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Javier E

The varieties of denialism | Scientia Salon - 1 views

scientiasalon.wordpress.com/...the-varieties-of-denialism

Science psychology bias denial pseudo-science critical thinking fallacy balance

shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • a stimulating conference at Clark University about “Manufacturing Denial,” which brought together scholars from wildly divergent disciplines — from genocide studies to political science to philosophy — to explore the idea that “denialism” may be a sufficiently coherent phenomenon underlying the willful disregard of factual evidence by ideologically motivated groups or individuals.
  • the Oxford defines a denialist as “a person who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historical evidence,” which represents a whole different level of cognitive bias or rationalization. Think of it as bias on steroids.
  • First, as a scientist: it’s just not about the facts, indeed — as Brendan showed data in hand during his presentation — insisting on facts may have counterproductive effects, leading the denialist to double down on his belief.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • if I think that simply explaining the facts to the other side is going to change their mind, then I’m in for a rude awakening.
  • As a philosopher, I found to be somewhat more disturbing the idea that denialism isn’t even about critical thinking.
  • what the large variety of denialisms have in common is a very strong, overwhelming, ideological commitment that helps define the denialist identity in a core manner. This commitment can be religious, ethnical or political in nature, but in all cases it fundamentally shapes the personal identity of the people involved, thus generating a strong emotional attachment, as well as an equally strong emotional backlash against critics.
  • To begin with, of course, they think of themselves as “skeptics,” thus attempting to appropriate a word with a venerable philosophical pedigree and which is supposed to indicate a cautiously rational approach to a given problem. As David Hume put it, a wise person (i.e., a proper skeptic) will proportion her beliefs to the evidence. But there is nothing of the Humean attitude in people who are “skeptical” of evolution, climate change, vaccines, and so forth.
  • Denialists have even begun to appropriate the technical language of informal logic: when told that a majority of climate scientists agree that the planet is warming up, they are all too happy to yell “argument from authority!” When they are told that they should distrust statements coming from the oil industry and from “think tanks” in their pockets they retort “genetic fallacy!” And so on. Never mind that informal fallacies are such only against certain background information, and that it is eminently sensible and rational to trust certain authorities (at the least provisionally), as well as to be suspicious of large organizations with deep pockets and an obvious degree of self-interest.
  • What commonalities can we uncover across instances of denialism that may allow us to tackle the problem beyond facts and elementary logic?
  • the evidence from the literature is overwhelming that denialists have learned to use the vocabulary of critical thinking against their opponents.
  • Another important issue to understand is that denialists exploit the inherently tentative nature of scientific or historical findings to seek refuge for their doctrines.
  • . Scientists have been wrong before, and doubtlessly will be again in the future, many times. But the issue is rather one of where it is most rational to place your bets as a Bayesian updater: with the scientific community or with Faux News?
  • Science should be portrayed as a human story of failure and discovery, not as a body of barely comprehensible facts arrived at by epistemic priests.
  • Is there anything that can be done in this respect? I personally like the idea of teaching “science appreciation” classes in high school and college [2], as opposed to more traditional (usually rather boring, both as a student and as a teacher) science instruction
  • Denialists also exploit the media’s self imposed “balanced” approach to presenting facts, which leads to the false impression that there really are two approximately equal sides to every debate.
  • This is a rather recent phenomenon, and it is likely the result of a number of factors affecting the media industry. One, of course, is the onset of the 24-hr media cycle, with its pernicious reliance on punditry. Another is the increasing blurring of the once rather sharp line between reporting and editorializing.
  • The problem with the media is of course made far worse by the ongoing crisis in contemporary journalism, with newspapers, magazines and even television channels constantly facing an uncertain future of revenues,
  • he push back against denialism, in all its varied incarnations, is likely to be more successful if we shift the focus from persuading individual members of the public to making political and media elites accountable.
  • This is a major result coming out of Brendan’s research. He showed data set after data set demonstrating two fundamental things: first, large sections of the general public do not respond to the presentation of even highly compelling facts, indeed — as mentioned above — are actually more likely to entrench further into their positions.
  • Second, whenever one can put pressure on either politicians or the media, they do change their tune, becoming more reasonable and presenting things in a truly (as opposed to artificially) balanced way.
  • Third, and most crucially, there is plenty of evidence from political science studies that the public does quickly rally behind a unified political leadership. This, as much as it is hard to fathom now, has happened a number of times even in somewhat recent times
  • when leaders really do lead, the people follow. It’s just that of late the extreme partisan bickering in Washington has made the two major parties entirely incapable of working together on the common ground that they have demonstrably had in the past.
  • Another thing we can do about denialism: we should learn from the detailed study of successful cases and see what worked and how it can be applied to other instances
  • Yet another thing we can do: seek allies. In the case of evolution denial — for which I have the most first-hand experience — it has been increasingly obvious to me that it is utterly counterproductive for a strident atheist like Dawkins (or even a relatively good humored one like yours truly) to engage creationists directly. It is far more effective when we have clergy (Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State [6] comes to mind) and religious scientists
  • Make no mistake about it: denialism in its various forms is a pernicious social phenomenon, with potentially catastrophic consequences for our society. It requires a rallying call for all serious public intellectuals, academic or not, who have the expertise and the stamina to join the fray to make this an even marginally better world for us all. It’s most definitely worth the fight.
Javier E

History News Network | Why Historians Need Imagination - 2 views

historynewsnetwork.org/...163280

history imagination reality fantasy

shared by Javier E on 19 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • There are two types of imagination: Fantasy-directed imagination, and Reality-directed imagination.
  • Fantasy-directed imagination is aimed at depicting a scenario that goes beyond reality. An example of fantasy-directed imagination would be the creation of Mickey Mouse.
  • Reality-directed imagination, on the other hand, is aimed at depicting a scenario that reflectsreality, whether as it is known at present or as it is known to have existed in the past. An example of reality-directed imagination would be the study of Napoleon.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Reality-directed imagination, for its part, endeavours to re-create, in the intellectual realm, actions and events that have existed or have taken place, which we may have plenty or partial information about.
  • Reality-directed imagination is thus a means to retain a solid sense of reality rather than to submerge into the everlasting landscape of fantasy. We imagine what was and try to afford it life.  
  • Without reality-directed imagination, on the other hand, the study of history would be well-nigh impossible.
  • By resorting to reality-directed imagination we are able intellectually to disconnect ourselves from the present; to visualize, like a landscape gradually making its appearance as we move backwards in time, the setting in which an event occurred or the personal features of an individual we follow. We are able emotionally to connect ourselves to the prevailing conditions or to a person's thoughts.
  • In the study of history we make use of reality-directed imagination as we depict in our minds the characters of individuals or the nature of events. We even try to fill the gaps by resorting to our imagination ever vigilant not to lose sight of reality as it was. In other words, we attempt to imagine the unknown by resorting to the known.
  • Without imagination as a study-device, the learning of history becomes well-nigh impossible, for the information furnished to us is rendered unintelligible. We are unable to relate to it in any meaningful manner. We assess it in a mechanical way, devoid of image, sound and feel. Our attempt to understand it leads to a dead-end for we cannot leap forward from the stale fact before us and relate it to other facts beyond it.
  • Without imagination we cannot compare, distinguish and separate; we cannot know the difference between the particular and the general. In order to study history we need to avoid the mechanical, on the one hand, and the fantastic, on the other. In other words, we ought to eschew both lack of imagination and fantasy-directed imagination; the first does not allow us to proceed forward while the latter leads us to the realm of the unreal.
sissij

War Goes Viral: The Atlantic's November Issue - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...503630

atlantic social media technology

shared by sissij on 06 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • the use of social media as both a tool in conflict and a shaper of it, tracking how online chatter has begun to intersect with real-life violence in dozens of armed confrontations around the globe.
  • ISIS is a prime example...and many others are successfully taking cues from the ISIS playbook.
  • Many of the new connections in the coming years will be concentrated in regions most susceptible to violence and conflict.
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  • In China, the “internet hive” no longer roils at foreigners alone, but also at China’s own military; and the U.S. military is now training for the “SMEIR” or “Social Media Environment and Internet Replication.”
  • How is Silicon Valley voting? Clinton: 88%; Undecided: 7%; Neither: 5%; Trump: 0%.
  • In the state, black students like Kenny are nearly four times as likely as their white peers to be charged with disturbing school. At least 22 states have disturbing school laws on the books, varying in their definition of the crime: whether it’s acting “in an obnoxious manner,” prohibiting “boisterous” behavior, or punishing students for “annoying conduct.”
  • sissij on 06 Dec 16
     
    This article talks about how media can be misused and weaponized using the example of ISIS. It also tangent on the politics within America as the media was so one sided during the election. I think the rate of support to Clinton showed by the silicon tech companies also reflects the overwhelming support on medias because they tech-based. --Sissi (12/6/2016)
sissij

The Year of Conquering Negative Thinking - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...quering-negative-thinking.html

new york times psychology brain science

shared by sissij on 04 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • All humans have a tendency to be a bit more like Eeyore than Tigger, to ruminate more on bad experiences than positive ones. It’s an evolutionary adaptation that helps us avoid danger and react quickly in a crisis.
  • Thinking styles can be genetic or the result of childhood experiences, said Judith Beck
  • “We were built to overlearn from negative experiences, but under learn from positive ones,” said Rick Hanson, a psychologist and senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
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  • The first step to stopping negative thoughts is a surprising one. Don’t try to stop them.
  • You can remind yourself to notice your thoughts in a nonjudgmental manner, without trying to change or alter them right away.
  • A study conducted at Ohio State University found that this method — known as Socratic questioning — was a simple way to reduce depressive symptoms in adults.
  • If you’re ruminating on your financial problems during a run around the track in hopes of finding a solution, then that is useful. But fretting for lap after lap about the president-elect or a foreign crisis is not going to accomplish anything.
  • sissij on 04 Jan 17
     
    Negative thinking is the result of the logic of survival. It is sometime essential and beneficial for us. I always think that negative things are bad and useless, but even negative things have their reason to exist. I was very surprised to know that our emotion is just like a child in puberty. If we oppressed it too much, it will stand back against. Instead, we should try to be friends with our emotion and accept them. It's just like parents should be calm and reasonable when their children do something wrong. They should talk reasonable with their children and try to persuade them. --Sissi (1/4/2017)
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

How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco's Life - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...uined-justine-saccos-life.html

social media psychology shame shaming

shared by Javier E on 15 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • I started to wonder about the recipients of our shamings, the real humans who were the virtual targets of these campaigns. So for the past two years, I’ve been interviewing individuals like Justine Sacco: everyday people pilloried brutally, most often for posting some poorly considered joke on social media. Whenever possible, I have met them in person, to truly grasp the emotional toll at the other end of our screens. The people I met were mostly unemployed, fired for their transgressions, and they seemed broken somehow — deeply confused and traumatized.
  • Read literally, she said that white people don’t get AIDS, but it seems doubtful many interpreted it that way. More likely it was her apparently gleeful flaunting of her privilege that angered people. But after thinking about her tweet for a few seconds more, I began to suspect that it wasn’t racist but a reflexive critique of white privilege — on our tendency to naïvely imagine ourselves immune from life’s horrors. Sacco, like Stone, had been yanked violently out of the context of her small social circle. Right?
  • “To me it was so insane of a comment for anyone to make,” she said. “I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was literal.” (She would later write me an email to elaborate on this point. “Unfortunately, I am not a character on ‘South Park’ or a comedian, so I had no business commenting on the epidemic in such a politically incorrect manner on a public platform,” she wrote. “To put it simply, I wasn’t trying to raise awareness of AIDS or piss off the world or ruin my life. Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the third world. I was making fun of that bubble.”)
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  • Her extended family in South Africa were African National Congress supporters — the party of Nelson Mandela. They were longtime activists for racial equality. When Justine arrived at the family home from the airport, one of the first things her aunt said to her was: “This is not what our family stands for. And now, by association, you’ve almost tarnished the family.”
  • I wanted to learn about the last era of American history when public shaming was a common form of punishment, so I was seeking out court transcripts from the 18th and early 19th centuries. I had assumed that the demise of public punishments was caused by the migration from villages to cities. Shame became ineffectual, I thought, because a person in the stocks could just lose himself or herself in the anonymous crowd as soon as the chastisement was over. Modernity had diminished shame’s power to shame — or so I assumed.
  • The pillory and whippings were abolished at the federal level in 1839, although Delaware kept the pillory until 1905 and whippings until 1972. An 1867 editorial in The Times excoriated the state for its obstinacy. “If [the convicted person] had previously existing in his bosom a spark of self-respect this exposure to public shame utterly extinguishes it. . . . The boy of 18 who is whipped at New Castle for larceny is in nine cases out of 10 ruined. With his self-respect destroyed and the taunt and sneer of public disgrace branded upon his forehead, he feels himself lost and abandoned by his fellows.”
  • I told her what Biddle had said — about how she was probably fine now. I was sure he wasn’t being deliberately glib, but like everyone who participates in mass online destruction, uninterested in learning that it comes with a cost.
  • “Well, I’m not fine yet,” Sacco said to me. “I had a great career, and I loved my job, and it was taken away from me, and there was a lot of glory in that. Everybody else was very happy about that.”
  • her shaming wasn’t really about her at all. Social media is so perfectly designed to manipulate our desire for approval, and that is what led to her undoing. Her tormentors were instantly congratulated as they took Sacco down, bit by bit, and so they continued to do so. Their motivation was much the same as Sacco’s own — a bid for the attention of strangers — as she milled about Heathrow, hoping to amuse people she couldn’t see.
  • Social media is, on the whole, a very bad thing. It wastes time, gives at best ephemeral pleasure with a modicum of interest, causes privacy and necessary social boundaries to disintegrate, and enriches people very much at the expense of others. Anyone can make a statement they later regret. It is now impossible to genuinely retract or escape such a statement. This is outrageous. Social media brings out the very worst in people. Rather than free speech, ot also promotes - essentially requires - a ridiculous level of self-censorship or imposition of extreme global shaming. This is not a societal good.
  • Reading this article, it made me very happy to not have a Twitter account. Anyone can say something some group doesn't like and interpret its meaning in negative ways, gang up on someone and bring them down
  • Look at Sacco's tweets on her flight and at the airport...absolutely meaningless junk that has no value to anyone. Why did she feel the need to post such thoughts? Post enough mindless thoughts and you'll probably post something really, really stupid you'd wished you hadn't.
  • I do feel sorry for the guy that made a stupid joke at a conference. When he said it, it was directed to one person and someone else decided to post to the world. That kind of stuff keeps up and nobody will ever do anything remotely interesting in public for fear it is misrepresented and their life ends. Getting fired for making a (to me, anyway) harmless joke seems severe
  • The offendee, it seems to me, would have done herself and others a favor by addressing the issue directly with him. Why the need to bypass any direct communication when you can post it and shame the person for the world? That's the act of a coward and someone who's out to punish.
sissij

By Demanding Too Much from Science, We Became a Post-Truth Society | Big Think - 1 views

bigthink.com/...dont-trust-the-experts-anymore

society science brain science research

shared by sissij on 10 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The number of people who today openly question reality are not the tin-foil hat-wearing kind. Increasingly they are our friends, and those who hold positions of power.
  • Indeed, the public understanding of what constitutes valid evidence, and a worthy expert opinion, seems to be at an all time low.
  • Well, a new study suggests that this wealth of information might be the problem.
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  • A new study out of Germany has found that people are much more confident in the claims of a popular science article then they are in the claims of an academic article written for experts
  • It was also found that the subjects were more confident in their own judgments after reading a popular article, and that this was tied to a lessened desire to seek out more information from expert sources.
  • "easiness effect”
  • the issue arises from the manner in which popular science is presented; as opposed to how scientists themselves present data to each other and to the public.
  • This emboldens people to reject the ideas of experts who they see as superfluous to their understanding of an idea (which they have already grasped).
  • notably health
  • sissij on 10 Feb 17
     
    Although many people allege themselves being scientific when trying to convince others by using the scientific researches they read on the mass media, does that really make their points more reliable? Not really. The popular science is sometimes not as meticulous as the academic article article written for experts. In popular science articles, the authors often changed their writing style to favor the general population, like having a more certain tone. This appeals to readers' desire for simplicity and this tendency is called the "easiness effect", which I find is really similar to the logic fallacy we talked about in TOK. Science itself has more and more become a table that can make an argument seem more rational. However, science is all about the scientific method used in the research that is an art of systematic simplification. Without these element, the title "science" means nothing. --Sissi (2/10/2017)
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.
  • It was habituated by practicing good manners, by being dependable, punctual and responsible day by day.
  • 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.
  • 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.”
  • 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.
Javier E

The Age of 'Infopolitics' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-age-of-infopolitics

information politics surveillance data mining digital rights

shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • we need a new way of thinking about our informational milieu. What we need is a concept of infopolitics that would help us understand the increasingly dense ties between politics and information
  • Infopolitics encompasses not only traditional state surveillance and data surveillance, but also “data analytics” (the techniques that enable marketers at companies like Target to detect, for instance, if you are pregnant), digital rights movements (promoted by organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation), online-only crypto-currencies (like Bitcoin or Litecoin), algorithmic finance (like automated micro-trading) and digital property disputes (from peer-to-peer file sharing to property claims in the virtual world of Second Life)
  • Surveying this iceberg is crucial because atop it sits a new kind of person: the informational person. Politically and culturally, we are increasingly defined through an array of information architectures: highly designed environments of data, like our social media profiles, into which we often have to squeeze ourselves
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  • We have become what the privacy theorist Daniel Solove calls “digital persons.” As such we are subject to infopolitics (or what the philosopher Grégoire Chamayou calls “datapower,” the political theorist Davide Panagia “datapolitik” and the pioneering thinker Donna Haraway “informatics of domination”).
  • Once fingerprints, biometrics, birth certificates and standardized names were operational, it became possible to implement an international passport system, a social security number and all other manner of paperwork that tells us who someone is. When all that paper ultimately went digital, the reams of data about us became radically more assessable and subject to manipulation,
  • We like to think of ourselves as somehow apart from all this information. We are real — the information is merely about us.
  • But what is it that is real? What would be left of you if someone took away all your numbers, cards, accounts, dossiers and other informational prostheses? Information is not just about you — it also constitutes who you are.
  • We understandably do not want to see ourselves as bits and bytes. But unless we begin conceptualizing ourselves in this way, we leave it to others to do it for us
  • agencies and corporations will continue producing new visions of you and me, and they will do so without our input if we remain stubbornly attached to antiquated conceptions of selfhood that keep us from admitting how informational we already are.
  • What should we do about our Internet and phone patterns’ being fastidiously harvested and stored away in remote databanks where they await inspection by future algorithms developed at the National Security Agency, Facebook, credit reporting firms like Experian and other new institutions of information and control that will come into existence in future decades?
  • What bits of the informational you will fall under scrutiny? The political you? The sexual you? What next-generation McCarthyisms await your informational self? And will those excesses of oversight be found in some Senate subcommittee against which we democratic citizens might hope to rise up in revolt — or will they lurk among algorithmic automatons that silently seal our fates in digital filing systems?
  • Despite their decidedly different political sensibilities, what links together the likes of Senator Wyden and the international hacker network known as Anonymous is that they respect the severity of what is at stake in our information.
  • information is a site for the call of justice today, alongside more quintessential battlefields like liberty of thought and equality of opportunity.
  • we lack the intellectual framework to grasp the new kinds of political injustices characteristic of today’s information society.
  • though nearly all of us have a vague sense that something is wrong with the new regimes of data surveillance, it is difficult for us to specify exactly what is happening and why it raises serious concern
Javier E

The psychology of hate: How we deny human beings their humanity - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...ny_human_beings_their_humanity

brain science science psychology hate racism bias theory of mind killing distance

shared by Javier E on 09 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The cross-cultural psychologist Gustav Jahoda catalogued how Europeans since the time of the ancient Greeks viewed those living in relatively primitive cultures as lacking a mind in one of two ways: either lacking self-control and emotions, like an animal, or lacking reason and intellect, like a child. So foreign in appearance, language, and manner, “they” did not simply become other people, they became lesser people. More specifically, they were seen as having lesser minds, diminished capacities to either reason or feel.
  • In the early 1990ss, California State Police commonly referred to crimes involving young black men as NHI—No Humans Involved.
  • The essence of dehumanization is, therefore, failing to recognize the fully human mind of another person. Those who fight against dehumanization typically deal with extreme cases that can make it seem like a relatively rare phenomenon. It is not. Subtle versions are all around us.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Even doctors—those whose business is to treat others humanely— can remain disengaged from the minds of their patients, particularly when those patients are easily seen as different from the doctors themselves. Until the early 1990s, for instance, it was routine practice for infants to undergo surgery without anesthesia. Why? Because at the time, doctors did not believe that infants were able to experience pain, a fundamental capacity of the human mind.
  • Your sixth sense functions only when you engage it. When you do not, you may fail to recognize a fully human mind that is right before your eyes.
  • Although it is indeed true that the ability to read the minds of others exists along a spectrum with stable individual differences, I believe that the more useful knowledge comes from understanding the moment-to-moment, situational influences that can lead even the most social person—yes, even you and me—to treat others as mindless animals or objects.
  • None of the cases described in this chapter so far involve people with chronic and stable personality disorders. Instead, they all come from predictable contexts in which people’s sixth sense remained disengaged for one fundamental reason: distance.
  • This three-part chain—sharing attention, imitating action, and imitation creating experience—shows one way in which your sixth sense works through your physical senses. More important, it also shows how your sixth sense could remain disengaged, leaving you disconnected from the minds of others. Close your eyes, look away, plug your ears, stand too far away to see or hear, or simply focus your attention elsewhere, and your sixth sense may not be triggered.
  • Distance keeps your sixth sense disengaged for at least two reasons. First, your ability to understand the minds of others can be triggered by your physical senses. When you’re too far away in physical space, those triggers do not get pulled. Second, your ability to understand the minds of others is also engaged by your cognitive inferences. Too far away in psychological space—too different, too foreign, too other—and those triggers, again, do not get pulled
  • For psychologists, distance is not just physical space. It is also psychological space, the degree to which you feel closely connected to someone else. You are describing psychological distance when you say that you feel “distant” from your spouse, “out of touch” with your kids’ lives, “worlds apart” from a neighbor’s politics, or “separated” from your employees. You don’t mean that you are physically distant from other people; you mean that you feel psychologically distant from them in some way
  • Interviews with U.S. soldiers in World War II found that only 15 to 20 percent were able to discharge their weapons at the enemy in close firefights. Even when they did shoot, soldiers found it hard to hit their human targets. In the U.S. Civil War, muskets were capable of hitting a pie plate at 70 yards and soldiers could typically reload anywhere from 4 to 5 times per minute. Theoretically, a regiment of 200 soldiers firing at a wall of enemy soldiers 100 feet wide should be able to kill 120 on the first volley. And yet the kill rate during the Civil War was closer to 1 to 2 men per minute, with the average distance of engagement being only 30 yards.
  • Modern armies now know that they have to overcome these empathic urges, so soldiers undergo relentless training that desensitizes them to close combat, so that they can do their jobs. Modern technology also allows armies to kill more easily because it enables killing at such a great physical distance. Much of the killing by U.S. soldiers now comes through the hands of drone pilots watching a screen from a trailer in Nevada, with their sixth sense almost completely disengaged.
  • Other people obviously do not need to be standing right in front of you for you to imagine what they are thinking or feeling or planning. You can simply close your eyes and imagine it.
  • The MPFC and a handful of other brain regions undergird the inferential component of your sixth sense. When this network of brain regions is engaged, you are thinking about others’ minds. Failing to engage this region when thinking about other people is then a solid indication that you’re overlooking their minds.
  • Research confirms that the MPFC is engaged more when you’re thinking about yourself, your close friends and family, and others who have beliefs similar to your own. It is activated when you care enough about others to care what they are thinking, and not when you are indifferent to others
  • As people become more and more different from us, or more distant from our immediate social networks, they become less and less likely to engage our MPFC. When we don’t engage this region, others appear relatively mindless, something less than fully human.
  • The mistake that can arise when you fail to engage with the minds of others is that you may come to think of them as relatively mindless. That is, you may come to think that these others have less going on between their ears than, say, you do.
  • It’s not only free will that other minds might seem to lack. This lesser minds effect has many manifestations, including what appears to be a universal tendency to assume that others’ minds are less sophisticated and more superficial than one’s own. Members of distant out-groups, ranging from terrorists to poor hurricane victims to political opponents, are also rated as less able to experience complicated emotions, such as shame, pride, embarassment, and guilt than close members of one’s own group.
Javier E

Checking Privilege Checking - Phoebe Maltz Bovy - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...361898

privilege cultural discourse justice

shared by Javier E on 12 May 14 - No Cached
  • While privilege is nothing new, the term “privilege” is everywhere in post-recession America, not just on college campuses.
  • The ideas of Peggy “Invisible Knapsack” McIntosh and Pierre “Cultural Capital” Bourdieu have trickled into the culture.
  • “Privilege” isn't merely unearned advantage—it implies entitlement. To say that someone “comes across as privileged” is to call that person clueless and insensitive.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • to stand accused of privilege, one need not actually possess the form of privilege in question.
  • To call someone “privileged” is to say that his or her successes are undeserved. It’s a personal insult posing as social critique.
  • Use of the term “privilege” has, I’d argue, actually set back the cultural conversation about privilege. It's not just that “privilege,” when used as an accusation, silences. It’s also that it’s made cluelessness a greater crime than inequality. These ubiquitous expressions—“check your privilege” or “your privilege is showing”—ask the accused to own up to privilege, not to do anything about it.
  • There may be a vague, implied hope that privilege checking will lead to efforts to remedy some injustice, but the more direct concern is not coming across as entitled, not offending anyone underprivileged
  • more typically, it’s a way for someone privileged to play self-appointed spokesperson for the marginalized, so as to win a sensitivity competition with others similarly aloof.
  • Having the privilege conversation is itself an expression of privilege.
  • It’s not just that commenting online about privilege—or any other topic—suggests leisure time. It’s also that the vocabulary of “privilege” is learned at liberal-arts colleges or in highbrow publications.
  • A certain sort of self-deprecating privilege awareness has become, in effect, upper- or upper-middle-class good manners, maybe even a new form of noblesse oblige, reinforcing class divides.
  • because “privileged” is essentially an epithet, it ends up encouraging privilege denial. “Your privilege is showing” inspires—and Fortgang's essay is just the latest example of this—all these selective histories of people's upbringings (or, if they grew up truly "blessed," that of their parents or grandparents) to create the illusion of scrappiness and an upward trajectory.
  • he self-deprecatory, class-signaling approach might (but rarely does) serve as a first step towards genuine self-examination and, in turn, some broader social-justice commitment. But the main result of privilege talk is scrappiness one-upmanship among the privileged.
Javier E

In 'Misbehaving,' an Economics Professor Isn't Afraid to Attack His Own - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ehaving-by-richard-thaler.html

economics science theory efficiency neoclassical social science

shared by Javier E on 06 May 15 - No Cached
  • economists have increasingly become the go-to experts on every manner of business and public policy issue facing society
  • The economics profession that Mr. Thaler entered in the early 1970s was deeply invested in proving that it was more than a mere social science
  • To achieve the same mathematical precision of hard sciences, economists made a radically simplifying assumption that people are “optimizers” whose behavior is as predictable as the speed of physical body falling through space.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Early in his career, Professor Thaler created a list of observed behaviors that were obviously inconsistent with the predictions of established orthodoxy.
  • “Misbehaving” charts Mr. Thaler’s journey to document these anomalies in the face of economists’ increasingly desperate, and sometimes comical, efforts to deny their existence or relevance
  • As these tools have been applied to practical problems, Professor Thaler has noted that there has been “very little actual economics involved.” Instead, the resulting insights have “come primarily from psychology and the other social sciences.”
  • To the extent that economists fought the integration of behavioral insights into economic analyses, it seems that their fears were founded. Rather than making the resulting work less rigorous, however, it simply made its economic underpinnings less relevant. Professor Thaler argues that it is actually “a slur on those other social sciences if people insist on calling any policy-related research some kind of economics.”
  • by trying to set itself as somehow above other social sciences, the “rationalist” school of economics actually ended up contributing far less than it could have. The group’s intellectual denial led to not just sloppy social science, but sloppy philosophy.
  • Economists would do well to embrace both their philosophical and social science roots. No amount of number-crunching can replace the need to confront the complexity of human existence.
  • It is not only in academics that the most difficult questions are avoided behind a mathematical smoke screen. When businesses use cost-benefit analysis, for instance, they are applying a moral philosophy known as utilitarianism, popularized by John Stuart Mill in the 19th century.
  • Mill has relatively few contemporary adherents in professional philosophical circles. But utilitarianism does have the virtue of lending itself to mathematical calculation. By giving the contentious philosophy a benign bureaucratic name like “cost-benefit analysis,” corporations hope to circumvent the need to confront the profound ethical issues implicated.
Javier E

In 'Misbehaving,' an Economics Professor Isn't Afraid to Attack His Own - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ehaving-by-richard-thaler.html

economics rationality behavioral social science utilitarian moral reasoning theory optimization chicago

shared by Javier E on 31 May 15 - No Cached
  • the book is part memoir, part attack on a breed of economist who dominated the academy – particularly, the Chicago School that dominated economic theory at the University of Chicago – for the much of the latter part of the 20th century.
  • economists have increasingly become the go-to experts on every manner of business and public policy issue facing society.
  • rather than being a disgruntled former employee or otherwise easily marginalized whistle-blower, Mr. Thaler recently took the reins as president of the American Economic Association (and still teaches at Chicago’s graduate business program
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The economics profession that Mr. Thaler entered in the early 1970s was deeply invested in proving that it was more than a mere social science.
  • But economic outcomes are the result of human decision-making. To achieve the same mathematical precision of hard sciences, economists made a radically simplifying assumption that people are “optimizers” whose behavior is as predictable as the speed of physical body falling through space.
  • After so-called behavioral economics began to go mainstream, Professor Thaler turned his attention to helping solve a variety of business and, increasingly, public policy issues. As these tools have been applied to practical problems, Professor Thaler has noted that there has been “very little actual economics involved.” Instead, the resulting insights have “come primarily from psychology and the other social sciences.”
  • it is actually “a slur on those other social sciences if people insist on calling any policy-related research some kind of economics.”
  • Professor Thaler’s narrative ultimately demonstrates that by trying to set itself as somehow above other social sciences, the “rationalist” school of economics actually ended up contributing far less than it could have. The group’s intellectual denial led to not just sloppy social science, but sloppy philosophy.
  • Economists would do well to embrace both their philosophical and social science roots. No amount of number-crunching can replace the need to confront the complexity of human existence.
  • It is not only in academics that the most difficult questions are avoided behind a mathematical smoke screen. When businesses use cost-benefit analysis, for instance, they are applying a moral philosophy known as utilitarianism, popularized by John Stuart Mill in the 19th century.
  • Compared against alternative moral philosophies, like those of Kant or Aristotle, Mill has relatively few contemporary adherents in professional philosophical circles. But utilitarianism does have the virtue of lending itself to mathematical calculation. By giving the contentious philosophy a benign bureaucratic name like “cost-benefit analysis,” corporations hope to circumvent the need to confront the profound ethical issues implicated.
  • The “misbehaving” of Professor Thaler’s title is supposed to refer to how human actions are inconsistent with rationalist economic theory
maddieireland334

Western manners: The latest Chinese status symbol - 0 views

diigo.com/07ocwn

culture knowledge

shared by maddieireland334 on 01 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • maddieireland334 on 01 Jun 15
     
    Meet Twitter's Chinese rival Expat shock at coming home Picking a winner A Frenchman takes China global Before you lift your chopsticks Five Chinese women are sitting upright in their chairs, designer handbags at their heels, listening attentively to a trendy Chinese Tatler magazine photographer describe how to pose in public.
Javier E

Is Algebra Necessary? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...is-algebra-necessary.html

math education requirement

shared by Javier E on 30 Jul 12 - Cached
  • My aim is not to spare students from a difficult subject, but to call attention to the real problems we are causing by misdirecting precious resources.
  • one in four ninth graders fail to finish high school. In South Carolina, 34 percent fell away in 2008-9, according to national data released last year; for Nevada, it was 45 percent. Most of the educators I’ve talked with cite algebra as the major academic reason.
  • Algebra is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white. In New Mexico, 43 percent of white students fell below “proficient,” along with 39 percent in Tennessee
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • The depressing conclusion of a faculty report: “failing math at all levels affects retention more than any other academic factor.” A national sample of transcripts found mathematics had twice as many F’s and D’s compared as other subjects.
  • Of all who embark on higher education, only 58 percent end up with bachelor’s degrees. The main impediment to graduation: freshman math.
  • California’s two university systems, for instance, consider applications only from students who have taken three years of mathematics and in that way exclude many applicants who might excel in fields like art or history. Community college students face an equally prohibitive mathematics wall. A study of two-year schools found that fewer than a quarter of their entrants passed the algebra classes they were required to take.
  • a definitive analysis by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce forecasts that in the decade ahead a mere 5 percent of entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra or above.
  • “mathematical reasoning in workplaces differs markedly from the algorithms taught in school.” Even in jobs that rely on so-called STEM credentials — science, technology, engineering, math — considerable training occurs after hiring, including the kinds of computations that will be required.
  • I fully concur that high-tech knowledge is needed to sustain an advanced industrial economy. But we’re deluding ourselves if we believe the solution is largely academic.
  • Nor will just passing grades suffice. Many colleges seek to raise their status by setting a high mathematics bar. Hence, they look for 700 on the math section of the SAT, a height attained in 2009 by only 9 percent of men and 4 percent of women. And it’s not just Ivy League colleges that do this: at schools like Vanderbilt, Rice and Washington University in St. Louis, applicants had best be legacies or athletes if they have scored less than 700 on their math SATs.
  • A January 2012 analysis from the Georgetown center found 7.5 percent unemployment for engineering graduates and 8.2 percent among computer scientists.
  • “Our civilization would collapse without mathematics.” He’s absolutely right.
  • Quantitative literacy clearly is useful in weighing all manner of public policies
  • Mathematics is used as a hoop, a badge, a totem to impress outsiders and elevate a profession’s status.
  • Instead of investing so much of our academic energy in a subject that blocks further attainment for much of our population, I propose that we start thinking about alternatives. Thus mathematics teachers at every level could create exciting courses in what I call “citizen statistics.” This would not be a backdoor version of algebra, as in the Advanced Placement syllabus. Nor would it focus on equations used by scholars when they write for one another. Instead, it would familiarize students with the kinds of numbers that describe and delineate our personal and public lives.
  • This need not involve dumbing down. Researching the reliability of numbers can be as demanding as geometry.
  • I hope that mathematics departments can also create courses in the history and philosophy of their discipline, as well as its applications in early cultures. Why not mathematics in art and music — even poetry — along with its role in assorted sciences? The aim would be to treat mathematics as a liberal art, making it as accessible and welcoming as sculpture or ballet
  • Yes, young people should learn to read and write and do long division, whether they want to or not. But there is no reason to force them to grasp vectorial angles and discontinuous functions. Think of math as a huge boulder we make everyone pull, without assessing what all this pain achieves. So why require it, without alternatives or exceptions? Thus far I haven’t found a compelling answer.
grayton downing

Sensing Gene Therapy | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34778/title/Sensing-Gene-Therapy/

sensing gene therapy science research

shared by grayton downing on 24 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • but gene therapy may be coming to the rescue. Gene therapy’s success in treating  blindness disorders –many are in late stage trials—gave hope to a field deterred by early missteps. And now gene therapy researchers are expanding their gaze to focus on all manner of sensory diseases.
  • notable success in using gene therapy techniques to treat a sensory disorder came last year when otolaryngolotist
  • In olfactory dysfunction, there are few curative therapies,
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • working on more broadly applying [the therapy] to other forms of genetic hearing loss,” he said. But in contrast to VGLUT3 mutant mice, which are missing the protein entirely, humans with missense mutations expressed a defective transporter, making it unclear whether Lustig’s strategy could translate to human VGLUT3-linked deafness.
  • Taste and smell are two of the senses that have received less attention from gene therapy researchers—but that’s changing
  • The neurons [in VGLUT3 mutant mice] are waiting for the neurotransmitter to activate them”—but no signal comes, and the mice are profoundly deaf,
  • Treating the mice intra-nasally with gene therapy vectors carrying the wildtype Ift88 gene, researchers saw significant regrowth of nasal cilia, whereas control mice given empty vectors showed no regrowth. Treated mice almost doubled in weight compared to controls.
  • So far, no scientists have designed a gene therapy to target taste buds, but at least one team is tackling an important factor in taste: saliva. If a person’s saliva production drops below 50 percent of normal, “you get tooth decay and trouble swallowing,”
  • Scientists are also developing gene therapies for disorders involving touch—or at least pain-sensing—neurons, with one drug candidate
  • Wolfe envisions that someday pain treatment could be as simple as visiting the doctor every few months for a quick skin prick “wherever it hurts”—choosing between a variety of genes to get the best effect.
Javier E

John Roberts, the Umpire in Chief - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...berts-the-umpire-in-chief.html

interpretation legal judicial theory constitutionality supreme court

shared by Javier E on 29 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • The Roberts-Scalia debate is part of a longstanding argument about how judges should interpret laws passed by Congress.
  • the chief justice embraces an approach called “purposivism,” while Justice Scalia prefers “textualism.”
  • In Judge Katzmann’s account, purposivism has been the approach favored for most of American history by conservative and liberal judges, senators, and representatives, as well as administrative agencies. Purposivism holds that judges shouldn’t confine themselves to the words of a law but should try to discern Congress’s broader purposes.
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  • In the 1980s, when he was a lower court judge, Justice Scalia began to champion a competing view of statutory interpretation, textualism, which holds that judges should confine themselves to interpreting the words that Congress chose without trying to discern Congress’s broader purposes.
  • Textualism, in this view, promises to constrain judicial activism by preventing judges from roving through legislative history in search of evidence that supports their own policy preferences. But in the view of its critics, like Chief Judge Katzmann, textualism “increases the probability that a judge will construe a law in a manner that the legislators did not intend.”
  • Judge Katzmann, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, also accuses Justice Scalia of inconsistency for consulting the intent of the framers in the case of constitutional interpretation but not statutory interpretation.
  • The chief justice’s embrace of bipartisan judicial restraint in the second Affordable Care Act case was consistent with his embrace of the same philosophy in the first Affordable Care Act case in 2012, where he quoted one of his heroes, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr: “The rule is settled that as between two possible interpretations of a statute, by one of which it would be unconstitutional and by the other valid, our plain duty is to adopt that which will save the Act.”
  • Chief Justice Roberts was not, as Justice Scalia charged, rewriting the law. Instead he was advancing the view that he championed soon after his confirmation: In a polarized age, it is important for the Supreme Court to maintain its institutional legitimacy by deferring to the political branches.
  • Chief Justice Roberts’s relatively consistent embrace of judicial deference to democratic decisions supports his statement during his confirmation hearings that judges should be like umpires calling “balls and strikes.” As he put it then: “Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules, but it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.”
Sophia C

Thomas Kuhn: Revolution Against Scientific Realism* - 1 views

history.hanover.edu/...hhr94_4.html

knowledge science

shared by Sophia C on 12 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • as such a complex system that nobody believed that it corresponded to the physical reality of the universe. Although the Ptolemaic system accounted for observations-"saved the appearances"-its epicycles and deferents were never intended be anything more than a mathematical model to use in predicting the position of heavenly bodies. [3]
  • lileo that he was free to continue his work with Copernican theory if he agreed that the theory did not describe physical reality but was merely one of the many potential mathematical models. [10] Galileo continued to work, and while he "formally (23)claimed to prove nothing," [11] he passed his mathematical advances and his observational data to Newton, who would not only invent a new mathematics but would solve the remaining problems posed by Copernicus. [12]
  • Thus without pretending that his method could find the underlying causes of things such as gravity, Newton believed that his method produced theory, based upon empirical evidence, that was a close approximation of physical reality.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • Medieval science was guided by "logical consistency."
  • The logical empiricist's conception of scientific progress was thus a continuous one; more comprehensive theory replaced compatible, older theory
  • Hempel also believed that science evolved in a continuous manner. New theory did not contradict past theory: "theory does not simply refute the earlier empirical generalizations in its field; rather, it shows that within a certain limited range defined by qualifying conditions, the generalizations hold true in fairly close approximation." [21]
  • New theory is more comprehensive; the old theory can be derived from the newer one and is one special manifestation" [22] of the more comprehensive new theory.
  • movement combined induction, based on empiricism, and deduction in the form of logic
  • It was the truth, and the prediction and control that came with it, that was the goal of logical-empirical science.
  • Each successive theory's explanation was closer to the truth than the theory before.
  • e notion of scientific realism held by Newton led to the evolutionary view of the progress of science
  • he entities and processes of theory were believed to exist in nature, and science should discover those entities and processes
  • Particularly disturbing discoveries were made in the area of atomic physics. For instance, Heisenberg's indeterminacy (25)principle, according to historian of science Cecil Schneer, yielded the conclusion that "the world of nature is indeterminate.
  • "even the fundamental principle of causality fail[ed] ."
  • was not until the second half of the twentieth century that the preservers of the evolutionary idea of scientific progress, the logical empiricists, were seriously challenged
  • revolutionary model of scientific change and examined the role of the scientific community in preventing and then accepting change. Kuhn's conception of scientific change occurring through revolutions undermined the traditional scientific goal, finding "truth" in nature
  • Textbooks inform scientists-to-be about this common body of knowledge and understanding.
  • for the world is too huge and complex to be explored randomly.
  • a scientist knows what facts are relevant and can build on past research
  • Normal science, as defined by Kuhn, is cumulative. New knowledge fills a gap of ignorance
  • ne standard product of the scientific enterprise is missing. Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none."
  • ntain a mechanism that uncovers anomaly, inconsistencies within the paradigm.
  • eventually, details arise that are inconsistent with the current paradigm
  • hese inconsistencies are eventually resolved or are ignored.
  • y concern a topic of central importance, a crisis occurs and normal science comes to a hal
  • that the scientists re-examine the foundations of their science that they had been taking for granted
  • it resolves the crisis better than the others, it offers promise for future research, and it is more aesthetic than its competitors. The reasons for converting to a new paradigm are never completely rational.
  • Unlike evolutionary science, in which new knowledge fills a gap of ignorance, in Kuhn's model new knowledge replaces incompatible knowledge.
  • Thus science is not a continuous or cumulative endeavor: when a paradigm shift occurs there is a revolution similar to a political revolution, with fundamental and pervasive changes in method and understanding. Each successive vision about the nature of the universe makes the past vision obsolete; predictions, though more precise, remain similar to the predictions of the past paradigm in their general orientation, but the new explanations do not accommodate the old
  • In a sense, we have circled back to the ancient and medieval practice of separating scientific theory from physical reality; both medieval scientists and Kuhn would agree that no theory corresponds to reality and therefore any number of theories might equally well explain a natural phenomenon. [36] Neither twentieth-century atomic theorists nor medieval astronomers are able to claim that their theories accurately describe physical phenomena. The inability to return to scientific realism suggests a tripartite division of the history of science, with a period of scientific realism fitting between two periods in which there is no insistence that theory correspond to reality. Although both scientific realism and the evolutionary idea of scientific progress appeal to common sense, both existed for only a few hundred years.
Javier E

Polling's Secrecy Problem - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...pollings-secrecy-problem.html

poll bias methods secrecy politics survey

shared by Javier E on 28 May 15 - No Cached
  • In the polling world, no survey firm releases its microdata in a timely manner. When pollsters release it at all — usually months after publication, to an archive that requires a paid subscription for access — they seldom provide the detailed methodological explanations necessary to replicate the survey results.
  • Critics have raised charges of full-scale fabrication, like that alleged in the LaCour study, about a handful of pollsters in recent years, and such a wholly fraudulent poll might well be able to evade detection.
  • But a bigger problem is that pollsters may be using questionable means to ensure that their results end up in a certain place. Any poll is required to make judgments about exactly how to weight the sample or decide who is likely to vote. But such choices can swing the results by several percentage points, and these decisions can be made with the results in mind.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In particular, there is reason to think that pollsters engage in a behavior known as herding, in which they announce results that are similar to those of other recent polls
  • There is strong evidence that some firms have engaged in herding.
  • The firm has since switched to more conventional weighting techniques, bringing the wild swings in the racial composition of the electorate to an end. Its findings now resemble those of other pollsters: offering no obvious signs of herding, but also not providing the data that would rule it out.
  • the association recently began a transparency initiative intended to address some of the concerns.But few polling organizations have signed up so far, and the transparency initiative’s disclosure standards generally fall short of what is needed to allow others researchers to identify or deter dubious practices.
  • It’s hard to say what’s more telling: that the transparency standards wouldn’t be enough to preclude bad practices, or that so few pollsters seem willing to adhere to even those requirements.
Emilio Ergueta

Addicts, Mythmakers and Philosophers | Issue 90 | Philosophy Now - 0 views

philosophynow.org/...ts_Mythmakers_and_Philosophers

Socrates Aristotle philosophy

shared by Emilio Ergueta on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Alan Brody explains Plato’s/Socrates’ understanding of habitually bad behavior.
  • the condition is capable of creating urges and motivations which bring about highly significant losses to a person’s well-being in spite of the person’s standing preference not to live like that.
  • It’s common to change one’s mind when faced with temptation. Sometimes the choice to go ahead with the temptation is the result of a cost-benefit evaluation – in other words, it seems worthwhile to do it. At other times a person might gratify their desire or urge without entertaining any qualms or even thoughts about it. So although an addict’s habitual behavior might be atypical, rather than seeing it as a result of a compulsion they’re not strong enough to fight against, why not see their addictive behavior as something done in a willing manner, because the person feels like doing it, and/or they regard it as worth doing?
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The experience of going along with temptation is not, Socrates argues, one in which the person protests or fights against its unreasonableness while being dragged along into gratifying it. For Socrates, ‘yielding to temptation’ is not being unwillingly overpowered, but is the experience of being a willing participant choosing what is at that moment wrongly thought to be best. This is also the essence of the willingness model of addictive behavior.
  • Aristotle thought that by asserting that when we gratify our desires for what tempts we are still doing what we think best, Socrates was denying the existence of akrasia – ‘weakness of will’, or a failure of self-restraint.
  • what the addict does can be explained in terms of Socrates’ willingness model and an addict’s immoral character: ie, they want to do it, and care more about satisfying their addiction than the consequences of doing so. The addict’s moral deficits reside in their motivations
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