Group items tagged

During his Inaugural address, Donald Trump said that under his administration, Americans would have a voice to be heard. “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” he stated. “Everyone is listening to you now.”

two days later, the Trump administration is clearly running counter to that statement, as your voice literally can’t be heard at the White House…not even with on a voice mail.

the comments line has been replaced with a recording asking that comments be left on the White House website or Facebook page. So much for those forgotten Americans having a voice, if they don’t use the internet anyway.

a larger wave of anti-rationalism that has been accelerating for years — manifested in the growing ascendance of emotion over reason in public debates, the blurring of lines among fact and opinion and lies, and denialism in the face of scientific findings about climate change and vaccination.

“Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue,”

“To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”

Cohen outlined a vision of 'Net-enabled scholarly publishing that I can only think to call the aggregation model: editorial committees scanning the 'Net to find the most interesting scholarly content in a given field or discipline, and highlighting it through websites and e-mail blasts that hearken back to the early days when weblogs were literally just collections of links with one- or two-sentence summaries attached. (An example, edited by Cohen and some of his associates: Digital Humanities Now.) Some of that work consists of traditional books and articles, but much of it consists of blog posts, online debates, etc. This model gives us scholarly work from the bottom up, instead of generating published scholarly work by tossing a piece into the random crapshoot of putatively blind peer-review and crossing your fingers to see what happens. It also gives us scholarly work that can be certified as such by the collective deliberation of the community, which "votes" for pieces and ideas by reading them, recirculating them, linking to them, and other signs of interest and approval that can be easily tracked with traffic-tracing tools. And then, on top of that editorial aggregation -- Cohen made a great point that this kind of aggregation shouldn't be fully automated, because automated tools reward "loudmouths" and popular voices that just get retweeted a lot; human editors can do a lot to surface novel insights and new voices -- an open-access journal that curates the best of those linked items into published pieces, perhaps with some revisions and peer review/commentary.

Welcome to another round of the Language Wars. By now we know the battle lines: As a “descriptivist,” I try to describe language as it is used. As a “prescriptivist,” you focus on how language should be used.

Your excellent guide, “Garner’s Modern American Usage,” shows you to be, in your words, a “descriptive prescriber.” You give not just “right” or “wrong” rulings on usage, but often a 1-5 score, in which a given usage may be a 1 (definitely a mistake), 3 (common, but …) or 5 (perfectly acceptable). This notion of correctness as a scale, not a binary state, makes you different from many prescriptivists.

“There is a set of standard conventions everyone needs for formal writing and speaking. Except under unusual circumstances, you should use the grammar and vocabulary of standard written English for these purposes.”

I don’t know the origin of the “Write What You Know” logic. A lot of folks attribute it to Hemingway, but what I find is his having said this: “From all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive.”

part of me dies inside when a student whose story has been critiqued responds to the workshop by saying, “You can’t object to the _________ scene. It really happened! I was there!” The writer is giving preference to the facts of an experience, the so-called literal truth, rather than fiction’s narrative and emotional integrity. Conceived this way, the writer’s story is relegated to an inferior and insurmountable station; it can neither compete with nor live without the ur-experience. Such a writer’s sole ambition is for the characters and events to represent other and superior—i.e., actual—characters and events. Meaning, the written story has never been what mattered most. Meaning, the reader is intended to care less about the characters and more about whoever inspired them, and the actions in a story serve to ensure that we track their provenance and regard that material as truer. Meaning, the story is engineered—and expected—to be about something. And aboutness is all but terminal in fiction.

Stories aren’t about things. Stories are things.

Kahan ran the exact same test with the exact same data, except this time the question was about gun bans and crime levels. Half of the time, he presented data suggesting that a gun ban increased crime, while the other half of the time the data suggested that a gun ban decreased crime. And guess what? Among the subset of test subjects who were very good at math, they suddenly got really stupid if they didn't like the answer they got.

But in another sense, it really doesn't matter at all. These days, even relatively simple public policy issues can only be properly analyzed using statistical techniques that are beyond the understanding of virtually all of us. So the fact that ideology destroys our personal ability to do math hardly matters. In practice, nearly all of us have to rely on the word of experts when it comes to this kind of stuff, and there's never any shortage of experts to crunch the numbers and produce whatever results our respective tribes demand.

How big a deal is this? In one sense, it's even worse than it looks. Aside from being able to tell that one number is bigger than another, this is literally about the easiest possible data analysis problem you can pose. If ideologues actively turn off their minds even for something this simple, there's really no chance of changing their minds with anything even modestly more sophisticated. This is something that most of us pretty much knew already, but it's a little chilling to see it so glaringly confirmed.

Once considered the product of genius or divine inspiration, creativity — the ability to spot problems and devise smart solutions — is being recast as a prized and teachable skill.

“The reality is that to survive in a fast-changing world you need to be creative,”

“That is why you are seeing more attention to creativity at universities,” he says. “The marketplace is demanding it.”

Freudenberg’s case is that the food industry is but one example of the threat to public health posed by what he calls “the corporate consumption complex,” an alliance of corporations, banks, marketers and others that essentially promote and benefit from unhealthy lifestyles.

six industries — food and beverage, tobacco, alcohol, firearms, pharmaceutical and automotive — use pretty much the same playbook to defend the sales of health-threatening products. This playbook, largely developed by the tobacco industry, disregards human health and poses greater threats to our existence than any communicable disease you can name.

All of these industries work hard to defend our “right” — to smoke, feed our children junk, carry handguns and so on — as matters of choice, freedom and responsibility. Their unified line is that anything that restricts those “rights” is un-American.

The patient is feeble and near death, his bone marrow eviscerated by cancer. The supervising oncologist has ordered a course of chemotherapy using a very toxic investigational drug. Stuart knows enough to feel certain that the treatment will kill the patient, and he does not believe the patient understands this.

“I walked out of that room and said, ‘There has got to be a better way than this,’ ” he told me recently. “I was appalled by how we care for—or, more accurately, fail to care about—people who are near the end of life. We literally treat them to death.”

advocating home-based primary care, which represents a fundamental change in the way we care for people who are chronically very ill. The idea is simple: rather than wait until people get sick and need hospitalization, you build a multidisciplinary team that visits them at home,

Russia's new anti-gay law has a loophole: The law, which has led to numerous arrests, beatings, and bans against LGBT people, specifically prohibits the "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations," but homosexuality is as traditionally Russian as vodka and caviar.

Where does one begin the list of prominent LGBT Russians? Peter Tchaikovsky, one of Russia's foremost composers; Nikolai Gogol, one of its leading writers; from the world of dance, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Nureyev

not to mention members of Russia's ruling classes

, individual political biases might have caused 2012 GOP presidential nominee's physical appearance to appear different to Republicans and Democrats.

, researchers created two sets of composite photos of Romney's face — one based on the choices of the GOP-leaning participants, and another based on the Democratic-leaning participants.

When a separate group of 213 adults were asked which images of Romney looked more trustworthy and more positive, overall they chose the ones generated by the Republicans.

Poverty shapes people in some hard-wired ways that we're only now beginning to understand.

Live in poverty as a child, and it affects you as an adult, too

Those who grew up poor later had impaired brain function as adults—a disadvantage researchers could literally see in the activity of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex on an fMRI scan.

“demarcation problem,” the issue of what separates good science from bad science and pseudoscience

Demarcation is crucial to our pursuit of knowledge; its issues go to the core of debates on epistemology and of the nature of truth and discovery

our society spends billions of tax dollars on scientific research, so it is important that we also have a good grasp of what constitutes money well spent in this regard

For language lovers, the facts are grim: Anglophones simply aren’t learning them any more. In Britain, despite four decades in the European Union, the number of A-levels taken in French and German has fallen by half in the past 20 years, while what was a growing trend of Spanish-learning has stalled. In America, the numbers are equally sorry.

compelling reasons remain for learning other languages.

First of all, learning any foreign language helps you understand all language better—many Anglophones first encounter the words “past participle” not in an English class, but in French. Second, there is the cultural broadening. Literature is always best read in the original. Poetry and lyrics suffer particularly badly in translation. And learning another tongue helps the student grasp another way of thinking.

All of these public policies have one thing in common: They create winners and losers among members of society. Therefore, an overarching question (on which economists themselves seem unable to agree) is whether economists in their role as social scientists should make recommendations on such issues at all — even if these recommendations are driven by the quest for greater efficiency. In fact, what does efficiency actually mean in economic analysis?

Astute readers will have figured out by now that literally every point falling on the entire solid curve in the graph must be “Pareto optimal” by the economist’s definition of that term, not only those falling on line segment Y-Z. That circumstance makes the economist’s use of the word optimal even more dubious.

Indeed, can it be said that a more efficient resource allocation is better than a less efficient one, given the changes in the distribution of welfare among members of society that these allocations imply?

The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Sunday, December 12, 2010Sunday, December 12, 2010 Go Follow the Atlantic » atlanticPrintlayoutnavigation()Politics Presented ByBack to the Gold Standard? Joshua GreenSenate Dems Lose Vote on 'Don't Ask' RepealMegan Scully & Dan FriedmanA Primary Challenge to Obama? Marc Ambinder Business Presented byif (typeof window.dartOrd == 'undefined') {window.dartOrd = ('000000000' + Math.ceil(Math.random()*1000000000).toString()).slice(-9);}jsProperties = 'TheAtlanticOnline/channel_business;pos=navlogo;sz=88x31,215x64;tile=1';document.write('');if( $(".adNavlogo").html().search("grey.gif") != -1 ){$(".adNavlogo").hide();}Will the Economy Get Jobs for Christmas?Daniel Indiviglio27 Key Facts About US ExportsDerek ThompsonThe Last StimulusDerek Thompson Culture Presented ByThe 10 Biggest Sports Stories of 2010Eleanor Barkhorn and Kevin Fallon al

at the force behind all that exists actually intervened in the consciousness of humankind in the form of a man so saturated in godliness that merely being near him healed people of the weight of the world's sins.

a general suspicion that language— figurative language in particular—can move us and manipulate us in harmful ways. Which makes James Geary's "I Is an Other" especially timely. Mr. Geary proposes to show that metaphors are a key to how we think and may often determine our thinking without our knowing it.

Metaphor works, most obviously, when we recognize a similarity between two different things. It is a matter of "pattern recognition," which may be more important in the working of the brain than logic.

Many have argued that language should be, at its core, literal and straightforward, that figurative language distorts our thinking. Mr. Geary quotes philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke on the need to abjure metaphor. For Hobbes, we "deceive others" by using words "in other sense than that they are ordained for." Locke denounced "the artificial and figurative application of words" as the bane of "order and clearness." Metaphors "mislead the judgement; and so indeed are perfect cheats."

based on our ever-growing knowledge of brain physiology and habit formation.   He can fix himself; it is absolutely within the realm of the possible.  But he won't do it by thinking about himself; he needs to externalize.  Contra Freud, insight alone rarely solves much, and a constant focus on oneself and one's problems, especially for people who are depressed, tends to make things worse in the absence of concommitant specific cognitive and/or behavioral strategies for change

focus on doing something for someone or something outside of himself, sounds counter-intuitive and Pollyanna-ish, if not outright cruel.  And yet...  his neuronal pathways tending towards depressing, defeatist self-references have obviously been over-enriched at the expense of, well, everything else.  So he's got to change that. These things are plastic, and literally grow or shrink depending on usage.  

He needs physical activity directed towards an external goal; not doing something for himself (although he will be), but for other people, animals, the planet, a political cause, neighborhood clean-up - whatever.  Once he finds that cause and starts working, setting goals (however small) to accomplish in that cause, and accomplishing them, the energy itself will build and grow, just like his non-depressive cognitive patterns.  And every time he finds himself thinking negative, defeatist thoughts, he should imagine one of those giant red stop signs and STOP!  It's another habit to develop, and gets easier and more effective every time he tries it.  

While I’ve not given up on religion in general or Catholicism in particular, I have said farewell to a specific conception of God, namely God as explanation, and in so doing have joined hands with the atheists and agnostics, if not for the whole of life’s journey, at least for a section of the walk. To clarify, I continue to call God creator and savior, but for me God is not the solution to riddle or a formula. God’s not an answer to scientific inquiry or the end result of metaphysical speculation. God is wholly other than all these lines of human reasoning, all these constructions fashioned to explain the world. My need for God is not the need of a student seeking to explain a mathematical theorem, or the need of an ethicist looking for a basis for good behavior, or someone searching for the last piece to a grand puzzle. The divine isn’t the intellectual rope that ties the whole system together.

I find it unwise to hold on to God as an explanation, for sooner or later, what I use God to explain will likely be revealed to have a different basis. If I believe in God because God explains this, that, and the other thing, then I can be almost sure to have a belief that’s not long for this world.

What is left of my faith when I have forsaken this idea of God? Having fled from the crumbling ruins of the unmoved mover and the uncaused cause, where do I go in search of the sacred? What conception of the divine lies ahead of me, having kicked the dust from my feet and departed the cities of certainty and supernatural explanation? In short, why do I still believe?

he proposes a two-part scale for determining which words (and phrases) we should try to stop from changing their meanings fundamentally. The usual suspects are familiar: nonplussed, presently, decimate, beg the question, fulsome and disinterested are now all used to mean something quite different from what they once meant.

proposes a two-part test for which changes to arrest: 1) how far along is the change?, and 2) how irreplaceable is the word undergoing the shift?  If his math is a little unserious (he just multiplies his two factors), and his data a little dodgy (he simply uses the first 20 Google-search results for his usage corpus), the two questions are pretty good ones.