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Javier E

It's Time for a Real Code of Ethics in Teaching - Noah Berlatsky - The Atlantic - 3 views

www.theatlantic.com/...274722

ethics teaching cheating analysis education

shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • More 5inShare Email Print A defendant in the Atlanta Public Schools case turns herself in at the Fulton County Jail on April 2. (David Goldman/AP) Earlier this week at The Atlantic, Emily Richmond asked whether high-stakes testing caused the Atlanta schools cheating scandal. The answer, I would argue, is yes... just not in the way you might think. Tests don't cause unethical behavior. But they did cause the Atlanta cheating scandal, and they are doing damage to the teaching profession. The argument that tests do not cause unethical behavior is fairly straightforward, and has been articulated by a number of writers. Jonathan Chait quite correctly points out that unethical behavior occurs in virtually all professions -- and that it occurs particularly when there are clear incentives to succeed. Incentivizing any field increases the impetus to cheat. Suppose journalism worked the way teaching traditionally had. You get hired at a newspaper, and your advancement and pay are dictated almost entirely by your years on the job, with almost no chance of either becoming a star or of getting fired for incompetence. Then imagine journalists changed that and instituted the current system, where you can get really successful if your bosses like you or be fired if they don't. You could look around and see scandal after scandal -- phone hacking! Jayson Blair! NBC's exploding truck! Janet Cooke! Stephen Glass! -- that could plausibly be attributed to this frightening new world in which journalists had an incentive to cheat in order to get ahead. It holds true of any field. If Major League Baseball instituted tenure, and maybe used tee-ball rules where you can't keep score and everybody gets a chance to hit, it could stamp out steroid use. Students have been cheating on tests forever -- massive, systematic cheating, you could say. Why? Because they have an incentive to do well. Give teachers and administrators an incentive for their students to do well, and more of them will cheat. For Chait, then, teaching has just been made more like journalism or baseball; it has gone from an incentiveless occupation to one with incentives.
  • Chait refers to violations of journalistic ethics -- like the phone-hacking scandal -- and suggests they are analogous to Major-League steroid use, and that both are similar to teachers (or students) cheating on tests. But is phone hacking "cheating"
  • Phone hacking was, then, not an example of cheating. It was a violation of professional ethics. And those ethics are not arbitrarily imposed, but are intrinsic to the practice of journalism as a profession committed to public service and to truth.
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  • Behaving ethically matters, but how it matters, and what it means, depends strongly on the context in which it occurs.
  • Ethics for teachers is not, apparently, first and foremost about educating their students, or broadening their minds. Rather, ethics for teachers in our current system consists in following the rules. The implicit, linguistic signal being given is that teachers are not like journalists or doctors, committed to a profession and to the moral code needed to achieve their professional goals. Instead, they are like athletes playing games, or (as Chait says) like children taking tests.
  • Using "cheating" as an ethical lens tends to both trivialize and infantilize teacher's work
  • Professions with social respect and social capital, like doctors and lawyers, collaborate in the creation of their own standards. The assumption is that those standards are intrinsic to the profession's goals, and that, therefore, professionals themselves are best equipped to establish and monitor them. Teachers' standards, though, are imposed from outside -- as if teachers are children, or as if teaching is a game.
  • High-stakes testing, then, does leads to cheating. It does not create unethical behavior -- but it does create the particular unethical behavior of "cheating."
  • We have reached a point where we can only talk about the ethics of the profession in terms of cheating or not cheating, as if teachers' main ethical duty is to make sure that scantron bubbles get filled in correctly. Teachers, like journalists, should have a commitment to truth; like doctors, they have a duty of care. Translating those commitments and duties into a bureaucratized measure of cheating-or-not-cheating diminishes ethic
  • For teachers it is, literally, demoralizing. It severs the moral experience of teaching from the moral evaluation of teaching, which makes it almost impossible for good teachers (in all the senses of "good") to stay in the system.
  • We need better ethics for teachers -- ethics that treat them as adults and professionals, not like children playing games.
ilanaprincilus06

Get the vax, win a shotgun: US states get creative to encourage vaccination | US politi... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...ates-america-covid-coronavirus

vaccine US

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 05 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • And West Virginia upped the ante, adding the chance to win hunting rifles or shotguns.
  • Governors across the country are resorting to almost shameless incentives to lure Americans who haven’t gotten a coronavirus vaccine to willingly take a jab.
  • Businesses, too, have stepped in to nudge the unvaccinated. The percentage of a state’s population that has been vaccinated varies dramatically. Some states are approaching 70%, and others are still below 50%.
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  • The incentive programs have become a bipartisan trend with governors from deep-red states like West Virginia or deep-blue states like California offering a range of inducements.
  • “It would be really great if we didn’t need any incentives at all. Hopefully, not dying is a great incentive,” the governor said according to the Deseret News.
Javier E

The price of your soul: How the brain decides whether to 'sell out' | Science Codex - 0 views

www.sciencecodex.com/...ides_whether_to_sell_out-84687

sacred values ethics morality culture brains religion research results incentives

shared by Javier E on 31 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • An Emory University neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold. "Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred – whether it's a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics – is a distinct cognitive process," says Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and lead author of the study. The results were published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits.
  • The brain imaging data showed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural systems associated with evaluating rights and wrongs (the left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems associated with reward. "Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives," Berns says. "Our findings indicate that it's unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people's behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives."
  • Research participants who reported more active affiliations with organizations, such as churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs, had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values. "Organized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms," Berns says.
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  • "As culture changes, it affects our brains, and as our brains change, that affects our culture. You can't separate the two," Berns says. "We now have the means to start understanding this relationship, and that's putting the relatively new field of cultural neuroscience onto the global stage." Future conflicts over politics and religion will likely play out biologically, Berns says. Some cultures will choose to change their biology, and in the process, change their culture, he notes. He cites the battles over women's reproductive rights and gay marriage as ongoing examples.
Javier E

The Economic Case for Regulating Social Media - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...media-facebook-regulation.html

social media network economics conspiracy theory hate speech addiction platform ad-financed business model click-bait psychology technology

shared by Javier E on 15 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter generate revenue by using detailed behavioral information to direct ads to individual users.
  • this bland description of their business model fails to convey even a hint of its profound threat to the nation’s political and social stability.
  • legislators in Congress to propose the breakup of some tech firms, along with other traditional antitrust measures. But the main hazard posed by these platforms is not aggressive pricing, abusive service or other ills often associated with monopoly.
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  • Instead, it is their contribution to the spread of misinformation, hate speech and conspiracy theories.
  • digital platforms, since the marginal cost of serving additional consumers is essentially zero. Because the initial costs of producing a platform’s content are substantial, and because any company’s first goal is to remain solvent, it cannot just give stuff away. Even so, when price exceeds marginal cost, competition relentlessly pressures rival publishers to cut prices — eventually all the way to zero. This, in a nutshell, is the publisher’s dilemma in the digital age.
  • These firms make money not by charging for access to content but by displaying it with finely targeted ads based on the specific types of things people have already chosen to view. If the conscious intent were to undermine social and political stability, this business model could hardly be a more effective weapon.
  • The algorithms that choose individual-specific content are crafted to maximize the time people spend on a platform
  • As the developers concede, Facebook’s algorithms are addictive by design and exploit negative emotional triggers. Platform addiction drives earnings, and hate speech, lies and conspiracy theories reliably boost addiction.
  • the subscription model isn’t fully efficient: Any positive fee would inevitably exclude at least some who would value access but not enough to pay the fee
  • a conservative think tank, says, for example, that government has no business second-guessing people’s judgments about what to post or read on social media.
  • That position would be easier to defend in a world where individual choices had no adverse impact on others. But negative spillover effects are in fact quite common
  • individual and collective incentives about what to post or read on social media often diverge sharply.
  • There is simply no presumption that what spreads on these platforms best serves even the individual’s own narrow interests, much less those of society as a whole.
  • a simpler step may hold greater promise: Platforms could be required to abandon that model in favor of one relying on subscriptions, whereby members gain access to content in return for a modest recurring fee.
  • Major newspapers have done well under this model, which is also making inroads in book publishing. The subscription model greatly weakens the incentive to offer algorithmically driven addictive content provided by individuals, editorial boards or other sources.
  • Careful studies have shown that Facebook’s algorithms have increased political polarization significantly
  • More worrisome, those excluded would come disproportionately from low-income groups. Such objections might be addressed specifically — perhaps with a modest tax credit to offset subscription fees — or in a more general way, by making the social safety net more generous.
  • Adam Smith, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher widely considered the father of economics, is celebrated for his “invisible hand” theory, which describes conditions under which market incentives promote socially benign outcomes. Many of his most ardent admirers may view steps to constrain the behavior of social media platforms as regulatory overreach.
  • But Smith’s remarkable insight was actually more nuanced: Market forces often promote society’s welfare, but not always. Indeed, as he saw clearly, individual interests are often squarely at odds with collective aspirations, and in many such instances it is in society’s interest to intervene. The current information crisis is a case in point.
Javier E

Study Finds Misconduct Widespread in Retracted Scientific Papers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tracted-scientific-papers.html

science cheating fraud culture incentives

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Last year the journal Nature reported an alarming increase in the number of retractions of scientific papers — a tenfold rise in the previous decade, to more than 300 a year across the scientific literature.
  • two scientists and a medical communications consultant analyzed 2,047 retracted papers in the biomedical and life sciences. They found that misconduct was the reason for three-quarters of the retractions for which they could determine the cause. “We found that the problem was a lot worse than we thought,”
  • the rising rate of retractions reflects perverse incentives that drive scientists to make sloppy mistakes or even knowingly publish false data.
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  • “It convinces me more that we have a problem in science,” he said. While the fraudulent papers may be relatively few, he went on, their rapid increase is a sign of a winner-take-all culture in which getting a paper published in a major journal can be the difference between heading a lab and facing unemployment. “Some fraction of people are starting to cheat,” he said.
Javier E

The Rediscovery of Character - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-rediscovery-of-character.html

character morality social science psychology crime prevention

shared by Javier E on 07 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • broken windows was only a small piece of what Wilson contributed, and he did not consider it the center of his work. The best way to understand the core Wilson is by borrowing the title of one of his essays: “The Rediscovery of Character.”
  • When Wilson began looking at social policy, at the University of Redlands, the University of Chicago and Harvard, most people did not pay much attention to character. The Marxists looked at material forces. Darwinians at the time treated people as isolated products of competition. Policy makers of right and left thought about how to rearrange economic incentives. “It is as if it were a mark of sophistication for us to shun the language of morality in discussing the problems of mankind,” he once recalled.
  • during the 1960s and ’70s, he noticed that the nation’s problems could not be understood by looking at incentives
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  • “At root,” Wilson wrote in 1985 in The Public Interest, “in almost every area of important concern, we are seeking to induce persons to act virtuously, whether as schoolchildren, applicants for public assistance, would-be lawbreakers or voters and public officials.”
  • When Wilson wrote about character and virtue, he didn’t mean anything high flown or theocratic. It was just the basics, befitting a man who grew up in the middle-class suburbs of Los Angeles in the 1940s: Behave in a balanced way. Think about the long-term consequences of your actions. Cooperate. Be decent.
  • Wilson argued that American communities responded to the stresses of industrialization by fortifying self-control.
  • he emphasized that character was formed in groups. As he wrote in “The Moral Sense,” his 1993 masterpiece, “Order exists because a system of beliefs and sentiments held by members of a society sets limits to what those members can do.”
  • Wilson set out to learn how groups created a good order, why that order sometimes frayed.
  • In “The Moral Sense,” he brilliantly investigated the virtuous sentiments we are born with and how they are cultivated by habit. Wilson’s broken windows theory was promoted in an essay with George Kelling called “Character and Community.” Wilson and Kelling didn’t think of crime primarily as an individual choice. They saw it as something that emerged from the social psychology of a community. When neighborhoods feel disorganized and scary, crime increases.
  • It was habituated by practicing good manners, by being dependable, punctual and responsible day by day.
  • But America responded to the stresses of the information economy by reducing the communal buttresses to self-control, with unfortunate results.
  • Wilson was not a philosopher. He was a social scientist. He just understood that people are moral judgers and moral actors, and he reintegrated the vocabulary of character into discussions of everyday life.
julia rhodes

Fict or Faction - How Much Do We Care About the Truth? | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...uch-do-we-care-about-the-truth

brain science science research knowledge psychology bias truth

shared by julia rhodes on 02 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Many books and hundreds of articles have been written about how drug companies have “gamed every system” to push their products. Negative clinical studies are suppressed; claims are made for larger usefulness that have no real basis in fact; side effects are ignored or deliberately underreported; and companies pay fines in the billions that still represent small fractions of total sales.
  • Spending enormous amounts of cash looking at cancer, cardiovascular and “women’s health” research, the Bayer scientists could corroborate less than a quarter of the studies they tested. In other words, 75-80% of these major research findings could not be confirmed.
  • Science lives on replication. Yet these clinically critical attempts to corroborate research findings could not confirm them. Why? Ironically, the reasons resemble many that are used to describe the malfeasance of drug companies – the need for money, grant support, major findings to achieve tenure – and a desire for others not to have the “secret sauce” of methodology needed to create the research.
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  • The author retorts “I really have an issue with the word hoax.” He regards himself as a performance artist. His response – “It’s the people who reported it who are deceiving their audience.”
  • Why is fake news so popular on newssites? Here are two reasons: first, it provides emotional “buzz.” Second, because it can make a lot of money. As the Washington Bureau chief of the Pulitzer winning Huffington Post lamented, “If you throw something up without fact checking it, and you’re the first one to put it up, and you get millions and millions of views, and later it’s proved false, you still got those views. That’s a problem. The incentives are all wrong.”Especially when, as at places like Bloomberg, remuneration is based on the number of hits an article receives. But incentives are wrong not just for news gathering organizations.
  • Americans continue to believe important historical “facts” that are untrue. After 9/11, Americans were incensed to hear that the many in the Middle East thought Osama bin Laden’s horrifying attack was the product of a CIA-Mossad plot. To this day, large majorities in countries like Pakistan think the massacre of 9/11 was created in Washington or Tel Aviv.
  • Yet close to a majority of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein, tyrant of Iraq, was in cahoots with Al-Qaeda, especially before the 9/11 attack. The Bush administration told them so.Which people in the Middle East rightly regard as preposterous.Saddam Hussein was the leader of a boldly secular, Arabist tyranny. Sunni fanatics like Al Qaeda were his regime’s blood enemies. That they would work together rather than murder each other was just insane. Welcome to the world of fict and faction.
  • What can we learn from this? Plausibility is not truth; when something is “too good to be true” it generally isn’t; institutions increasingly do not back up what they proclaim and sell.And the “free informational marketplace” of the Internet is a wonderful site for fraud, scams, lies, plausible lies, and pleasant, beautiful untruths. So we all need our own truth detectors.
Javier E

Rise in Scientific Journal Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-prompts-calls-for-reform.html

science ethics methods cheating bias reseach results

shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 12 - Cached
  • before long they reached a troubling conclusion: not only that retractions were rising at an alarming rate, but that retractions were just a manifestation of a much more profound problem — “a symptom of a dysfunctional scientific climate,” as Dr. Fang put it.
  • he feared that science had turned into a winner-take-all game with perverse incentives that lead scientists to cut corners and, in some cases, commit acts of misconduct.
  • Members of the committee agreed with their assessment. “I think this is really coming to a head,” said Dr. Roberta B. Ness, dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health. And Dr. David Korn of Harvard Medical School agreed that “there are problems all through the system.”
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  • science has changed in some worrying ways in recent decades — especially biomedical research, which consumes a larger and larger share of government science spending.
  • the journal Nature reported that published retractions had increased tenfold over the past decade, while the number of published papers had increased by just 44 percent.
  • because journals are now online, bad papers are simply reaching a wider audience, making it more likely that errors will be spotted.
  • The National Institutes of Health accepts a much lower percentage of grant applications today than in earlier decades. At the same time, many universities expect scientists to draw an increasing part of their salaries from grants, and these pressures have influenced how scientists are promoted.
  • Dr. Fang and Dr. Casadevall looked at the rate of retractions in 17 journals from 2001 to 2010 and compared it with the journals’ “impact factor,” a score based on how often their papers are cited by scientists. The higher a journal’s impact factor, the two editors found, the higher its retraction rate.
  • Each year, every laboratory produces a new crop of Ph.D.’s, who must compete for a small number of jobs, and the competition is getting fiercer. In 1973, more than half of biologists had a tenure-track job within six years of getting a Ph.D. By 2006 the figure was down to 15 percent.
  • Yet labs continue to have an incentive to take on lots of graduate students to produce more research. “I refer to it as a pyramid scheme,
  • In such an environment, a high-profile paper can mean the difference between a career in science or leaving the field. “It’s becoming the price of admission,”
  • To survive professionally, scientists feel the need to publish as many papers as possible, and to get them into high-profile journals. And sometimes they cut corners or even commit misconduct to get ther
  • “What people do is they count papers, and they look at the prestige of the journal in which the research is published, and they see how may grant dollars scientists have, and if they don’t have funding, they don’t get promoted,” Dr. Fang said. “It’s not about the quality of the research.”
  • Dr. Ness likens scientists today to small-business owners, rather than people trying to satisfy their curiosity about how the world works. “You’re marketing and selling to other scientists,” she said. “To the degree you can market and sell your products better, you’re creating the revenue stream to fund your enterprise.”
  • Universities want to attract successful scientists, and so they have erected a glut of science buildings, Dr. Stephan said. Some universities have gone into debt, betting that the flow of grant money will eventually pay off the loans.
  • “You can’t afford to fail, to have your hypothesis disproven,” Dr. Fang said. “It’s a small minority of scientists who engage in frank misconduct. It’s a much more insidious thing that you feel compelled to put the best face on everything.”
  • , Dr. Stephan points out that a number of countries — including China, South Korea and Turkey — now offer cash rewards to scientists who get papers into high-profile journals.
  • To change the system, Dr. Fang and Dr. Casadevall say, start by giving graduate students a better understanding of science’s ground rules — what Dr. Casadevall calls “the science of how you know what you know.”
  • They would also move away from the winner-take-all system, in which grants are concentrated among a small fraction of scientists. One way to do that may be to put a cap on the grants any one lab can receive.
  • Such a shift would require scientists to surrender some of their most cherished practices — the priority rule, for example, which gives all the credit for a scientific discovery to whoever publishes results first.
  • To ease such cutthroat competition, the two editors would also change the rules for scientific prizes and would have universities take collaboration into account when they decide on promotions.
  • Even scientists who are sympathetic to the idea of fundamental change are skeptical that it will happen any time soon. “I don’t think they have much chance of changing what they’re talking about,” said Dr. Korn, of Harvard.
  • “When our generation goes away, where is the new generation going to be?” he asked. “All the scientists I know are so anxious about their funding that they don’t make inspiring role models. I heard it from my own kids, who went into art and music respectively. They said, ‘You know, we see you, and you don’t look very happy.’ ”
Javier E

Economics: A new focus on context and connections - 0 views

www.economist.com/..._focus_context_and_connections

economics crisis paradigm instruction theory connections government efficiency market market fundamentalism

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • THE basic principles of economics have not changed—people and firms respond to incentives; demand and supply determine the relative prices of goods, services and even money itself; markets generally allocate resources well and deliver welfare-improving outcomes. However, the notion that markets are always efficient, can be left to themselves and are self-correcting is no longer tenable. Markets do eventually correct but, if allowed free rein, can get so far out of line that the corrections take the form of collapses that can be very painful. 
  • The crisis has highlighted the importance of the government's role in regulating markets to make them function smoothly. At the same time, the government is equally capable of mucking up markets—even well-meaning governments, in the name of improving social welfare (e.g., making housing affordable for everyone), can often create perverse incentives that only foment more instability.
  • In short, the crisis has brought to the fore the complex connections among markets, government and social and economic policies.
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  • The crisis has injected a good dose of humility into the discipline (at least in most corners) and made it much more challenging to teach economics because our existing models are simply too rudimentary to capture all of these connections
  • It is has become even more important to emphasise what economic theory can in fact give us—powerful but narrow insights that should guide our thinking but not dominate them. 
ilanaprincilus06

Should The Government Pay People To Get Vaccinated? Some Economists Think So : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...nated-some-economists-think-so

vaccination Covid-19 immunity

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • the country will likely need a vaccination level of between 70% and 90% to reach herd immunity
  • The idea of a cash-for-shots program is being promoted by some economists and politicians in case the country struggles to get to herd immunity this year.
  • Here's how his idea works: Everyone who gets vaccinated would be eligible for a $1,000 payment from the federal government. You'd get $200 for taking both vaccine shots. And then an additional $800 once the country reaches herd immunity.
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  • The idea is textbook economics. People respond to incentives.
  • incentives can be used not just for the sake of individuals, but for the benefit of society as a whole.
  • His plan would cost the country between $250 billion and $300 billion.
  • it would be a drop in the bucket compared to the economic harm if the pandemic persists.
  • "Payments may indeed encourage some people to get the vaccine," says Cynthia Cryder, an associate professor of marketing at Washington University's Olin Business School. "But it may also deter people from getting the vaccine. Because payments signal that the vaccine is risky."
  • Another method of getting to herd immunity may exist, though it has not been discussed widely. Mandates — requiring people to get vaccinated either by orders of state governments or employers.
  • To economist Robert Litan, if we ultimately must choose between the carrot of cash payouts and the stick of mandated vaccines, the answer is clear: the carrot.
  • "I think the level of anger in the country will go up extraordinarily high if we had mandates," he says.
Javier E

Fixation on Fake News Overshadows Waning Trust in Real Reporting - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...g-trust-in-real-reporting.html

fake news facebook culture crisis informed citizenry reporting social media

shared by Javier E on 19 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • It misunderstands a new media world in which every story, and source, is at risk of being discredited, not by argument but by sheer force.
  • During the months I spent talking to partisan Facebook page operators for a magazine article this year, it became clear that while the ecosystem contained easily identifiable and intentional fabrication, it contained much, much more of something else.
  • I recall a conversation with a fact checker about how to describe a story, posted on a pro-Trump website and promoted on a pro-Trump Facebook page — and, incidentally, copied from another pro-Trump site by overseas contractors. It tried to cast suspicion on Khizr Khan, the father of a slain American soldier, who had spoken out against Donald J. Trump.
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  • The overarching claims of the story were disingenuous and horrifying; the facts it included had been removed from all useful context and placed in a new, sinister one; its insinuating mention of “Muslim martyrs,” in proximity to mentions of Mr. Khan’s son, and its misleading and strategic mention of Shariah law, amounted to a repulsive smear. It was a story that appealed to bigoted ideas and that would clearly appeal to those who held them.
  • This was a story the likes of which was an enormous force in this election, clearly designed to function well within Facebook’s economy of sharing. And it probably would not run afoul of the narrow definition of “fake news.”
  • Stories like that one get to the heart of the rhetorical and strategic risk of holding up “fake news” as a broad media offensive position, especially after an election cycle characterized by the euphoric inversion of rhetoric by some of Mr. Trump’s supporters, and by the candidate himself
  • This tactic was used on the language of social justice, which was appropriated by opponents and redeployed nihilistically, in an open effort to sap its power while simultaneously taking advantage of what power it retained
  • Anti-racists were cast as the real racists. Progressives were cast as secretly regressive on their own terms
  • This was not a new tactic, but it was newly effective. It didn’t matter that its targets knew that it was a bad-faith maneuver, a clear bid for power rather than an attempt to engage or reason. The referees called foul, but nobody could hear them over the roar of the crowds. Or maybe they could, but realized that nobody could make them listen.
  • This wide formulation of “fake news” will be applied back to the traditional news media, which does not yet understand how threatened its ability is to declare things true, even when they are.
  • the worst identified defenders make their money outside Facebook anyway.
  • Another narrow response from Facebook could be to assert editorial control over external forces
  • Facebook is a place where people construct and project identities to friends, family and peers. It is a marketplace in which news is valuable mainly to the extent that it serves those identities. It is a system built on ranking and vetting and votin
  • Fake news operations are closely aligned with the experienced incentives of the Facebook economy
  • the outrage is at risk of being misdirected, and will be followed by the realization that the colloquial “fake news” — the newslike media, amateur and professional, for which truth is defined first in personal and political terms, and which must only meet the bar of not being obviously, inarguably, demonstrably false — will continue growing apace, gaining authority by sheer force
  • Media companies have spent years looking to Facebook, waiting for the company to present a solution to their mounting business concerns
  • Those who expect the operator of the dominant media ecosystem of our time, in response to getting caught promoting lies, to suddenly return authority to the companies it has superseded are in for a similar surprise.
Javier E

The decline effect and the scientific method : The New Yorker - 3 views

www.newyorker.com/...101213fa_fact_lehrer

science empiricism philosophy scientific method decline research statistics method bias truth

shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 12 - Cached
  • The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.
  • But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable.
  • This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.
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  • If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe?
  • Schooler demonstrated that subjects shown a face and asked to describe it were much less likely to recognize the face when shown it later than those who had simply looked at it. Schooler called the phenomenon “verbal overshadowing.”
  • The most likely explanation for the decline is an obvious one: regression to the mean. As the experiment is repeated, that is, an early statistical fluke gets cancelled out. The extrasensory powers of Schooler’s subjects didn’t decline—they were simply an illusion that vanished over time.
  • yet Schooler has noticed that many of the data sets that end up declining seem statistically solid—that is, they contain enough data that any regression to the mean shouldn’t be dramatic. “These are the results that pass all the tests,” he says. “The odds of them being random are typically quite remote, like one in a million. This means that the decline effect should almost never happen. But it happens all the time!
  • this is why Schooler believes that the decline effect deserves more attention: its ubiquity seems to violate the laws of statistics
  • In 2001, Michael Jennions, a biologist at the Australian National University, set out to analyze “temporal trends” across a wide range of subjects in ecology and evolutionary biology. He looked at hundreds of papers and forty-four meta-analyses (that is, statistical syntheses of related studies), and discovered a consistent decline effect over time, as many of the theories seemed to fade into irrelevance.
  • Jennions admits that his findings are troubling, but expresses a reluctance to talk about them
  • publicly. “This is a very sensitive issue for scientists,” he says. “You know, we’re supposed to be dealing with hard facts, the stuff that’s supposed to stand the test of time. But when you see these trends you become a little more skeptical of things.”
  • While publication bias almost certainly plays a role in the decline effect, it remains an incomplete explanation. For one thing, it fails to account for the initial prevalence of positive results among studies that never even get submitted to journals. It also fails to explain the experience of people like Schooler, who have been unable to replicate their initial data despite their best efforts.
  • Jennions, similarly, argues that the decline effect is largely a product of publication bias, or the tendency of scientists and scientific journals to prefer positive data over null results, which is what happens when no effect is found. The bias was first identified by the statistician Theodore Sterling, in 1959, after he noticed that ninety-seven per cent of all published psychological studies with statistically significant data found the effect they were looking for
  • Sterling saw that if ninety-seven per cent of psychology studies were proving their hypotheses, either psychologists were extraordinarily lucky or they published only the outcomes of successful experiments.
  • One of his most cited papers has a deliberately provocative title: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
  • suspects that an equally significant issue is the selective reporting of results—the data that scientists choose to document in the first place. Palmer’s most convincing evidence relies on a statistical tool known as a funnel graph. When a large number of studies have been done on a single subject, the data should follow a pattern: studies with a large sample size should all cluster around a common value—the true result—whereas those with a smaller sample size should exhibit a random scattering, since they’re subject to greater sampling error. This pattern gives the graph its name, since the distribution resembles a funnel.
  • after Palmer plotted every study of fluctuating asymmetry, he noticed that the distribution of results with smaller sample sizes wasn’t random at all but instead skewed heavily toward positive results. Palmer has since documented a similar problem in several other contested subject areas. “Once I realized that selective reporting is everywhere in science, I got quite depressed,” Palmer told me. “As a researcher, you’re always aware that there might be some nonrandom patterns, but I had no idea how widespread it is.”
  • Palmer summarized the impact of selective reporting on his field: “We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some—perhaps many—cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their biological significance and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs often repeated.”
  • Palmer emphasizes that selective reporting is not the same as scientific fraud. Rather, the problem seems to be one of subtle omissions and unconscious misperceptions, as researchers struggle to make sense of their results. Stephen Jay Gould referred to this as the “sho
  • horning” process.
  • “A lot of scientific measurement is really hard,” Simmons told me. “If you’re talking about fluctuating asymmetry, then it’s a matter of minuscule differences between the right and left sides of an animal. It’s millimetres of a tail feather. And so maybe a researcher knows that he’s measuring a good male”—an animal that has successfully mated—“and he knows that it’s supposed to be symmetrical. Well, that act of measurement is going to be vulnerable to all sorts of perception biases. That’s not a cynical statement. That’s just the way human beings work.”
  • For Simmons, the steep rise and slow fall of fluctuating asymmetry is a clear example of a scientific paradigm, one of those intellectual fads that both guide and constrain research: after a new paradigm is proposed, the peer-review process is tilted toward positive results. But then, after a few years, the academic incentives shift—the paradigm has become entrenched—so that the most notable results are now those that disprove the theory.
  • John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, argues that such distortions are a serious issue in biomedical research. “These exaggerations are why the decline has become so common,” he says. “It’d be really great if the initial studies gave us an accurate summary of things. But they don’t. And so what happens is we waste a lot of money treating millions of patients and doing lots of follow-up studies on other themes based on results that are misleading.”
  • In 2005, Ioannidis published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that looked at the forty-nine most cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals.
  • the data Ioannidis found were disturbing: of the thirty-four claims that had been subject to replication, forty-one per cent had either been directly contradicted or had their effect sizes significantly downgraded.
  • the most troubling fact emerged when he looked at the test of replication: out of four hundred and thirty-two claims, only a single one was consistently replicable. “This doesn’t mean that none of these claims will turn out to be true,” he says. “But, given that most of them were done badly, I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
  • According to Ioannidis, the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls “significance chasing,” or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance—the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher.
  • One of the classic examples of selective reporting concerns the testing of acupuncture in different countries. While acupuncture is widely accepted as a medical treatment in various Asian countries, its use is much more contested in the West. These cultural differences have profoundly influenced the results of clinical trials.
  • The problem of selective reporting is rooted in a fundamental cognitive flaw, which is that we like proving ourselves right and hate being wrong.
  • “It feels good to validate a hypothesis,” Ioannidis said. “It feels even better when you’ve got a financial interest in the idea or your career depends upon it. And that’s why, even after a claim has been systematically disproven”—he cites, for instance, the early work on hormone replacement therapy, or claims involving various vitamins—“you still see some stubborn researchers citing the first few studies
  • That’s why Schooler argues that scientists need to become more rigorous about data collection before they publish. “We’re wasting too much time chasing after bad studies and underpowered experiments,”
  • The current “obsession” with replicability distracts from the real problem, which is faulty design.
  • “Every researcher should have to spell out, in advance, how many subjects they’re going to use, and what exactly they’re testing, and what constitutes a sufficient level of proof. We have the tools to be much more transparent about our experiments.”
  • Schooler recommends the establishment of an open-source database, in which researchers are required to outline their planned investigations and document all their results. “I think this would provide a huge increase in access to scientific work and give us a much better way to judge the quality of an experiment,”
  • scientific research will always be shadowed by a force that can’t be curbed, only contained: sheer randomness. Although little research has been done on the experimental dangers of chance and happenstance, the research that exists isn’t encouraging.
  • The disturbing implication of the Crabbe study is that a lot of extraordinary scientific data are nothing but noise. The hyperactivity of those coked-up Edmonton mice wasn’t an interesting new fact—it was a meaningless outlier, a by-product of invisible variables we don’t understand.
  • The problem, of course, is that such dramatic findings are also the most likely to get published in prestigious journals, since the data are both statistically significant and entirely unexpected
  • This suggests that the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion. While Karl Popper imagined falsification occurring with a single, definitive experiment—Galileo refuted Aristotelian mechanics in an afternoon—the process turns out to be much messier than that.
  • Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests.
  • Even the law of gravity hasn’t always been perfect at predicting real-world phenomena. (In one test, physicists measuring gravity by means of deep boreholes in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data.)
  • Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren’t surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.)
  • The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe. ♦
kirkpatrickry

Why Every Marketer Should Read 'Influence: The Psychology Of Persuasion' - Forbes - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...e-the-psychology-of-persuasion

psychology science

shared by kirkpatrickry on 03 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • While it’s imperative that you actually read and study the book itself, sometimes it’s helpful to gain understanding by also reading what others have taken from the book, and how it helps them become better marketers and run a successful business. The Psychology of Persuasion was written by Robert Cialdini, a world-renowned psychologist who has previously worked at many universities, including Stanford. His principles have stood well the test of time, and this book has topped the New York Times Bestseller List.
  • The foundation of the book is simple – if someone does go out of their way for you, you are more likely to do so in return. Now, let’s think of this from a business standpoint. Let’s say you are a business that offers terrific incentives, programs, or sales. You also offer great customer service (a very liberal return policy, for example). What you get in return as reciprocity is customer loyalty, as well as word of mouth. Building a customer base is one of the most important parts of marketing, and in this instance, sometimes you have to give a little to get some in return. However, having a customer for life, who speaks well of you to their friends, is worth the price of a liberal return policy, or whatever method you choose.
  • if one person says black, the other person would say white. This correlation is also known as priming. This is one of those functions that works well in both a psychological and marketing arena.
kirkpatrickry

The Fascinating Economics Of The Hedge Funds' Private Brexit Exit Polls - Forbes - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...unds-private-brexit-exit-polls

knowledge economics

shared by kirkpatrickry on 03 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • This is our efficient markets hypothesis in action. The EMH does not insist, not at all, that markets are the efficient manner of organising everything. Rather, simply that markets are efficient at processing the information about what prices should be in a market. And this is one of the ways this works. We don’t know the result of that coming referendum. But we do know that it will have major effects on prices either way. Leave and sterling tumbles, stay in and it rises (largely offsetting that current risk of it falling). And obviously we’ll not actually know until the votes have been counted.
  • Firstly, information about what will happen in the future gets incorporated into prices today. Because people trade on it today to profit from that future event. Secondly, there’s significant incentive to go out and find the information about what will happen in the future.
Javier E

The Choice Explosion - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-choice-explosion.html

choice decision-making bias

shared by Javier E on 03 May 16 - No Cached
  • the social psychologist Sheena Iyengar asked 100 American and Japanese college students to take a piece of paper. On one side, she had them write down the decisions in life they would like to make for themselves. On the other, they wrote the decisions they would like to pass on to others.
  • The Americans desired choice in four times more domains than the Japanese.
  • Americans now have more choices over more things than any other culture in human history. We can choose between a broader array of foods, media sources, lifestyles and identities. We have more freedom to live out our own sexual identities and more religious and nonreligious options to express our spiritual natures.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • But making decisions well is incredibly difficult, even for highly educated professional decision makers. As Chip Heath and Dan Heath point out in their book “Decisive,” 83 percent of corporate mergers and acquisitions do not increase shareholder value, 40 percent of senior hires do not last 18 months in their new position, 44 percent of lawyers would recommend that a young person not follow them into the law.
  • It’s becoming incredibly important to learn to decide well, to develop the techniques of self-distancing to counteract the flaws in our own mental machinery. The Heath book is a very good compilation of those techniques.
  • assume positive intent. When in the midst of some conflict, start with the belief that others are well intentioned. It makes it easier to absorb information from people you’d rather not listen to.
  • Suzy Welch’s 10-10-10 rule. When you’re about to make a decision, ask yourself how you will feel about it 10 minutes from now, 10 months from now and 10 years from now. People are overly biased by the immediate pain of some choice, but they can put the short-term pain in long-term perspective by asking these questions.
  • An "explosion" that may also be a "dissolution" or "disintegration," in my view. Unlimited choices. Conduct without boundaries. All of which may be viewed as either "great" or "terrible." The poor suffer when they have no means to pursue choices, which is terrible. The rich seem only to want more and more, wealth without boundaries, which is great for those so able to do. Yes, we need a new decision-making tool, but perhaps one that is also very old: simplify, simplify,simplify by setting moral boundaries that apply to all and which define concisely what our life together ought to be.
  • our tendency to narrow-frame, to see every decision as a binary “whether or not” alternative. Whenever you find yourself asking “whether or not,” it’s best to step back and ask, “How can I widen my options?”
  • deliberate mistakes. A survey of new brides found that 20 percent were not initially attracted to the man they ended up marrying. Sometimes it’s useful to make a deliberate “mistake” — agreeing to dinner with a guy who is not your normal type. Sometimes you don’t really know what you want and the filters you apply are hurting you.
  • It makes you think that we should have explicit decision-making curriculums in all schools. Maybe there should be a common course publicizing the work of Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein, Dan Ariely and others who study the way we mess up and the techniques we can adopt to prevent error.
  • The explosion of choice places extra burdens on the individual. Poorer Americans have fewer resources to master decision-making techniques, less social support to guide their decision-making and less of a safety net to catch them when they err.
  • the stress of scarcity itself can distort decision-making. Those who experienced stress as children often perceive threat more acutely and live more defensively.
  • The explosion of choice means we all need more help understanding the anatomy of decision-making.
  • living in an area of concentrated poverty can close down your perceived options, and comfortably “relieve you of the burden of choosing life.” It’s hard to maintain a feeling of agency when you see no chance of opportunity.
  • In this way the choice explosion has contributed to widening inequality.
  • The relentless all-hour reruns of "Law and Order" in 100 channel cable markets provide direct rebuff to the touted but hollow promise/premise of wider "choice." The small group of personalities debating a pre-framed trivial point of view, over and over, nightly/daily (in video clips), without data, global comparison, historic reference, regional content, or a deep commitment to truth or knowledge of facts has resulted in many choosing narrower limits: streaming music, coffee shops, Facebook--now a "choice" of 1.65 billion users.
  • It’s important to offer opportunity and incentives. But we also need lessons in self-awareness — on exactly how our decision-making tool is fundamentally flawed, and on mental frameworks we can adopt to avoid messing up even more than we do.
Javier E

How 'Concept Creep' Made Americans So Sensitive to Harm - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...477939

concept creep psychology liberalism harmful trauma torture

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • How did American culture arrive at these moments? A new research paper by Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, offers as useful a framework for understanding what’s going on as any I’ve seen. In “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,”
  • concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before,”expanded meanings that reflect “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm.”
  • “they also have potentially damaging ramifications for society and psychology that cannot be ignored.”
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • He calls these expansions of meaning “concept creep.”
  • critics may hold concept creep responsible for damaging cultural trends, he writes, “such as supposed cultures of fear, therapy, and victimhood, the shifts I present have some positive implications.”
  • Concept creep is inevitable and vital if society is to make good use of new information. But why has the direction of concept creep, across so many different concepts, trended toward greater sensitivity to harm as opposed to lesser sensitivity?
  • The concept of abuse expanded too far.
  • Classically, psychological investigations recognized two forms of child abuse, physical and sexual, Haslam writes. In more recent decades, however, the concept of abuse has witnessed “horizontal creep” as new forms of abuse were recognized or studied. For example, “emotional abuse” was added as a new subtype of abuse. Neglect, traditionally a separate category, came to be seen as a type of abuse, too.
  • Meanwhile, the concept of abuse underwent “vertical creep.” That is, the behavior seen as qualifying for a given kind of abuse became steadily less extreme. Some now regard any spanking as physical abuse. Within psychology, “the boundary of neglect is indistinct,” Haslam writes. “As a consequence, the concept of neglect can become over-inclusive, identifying behavior as negligent that is substantially milder or more subtle than other forms of abuse. This is not to deny that some forms of neglect are profoundly damaging, merely to argue that the concept’s boundaries are sufficiently vague and elastic to encompass forms that are not severe.”
  • How did a working-class mom get arrested, lose her fast food job, and temporarily lose custody of her 9-year-old for letting the child play alone at a nearby park?
  • One concerns the field of psychology and its incentives. “It could be argued that just as successful species increase their territory, invading and adapting to new habitats, successful concepts and disciplines also expand their range into new semantic niches,” he theorizes. “Concepts that successfully attract the attention of researchers and practitioners are more likely to be applied in new ways and new contexts than those that do not.”
  • Concept creep can be necessary or needless. It can align concepts more or less closely with underlying realities. It can change society for better or worse. Yet many who push for more sensitivy to harm seem unaware of how oversensitivty can do harm.
  • The other theory posits an ideological explanation. “Psychology has played a role in the liberal agenda of sensitivity to harm and responsiveness to the harmed,” he writes “and its increased focus on negative phenomena—harms such as abuse, addiction, bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma—has been symptomatic of the success of that social agenda.”
  • Jonathan Haidt, who believes it has gone too far, offers a fourth theory. “If an increasingly left-leaning academy is staffed by people who are increasingly hostile to conservatives, then we can expect that their concepts will shift, via motivated scholarship, in ways that will help them and their allies (e.g., university administrators) to prosecute and condemn conservatives,
  • While Haslam and Haidt appear to have meaningfully different beliefs about why concept creep arose within academic psychology and spread throughout society, they were in sufficient agreement about its dangers to co-author a Guardian op-ed on the subject.
  • It focuses on how greater sensitivity to harm has affected college campuses.
  • “Of course young people need to be protected from some kinds of harm, but overprotection is harmful, too, for it causes fragility and hinders the development of resilience,” they wrote. “As Nasim Taleb pointed out in his book Antifragile, muscles need resistance to develop, bones need stress and shock to strengthen and the growing immune system needs to be exposed to pathogens in order to function. Similarly, he noted, children are by nature anti-fragile – they get stronger when they learn to recover from setbacks, failures and challenges to their cherished ideas.”
  • police officers fearing harm from dogs kill them by the hundreds or perhaps thousands every year in what the DOJ calls an epidemic.
  • After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration and many Americans grew increasingly sensitive to harms, real and imagined, from terrorism
  • Dick Cheney declared, “If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response.” The invasion of Iraq was predicated, in part, on the idea that 9/11 “changed everything,”
  • Before 9/11, the notion of torturing prisoners was verboten. After the Bush Administration’s torture was made public, popular debate focused on mythical “ticking time bomb” scenarios, in which a whole city would be obliterated but for torture. Now Donald Trump suggests that torture should be used more generally against terrorists. Torture is, as well, an instance in which people within the field of psychology pushed concept creep in the direction of less sensitivity to harm,
  • Haslam endorses two theories
  • there are many reasons to be concerned about excessive sensitivity to harm:
Javier E

The Science of Bragging and Boasting - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4451104577390392329291890.html

self-presentation self-portrayal emotion brain science psychology

shared by Javier E on 09 May 12 - Cached
  • Talking about ourselves—whether in a personal conversation or through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter—triggers the same sensation of pleasure in the brain as food or money
  • About 40% of everyday speech is devoted to telling others about what we feel or think. Now, through five brain imaging and behavioral experiments, Harvard University neuroscientists have uncovered the reason: It feels so rewarding, at the level of brain cells and synapses, that we can't help sharing our thoughts.
  • Despite the financial incentive, people often preferred to talk about themselves and willingly gave up between 17% and 25% of their potential earnings so they could reveal personal information
Duncan H

The Materialist Fallacy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-the-materialist-fallacy.html

education research

shared by Duncan H on 14 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • The half-century between 1912 and 1962 was a period of great wars and economic tumult but also of impressive social cohesion. Marriage rates were high. Community groups connected people across class.
  • In the half-century between 1962 and the present, America has become more prosperous, peaceful and fair, but the social fabric has deteriorated. Social trust has plummeted. Society has segmented. The share of Americans born out of wedlock is now at 40 percent and rising.
  • Liberals congregated around an economically determinist theory. The loss of good working-class jobs undermined communities and led to the social deterioration.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Libertarians congregated around a government-centric theory. Great Society programs enabled people to avoid work and gave young women an incentive to have children without marrying.
  • Neo-conservatives had a more culturally deterministic theory. Many of them had been poor during the Depression. Economic stress had not undermined the family then. Moreover, social breakdown began in the 1960s, a time of unprecedented prosperity. They argued that the abandonment of traditional bourgeois norms led to social disruption, especially for those in fragile circumstances.
  • a new body of research has emerged, which should lead to new theories. This research
  • tends to support a few common themes. First, no matter how social disorganization got started, once it starts, it takes on a momentum of its own. People who grow up in disrupted communities are more likely to lead disrupted lives as adults, magnifying disorder from one generation to the next.
  • Second, it’s not true that people in disorganized neighborhoods have bad values. Their goals are not different from everybody else’s. It’s that they lack the social capital to enact those values. Third, while individuals are to be held responsible for their behavior, social context is more powerful than we thought. If any of us grew up in a neighborhood where a third of the men dropped out of school, we’d be much worse off, too.
  • disruption breeds disruption
  • children who can’t form secure attachments by 18 months face a much worse set of chances for the rest of their lives because they find it harder to build stable relationships.
  • Duncan H on 14 Feb 12
     
    What do you think?
Javier E

Why It's OK to Let Apps Make You a Better Person - Evan Selinger - Technology - The Atl... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...254246

self person morality will agent willpower technology enhanced psychology

shared by Javier E on 19 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • one theme emerges from the media coverage of people's relationships with our current set of technologies: Consumers want digital willpower. App designers in touch with the latest trends in behavioral modification--nudging, the quantified self, and gamification--and good old-fashioned financial incentive manipulation, are tackling weakness of will. They're harnessing the power of payouts, cognitive biases, social networking, and biofeedback. The quantified self becomes the programmable self.
  • the trend still has multiple interesting dimensions
  • Individuals are turning ever more aspects of their lives into managerial problems that require technological solutions. We have access to an ever-increasing array of free and inexpensive technologies that harness incredible computational power that effectively allows us to self-police behavior everywhere we go. As pervasiveness expands, so does trust.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Some embrace networked, data-driven lives and are comfortable volunteering embarrassing, real time information about what we're doing, whom we're doing it with, and how we feel about our monitored activities.
  • Put it all together and we can see that our conception of what it means to be human has become "design space." We're now Humanity 2.0, primed for optimization through commercial upgrades. And today's apps are more harbinger than endpoint.
  • philosophers have had much to say about the enticing and seemingly inevitable dispersion of technological mental prosthetic that promise to substitute or enhance some of our motivational powers.
  • beyond the practical issues lie a constellation of central ethical concerns.
  • It simply means that when it comes to digital willpower, we should be on our guard to avoid confusing situational with integrated behaviors.
  • it is antithetical to the ideal of " resolute choice." Some may find the norm overly perfectionist, Spartan, or puritanical. However, it is not uncommon for folks to defend the idea that mature adults should strive to develop internal willpower strong enough to avoid external temptations, whatever they are, and wherever they are encountered.
  • In part, resolute choosing is prized out of concern for consistency, as some worry that lapse of willpower in any context indicates a generally weak character.
  • Fragmented selves behave one way while under the influence of digital willpower, but another when making decisions without such assistance. In these instances, inconsistent preferences are exhibited and we risk underestimating the extent of our technological dependency.
  • they should cause us to pause as we think about a possible future that significantly increases the scale and effectiveness of willpower-enhancing apps. Let's call this hypothetical future Digital Willpower World and characterize the ethical traps we're about to discuss as potential general pitfalls
  • the problem of inauthenticity, a staple of the neuroethics debates, might arise. People might start asking themselves: Has the problem of fragmentation gone away only because devices are choreographing our behavior so powerfully that we are no longer in touch with our so-called real selves -- the selves who used to exist before Digital Willpower World was formed?
  • Infantalized subjects are morally lazy, quick to have others take responsibility for their welfare. They do not view the capacity to assume personal responsibility for selecting means and ends as a fundamental life goal that validates the effort required to remain committed to the ongoing project of maintaining willpower and self-control.
  • Michael Sandel's Atlantic essay, "The Case Against Perfection." He notes that technological enhancement can diminish people's sense of achievement when their accomplishments become attributable to human-technology systems and not an individual's use of human agency.
  • Borgmann worries that this environment, which habituates us to be on auto-pilot and delegate deliberation, threatens to harm the powers of reason, the most central component of willpower (according to the rationalist tradition).
  • In several books, including Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, he expresses concern about technologies that seem to enhance willpower but only do so through distraction. Borgmann's paradigmatic example of the non-distracted, focally centered person is a serious runner. This person finds the practice of running maximally fulfilling, replete with the rewarding "flow" that can only comes when mind/body and means/ends are unified, while skill gets pushed to the limit.
  • Perhaps the very conception of a resolute self was flawed. What if, as psychologist Roy Baumeister suggests, willpower is more "staple of folk psychology" than real way of thinking about our brain processes?
  • novel approaches suggest the will is a flexible mesh of different capacities and cognitive mechanisms that can expand and contract, depending on the agent's particular setting and needs. Contrary to the traditional view that identifies the unified and cognitively transparent self as the source of willed actions, the new picture embraces a rather diffused, extended, and opaque self who is often guided by irrational trains of thought. What actually keeps the self and its will together are the given boundaries offered by biology, a coherent self narrative created by shared memories and experiences, and society. If this view of the will as an expa
  • nding and contracting system with porous and dynamic boundaries is correct, then it might seem that the new motivating technologies and devices can only increase our reach and further empower our willing selves.
  • "It's a mistake to think of the will as some interior faculty that belongs to an individual--the thing that pushes the motor control processes that cause my action," Gallagher says. "Rather, the will is both embodied and embedded: social and physical environment enhance or impoverish our ability to decide and carry out our intentions; often our intentions themselves are shaped by social and physical aspects of the environment."
  • It makes perfect sense to think of the will as something that can be supported or assisted by technology. Technologies, like environments and institutions can facilitate action or block it. Imagine I have the inclination to go to a concert. If I can get my ticket by pressing some buttons on my iPhone, I find myself going to the concert. If I have to fill out an application form and carry it to a location several miles away and wait in line to pick up my ticket, then forget it.
  • Perhaps the best way forward is to put a digital spin on the Socratic dictum of knowing myself and submit to the new freedom: the freedom of consuming digital willpower to guide me past the sirens.
Duncan H

Stop the Great Firewall of America - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-infringe-on-free-speech.html

Patent Intellectual Property

shared by Duncan H on 16 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Duncan H on 16 Nov 11
     
    What side of this issue are people on? I understand that people want to stop piracy and provide the incentive for people to invent new things they can patent, but I worry that if the rules become too draconian, they could suffucate the very creativity they should be protecting.
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