’t do the brain work yourself, you’ll skip the learning benefits of retrieval
  • Retrieval strengthens your memory and interrupts forgetting and, as other researchers replicate, as a learning event, the act of retrieving information is considerably more potent than is an additional study opportunity, particularly in terms of facilitating long-term recall.
  • How I apply retrieval: I retrieve a book’s content from my memory by writing a book summary for every book I want to remember. I ask myself questions like: “How would you summarize the book in three sentences? Which concepts do you want to keep in mind or apply? How does the book relate to what you already know?”
  • I then publish my summaries on Goodreads or write an article about my favorite insights
  • How you can apply retrieval: You can come up with your own questions or use mine. If you don’t want to publish your summaries in public, you can write a summary into your journal, start a book club, create a private blog, or initiate a WhatsApp group for sharing book summaries.
  • a few days after we learn something, forgetting sets in
  • #3 Spaced Repetition
  • With spaced repetition, you repeat the same piece of information across increasing intervals.
  • The harder it feels to recall the information, the stronger the learning effect. “Spaced practice, which allows some forgetting to occur between sessions, strengthens both the learning and the cues and routes for fast retrieval,”
  • Why it works: It might sound counterintuitive, but forgetting is essential for learning. Spacing out practice might feel less productive than rereading a text because you’ll realize what you forgot. Your brain has to work harder to retrieve your knowledge, which is a good indicator of effective learning.
  • How I apply spaced repetition: After some weeks, I revisit a book and look at the summary questions (see #2). I try to come up with my answer before I look up my actual summary. I can often only remember a fraction of what I wrote and have to look at the rest.
  • “Knowledge trapped in books neatly stacked is meaningless and powerless until applied for the betterment of life.”
  • How you can apply spaced repetition: You can revisit your book summary medium of choice and test yourself on what you remember. What were your action points from the book? Have you applied them? If not, what hindered you?
  • By testing yourself in varying intervals on your book summaries, you’ll strengthen both learning and cues for fast retrieval.
  • Why interleaving works: Alternate working on different problems feels more difficult as it, again, facilitates forgetting.
  • How I apply interleaving: I read different books at the same time.
  • 1) Highlight everything you want to remember
  • #5 Self-Testing
  • While reading often falsely tricks us into perceived mastery, testing shows us whether we truly mastered the subject at hand. Self-testing helps you identify knowledge gaps and brings weak areas to the light
  • “It’s better to solve a problem than to memorize a solution.”
  • Why it works: Self-testing helps you overcome the illusion of knowledge. “One of the best habits a learner can instill in herself is regular self-quizzing to recalibrate her understanding of what she does and does not know.”
  • How I apply self-testing: I explain the key lessons from non-fiction books I want to remember to others. Thereby, I test whether I really got the concept. Often, I didn’t
  • instead of feeling frustrated, cognitive science made me realize that identifying knowledge gaps are a desirable and necessary effect for long-term remembering.
  • How you can apply self-testing: Teaching your lessons learned from a non-fiction book is a great way to test yourself. Before you explain a topic to somebody, you have to combine several mental tasks: filter relevant information, organize this information, and articulate it using your own vocabulary.
  • Now that I discovered how to use my Kindle as a learning device, I wouldn’t trade it for a paper book anymore. Here are the four steps it takes to enrich your e-reading experience
  • How you can apply interleaving: Your brain can handle reading different books simultaneously, and it’s effective to do so. You can start a new book before you finish the one you’re reading. Starting again into a topic you partly forgot feels difficult first, but as you know by now, that’s the effect you want to achieve.
  • it won’t surprise you that researchers proved highlighting to be ineffective. It’s passive and doesn’t create memory cues.
  • 2) Cut down your highlights in your browser
  • After you finished reading the book, you want to reduce your highlights to the essential part. Visit your Kindle Notes page to find a list of all your highlights. Using your desktop browser is faster and more convenient than editing your highlights on your e-reading device.
  • Now, browse through your highlights, delete what you no longer need, and add notes to the ones you really like. By adding notes to the highlights, you’ll connect the new information to your existing knowledge
  • 3) Use software to practice spaced repetitionThis part is the main reason for e-books beating printed books. While you can do all of the above with a little extra time on your physical books, there’s no way to systemize your repetition praxis.
  • Readwise is the best software to combine spaced repetition with your e-books. It’s an online service that connects to your Kindle account and imports all your Kindle highlights. Then, it creates flashcards of your highlights and allows you to export your highlights to your favorite note-taking app.
  • Common Learning Myths DebunkedWhile reading and studying evidence-based learning techniques I also came across some things I wrongly believed to be true.
  • #2 Effective learning should feel easyWe think learning works best when it feels productive. That’s why we continue to use ineffective techniques like rereading or highlighting. But learning works best when it feels hard, or as the authors of ‘Make It Stick’ write: “Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.”
  • In Conclusion
  • I developed and adjusted these strategies over two years, and they’re still a work in progress.
  • Try all of them but don’t force yourself through anything that doesn’t feel right for you. I encourage you to do your own research, add further techniques, and skip what doesn’t serve you
  • “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”— Mortimer J. Adler
anonymous

As COVID-19 Continues, Classroom Learning Gaps Between Haves And Have-Nots Are Getting ... - 1 views

  • After months away from school, some of his classmates seemed to have mysteriously advanced, easily reciting concepts he says they were never taught.
  • Scott believes other kids in her son’s class spent the spring and summer getting extra tutoring and virtual enrichment, overseen by their parents.
  • Education researchers have been studying how much learning loss is taking place as a result of school shutdowns and remote school.
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  • The latest numbers from NWEA, an education research group, says that the average student in third through eighth grade has lost 5 to 10 percentile points in math, but remained on track for reading.
  • Fewer of the students in groups more likely to be negatively impacted by COVID-19 participated in the research, and early indicators suggest that Black and Hispanic students in upper elementary grades may have experienced small declines in reading scores not shared by other groups.
  • Scott suspects there were more children with such opportunities and that other parents had more time to help supervise or tutor.
  • Some of the ways in which groups of affluent parents have been using their wealth for educational advantage during the pandemic have been well-documented. Many private schools, in some areas more likely to open in-person education, have seen increased enrollment numbers
  • But there’s little research on how often families are taking advantage of increased tutoring or other supplemental services
  • But the pandemic has only further exposed the artifice that school alone has the ability to close achievement gaps. Resources and money will always play a role.
  • noting that students of color are more likely to have had someone close to them who suffered severely or even died from COVID-19. These students are also more likely to have been affected by high-profile instances of racism this past summer
  • “I think the district was insensitive about supplies because it’s used to catering to high-income families,”
  • “You have teachers saying, ‘Ask your parent for help if you don’t understand the work,’ but what if the parent is not available?”
katherineharron

Women at Citi earn 27% less than men - CNN - 0 views

  • Citigroup is making progress toward shrinking its gender pay gap. But it still has some work to do.
  • Globally, the bank's female employees earned 27% less than men did, according to a new report from the company. That's a slight improvement over the 29% gender pay gap Citigroup reported for 2018. This year's analysis also found that the median income for minority workers in the US was 6% less than the median income for non-minorities, down from 7% last year.
  • When adjusted to account for job titles, seniority and location, women at Citigroup (C) earned 1% less than their male counterparts, according to the report. Citigroup said that following a review of its global pay, it made pay adjustments as part of this year's compensation cycle according to the blog post.The company also said it has committed to increasing representation at the assistant vice president through managing director levels to at least 40% for women globally and 8% for black employees in the US by the end of 2021.
peterconnelly

Data Sharing Knowledge Gaps Widespread Among Patients - 0 views

  • The Health Care Data Sharing Survey, commissioned and published by Chicago-based clinical data management company Q-Centrix, was conducted in December 2021 with a sample size of 1,191 people.
  • Fifty-three percent of respondents were female, and 47 percent were male. Respondents fell into four age groups: 18-29 (21 percent), 30-44 (27 percent), 45-60 (29 percent), and over 60 (23 percent). Respondents were also split based on household income: $49,999 or less (41 percent), $50,000-$99,999 (34 percent), and $100,000 or more (25 percent).
  • These patient concerns may translate to a hesitancy to share data for purposes other than improving their own healthcare. Some respondents said they were unsure about whether they’d be willing to share their de-identified healthcare data for clinical research (21 percent), to improve hospital services (22 percent), to improve other patients’ healthcare (22 percent), and to advance care equity and identify disparities (24 percent).
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  • Over half (51 percent) of respondents reported that they either didn’t believe or weren’t sure that the data recorded in their EMRs was accurate.
  • The healthcare industry’s growing reliance on clinical data and EHRs requires that patients are educated and empowered about data collection, sharing, and use, the report authors noted. Bridging knowledge gaps between health systems and patients has the potential to significantly improve care, medical research, and health equity.
Javier E

Girls Outnumbered in New York's Elite Public Schools - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • the gap at the elite schools could be as elemental as their perception as havens for science, technology, engineering or math, making them a natural magnet for boys, just as girls might gravitate to schools known for humanities.
  • Mr. Finn, who, with Jessica A. Hockett, wrote the recent book, “Exam Schools: Inside America’s Most Selective Public High Schools.” “I think you’re looking at habit, culture, perceptions, tradition and curricular emphasis.”
  • enrollment in highly competitive high schools is 55 percent female. “The big gender-related chasm in American education these days is how much worse boys are doing, than girls,”
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  • Of the 3,060 students who applied to his school this year, 44 percent were boys. To help rank the candidates, he said, he simply adjusted the focus of student interviews to more effectively draw boys out in describing their own strengths. This year he offered seats to 136 boys and 134 girls. “Are we worried about getting unqualified boys?” asked Dr. Lerner. “No not at all.”
charlottedonoho

Big Gap between What Scientists Say and Americans Think about Climate Change - Scientif... - 1 views

  • There is good and bad news for climate scientists. The good news: Most Americans (79 percent) say that science and scientists are invaluable
  • a significant number of Americans do not use science to inform their views. Instead, they use political orientation and ideology, which are reflected in their level of education, to decide whether humans are driving planetary warming.
  • the vast majority (87 percent) of scientists said that human activity is driving global warming, and yet only half the American public ascribed to that view. And 77 percent of scientists said climate change is a very serious problem. In comparison, only 33 percent of the general public said it was a very serious problem in a 2013 poll.
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  • This could be interpreted as a failure by scientists to better communicate with the public, said Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of AAAS
  • Leshner said scientists should not shy away from polarizing topics in public.
Javier E

How The Economy Collapsed (As a Political Issue) - 1 views

  • the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, which routinely asks voters about the news they are hearing about the economy. In August of 2011, Americans of all parties said the news was mostly bad, with only minor differences showing between members of different political parties.A year later, a survey taken in early September found a "record partisan gap." A full 60% of Republicans said they were hearing “mostly bad” news. Only 15% of Democrats reported the same. And independent voters split on the question, with 36% saying they were hearing mostly bad news
  • Gallup’s tracking of Americans’ reported confidence in the economy has also seen a dramatic divergence: Democrats’ confidence reached a new high in a survey released September 25; Republicans’ reached a record low.
  • “Cues and signaling from the political leaders definitely influence how people experience their own lives,”
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  • A debate over “partisan perceptual bias” has raged in the political science literature ever since, Princeton’s Larry Bartels noted that it was particularly pronounced during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, with surveys showing that “Democrats were strikingly impervious to the good economic news.” Lee Drutman noted in Slate in 2010 that something similar seemed to apply to Republicans' reporting of their own economic conditions between 2008 and 2010.
  • The landmark 1960 The American Voter, a study of the elections of 1948 through 1956, found something similar of voter attitudes toward the Korean War, speculating that when a voters’ views conflict with his party allegiance, “allegiance presumably will work to undo the contrary opinions.”
  • “The economy” simply means different tings to different people.
  • the Obama campaign has long ago stopped trying to convince Americans that the economy is better than they thought, targeting their message at a “severely conservative” Romney.
  • And while the Romney campaign made the economy the core of their campaign earlier this year, they’ve recently diversified after struggling — mostly in vain — to persuade voters despite a steady stream of negative data points. Now, the economic argument is part of a broader case the campaign tries to make
Javier E

What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? - WSJ.com - 1 views

  • What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness.
  • The crucial new idea is that there are two different neural and psychological systems that interact to turn children into adults. Over the past two centuries, and even more over the past generation, the developmental timing of these two systems has changed. That, in turn, has profoundly changed adolescence and produced new kinds of adolescent woe. The big question for anyone who deals with young people today is how we can go about bringing these cogs of the teenage mind into sync once again
  • The first of these systems has to do with emotion and motivation. It is very closely linked to the biological and chemical changes of puberty and involves the areas of the brain that respond to rewards. This is the system that turns placid 10-year-olds into restless, exuberant, emotionally intense teenagers, desperate to attain every goal, fulfill every desire and experience every sensation. Later, it turns them back into relatively placid adults.
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  • adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do. The reward centers of the adolescent brain are much more active than those of either children or adults.
  • What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers
  • Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers. Puberty not only turns on the motivational and emotional system with new force, it also turns it away from the family and toward the world of equals.
  • The second crucial system in our brains has to do with control; it channels and harnesses all that seething energy. In particular, the prefrontal cortex reaches out to guide other parts of the brain, including the parts that govern motivation and emotion. This is the system that inhibits impulses and guides decision-making, that encourages long-term planning and delays gratification.
  • Today's adolescents develop an accelerator a long time before they can steer and brake.
  • Expertise comes with experience.
  • In gatherer-hunter and farming societies, childhood education involves formal and informal apprenticeship. Children have lots of chances to practice the skills that they need to accomplish their goals as adults, and so to become expert planners and actors.
  • In the past, to become a good gatherer or hunter, cook or caregiver, you would actually practice gathering, hunting, cooking and taking care of children all through middle childhood and early adolescence—tuning up just the prefrontal wiring you'd need as an adult. But you'd do all that under expert adult supervision and in the protected world of childhood
  • In contemporary life, the relationship between these two systems has changed dramatically. Puberty arrives earlier, and the motivational system kicks in earlier too. At the same time, contemporary children have very little experience with the kinds of tasks that they'll have to perform as grown-ups.
  • The experience of trying to achieve a real goal in real time in the real world is increasingly delayed, and the growth of the control system depends on just those experiences.
  • This control system depends much more on learning. It becomes increasingly effective throughout childhood and continues to develop during adolescence and adulthood, as we gain more experience.
  • An ever longer protected period of immaturity and dependence—a childhood that extends through college—means that young humans can learn more than ever before. There is strong evidence that IQ has increased dramatically as more children spend more time in school
  • children know more about more different subjects than they ever did in the days of apprenticeships.
  • Wide-ranging, flexible and broad learning, the kind we encourage in high-school and college, may actually be in tension with the ability to develop finely-honed, controlled, focused expertise in a particular skill, the kind of learning that once routinely took place in human societies.
  • this new explanation based on developmental timing elegantly accounts for the paradoxes of our particular crop of adolescents.
  • First, experience shapes the brain.
  • the brain is so powerful precisely because it is so sensitive to experience. It's as true to say that our experience of controlling our impulses make the prefrontal cortex develop as it is to say that prefrontal development makes us better at controlling our impulses
  • Second, development plays a crucial role in explaining human nature
  • there is more and more evidence that genes are just the first step in complex developmental sequences, cascades of interactions between organism and environment, and that those developmental processes shape the adult brain. Even small changes in developmental timing can lead to big changes in who we become.
  • Brain research is often taken to mean that adolescents are really just defective adults—grown-ups with a missing part.
  • But the new view of the adolescent brain isn't that the prefrontal lobes just fail to show up; it's that they aren't properly instructed and exercised
  • Instead of simply giving adolescents more and more school experiences—those extra hours of after-school classes and homework—we could try to arrange more opportunities for apprenticeship
  • Summer enrichment activities like camp and travel, now so common for children whose parents have means, might be usefully alternated with summer jobs, with real responsibilities.
  •  
    The two brain systems, the increasing gap between them, and the implications for adolescent education.
Duncan H

Money and Morals - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Lately inequality has re-entered the national conversation. Occupy Wall Street gave the issue visibility, while the Congressional Budget Office supplied hard data on the widening income gap. And the myth of a classless society has been exposed: Among rich countries, America stands out as the place where economic and social status is most likely to be inherited.
  • some indicators of social dysfunction have improved dramatically even as traditional families continue to lose ground. As far as I can tell, Mr. Murray never mentions either the plunge in teenage pregnancies among all racial groups since 1990 or the 60 percent decline in violent crime since the mid-90s. Could it be that traditional families aren’t as crucial to social cohesion as advertised?
  • To be fair, the new book at the heart of the conservative pushback, Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” does highlight some striking trends. Among white Americans with a high school education or less, marriage rates and male labor force participation are down, while births out of wedlock are up. Clearly, white working-class society has changed in ways that don’t sound good.
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  • Mr. Murray and other conservatives often seem to assume that the decline of the traditional family has terrible implications for society as a whole. This is, of course, a longstanding position. Reading Mr. Murray, I found myself thinking about an earlier diatribe, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s 1996 book, “The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values,” which covered much of the same ground, claimed that our society was unraveling and predicted further unraveling as the Victorian virtues continued to erode.
  • But is it really all about morals? No, it’s mainly about money.
  • Still, something is clearly happening to the traditional working-class family. The question is what. And it is, frankly, amazing how quickly and blithely conservatives dismiss the seemingly obvious answer: A drastic reduction in the work opportunities available to less-educated men.
  • For lower-education working men, however, it has been all negative. Adjusted for inflation, entry-level wages of male high school graduates have fallen 23 percent since 1973. Meanwhile, employment benefits have collapsed. In 1980, 65 percent of recent high-school graduates working in the private sector had health benefits, but, by 2009, that was down to 29 percent.
  • So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals.
  •  
    What do you think about the points Krugman makes in response to Murry's article?
summertyler

Seeing Isn't Believing | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

  • Much of the early research on motion perception was performed on insects,1 but similar results have been found for a huge range of species, from fishes to birds to mammals
  • Correspondingly, prey animals would find color vision of little use, but they are extremely good at seeing the motion of an approaching predator.
  • Ambiguous illusions that can be interpreted in two different ways, but not both ways at the same time, can also shed light on how we perceive the world around us
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  • But as good as animals are at detecting motion, they can also be fooled.
  • Visual movement can be thought of as a change in brightness, or luminance, over space and time
  • Why does the visual system treat this jumping dot as a single object in motion, instead of seeing one spot disappear while an unrelated spot appears nearby at the same instant? First, the brain usually treats “suspicious coincidences” as being more than coincidences: it is more likely that this is a single spot in motion rather than two separate events. Second, the visual system is tolerant of brief gaps in stimuli, filling in those gaps when necessary. This perception of apparent motion is, of course, the basis of the entire movie and TV industries, as viewers see a smooth motion picture when in reality they are simply watching a series of stationary stills.
  •  
    The perception of illusions
Javier E

Owner of a Credit Card Processor Is Setting a New Minimum Wage: $70,000 a Year - NYTime... - 1 views

  • Mr. Price surprised his 120-person staff by announcing that he planned over the next three years to raise the salary of even the lowest-paid clerk, customer service representative and salesman to a minimum of $70,000.
  • Mr. Price, who started the Seattle-based credit-card payment processing firm in 2004 at the age of 19, said he would pay for the wage increases by cutting his own salary from nearly $1 million to $70,000 and using 75 to 80 percent of the company’s anticipated $2.2 million in profit this year.
  • his unusual proposal does speak to an economic issue that has captured national attention: The disparity between the soaring pay of chief executives and that of their employees.
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  • The United States has one of the world’s largest pay gaps, with chief executives earning nearly 300 times what the average worker makes, according to some economists’ estimates. That is much higher than the 20-to-1 ratio recommended by Gilded Age magnates like J. Pierpont Morgan and the 20th century management visionary Peter Drucker.
  • “The market rate for me as a C.E.O. compared to a regular person is ridiculous, it’s absurd,” said Mr. Price, who said his main extravagances were snowboarding and picking up the bar bill. He drives a 12-year-old Audi
  • Under a financial overhaul passed by Congress in 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission was supposed to require all publicly held companies to disclose the ratio of C.E.O. pay to the median pay of all other employees, but it has so far failed to put it in effect. Corporate executives have vigorously opposed the idea, complaining it would be cumbersome and costly to implement.
  • Of all the social issues that he felt he was in a position to do something about as a business leader, “that one seemed like a more worthy issue to go after.”
  • The happiness research behind Mr. Price’s announcement on Monday came from Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist. They found that what they called emotional well-being — defined as “the emotional quality of an individual’s everyday experience, the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one’s life pleasant or unpleasant” — rises with income, but only to a point. And that point turns out to be about $75,000 a year.
  • Of course, money above that level brings pleasures — there’s no denying the delights of a Caribbean cruise or a pair of diamond earrings — but no further gains on the emotional well-being scale.
  • As Mr. Kahneman has explained it, income above the threshold doesn’t buy happiness, but a lack of money can deprive you of it.
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