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sissij

Are You Lucky? How You Respond Affects Your Fate. | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...-you-respond-affects-your-fate

brain science research psychology

shared by sissij on 19 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Humans are superstitious creatures. Our rituals are vast. We tie one shoelace before the other; if we tie one, we have to tie the other even if it’s not loose.
  • Luck is the ever-present elephant in the room, dwarfed in our vocabulary by destiny and blessings.
  • But a roll of seven has more to do with the flick of a wrist than fate. 
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  • Considering yourself lucky is a good thing. Rather than having a negative worldview—“that’s just my luck”—thinking yourself to be lucky results in positive brain functioning and overall well-being.
  • To navigate this tricky terrain, Frank suggests asking someone about their luck rather than informing them of their luck.
  • As should we all. Luck is not a mystical ally.
  • sissij on 19 Apr 17
     
    I think luck is very tricky thing in human social science. As study suggests, luck is not a real thing, it is just something that human invented to comfort themselves. However, the belief of luck does have an effect on people's performance. I remembered once I saw in a study that people who believe that they are very lucky would have a better chance of good performance. This does not necessarily means that there is some unknown force called luck. It just means that believing in oneself would have a positive effect. I think it is very interesting that people are so used to use the word luck when a thing that is low in possibility happened to them. I think the language itself is giving people suggestions that there is some force that helps people in their action. --Sissi (4/19/2017)
Javier E

Inequality in America and Norway - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...512735

inequality norway US redistribution luck fairness psychology

shared by Javier E on 12 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Norway, like many European states, has public offerings many Americans would consider political fantasy. There is lengthy paid maternity leave, free university education, and long-term unemployment benefits
  • What is it about the Norwegian state—or about Scandinavian countries in general—that leads their populations to support redistribution policies in a way that Americans don’t?
  • A group of Scandinavian researchers recently did an experiment trying to tease that out. Their goal: to find out how social attitudes towards inequality in the U.S. and Norway differ, in an effort to explain why the two countries have such different redistribution policies. The difference, they discovered, hinges on how people think about luck and fairness.
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  • “In Norway, people very much disapprove of inequalities that are due to bad luck,”
  • “People in the U.S. are more willing to accept inequality, even if it reflects pure good luck for some and pure bad luck for others.”
  • The purpose of setting up the experiment this way, Tungodden told me, was to find out spectators’ views about different sources of inequality. In the first setting, inequality was a result of luck: The workers both did the task well, but one just got lucky and received a bonus. In the second, inequality was a result of merit: One worker did the task better. And the third was to assess whether people were willing to eradicate inequality created by luck if doing so had costs: The bonus was lower if the spectators chose to redistribute it more fairly.
  • In the experiment, Americans were more willing to accept inequality if it’s a result of luck than Norwegians were. When both workers did the task well, but only one got the bonus (the first setting), half of Americans said they wanted to redistribute the bonus equally. By contrast, 78 percent of Norwegians did. “It’s an enormous difference in exactly the same situation in a willingness to accept brute luck,” Tungodden said. “Americans hold this view of, whatever comes to you, good for you.”
  • When inequality was a result of merit, on the other hand, people in both countries were willing to accept it. Just 15 percent of people in the U.S. and 36 percent of people in Norway redistributed the bonus in the second situation.
  • Together, this helps explain why Norway has a more robust welfare state than the U.S. does, Tungodden said. Norwegians believe that when someone is, by bad luck, born into a poor family, or is, by bad luck, thrust into poverty, that person should have help from others. U.S. residents are more split on this idea
  • This could be because Americans admire wealth and would be hesitant to implement policies that would hurt people who, by luck, are wealthy.
  • There were some differences in which demographics in each country were willing to redistribute the bonuses.
  • white Americans tend to be more withholding when it comes to welfare if they believe the money is going to black Americans. It would be illuminating for another, similar study to be performed that looks at whether white people perceive luck as more or less fair if the beneficiary (or loser, as the case may be) is black.
  • Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, both Americans and Norwegians seemed willing to weather some costs of wealth redistribution. In the third setting, when spectators were told that the inequality was the result of luck, but that redistributing the bonus would have a significant cost, about equal numbers of Americans and Norwegians decided to redistribute
  • it shows that people in both countries are more concerned about whether inequalities are fair than about whether there are costs to redistribution.
  • Debates about the costs of a welfare state and redistribution in America, then, may be besides the point. Costs don’t seem to be Americans’ big hang-up with redistribution. Rather, their opposition seems to go to an underlying acceptance of fate and the fortunes it brings.
Javier E

Never Had Covid? Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 May End Your Luck - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...a-4-and-ba-5-may-end-your-luck

covid-19 infection research pandemic science

shared by Javier E on 11 Jul 22 - No Cached
  • Covid virginity is becoming more special now that it describes a shrinking minority. The lucky few, like weight-loss gurus, are only too happy to share their secrets to success.
  • Some sound quite reasonable, such as virologist Angela Rasmussen, who tweeted that despite resuming travel to scientific conferences, she’s remained uninfected by wearing high quality masks when warranted, skipping the hotel gym, eating outdoors and walking instead of cabbing if possible.
  • Others are more extreme, such as the expert who Tweeted that, among other measures, he sealed his N95 tightly on his face for the entire trip from the U.S. to Australia. He never removed it even to take a sip of water.
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  • But one piece of advice almost no one is giving? Be lucky. Pediatrician Neil Stone says that there’s no “secret” for staying Covid-19 free because there’s just too much luck involved.
  • As for me, I have some data that can, to an extent, quantify and explain my own good luck in avoiding Covid so far. I’m participating in a study on immunity which allowed me to learn that my blood still carries loads of antibodies induced by my vaccine and December booster shot, and no signs of any prior infection. Not everyone’s antibodies wane at the same rate, and in some people, the antibodies don’t wane much at all. (At some point it should become routine to collect this information to help people decide whether to get additional booster shots.)
  • My high level of vaccine antibodies probably explains my success more than my behavior. I make some effort to avoid Covid, but have been far from perfect. And I’ve been potentially exposed at least twice: Once last December, when someone at a small holiday gathering I’d attended developed symptoms the next day, and more recently, when I shared a large indoor space with two people who later tested positive. But according to my lab work, I’ve never had even a silent infection.
  • It’s possible I was protected by my high antibodies, or that some quirk of air flow meant I never breathed in enough virus to get sick. Or perhaps I benefited from a different form of luck. There’s another facet to immunity called the innate immune system, which acts as a first line of defense and sometimes knocks out a virus or other pathogen before it replicates enough to elicit the production of antibodies. Good innate immunity might help explain something many of us have experienced — not getting a cold or flu even when sleeping in the same bed with the sick person through the whole illness.
  • Stress, diet, general health and even sunlight might all affect innate immunity. So could other factors. There’s so much we still don’t know about the immune system. And that’s one reason we talk about “luck.”
  • understanding how the luck works could help other people avoid Covid, whether for the first time or for the second or third time. Taking a closer look at what passed for luck helped researchers like Gary Taubes discover that public health had obesity all wrong, and the standard high carb/low fat diets were causing people to gain weight.
katieb0305

Are You Successful? If So, You've Already Won the Lottery - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-already-won-the-lottery.html

shared by katieb0305 on 26 May 16 - No Cached
  • Chance events play a much larger role in life than many people once imagined.
  • But randomness often plays out in subtle ways, and it’s easy to construct narratives that portray success as having been inevitable.
  • In the years since, the painting has come to represent Western culture itself. Yet had it never been stolen, most of us would know no more about it than we do of the two obscure Leonardo da Vinci canvases from the same period that hang in an adjacent gallery at the Louvre.
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  • Inevitably, some of those initial steps will have been influenced by seemingly trivial random events. So it is reasonable to conclude that virtually all successful careers entail at least a modicum of luck.
  • One’s date of birth can matter enormously, for example. According to a 2008 study, most children born in the summer tend to be among the youngest members of their class at school, which appears to explain why they are significantly less likely to hold leadership positions during high school and thus, another study indicates, less likely to land premium jobs later in life. Similarly, according to research published in the journal Economics Letters in 2012, the number of American chief executives who were born in June and July is almost one-third lower than would be expected on the basis of chance alone.
  • To acknowledge the importance of random events is not to suggest that success is independent of talent and effort. In highly competitive arenas, those who do well are almost always extremely talented and hard-working.
  • Such expertise comes not from luck but from thousands of hours of assiduous effort.
  • Being born in a good environment is one of the few dimensions of luck we can control — that is, at least we can decide how lucky our children will be.
  • The unlucky population is growing, and its luck is getting worse.
  • Evidence from the social sciences demonstrates that beyond a certain income threshold, people’s sense of well-being depends much more on their relative purchasing power than on how much they spend in absolute terms. If top tax rates were a little higher, all homes would be a little smaller, all cars a little less expensive, all diamonds a little more modest and all celebrations a little less costly. The standards that define “special” would adjust accordingly, leaving most successful people quite satisfied.
  • Merely prompting people to reflect on their good fortune tends to make them more willing to contribute to the common good, according to a 2010 study published in the journal Emotion.
Javier E

How to Make Your Own Luck | Brain Pickings - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...how-to-make-your-own-luck

creativity journals habit luck openness risk career expertise innovation

shared by Javier E on 07 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • editor Jocelyn Glei and her team at Behance’s 99U pull together another package of practical wisdom from 21 celebrated creative entrepreneurs. Despite the somewhat self-helpy, SEO-skewing title, this compendium of advice is anything but contrived. Rather, it’s a no-nonsense, experience-tested, life-approved cookbook for creative intelligence, exploring everything from harnessing the power of habit to cultivating meaningful relationships that enrich your work to overcoming the fear of failure.
  • If the twentieth-century career was a ladder that we climbed from one predictable rung to the next, the twenty-first-century career is more like a broad rock face that we are all free-climbing. There’s no defined route, and we must use our own ingenuity, training, and strength to rise to the top. We must make our own luck.
  • Lucky people take advantage of chance occurrences that come their way. Instead of going through life on cruise control, they pay attention to what’s happening around them and, therefore, are able to extract greater value from each situation… Lucky people are also open to novel opportunities and willing to try things outside of their usual experiences. They’re more inclined to pick up a book on an unfamiliar subject, to travel to less familiar destinations, and to interact with people who are different than themselves.
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  • the primary benefit of a diary as a purely pragmatic record of your workday productivity and progress — while most dedicated diarists would counter that the core benefits are spiritual and psychoemotional — it does offer some valuable insight into the psychology of how journaling elevates our experience of everyday life:
  • We can’t, however, simply will ourselves into better habits. Since willpower is a limited resource, whenever we’ve overexerted our self-discipline in one domain, a concept known as “ego depletion” kicks in and renders us mindless automata in another
  • the key to changing a habit is to invest heavily in the early stages of habit-formation so that the behavior becomes automated and we later default into it rather than exhausting our willpower wrestling with it. Young also cautions that it’s a self-defeating strategy to try changing several habits at once. Rather, he advises, spend one month on each habit alone before moving on to the next
  • a diary boosts your creativity
  • This is one of the most important reasons to keep a diary: it can make you more aware of your own progress, thus becoming a wellspring of joy in your workday.
  • The second reason is focalism. When we contemplate failure from afar, according to Gilbert and Wilson, we tend to overemphasize the focal event (i.e., failure) and overlook all the other episodic details of daily life that help us move on and feel better. The threat of failure is so vivid that it consumes our attention
  • the authors point to a pattern that reveals the single most important motivator: palpable progress on meaningful work: On the days when these professionals saw themselves moving forward on something they cared about — even if the progress was a seemingly incremental “small win” — they were more likely to be happy and deeply engaged in their work. And, being happier and more deeply engaged, they were more likely to come up with new ideas and solve problems creatively.
  • Although the act of reflecting and writing, in itself, can be beneficial, you’ll multiply the power of your diary if you review it regularly — if you listen to what your life has been telling you. Periodically, maybe once a month, set aside time to get comfortable and read back through your entries. And, on New Year’s Day, make an annual ritual of reading through the previous year.
  • This, they suggest, can yield profound insights into the inner workings of your own mind — especially if you look for specific clues and patterns, trying to identify the richest sources of meaning in your work and the types of projects that truly make your heart sing. Once you understand what motivates you most powerfully, you’ll be able to prioritize this type of work in going forward. Just as important, however, is cultivating a gratitude practice and acknowledging your own accomplishments in the diary:
  • Fields argues that if we move along the Uncertainty Curve either too fast or too slowly, we risk either robbing the project of its creative potential and ending up in mediocrity. Instead, becoming mindful of the psychology of that process allows us to pace ourselves better and master that vital osmosis between freedom and constraint.
  • Schwalbe reminds us of the “impact bias” — our tendency to greatly overestimate the intensity and extent of our emotional reactions, which causes us to expect failures to be more painful than they actually are and thus to fear them more than we should.
  • When we think about taking a risk, we rarely consider how good we will be at reframing a disappointing outcome. In short, we underestimate our resilience.
  • what you do every day is best seen as an iceberg, with a small fraction of conscious decision sitting atop a much larger foundation of habits and behaviors.
  • don’t let yourself forget that the good life, the meaningful life, the truly fulfilling life, is the life of presence, not of productivity.
Javier E

Getting It Right - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...getting-it-right

knowledge ethics right justification accuracy epistemic truth TOK

shared by Javier E on 29 May 15 - No Cached
  • What is it to truly know something?
  • In the complacent 1950s, it was received wisdom that we know a given proposition to be true if, and only if, it is true, we believe it to be true, and we are justified in so believing.
  • This consensus was exploded in a brief 1963 note by Edmund Gettier in the journal Analysis.
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  • Suppose you have every reason to believe that you own a Bentley, since you have had it in your possession for many years, and you parked it that morning at its usual spot. However, it has just been destroyed by a bomb, so that you own no Bentley, despite your well justified belief that you do. As you sit in a cafe having your morning latte, you muse that someone in that cafe owns a Bentley (since after all you do). And it turns out you are right, but only because the other person in the cafe, the barista, owns a Bentley, which you have no reason to suspect. So you here have a well justified true belief that is not knowledge.
  • After many failed attempts to fix the justified-true-belief account with minor modifications, philosophers tried more radical departures. One promising approach suggests that knowledge is a form of action, comparable to an archer’s success when he consciously aims to hit a target.
  • An archer’s shot can be assessed in several ways. It can be accurate (successful in hitting the target). It can also be adroit (skillful or competent). An archery shot is adroit only if, as the arrow leaves the bow, it is oriented well and powerfully enough.
  • A shot’s aptness requires that its success be attained not just by luck (such as the luck of that second gust). The success must rather be a result of competence.
  • we can generalize from this example, to give an account of a fully successful attempt of any sort. Any attempt will have a distinctive aim and will thus be fully successful only if it succeeds not only adroitly but also aptly.
  • We need people to be willing to affirm things publicly. And we need them to be sincere (by and large) in doing so, by aligning public affirmation with private judgment. Finally, we need people whose assertions express what they actually know.
  • Aristotle in his “Nicomachean Ethics” developed an AAA account of attempts to lead a flourishing life in accord with fundamental human virtues (for example, justice or courage). Such an approach is called virtue ethics.
  • Since there is much truth that must be grasped if one is to flourish, some philosophers have begun to treat truth’s apt attainment as virtuous in the Aristotelian sense, and have developed a virtue epistemology
  • Virtue epistemology begins by recognizing assertions or affirmations.
  • A particularly important sort of affirmation is one aimed at attaining truth, at getting it right
  • All it takes for an affirmation to be alethic is that one of its aims be: getting it right.
  • Humans perform acts of public affirmation in the endeavor to speak the truth, acts with crucial importance to a linguistic species. We need such affirmations for activities of the greatest import for life in society: for collective deliberation and coordination, and for the sharing of information.
  • a fully successful attempt is good overall only if the agent’s goal is good enough. An attempt to murder an innocent person is not good even if it fully succeeds.
  • Virtue epistemology gives an AAA account of knowledge: to know affirmatively is to make an affirmation that is accurate (true) and adroit (which requires taking proper account of the evidence). But in addition, the affirmation must be apt; that is, its accuracy must be attributable to competence rather than luck.
  • Requiring knowledge to be apt (in addition to accurate and adroit) reconfigures epistemology as the ethics of belief.
  • as a bonus, it allows contemporary virtue epistemology to solve our Gettier problem. We now have an explanation for why you fail to know that someone in the cafe owns a Bentley, when your own Bentley has been destroyed by a bomb, but the barista happens to own one. Your belief in that case falls short of knowledge for the reason that it fails to be apt. You are right that someone in the cafe owns a Bentley, but the correctness of your belief does not manifest your cognitive or epistemic competence. You are right only because by epistemic luck the barista happens to own one.
  • When in your musings you affirm to yourself that someone in the cafe owns a Bentley, therefore, your affirmation is not an apt alethic affirmation, and hence falls short of knowledge.
Javier E

Living the life authentic: Bernard Williams on Paul Gauguin | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...rnard-williams-on-paul-gauguin

moral reasoning luck moral luck meaning of life project

shared by Javier E on 12 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Williams invites us to see Gauguin’s meaning in life as deeply intertwined with his artistic ambition. His art is, to use Williams’s term for such meaning-giving enterprises, his ground project
  • This is what a ground project does, according to Williams: it gives a reason, not just given that you are alive, but a reason to be alive in the first place.
  • The desires and goals at the heart of what Williams calls a ground project form a fundamental part of one’s identity, and in that sense being true to one’s deepest desires is being true to who one is most deeply.
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  • We see here the enormously influential cultural ideal mentioned at the outset: the purpose of life is to be authentic, where that means finding out who you are and living accordingly. Gauguin, in other words, was a cultural prototype for a conception of life’s meaning that today has widespread appeal around the world.
  • Williams, however, thinks that Gauguin’s eventual success as a painter constitutes a form of moral luck, in that his artistic achievement justifies what he did. It provides a justification that not everyone will accept, but one that can make sense to Gauguin himself, and perhaps to others
  • In his essay ‘Moral Luck’ (1976), Williams discusses Paul Gauguin’s decision to leave Paris in order to move to Tahiti where he hoped he could become a great painter. Gauguin left behind – basically abandoned – his wife and children
  • If there’s one theme in all my work it’s about authenticity and self-expression,’ said the philosopher Bernard Williams in an interview with The Guardian in 2002
Javier E

The Equality Conundrum | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...the-equality-conundrum

equality philosophy political theory history politics

shared by Javier E on 26 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The philosopher Ronald Dworkin considered this type of parental conundrum in an essay called “What Is Equality?,” from 1981. The parents in such a family, he wrote, confront a trade-off between two worthy egalitarian goals. One goal, “equality of resources,” might be achieved by dividing the inheritance evenly, but it has the downside of failing to recognize important differences among the parties involved.
  • Another goal, “equality of welfare,” tries to take account of those differences by means of twisty calculations.
  • Take the first path, and you willfully ignore meaningful facts about your children. Take the second, and you risk dividing the inheritance both unevenly and incorrectly.
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  • In 2014, the Pew Research Center asked Americans to rank the “greatest dangers in the world.” A plurality put inequality first, ahead of “religious and ethnic hatred,” nuclear weapons, and environmental degradation. And yet people don’t agree about what, exactly, “equality” means.
  • One side argues that the city should guarantee procedural equality: it should insure that all students and families are equally informed about and encouraged to study for the entrance exam. The other side argues for a more direct, representation-based form of equality: it would jettison the exam, adopting a new admissions system designed to produce student bodies reflective of the city’s demography
  • In the past year, for example, New York City residents have found themselves in a debate over the city’s élite public high schools
  • The complexities of egalitarianism are especially frustrating because inequalities are so easy to grasp. C.E.O.s, on average, make almost three hundred times what their employees make; billionaire donors shape our politics; automation favors owners over workers; urban economies grow while rural areas stagnate; the best health care goes to the richest.
  • It’s not just about money. Tocqueville, writing in 1835, noted that our “ordinary practices of life” were egalitarian, too: we behaved as if there weren’t many differences among us. Today, there are “premiere” lines for popcorn at the movies and five tiers of Uber;
  • Inequality is everywhere, and unignorable. We’ve diagnosed the disease. Why can’t we agree on a cure?
  • In a book based on those lectures, “One Another’s Equals: The Basis of Human Equality,” Waldron points out that people are also marked by differences of skill, experience, creativity, and virtue. Given such consequential differences, he asks, in what sense are people “equal”?
  • According to the Declaration of Independence, it is “self-evident” that all men are created equal. But, from a certain perspective, it’s our inequality that’s self-evident.
  • More than twenty per cent of Americans, according to a 2015 poll, agree: they believe that the statement “All men are created equal” is false.
  • In Waldron’s view, though, it’s not a binary choice; it’s possible to see people as equal and unequal simultaneously. A society can sort its members into various categories—lawful and criminal, brilliant and not—while also allowing some principle of basic equality to circumscribe its judgments and, in some contexts, override them
  • Egalitarians like Dworkin and Waldron call this principle “deep equality.” It’s because of deep equality that even those people who acquire additional, justified worth through their actions—heroes, senators, pop stars—can still be considered fundamentally no better than anyone else.
  • In the course of his search, he explores centuries of intellectual history. Many thinkers, from Cicero to Locke, have argued that our ability to reason is what makes us equals.
  • Other thinkers, including Immanuel Kant, have cited our moral sense.
  • Some philosophers, such as Jeremy Bentham, have suggested that it’s our capacity to suffer that equalizes us
  • Waldron finds none of these arguments totally persuasive.
  • In various religious traditions, he observes, equality flows not just from broad assurances that we are all made in God’s image but from some sense that everyone is the protagonist in a saga of error, realization, and redemption: we’re equal because God cares about how things turn out for each of us.
  • Waldron himself is taken by Hannah Arendt’s related concept of “natality,” the notion that what each of us share is having been born as a “newcomer,” entering into history with “the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting.”
  • equality may be not a self-evident fact about human beings but a human-made social construction that we must choose to put into practice.
  • In the end, Waldron concludes that there is no “small polished unitary soul-like substance” that makes us equal; there’s only a patchwork of arguments for our deep equality, collectively compelling but individually limited.
  • Equality is a composite idea—a nexus of complementary and competing intuitions.
  • The blurry nature of equality makes it hard to solve egalitarian dilemmas from first principles. In each situation, we must feel our way forward, reconciling our conflicting intuitions about what “equal” means.
  • The communities that have the easiest time doing that tend to have some clearly defined, shared purpose. Sprinters competing in a hundred-metre dash have varied endowments and train in different conditions; from a certain perspective, those differences make every race unfair.
  • By embracing an agreed-upon theory of equality before the race, the sprinters can find collective meaning in the ranked inequalities that emerge when it ends
  • Perhaps because necessity is so demanding, our egalitarian commitments tend to rest on a different principle: luck.
  • “Some people are blessed with good luck, some are cursed with bad luck, and it is the responsibility of society—all of us regarded collectively—to alter the distribution of goods and evils that arises from the jumble of lotteries that constitutes human life as we know it.” Anderson, in an influential coinage, calls this outlook “luck egalitarianism.”
  • This sort of artisanal egalitarianism is comparatively easy to arrange. Mass-producing it is what’s hard. A whole society can’t get together in a room to hash things out. Instead, consensus must coalesce slowly around broad egalitarian principles.
  • No principle is perfect; each contains hidden dangers that emerge with time. Many people, in contemplating the division of goods, invoke the principle of necessity: the idea that our first priority should be the equal fulfillment of fundamental needs. The hidden danger here becomes apparent once we go past a certain point of subsistence.
  • a core problem that bedevils egalitarianism—what philosophers call “the problem of expensive tastes.”
  • The problem—what feels like a necessity to one person seems like a luxury to another—is familiar to anyone who’s argued with a foodie spouse or roommate about the grocery bil
  • The problem is so insistent that a whole body of political philosophy—“prioritarianism”—is devoted to the challenge of sorting people with needs from people with wants
  • the line shifts as the years pass. Medical procedures that seem optional today become necessities tomorrow; educational attainments that were once unusual, such as college degrees, become increasingly indispensable with time
  • Some thinkers try to tame the problem of expensive tastes by asking what a “normal” or “typical” person might find necessary. But it’s easy to define “typical” too narrowly, letting unfair assumptions influence our judgment
  • an odd feature of our social contract: if you’re fired from your job, unemployment benefits help keep you afloat, while if you stop working to have a child you must deal with the loss of income yourself. This contradiction, she writes, reveals an assumption that “the desire to procreate is just another expensive taste”; it reflects, she argues, the sexist presumption that “atomistic egoism and self-sufficiency” are the human norm. The word “necessity” suggests the idea of a bare minimum. In fact, it sets a high bar. Clearing it may require rethinking how society functions.
Javier E

Ben Bernanke to Princeton Grads: The World Isn't Fair (and You All Got Lucky) - Jordan ... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...276471

lifelong learning advice fairness luck meritocracy

shared by Javier E on 25 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • We have been taught that meritocratic institutions and societies are fair. Putting aside the reality that no system, including our own, is really entirely meritocratic, meritocracies may be fairer and more efficient than some alternatives. But fair in an absolute sense? Think about it. A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement, and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate -- these are the folks who reap the largest rewards.
  • The only way for even a putative meritocracy to hope to pass ethical muster, to be considered fair, is if those who are the luckiest in all of those respects also have the greatest responsibility to work hard, to contribute to the betterment of the world, and to share their luck with others.
  • In so many words: You, Princeton Class of 2013, got lucky, and never forget it.
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  • You're here because you're smart, but you're smart because you're fortunate.
  • Life is amazingly unpredictable; any 22-year-old who thinks he or she knows where they will be in 10 years, much less in 30, is simply lacking imagination.
  • Whatever life may have in store for you, each of you has a grand, lifelong project, and that is the development of yourself as a human being.
  • Those most worthy of admiration are those who have made the best use of their advantages or, alternatively, coped most courageously with their adversities.
  • Speaking as somebody who has been happily married for 35 years, I can't imagine any choice more consequential for a lifelong journey than the choice of a traveling companion. 
anonymous

Symmetry in the universe: Physics says you shouldn't exist. - 0 views

www.slate.com/...ou_shouldn_t_exist.single.html

science physics inconsistencies

shared by anonymous on 21 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • You, me, and even the most calming manatee are nothing but impurities in an otherwise beautifully simple universe.
  • Your existence wasn’t just predicated on amorousness and luck of your ancestors, but on an almost absurdly finely tuned universe. Had the universe opted to turn up the strength of the electromagnetic force by even a small factor, poof
  • if the universe were only minutely denser than the one we inhabit, it would have collapsed before it began.
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  • Worse still, the laws of physics themselves seem to be working against us. Ours isn’t just a randomly hostile universe, it's an actively hostile universe
  • The history of physics, in fact, is a marvel of using simple symmetry principles to construct complicated laws of the universe
  • if the entire universe were made symmetric, then all of the good features (e.g., you) are decidedly asymmetric lumps that ruin the otherwise perfect beauty of the cosmo
  • it would be a mistake to be comforted by the symmetries of the universe. In truth, they are your worst enemies. Everything we know about those rational, predictable arrangements dictates that you shouldn't be here at all.
  • Matter and antimatter should have completely annihilated one another in the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang. You should not even exist. But you do, and there’s lots more matter where you came from.
  • The symmetry of the universe would bake us in no time at all, but an asymmetry rescues us
  • In literally every experiment and observation that we’ve ever done, matter and antimatter get created (or annihilated) in perfect concert. That is, every experiment except for one: us.
  • How hostile is the universe to your fundamental existence? Very. Even the simplest assumptions about our place in the universe seem to lead inexorably to devastating results
  • if the perfect symmetry between matter and antimatter remained perfect, you wouldn’t be here to think about it.
  • The flow of time (as near as we can tell) is completely arbitrary. Does entropy increase with time or does it make time? Are our memories the thing that ultimately breaks the symmetry of time?
  • It seems only a matter of luck (and some fairly arbitrary-looking math) that a symmetric universe would end up being remotely hospitable to complex creatures like us
  • Without electrons binding to protons, there would be no chemistry, no molecules, and nothing more complicated than a cloud of charged gas. And you’re not a sentient cloud of gas, are you?
kushnerha

How to Cultivate the Art of Serendipity - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...te-the-art-of-serendipity.html

new york times perception luck innovation

shared by kushnerha on 03 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • A surprising number of the conveniences of modern life were invented when someone stumbled upon a discovery or capitalized on an accident
  • wonder whether we can train ourselves to become more serendipitous. How do we cultivate the art of finding what we’re not seeking?
  • Croatian has no word to capture the thrill of the unexpected discovery, so she was delighted when — after moving to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship in the 1980s — she learned the English word “serendipity.”
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  • Today we think of serendipity as something like dumb luck. But its original meaning was very different.
  • suggested that this old tale contained a crucial idea about human genius: “As their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” And he proposed a new word — “serendipity” — to describe this princely talent for detective work. At its birth, serendipity meant a skill rather than a random stroke of good fortune.
  • sees serendipity as something people do. In the mid-1990s, she began a study of about 100 people to find out how they created their own serendipity, or failed to do so.
  • As people dredge the unknown, they are engaging in a highly creative act. What an inventor “finds” is always an expression of him- or herself.
  • subjects fell into three distinct groups. Some she called “non-encounterers”; they saw through a tight focus, a kind of chink hole, and they tended to stick to their to-do lists when searching for information rather than wandering off into the margins. Other people were “occasional encounterers,” who stumbled into moments of serendipity now and then. Most interesting were the “super-encounterers,” who reported that happy surprises popped up wherever they looked.
  • “gathering string” is just another way of talking about super-encountering. After all, “string” is the stuff that accumulates in a journalist’s pocket. It’s the note you jot down in your car after the interview, the knickknack you notice on someone’s shelf, or the anomaly that jumps out at you in Appendix B of an otherwise boring research study.
  • came up with the term super-encounterer to give us a way to talk about the people rather than just the discoveries. Without such words, we tend to become dazzled by the happy accident itself, to think of it as something that exists independent of an observer.
  • We can slip into a twisted logic in which we half-believe the penicillin picked Alexander Fleming to be its emissary, or that the moons of Jupiter wanted to be seen by Galileo. But discoveries are products of the human mind.
  • You become a super-encounterer, according to Dr. Erdelez, in part because you believe that you are one — it helps to assume that you possess special powers of perception
  • One survey of patent holders (the PatVal study of European inventors, published in 2005) found that an incredible 50 percent of patents resulted from what could be described as a serendipitous process. Thousands of survey respondents reported that their idea evolved when they were working on an unrelated project — and often when they weren’t even trying to invent anything.
  • need to develop a new, interdisciplinary field — call it serendipity studies — that can help us create a taxonomy of discoveries in the chemistry lab, the newsroom, the forest, the classroom, the particle accelerator and the hospital. By observing and documenting the many different “species” of super-encounterers, we might begin to understand their minds.
  • Of course, even if we do organize the study of serendipity, it will always be a whimsical undertaking, given that the phenomenon is difficult to define, amazingly variable and hard to capture in data. The clues will no doubt emerge where we least expect them
caelengrubb

Why Is Memory So Good and So Bad? - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...why-memory-so-good-bad

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Memories of visual images (e.g., dinner plates) are stored in what is called visual memory.
  • Our minds use visual memory to perform even the simplest of computations; from remembering the face of someone we’ve just met, to remembering what time it was last we checked. Without visual memory, we wouldn’t be able to store—and later retrieve—anything we see.
  • ust as a computer’s memory capacity constrains its abilities, visual memory capacity has been correlated with a number of higher cognitive abilities, including academic success, fluid intelligence (the ability to solve novel problems), and general comprehension.
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  • For many reasons, then, it would be very useful to understand how visual memory facilitates these mental operations, as well as constrains our ability to perform them
  • Visual working memory is where visual images are temporarily stored while your mind works away at other tasks—like a whiteboard on which things are briefly written and then wiped away. We rely on visual working memory when remembering things over brief intervals, such as when copying lecture notes to a notebook.
  • Which is exactly what happened: Zhang & Luck found that participants were either very precise, or they completely guessed; that is, they either remembered the square’s color with great accuracy, or forgot it completely
  • The participants had a simple task: to recall the color of one particular square, not knowing in advance which square they would be asked to recall. The psychologists assumed that measuring how visual working memory behaves over increasing demands (i.e., the increasing durations of 1,4 or 10 seconds) would reveal something about how the system works.
  • If short-term visual memories fade away—if they are gradually wiped away from the whiteboard—then after longer intervals participants’ accuracy in remembering the colors should still be high, deviating only slightly from the square’s original color. But if these memories are wiped out all at once—if the whiteboard is left untouched until, all at once, scrubbed clean—then participants should make very precise responses (corresponding to instances when the memories are still untouched) and then, after the interval grows too long, very random guesses.
  • UC Davis psychologists Weiwei Zhang and Steven Luck have shed some light on this problem. In their experiment, participants briefly saw three colored squares flashed on a computer screen, and were asked to remember the colors of each square. Then, after 1, 4 or 10 seconds the squares re-appeared, except this time their colors were missing, so that all that was visible were black squares outlined in white.
  • But this, it turns out, is not true of all memories
  • In a recent paper, Researchers at MIT and Harvard found that, if a memory can survive long enough to make it into what is called “visual long-term memory,” then it doesn’t have to be wiped out at all.
  • Talia Konkle and colleagues showed participants a stream of three thousand images of different scenes, such as ocean waves, golf courses or amusement parks. Then, participants were shown two hundred pairs of images—an old one they had seen in the first task, and a completely new one—and asked to indicate which was the old one.
  • Participants were remarkably accurate at spotting differences between the new and old images—96 percent
  • In a recent review, researchers at Harvard and MIT argue that the critical factor is how meaningful the remembered images are—whether the content of the images you see connects to pre-existing knowledge about them
  • This prior knowledge changes how these images are processed, allowing thousands of them to be transferred from the whiteboard of short-term memory into the bank vault of long-term memory, where they are stored with remarkable detail.
  • Together, these experiments suggest why memories are not eliminated equally— indeed, some don’t seem to be eliminated at all. This might also explain why we’re so hopeless at remembering some things, and yet so awesome at remembering others.
Emily Horwitz

Good News, Bad News: The Universe Next Door : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ad-news-the-universe-next-door

physics multiverse universe uncertainty science npr knowledge

shared by Emily Horwitz on 09 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Welcome to cosmic catastrophism
  • universe began its existence 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since.
  • xpansion wasn't always at the same rate.
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  • our whole universe could have emerged from a tiny patch of space that was stretched like a rubber band by the enormous factor of one hundred trillion trillion times (1026) in a fraction of a second. The universe we observe today fits within this stretched region, like an island in an ocean.
  • imagine that other portions of space, neighbors to that tiny patch that gave rise to our universe, also got stretched at different rates and at different times. We would have a universe filled with island-universes, each with its own history and possibly even types of matter, etc. This ocean of island-universes is called the multiverse.
  • Since
  • hysics is an empirical science
  • Cosmic inflation predicts that our universe is geometrically flat (or almost) like the surface of a table but in three dimensions; it also predicts that space should be filled with radiation with a uniform temperature, as bathwater fills a bathtub
  • Since we can't receive information from outside our universe (or better, from outside our "horizon", the sphere that delimits how far light travelled in 13.7 billion years), how can we possibly test the existence of other universes "out there"?
  • However, we can do the next best thing, and see if at least neighboring universes exist. Just as with soap bubbles that vibrate when they collide with one another without popping, if another universe collided with ours in the distant past, the radiation inside our universe would have vibrated in response to the perturbations caused by the collision.
  • The bad news is that the probability of a collision with another universe increases with time: we could disappear at any instant: live life to the fullest!
  • The good news is that, although the multiverse as a whole may not be a testable scientific hypothesis, with some luck we may at least know if one or a few other universes exist. An observational test distinguishes science from idle speculation.
Javier E

Gamblers, Scientists and the Mysterious Hot Hand - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-the-mysterious-hot-hand.html

pattern recognition brain science research psychology randomness

shared by Javier E on 18 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Psychologists who study how the human mind responds to randomness call this the gambler’s fallacy — the belief that on some cosmic plane a run of bad luck creates an imbalance that must ultimately be corrected, a pressure that must be relieved
  • The opposite of that is the hot-hand fallacy — the belief that winning streaks, whether in basketball or coin tossing, have a tendency to continue
  • Both misconceptions are reflections of the brain’s wired-in rejection of the power that randomness holds over our lives. Look deep enough, we instinctively believe, and we may uncover a hidden order.
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  • A working paper published this summer has caused a stir by proposing that a classic body of research disproving the existence of the hot hand in basketball is flawed by a subtle misperception about randomness. If the analysis is correct, the possibility remains that the hot hand is real.
  • We mortals can benefit, at least in theory, from islands of predictability — a barely perceptible tilt of a roulette table that makes the ball slightly more likely to land on one side of the wheel than the other
  • The same is true for the random walk of the stock market. Becoming aware of information before it has propagated worldwide can give a speculator a tiny, temporary edge. Some traders pay a premium to locate their computer servers as close as possible to Lower Manhattan, gaining advantages measured in microseconds.
  • Taken to extremes, seeing connections that don’t exist can be a symptom of a psychiatric condition called apophenia. In less pathological forms, the brain’s hunger for pattern gives rise to superstitions (astrology, numerology) and is a driving factor in what has been called a replication crisis in science
  • I know it sounds crazy but when you average the scores together the answer is not 50-50, as most people would expect, but about 40-60 in favor of tails.
  • There is not, as Guildenstern might imagine, a tear in the fabric of space-time. It remains as true as ever that each flip is independent, with even odds that the coin will land one way or the other. But by concentrating on only some of the data — the flips that follow heads — a gambler falls prey to a selection bias.
  • basketball is no streakier than a coin toss. For a 50 percent shooter, for example, the odds of making a basket are supposed to be no better after a hit — still 50-50. But in a purely random situation, according to the new analysis, a hit would be expected to be followed by another hit less than half the time. Finding 50 percent would actually be evidence in favor of the hot hand
  • Dr. Gilovich is withholding judgment. “The larger the sample of data for a given player, the less of an issue this is,” he wrote in an email. “Because our samples were fairly large, I don’t believe this changes the original conclusions about the hot hand. ”
  • Take a fair coin — one as likely to land on heads as tails — and flip it four times. How often was heads followed by another head?
  • For all their care to be objective, scientists are as prone as anyone to valuing data that support their hypothesis over those that contradict it. Sometimes this results in experiments that succeed only under very refined conditions, in certain labs with special reagents and performed by a scientist with a hot hand.
  • We’re all in the same boat. We evolved with this uncanny ability to find patterns. The difficulty lies in separating what really exists from what is only in our minds.
Javier E

Jonah Lehrer plagiarism in Wired.com: An investigation into plagiarism, quotes, and fac... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...tual_inaccuracies_.single.html

Plagiarism Journalism ethics truth values cultural science

shared by Javier E on 03 Sep 12 - Cached
  • I am convinced that Lehrer has a cavalier attitude about truth and falsehood. This shows not only in his attitude toward quotations but in some of the other details of his writing. And a journalist who repeatedly fails to correct errors when they're pointed out is, in my opinion, exhibiting reckless disregard for the truth. It is thus my opinion that Lehrer plagiarized others' work, published inaccurate quotations, printed narrative details that were factually incorrect, and failed to address errors when they were pointed out.
  • Lehrer's transgressions are inexcusable—but I can't help but think that the industry he (and I) work for share a some of the blame for his failure. I'm 10 years older than Lehrer, and unlike him, my contemporaries and I had all of our work scrutinized by layers upon layers of editors, top editors, copy editors, fact checkers and even (heaven help us!) subeditors before a single word got published. When we screwed up, there was likely someone to catch it and save us (public) embarrassment. And if someone violated journalistic ethics, it was more likely to be caught early in his career—allowing him the chance either to reform and recover or to slink off to another career without being humiliated on the national stage. No such luck for Lehrer; he rose to the very top in a flash, and despite having his work published by major media companies, he was    operating, most of the time, without a safety net. Nobody noticed that something was amiss until it was too late to save him.
Javier E

Ryan, Romney and the Veil of Opulence - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-veil-of-opulence

fairness ignorance disadvantages opulence

shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 12 - Cached
  • Nowadays, the veil of ignorance is challenged by a powerful but ancient contender: the veil of opulence. While no serious political philosopher actually defends such a device — the term is my own — the veil of opulence runs thick in our political discourse. Where the veil of ignorance offers a test for fairness from an impersonal, universal point of view — “What system would I want if I had no idea who I was going to be, or what talents and resources I was going to have?” — the veil of opulence offers a test for fairness from the first-person, partial point of view: “What system would I want if I were so-and-so?”
  • Those who don the veil of opulence may imagine themselves to be fantastically wealthy movie stars or extremely successful business entrepreneurs. They vote and set policies according to this fantasy. “If I were such and such a wealthy person,” they ask, “how would I feel about giving X percentage of my income, or Y real dollars per year, to pay for services that I will never see nor use?
  • the veil of opulence operates only under the guise of fairness. It is rather a distortion of fairness, by virtue of the partiality that it smuggles in. It asks not whether a policy is fair given the huge range of advantages or hardships the universe might throw at a person but rather whether it is fair that a very fortunate person should shoulder the burdens of others. That is, the veil of opulence insists that people imagine that resources and opportunities and talents are freely available to all, that such goods are widely abundant, that there is no element of randomness or chance that may negatively impact those who struggle to succeed but sadly fail through no fault of their own. It blankets off the obstacles that impede the road to success. It turns a blind eye to the adversity that some people, let’s face it, are born into. By insisting that we consider public policy from the perspective of the most-advantaged, the veil of opulence obscures the vagaries of brute luck.
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  • If there’s one thing about fairness, it is fundamentally an impartial notion, an idea that restricts us from privileging one group over another. When asking about fairness, we cannot ask whether X policy is fair for me, or whether Y policy is fair for someone with a yacht and two vacation homes. We must ask whether Z policy is fair, full stop. What we must ask here is whether the policy could be applied to all; whether it is the sort of system with which we could live, if we were to end up in one of the many socioeconomic groupings that make up our diverse community, whether most-advantaged or least-advantaged, fortunate or unfortunate
  • This is why the veil of ignorance is a superior test for fairness over the veil of opulence. It tackles the universality of fairness without getting wrapped up in the particularities of personal interest. If you were to start this world anew, unaware of who you would turn out to be, what sort of die would you be willing to cast?
  • In the interest of firming up the game, in the interest of being fair, the N.F.L. decided long ago to give the worst teams in football the best shot at improving their game.
  • The question of fairness has widespread application throughout our political discourse. It affects taxation, health care, education, social safety nets and so on. The veil of opulence would have us screen for fairness by asking what the most fortunate among us are willing to bear. The veil of ignorance would have us screen for fairness by asking what any of us would be willing to bear, if it were the case that we, or the ones we love, might be born into difficult circumstances or, despite our hard work, blindsided by misfortune.
  • Society is in place to correct for the injustices of the universe, to ensure that our lives can run smoothly despite the stuff that is far out of our control: not to hand us what we need, but to give us the opportunity to pursue life, liberty and happiness.
Javier E

The New York Times > Magazine > In the Magazine: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...17BUSH.html

Bush presidency faith certainty openness crisis culture policy

shared by Javier E on 11 May 14 - No Cached
  • The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush's top deputies -- from cabinet members like Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to generals fighting in Iraq -- have been told for years when they requested explanations for many of the president's decisions, policies that often seemed to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he relied on his ''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of state, and then he ''prayed over it.''
  • What underlies Bush's certainty? And can it be assessed in the temporal realm of informed consent?
  • Top officials, from cabinet members on down, were often told when they would speak in Bush's presence, for how long and on what topic. The president would listen without betraying any reaction. Sometimes there would be cross-discussions -- Powell and Rumsfeld, for instance, briefly parrying on an issue -- but the president would rarely prod anyone with direct, informed questions.
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  • This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker.
  • has spent a lot of time trying to size up the president. ''Most successful people are good at identifying, very early, their strengths and weaknesses, at knowing themselves,'' he told me not long ago. ''For most of us average Joes, that meant we've relied on strengths but had to work on our weakness -- to lift them to adequacy -- otherwise they might bring us down. I don't think the president really had to do that, because he always had someone there -- his family or friends -- to bail him out. I don't think, on balance, that has served him well for the moment he's in now as president. He never seems to have worked on his weaknesses.''
  • Details vary, but here's the gist of what I understand took place. George W., drunk at a party, crudely insulted a friend of his mother's. George senior and Barbara blew up. Words were exchanged along the lines of something having to be done. George senior, then the vice president, dialed up his friend, Billy Graham, who came to the compound and spent several days with George W. in probing exchanges and walks on the beach. George W. was soon born again. He stopped drinking, attended Bible study and wrestled with issues of fervent faith. A man who was lost was saved.
  • Rubenstein described that time to a convention of pension managers in Los Angeles last year, recalling that Malek approached him and said: ''There is a guy who would like to be on the board. He's kind of down on his luck a bit. Needs a job. . . . Needs some board positions.'' Though Rubenstein didn't think George W. Bush, then in his mid-40's, ''added much value,'' he put him on the Caterair board. ''Came to all the meetings,'' Rubenstein told the conventioneers. ''Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years: 'You know, I'm not sure this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else. Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the board. You don't know that much about the company.' He said: 'Well, I think I'm getting out of this business anyway. And I don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign from the board.' And I said thanks. Didn't think I'd ever see him again.''
  • challenges -- from either Powell or his opposite number as the top official in domestic policy, Paul O'Neill -- were trials that Bush had less and less patience for as the months passed. He made that clear to his top lieutenants. Gradually, Bush lost what Richard Perle, who would later head a largely private-sector group under Bush called the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had described as his open posture during foreign-policy tutorials prior to the 2000 campaign. (''He had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much,'' Perle said.) By midyear 2001, a stand-and-deliver rhythm was established. Meetings, large and small, started to take on a scripted quality.
  • That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.
  • A cluster of particularly vivid qualities was shaping George W. Bush's White House through the summer of 2001: a disdain for contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness, a retreat from empiricism, a sometimes bullying impatience with doubters and even friendly questioners.
  • By summer's end that first year, Vice President Dick Cheney had stopped talking in meetings he attended with Bush. They would talk privately, or at their weekly lunch. The president was spending a lot of time outside the White House, often at the ranch, in the presence of only the most trustworthy confidants.
  • ''When I was first with Bush in Austin, what I saw was a self-help Methodist, very open, seeking,'' Wallis says now. ''What I started to see at this point was the man that would emerge over the next year -- a messianic American Calvinist. He doesn't want to hear from anyone who doubts him.''
  • , I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
  • The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
  • ''If you operate in a certain way -- by saying this is how I want to justify what I've already decided to do, and I don't care how you pull it off -- you guarantee that you'll get faulty, one-sided information,'' Paul O'Neill, who was asked to resign his post of treasury secretary in December 2002, said when we had dinner a few weeks ago. ''You don't have to issue an edict, or twist arms, or be overt.''
  • George W. Bush and his team have constructed a high-performance electoral engine. The soul of this new machine is the support of millions of likely voters, who judge his worth based on intangibles -- character, certainty, fortitude and godliness -- rather than on what he says or does.
Javier E

American Dream? Or Mirage? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...american-dream-or-mirage.html

American idea American dream inequality psychology research

shared by Javier E on 03 May 15 - No Cached
  • ECONOMIC inequality in the United States is at its highest level since the 1930s, yet most Americans remain relatively unconcerned with the issue. Why
  • One theory is that Americans accept such inequality because they overestimate the reality of the “American dream” — the idea that any American, with enough resolve and determination, can climb the economic ladder, regardless of where he starts in life.
  • The American dream implies that the greatest economic rewards rightly go to society’s most hard-working and deserving members.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • When asked to estimate how many college students came from families in the bottom 20 percent of income, respondents substantially misjudged, estimating that those from the lowest income bracket attended college at a rate five times greater than the actual one
  • The data also confirmed the psychological utility of this mistake: Overestimating upward mobility was self-serving for rich and poor people alike. For those who saw themselves as rich and successful, it helped justify their wealth. For the poor, it provided hope for a brighter economic future.
  • Participants in the survey overshot the likelihood of rising from the poorest quintile to one of the three top quintiles by nearly 15 percentage points. (On average, only 30 percent of individuals make that kind of leap.)
  • studies by two independent research teams (each led by an author of this article) found that Americans across the economic spectrum did indeed severely misjudge the amount of upward mobility in society.
  • they were also asked to estimate upward mobility for people who were similar to them “in terms of goals, abilities, talents and motivations.” In this case, respondents were even more likely to overestimate upward mobility.
  • Those with the most room to move up were more likely to think that such movement was possible.
  • The higher up people said they were, the more they overestimated the likelihood of upward mobility. Being aware of your position at the top of a low-mobility hierarchy can be uncomfortable, because without mobility, sitting at the top is the result of luck, rather than merit.
  • political liberals were less likely to overestimate upward mobility relative to conservatives — a finding consistent with other research suggesting that conservatives see our society as more merit-based than do liberals.
  • members of ethnic minority groups tended to overestimate upward mobility more than did European Americans. This result indicated that those with the most to gain from believing in an upwardly mobile society tended to believe so more strongly.
  • belief in the American dream is woefully misguided when compared with objective reality. Addressing the rising economic gap between rich and poor in society, it seems, will require us to contend not only with economic and political issues, but also with biases of our psychology.
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