Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged medium

Rss Feed Group items tagged

runlai_jiang

You Asked About CES 2018. We Answered. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • You Asked About CES 2018. We Answered. By BRIAN X. CHEN At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, thousands of tech companies showcased some of the hottest new innovations: artificial intelligence, self-driving car tech, the smart home, voice-controlled accessories, fifth-generation cellular connectivity and more.Curious about the new products and how they will affect your personal technology? Readers asked Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology writer who is attending the trade show, their questions about wireless, TV and the Internet of Things. Jump to topic: CES Internet of Things TV Wireless Expand All Collapse All /* SHOW LIBRARY ===================== */ .g-show-xsmall, .g-show-small, .g-show-smallplus, .g-show-submedium, .g-show-sub-medium, .g-show-medium, .g-show-large, .g-show-xlarge { display: none; } .g-show { display: block; } .lt-ie10 .g-aiImg { width: 100%; } /* story top */ .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .story-heading { max-width: 720px; margin: 0 auto 10px; text-align: center; line-height: 2.844rem; font-size: 2.4rem; } @media only screen and (max-width: 1244px) { .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .story-heading { line-height: 2.5596rem; font-size: 2.16rem; } } @media only screen and (max-width: 719px) { .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .story-heading { line-height: 2.2752rem; font-size: 1.92rem; } } .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .interactive-leadin.summary { max-width: 460px; margin: 0 auto 20px auto; text-align: left; font-size: 17px; line-height: 1.6; } .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .byline-dateline { text-align: center; } /* top asset */ .g-top-asset { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 20px; } .g-top-asset img { width: 100%; } /* body text */ .g-body { max-width: 460px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; font-size: 17px; line-height: 1.6; } .g-body b, .g-body strong { font-family: 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; } .g-body a { text-decoration: underline; } /* subhed */ .g-subhed h2 { max-width: 460px; margin: 2em auto 1em auto; font: 700 1.2em/1.3em 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; text-align: center; } .viewport-small-10 .g-subhed h2 { font-size: 1.5em; } /* images */ .g-item-image { margin: 25px auto; } .g-item-image img { width: 100%; } /* video */ .g-item-video { margin: 25px auto; } /* sources and credits */ .g-asset-source { padding-top: 3px; } .g-asset-source .g-source { font: 400 12px/15px 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; color: #999; } .g-asset-source .g-pipe { margin: 0 6px 0 3px; font: 400 12px/12px 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; color: #999; } .g-asset-source .g-caption { font: 300 14px/17px georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; } .g-asset-source .g-credit { font: 400 12px/17px 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; display: inline-block; color: #999; } /* graphics */ .g-item-ai2html { margin: 25px auto; } p.g-asset-hed { font: 700 16px/18px 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0; } .g-map-key { float: none; clear: both; overflow: hidden; margin: 10px auto 4px auto; } .g-map-key .g-key-row { margin-bottom: 5px; margin-right: 15px; float: left; } .viewport-small .g-map-key .g-key-row { width: auto; margin-bottom: 0; } .viewport-small-20 .g-map-key .g-key-row { width: auto; } .g-map-key .g-key-row .g-key-rect, .g-map-key .g-key-row .g-key-circle { display: inline-block; vertical-align: middle; margin-right: 8px; float: left; } .g-map-key .g-key-row p { font: 500 0.9em/1.6 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; float: left; vertical-align: middle; margin: -2px 0 0 0; } .viewport-small .g-map-key .g-key-row p { max-width: 92%; } .viewport-small-20 .g-map-key .g-key-row p { width: auto; max-width: none; } .g-map-key .g-key-row .g-key-rect { width: 22px; height: 10px; margin-top: 4px; } .g-map-key .g-key-row .g-key-circle { width: 9px; height: 9px; border-radius: 50%; margin-top: 4px; } .g-map-key .g-key-row .g-key-custom { width: 20px; height: 20px; background-size: 100%; display: block; float: left; width: 24px; height: 24px; margin: -4px 2px 0 0; } .viewport-small .g-map-key .g-key-row-title p { width: 100%; max-width: none; } .g-red-dot, .g-black-dot { display: inline-block; background: #d00; color: white; font-weight: bold; width: 20px; height: 20px; font: 700 14px/1.4 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; text-align: center; border-radius: 10px; line-height: 20px; } .g-black-dot { background: #222; } /* column text */ .g-column-container { max-width: 460px; margin: 20px auto 0 auto; } .viewport-medium .g-column-container { max-width: 1050px; } .viewport-large .g-column-container { margin-bottom: 30px; } .g-column-container .g-column-hed { font-family: 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; font-weight: 700; margin-bottom: 2px; } .g-column-container .g-column-col { vertical-align: top; } .viewport-small .g-column-container .g-column-col { display: block; min-width: 100%; } .viewport-medium .g-column-container .g-column-col { min-width: 0; display: inline-block; margin-right: 15px; } .viewport-medium .g-column-container .g-column-col:last-child { margin-right: 0; } .g-column-container .g-column-asset, .g-column-container .g-column-image { margin-bottom: 8px; } .g-column-container .g-column-image img { width: 100%; } /* tables */ .g-table { margin: 0 auto; margin-bottom: 25px; } .g-table tr { border-bottom: 1px solid #ececec; } .g-table p { font: 500 14px/1.4 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; text-align: left; margin: 6px 0; } /* grid */ .g-grid { margin-bottom: 15px; } .g-grid .g-grid-item { position: relative; display: inline-block; min-width: calc(50% - 5px); } .viewport-small-20 .g-grid .g-grid-item { min-width: calc(33% - 5px); } .viewport-medium .g-grid .g-grid-item { min-width: 0; } .g-grid .g-grid-item p { font: 500 15px/1.4 'nyt-franklin', arial, sans-serif; position: absolute; bottom: 10px; left: 10px; color: #fff; margin-bottom: 0; } /* Mobile issues */ /* Get rid of border under intro and share tools on mobile */ .story-header.interactive-header { border-bottom: none !important; } /* Share tools issues */ /* Pad out the kicker/sharetool space */ .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .kicker-container { margin-bottom: 12px; } /* Override the moving sharetools on mobile */ .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .kicker-container .sharetools { position: relative; float: right; /*right: 0px;*/ bottom: auto; left: auto; width: auto; margin-top: -6px; clear: none; } /* Maintain the proper space with the section name and kicker next to share tools */ .story.theme-main .story-header .story-meta .interactive-kicker { float: left; width: 70%; display: inline-block; } .g-graphic.g-graphic-freebird .g-ad-wrapper { margin: 30px auto; max-width: 1050px; } .viewport-medium .g-graphic.g-graphic-freebird .g-ad-wrapper { margin: 50px auto; } .g-graphic.g-graphic-freebird .g-ad-wrapper .ad { border-top: 1px solid #e2e2e2 !important; border-bottom: 1px solid #e2e2e2 !important; margin: 0 auto; padding: 10px 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .g-graphic.g-graphic-freebird .g-ad-wrapper .ad div { margin: 0 auto; display: block !important; } .g-graphic.g-graphic-freebird .g-ad-wrapper iframe { margin: 0 auto; display: block; } .g-graphic.g-graphic-freebird .g-ad-wrapper .g-ad-text { text-align: center; font: 500 12px/1.2 "nyt-franklin", arial, sans-serif; color: #bfbfbf; text-transform: uppercase; margin-bottom: 7px; } .ad.top-ad { border: none; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } /* Fix spacing at top of story */ .has-top-ad .story.theme-interactive, .has-ribbon .story.theme-interactive { margin-top: 10px; } /* Fix comments button margin */ .story.theme-interactive .comments-button.theme-kicker { margin-top: 0; } /* Get rid of border under intro and share tools on mobile */ .page-interactive-default .story.theme-main .story-header { border-bottom: none; } /*
  • At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, thousands of tech companies showcased some of the hottest new innovations: artificial intelligence, self-driving car tech, the smart home, voice-controlled accessories, fifth-generation cellular connectivity and more.
  • Curious about the new products and how they will affect your personal technology? Readers asked Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology writer who attended the trade show, their questions about wireless, TV and the Internet of Things. (In addition,
katherineharron

FBI arrests spotlight lessons learned after Charlottesville (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

  • On Thursday, the FBI arrested three men, Patrik J. Mathews, 27, Brian M. Lemley Jr., 33, and William G. Bilbrough IV, 19, with firearms charges, and they had plans, an official said, to attend a Virginia pro-gun rally. This followed Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam's declaration of a temporary state of emergency after authorities learned that extremists hoped to use the anti-gun control rally planned next Monday -- Martin Luther King, Jr. Day -- to incite a violent clash.
  • These arrests add to mounting evidence that a decades-old and violent white-power movement is alive and well, perhaps even gaining strength. White power is a social movement that has united neo-Nazis, Klansmen, skinheads, and militiamen around a shared fear of racial annihilation and cultural change. Since 1983, when movement leaders declared war on the federal government, members of such groups have worked together to bring about a race war.
  • JUST WATCHEDOn GPS: What motivates white power activists?ReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCH position: absol
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Silver linings aside, it will take many, many more instances of coordinated response to stop a movement generations in the making. In more than a decade of studying the earlier white power movement, I have become familiar with the themes of underground activity that are today clearly drawing from the earlier movement. In the absence of decisive action across multiple institutions, a rich record of criminal activity and violence will continue to provide these activists with a playbook for further chaos.
  • The Base, furthermore, is what experts call "accelerationist," meaning that its members hope to provoke what they see as an inevitable race war. They have conducted paramilitary training in the Pacific Northwest. Both of these strategies date back to the 1980s, when the Order trained in those forests with hopes of provoking the same race war.
  • One of the men arrested Thursday was formerly a reservist in the Canadian Army, where he received training in explosives and demolition, according to the New York Times. This kind of preparation, too, is common among extremists like these. To take just a few representative examples, in the 1960s, Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Marine trained in demolition, helped fellow members of the United Klans of America to bomb the 16th Street Birmingham Baptist Church, killing four black girls.
  • This news out of Virginia shows that there is a real social benefit when people direct their attention to these events -- and sustain the public conversation about the presence of a renewed white-power movement and what it means for our society.
runlai_jiang

A New Antidote for Noisy Airports: Slower Planes - WSJ - 0 views

  • Urban airports like Boston’s Logan thought they had silenced noise issues with quieter planes. Now complaints pour in from suburbs 10 to 15 miles away because new navigation routes have created relentless noise for some homeowners. Photo: Alamy By Scott McCartney Scott McCartney The Wall Street Journal BiographyScott McCartney @MiddleSeat Scott.McCartney@wsj.com March 7, 2018 8:39 a.m. ET 146 COMMENTS saveSB107507240220
  • It turns out engines aren’t the major culprit anymore. New airplanes are much quieter. It’s the “whoosh” that big airplanes make racing through the air.
  • Computer models suggest slowing departures by 30 knots—about 35 miles an hour—would reduce noise on the ground significantly.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The FAA says it’s impressed and is moving forward with recommendations Boston has made.
  • . A working group is forming to evaluate the main recommendation to slow departing jets to a speed limit of 220 knots during the climb to 10,000 feet, down from 250 knots.
  • New routes put planes over quiet communities. Complaints soared. Phoenix neighborhoods sued the FAA; Chicago neighborhoods are pushing for rotating runway use. Neighborhoods from California to Washington, D.C., are fighting the new procedures that airlines and the FAA insist are vital to future travel.
  • “It’s a concentration problem. It’s a frequency problem. It’s not really a noise problem.”
  • “The flights wake you up. We get a lot of complaints from young families with children,” says Mr. Wright, a data analyst who works from home for a major health-care company.
  • In Boston, an analysis suggested only 54% of the complaints Massport received resulted from noise louder than 45 decibels—about the level of background noise. When it’s relentless, you notice it more.
  • With a 30-knot reduction, noise directly under the flight track would decrease by between 1.5 and 5 decibels and the footprint on the ground would get a lot skinnier, sharply reducing the number of people affected, Mr. Hansman says.
  • The industry trade association Airlines for America has offered cautious support of the Boston recommendations. In a statement, the group said the changes must be safe, work with a variety of aircraft and not reduce the airport’s capacity for takeoffs and landings.
  • Air-traffic controllers will need to delay a departure a bit to put more room between a slower plane and a faster one, or modify its course slightly.
katherineharron

Year-long resolutions don't work. Here's how to make 12 'micro-resolutions' instead - CNN - 0 views

  • A mini- or micro-resolution is any behavior you commit to for four weeks. And even longer-term goals to, say, eat better or learn a new skill, can be broken down into more achievable goals on the way. Before you can land on Mars, focus on landing on the moon.
  • To create your micro-resolutions, you can start by thinking of 12 "bad" habits or indulgences you'd like to cut back on or give up entirely. This is what I did last year for what I called my "Year of Abstinence." My plan was to learn something about myself through self-denial, and it worked: I gave up alcohol, sweets, television and nine other things, but just for a month each. The mini-resolutions were as positive as they were eye-opening.
  • In order to simply increase my own, general awareness, every day in January my goal was to notice something new. I kept my eyes open, looked a bit longer, stopped to read the history markers, noticing buildings or took a different route than normal -- small ways to avoid sleepwalking through life.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Sleep is tied to many positive health outcomes according to a constant stream of medical research, much of which recommends more than seven hours a night. My goal was to sleep eight hours each night, and for the first two weeks of the month I tried and failed. I didn't manage it once. It started stressing me out.Wake up, people: You're fooling yourself about sleep, study says I did get more sleep than I would have otherwise because I prioritized getting to bed earlier. But between work, training for a marathon, kids' bedtimes and evening plans, my life was not conducive to that schedule. But since I'm making up the rules (and you make up yours) I gave up on sleep.
  • Research ties nature exposure to both longevity and happiness, so I made it a goal to commune with nature every day. This could include a run through a park, stopping to hug a tree (which I did at least once), or watching a convoy of ants cross a sidewalk.
  • Another super-habit for mental and physical health, I made an effort to incorporate meditation in some form -- whether it was 10 breaths, 30 minutes, guided, formal, mantra-led, what have you -- every day.
  • To complement March's switch-up, my plan for June was the same split: 8 hours of sleep at night and active listening with the kids. I didn't think I could pull a straight fortnight of great sleep, so my aim was for 15 nights of sleep and 15 days of not doing something else while listening.
  • At CNN, I sit near a constant pile of sweets. And that combined with my weakness for them equals a snacking problem. So in July, my goal was to make fresh fruit my standard snack of choice and eat at least one piece or serving a day. And more water -- at least a pint before coffee in the morning.
  • In August I attempted to not stay seated for more than 30 minutes during waking hours. Recent research has associated a number of poor health conditions with a sedentary lifestyle. And while no one can definitively say how much sitting is bad for us, moving every 30 minutes has emerged as a good guideline.
  • My commitment in September was 15 minutes of some form of creative writing each day, almost entirely in a writer's notebook that I've had since college. It's full of random dialogue, lists and story plots, and I used to write in it often but not so much in recent years.
  • Read a novel. That was it. Given that I mainly read non-fiction, this idea seemed rather novel (sorry).
  • My intention was to make a daily gesture of gratitude -- an emotional state with its own positive health outcomes -- and I quickly fell behind. I decided instead (because, again, I make up the rules) to make the goal a total of 30 thank yous, one for each day of the month, and I managed to cram them all in.
  • In another attempt to combat unhealthy snacking, my final goal for 2019 was to convert my diet into one filled with non-processed, whole foods. Carrots and peanut butter instead of donuts; almonds instead of old Halloween candy -- you get the idea. I also declared my intention to track my progress and give myself a daily score.
katherineharron

Binge drinking: US adults are drinking even more, study says - CNN - 0 views

  • Adults in the United States who binge drink are consuming even more alcohol per binging episode, according to a new study published Thursday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers analyzed data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System over a six-year period and discovered that the annual number of binge drinks among adults who reported excessive drinking jumped on average from 472 in 2011 to 529 in 2017. That's a 12% increase.It's not just college kids. A new study says older adults binge drink, tooThe CDC defines binge drinking as five drinks or more for men or four or more for women on a single occasion. Binge drinking has serious health risks, according to the CDC, including car accidents, domestic violence, STDs, unintentional pregnancy, stroke, heart and liver disease.
  • In 2017, the number of binge drinks pear year among adult binge drinkers ranged from 320 per year in Massachusetts to 1,219 in Wyoming. The number of drinks among those who reported binge drinking increased in nine states -- Idaho, Indiana, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio and Virginia -- while the number of drinks decreased significantly in Massachusetts and West Virginia.
Javier E

Opinion | Richard Powers on What We Can Learn From Trees - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Theo and Robin have a nightly ritual where they say a prayer that Alyssa, the deceased wife and mother, taught them: May all sentient beings be free from needless suffering. That prayer itself comes from the four immeasurables in the Buddhist tradition.
  • When we enter into or recover this sense of kinship that was absolutely fundamental to so many indigenous cultures everywhere around the world at many, many different points in history, that there is no radical break between us and our kin, that even consciousness is shared, to some degree and to a large degree, with a lot of other creatures, then death stops seeming like the enemy and it starts seeming like one of the most ingenious kinds of design for keeping evolution circulating and keeping the experiment running and recombining.
  • Look, I’m 64 years old. I can remember sitting in psychology class as an undergraduate and having my professor declare that no, of course animals don’t have emotions because they don’t have an internal life. They don’t have conscious awareness. And so what looks to you like your dog being extremely happy or being extremely guilty, which dogs do so beautifully, is just your projection, your anthropomorphizing of those other creatures. And this prohibition against anthropomorphism created an artificial gulf between even those animals that are ridiculously near of kin to us, genetically.
  • ...62 more annotations...
  • I don’t know if that sounds too complicated. But the point is, it’s not just giving up domination. It’s giving up this sense of separateness in favor of a sense of kinship. And those people who do often wonder how they failed to see how much continuity there is in the more-than-human world with the human world.
  • to go from terror into being and into that sense that the experiment is sacred, not this one outcome of the experiment, is to immediately transform the way that you think even about very fundamental social and economic and cultural things. If the experiment is sacred, how can we possibly justify our food systems, for instance?
  • when I first went to the Smokies and hiked up into the old growth in the Southern Appalachians, it was like somebody threw a switch. There was some odd filter that had just been removed, and the world sounded different and smelled different.
  • richard powersYeah. In human exceptionalism, we may be completely aware of evolutionary continuity. We may understand that we have a literal kinship with the rest of creation, that all life on Earth employs the same genetic code, that there is a very small core of core genes and core proteins that is shared across all the kingdoms and phyla of life. But conceptually, we still have this demented idea that somehow consciousness creates a sanctity and a separation that almost nullifies the continuous elements of evolution and biology that we’ve come to understand.
  • if we want to begin this process of rehabilitation and transformation of consciousness that we are going to need in order to become part of the living Earth, it is going to be other kinds of minds that give us that clarity and strength and diversity and alternative way of thinking that could free us from this stranglehold of thought that looks only to the maximizing return on investment in very leverageable ways.
  • richard powersIt amazed me to get to the end of the first draft of “Bewilderment” and to realize how much Buddhism was in the book, from the simplest things.
  • I think there is nothing more science inflected than being out in the living world and the more-than-human world and trying to understand what’s happening.
  • And of course, we can combine this with what we were talking about earlier with death. If we see all of evolution as somehow leading up to us, all of human, cultural evolution leading up to neoliberalism and here we are just busily trying to accumulate and make meaning for ourselves, death becomes the enemy.
  • And you’re making the point in different ways throughout the book that it is the minds we think of as unusual, that we would diagnose as having some kind of problem or dysfunction that are, in some cases, are the only ones responding to the moment in the most common sense way it deserves. It is almost everybody else’s brain that has been broken.
  • it isn’t surprising. If you think of the characteristics of this dominant culture that we’ve been talking about — the fixation on control, the fixation on mastery, the fixation on management and accumulation and the resistance of decay — it isn’t surprising that that culture is also threatened by difference and divergence. It seeks out old, stable hierarchies — clear hierarchies — of control, and anything that’s not quite exploitable or leverageable in the way that the normal is terrifying and threatening.
  • And the more I looked for it, the more it pervaded the book.
  • ezra kleinI’ve heard you say that it has changed the way you measure a good day. Can you tell me about that?richard powersThat’s true.I suppose when I was still enthralled to commodity-mediated individualist market-driven human exceptionalism — we need a single word for this
  • And since moving to the Smokies and since publishing “The Overstory,” my days have been entirely inverted. I wake up, I go to the window, and I look outside. Or I step out onto the deck — if I haven’t been sleeping on the deck, which I try to do as much as I can in the course of the year — and see what’s in the air, gauge the temperature and the humidity and the wind and see what season it is and ask myself, you know, what’s happening out there now at 1,700 feet or 4,000 feet or 5,000 feet.
  • let me talk specifically about the work of a scientist who has herself just recently published a book. It’s Dr. Suzanne Simard, and the book is “Finding the Mother Tree.” Simard has been instrumental in a revolution in our way of thinking about what’s happening underground at the root level in a forest.
  • it was a moving moment for me, as an easterner, to stand up there and to say, this is what an eastern forest looks like. This is what a healthy, fully-functioning forest looks like. And I’m 56 years old, and I’d never seen it.
  • the other topics of that culture tend to circle back around these sorts of trends, human fascinations, ways of magnifying our throw weight and our ability and removing the last constraints to our desires and, in particular, to eliminate the single greatest enemy of meaning in the culture of the technological sublime that is, itself, such a strong instance of the culture of human separatism and commodity-mediated individualist capitalism— that is to say, the removal of death.
  • Why is it that we have known about the crisis of species extinction for at least half a century and longer? And I mean the lay public, not just scientists. But why has this been general knowledge for a long time without public will demanding some kind of action or change
  • And when you make kinship beyond yourself, your sense of meaning gravitates outwards into that reciprocal relationship, into that interdependence. And you know, it’s a little bit like scales falling off your eyes. When you do turn that corner, all of the sources of anxiety that are so present and so deeply internalized become much more identifiable. And my own sense of hope and fear gets a much larger frame of reference to operate in.
  • I think, for most of my life, until I did kind of wake up to forests and to trees, I shared — without really understanding this as a kind of concession or a kind of subscription — I did share this cultural consensus that meaning is a private thing that we do for ourselves and by ourselves and that our kind of general sense of the discoveries of the 19th and 20th century have left us feeling a bit unsponsored and adrift beyond the accident of human existence.
  • The largest single influence on any human being’s mode of thought is other human beings. So if you are surrounded by lots of terrified but wishful-thinking people who want to believe that somehow the cavalry is going to come at the last minute and that we don’t really have to look inwards and change our belief in where meaning comes from, that we will somehow be able to get over the finish line with all our stuff and that we’ll avert this disaster, as we have other kinds of disasters in the past.
  • I think what was happening to me at that time, as I was turning outward and starting to take the non-human world seriously, is my sense of meaning was shifting from something that was entirely about me and authored by me outward into this more collaborative, reciprocal, interdependent, exterior place that involved not just me but all of these other ways of being that I could make kinship with.
  • And I think I was right along with that sense that somehow we are a thing apart. We can make purpose and make meaning completely arbitrarily. It consists mostly of trying to be more in yourself, of accumulating in one form or another.
  • I can’t really be out for more than two or three miles before my head just fills with associations and ideas and scenes and character sketches. And I usually have to rush back home to keep it all in my head long enough to get it down on paper.
  • for my journey, the way to characterize this transition is from being fascinated with technologies of mastery and control and what they’re doing to us as human beings, how they’re changing what the capacities and affordances of humanity are and how we narrate ourselves, to being fascinated with technologies and sciences of interdependence and cooperation, of those sciences that increase our sense of kinship and being one of many, many neighbors.
  • And that’s an almost impossible persuasion to rouse yourself from if you don’t have allies. And I think the one hopeful thing about the present is the number of people trying to challenge that consensual understanding and break away into a new way of looking at human standing is growing.
  • And when you do subscribe to a culture like that and you are confronted with the reality of your own mortality, as I was when I was living in Stanford, that sense of stockpiling personal meaning starts to feel a little bit pointless.
  • And I just head out. I head out based on what the day has to offer. And to have that come first has really changed not only how I write, but what I’ve been writing. And I think it really shows in “Bewilderment.” It’s a totally different kind of book from my previous 12.
  • the marvelous thing about the work, which continues to get more sophisticated and continues to turn up newer and newer astonishments, is that there was odd kind of reciprocal interdependence and cooperation across the species barrier, that Douglas firs and birches were actually involved in these sharing back and forth of essential nutrients. And that’s a whole new way of looking at forest.
  • she began to see that the forests were actually wired up in very complex and identifiable ways and that there was an enormous system of resource sharing going on underground, that trees were sharing not only sugars and the hydrocarbons necessary for survival, but also secondary metabolites. And these were being passed back and forth, both symbiotically between the trees and the fungi, but also across the network to other trees so that there were actually trees in wired up, fungally-connected forests where large, dominant, healthy trees were subsidizing, as it were, trees that were injured or not in favorable positions or damaged in some way or just failing to thrive.
  • so when I was still pretty much a card-carrying member of that culture, I had this sense that to become a better person and to get ahead and to really make more of myself, I had to be as productive as possible. And that meant waking up every morning and getting 1,000 words that I was proud of. And it’s interesting that I would even settle on a quantitative target. That’s very typical for that kind of mindset that I’m talking about — 1,000 words and then you’re free, and then you can do what you want with the day.
  • there will be a threshold, as there have been for these other great social transformations that we’ve witnessed in the last couple of decades where somehow it goes from an outsider position to absolutely mainstream and common sense.
  • I am persuaded by those scholars who have showed the degree to which the concept of nature is itself an artificial construction that’s born of cultures of human separatism. I believe that everything that life does is part of the living enterprise, and that includes the construction of cities. And there is no question at all the warning that you just gave about nostalgia creating a false binary between the built world and the true natural world is itself a form of cultural isolation.
  • Religion is a technology to discipline, to discipline certain parts of the human impulse. A lot of the book revolves around the decoded neurofeedback machine, which is a very real literalization of a technology, of changing the way we think
  • one of the things I think that we have to take seriously is that we have created technologies to supercharge some parts of our natural impulse, the capitalism I think should be understood as a technology to supercharge the growth impulse, and it creates some wonders out of that and some horrors out of that.
  • richard powersSure. I base my machine on existing technology. Decoded neurofeedback is a kind of nascent field of exploration. You can read about it; it’s been publishing results for a decade. I first came across it in 2013. It involves using fMRI to record the brain activity of a human being who is learning a process, interacting with an object or engaged in a certain emotional state. That neural activity is recorded and stored as a data structure. A second subsequent human being is then also scanned in real time and fed kinds of feedback based on their own internal neural activity as determined by a kind of software analysis of their fMRI data structures.
  • And they are queued little by little to approximate, to learn how to approximate, the recorded states of the original subject. When I first read about this, I did get a little bit of a revelation. I did feel my skin pucker and think, if pushed far enough, this would be something like a telepathy conduit. It would be a first big step in answering that age-old question of what does it feel like to be something other than we are
  • in the book I simply take that basic concept and extend it, juke it up a little bit, blur the line between what the reader might think is possible right now and what they might wonder about, and maybe even introduce possibilities for this empathetic transference
  • ezra kleinOne thing I loved about the role this played in the book is that it’s highlighting its inverse. So a reader might look at this and say, wow, wouldn’t that be cool if we had a machine that could in real time change how we think and change our neural pathways and change our mental state in a particular direction? But of course, all of society is that machine,
  • Robin and Theo are in an airport. And you’ve got TVs everywhere playing the news which is to say playing a constant loop of outrage, and disaster, and calamity. And Robbie, who’s going through these neural feedback sessions during this period, turns to his dad and says, “Dad, you know how the training’s rewiring my brain? This is what is rewiring everybody else.”
  • ezra kleinI think Marshall McLuhan knew it all. I really do. Not exactly what it would look like, but his view and Postman’s view that we are creating a digital global nervous system is a way they put it, it was exactly right. A nervous system, it was such the exact right metaphor.
  • the great insight of McLuhan, to me, what now gets called the medium is the message is this idea that the way media acts upon us is not in the content it delivers. The point of Twitter is not the link that you click or even the tweet that you read; it is that the nature and structure of the Twitter system itself begins to act on your system, and you become more like it.If you watch a lot of TV, you become more like TV. If you watch a lot of Twitter, you become more like Twitter, Facebook more like Facebook. Your identities become more important to you — that the content is distraction from the medium, and the medium changes you
  • it is happening to all of us in ways that at least we are not engaging in intentionally, not at that level of how do we want to be transformed.
  • richard powersI believe that the digital neural system is now so comprehensive that the idea that you could escape it somewhere, certainly not in the Smokies, even more remotely, I think, becomes more and more laughable. Yeah, and to build on this idea of the medium being the message, not the way in which we become more like the forms and affordances of the medium is that we begin to expect that those affordances, the method in which those media are used, the physiological dependencies and castes of behavior and thought that are required to operate them and interact with them are actual — that they’re real somehow, and that we just take them into human nature and say no, this is what we’ve always wanted and we’ve simply been able to become more like our true selves.
  • Well, the warpage in our sense of time, the warpage in our sense of place, are profound. The ways in which digital feedback and the affordances of social media and all the rest have changed our expectations with regard to what we need to concentrate on, what we need to learn for ourselves, are changing profoundly.
  • If you look far enough back, you can find Socrates expressing great anxiety and suspicion about the ways in which writing is going to transform the human brain and human expectation. He was worried that somehow it was going to ruin our memories. Well, it did up to a point — nothing like the way the digital technologies have ruined our memories.
  • my tradition is Jewish, the Sabbath is a technology, is a technology to create a different relationship between the human being, and time, and growth, and productive society than you would have without the Sabbath which is framed in terms of godliness but is also a way of creating separation from the other impulses of the weak.
  • Governments are a technology, monogamy is a technology, a religiously driven technology, but now one that is culturally driven. And these things do good and they do bad. I’m not making an argument for any one of them in particular. But the idea that we would need to invent something wholly new to come up with a way to change the way human beings act is ridiculous
  • My view of the story of this era is that capitalism was one of many forces, and it has become, in many societies, functionally the only one that it was in relationship with religion, it was in relationship with more rooted communities.
  • it has become not just an economic system but a belief system, and it’s a little bit untrammeled. I’m not an anti-capitalist person, but I believe it needs countervailing forces. And my basic view is that it doesn’t have them anymore.
  • the book does introduce this kind of fable, this kind of thought experiment about the way the affordances that a new and slightly stronger technology of empathy might deflect. First of all, the story of a little boy and then the story of his father who’s scrambling to be a responsible single parent. And then, beyond that, the community of people who hear about this boy and become fascinated with him as a narrative, which again ripples outward through these digital technologies in ways that can’t be controlled or whose consequences can be foreseen.
  • I’ve talked about it before is something I’ve said is that I think a push against, functionally, materialism and want is an important weight in our society that we need. And when people say it is the way we’ll deal with climate change in the three to five year time frame, I become much more skeptical because to the point of things like the technology you have in the book with neural feedback, I do think one of the questions you have to ask is, socially and culturally, how do you move people’s minds so you can then move their politics?
  • You’re going to need something, it seems to me, outside of politics, that changes humans’ sense of themselves more fundamentally. And that takes a minute at the scale of billions.
  • richard powersWell, you are correct. And I don’t think it’s giving away any great reveal in the book to say that a reader who gets far enough into the story probably has this moment of recursive awareness where they, he or she comes to understand that what Robin is doing in this gradual training on the cast of mind of some other person is precisely what they’re doing in the act of reading the novel “Bewilderment” — by living this act of active empathy for these two characters, they are undergoing their own kind of neurofeedback.
  • The more we understand about the complexities of living systems, of organisms and the evolution of organisms, the more capable it is to feel a kind of spiritual awe. And that certainly makes it easier to have reverence for the experiment beyond me and beyond my species. I don’t think those are incommensurable or incompatible ways of knowing the world. In fact, I think to invoke one last time that Buddhist precept of interbeing, I think there is a kind of interbeing between the desire, the true selfless desire to understand the world out there through presence, care, measurement, attention, reproduction of experiment and the desire to have a spiritual affinity and shared fate with the world out there. They’re really the same project.
  • richard powersWell, sure. If we turn back to the new forestry again and researchers like Suzanne Simard who were showing the literal interconnectivity across species boundaries and the cooperation of resource sharing between different species in a forest, that is rigorous science, rigorous reproducible science. And it does participate in that central principle of practice, or collection of practices, which always requires the renunciation of personal wish and ego and prior belief in favor of empirical reproduction.
  • I’ve begun to see people beginning to build out of the humbling sciences a worldview that seems quite spiritual. And as you’re somebody who seems to me to have done that and it has changed your life, would you reflect on that a bit?
  • So much of the book is about the possibility of life beyond Earth. Tell me a bit about the role that’s playing. Why did you make the possibility of alien life in the way it might look and feel and evolve and act so central in a book about protecting and cherishing life here?
  • richard powersI’m glad that we’re slipping this in at the end because yes this framing of the book around this question of are we alone or does the universe want life it’s really important. Theo, Robin’s father, is an astrobiologist.
  • Imagine that everything happens just right so that every square inch of this place is colonized by new forms of experiments, new kinds of life. And the father trying to entertain his son with the story of this remarkable place in the sun just stopping him and saying, Dad, come on, that’s asking too much. Get real, that’s science fiction. That’s the vision that I had when I finished the book, an absolutely limitless sense of just how lucky we’ve had it here.
  • one thing I kept thinking about that didn’t make it into the final book but exists as a kind of parallel story in my own head is the father and son on some very distant planet in some very distant star, many light years from here, playing that same game. And the father saying, OK, now imagine a world that’s just the right size, and it has plate tectonics, and it has water, and it has a nearby moon to stabilize its rotation, and it has incredible security and safety from asteroids because of other large planets in the solar system.
  • they make this journey across the universe through all kinds of incubators, all kinds of petri dishes for life and the possibilities of life. And rather than answer the question — so where is everybody? — it keeps deferring the question, it keeps making that question more subtle and stranger
  • For the purposes of the book, Robin, who desperately believes in the sanctity of life beyond himself, begs his father for these nighttime, bedtime stories, and Theo gives him easy travel to other planets. Father and son going to a new planet based on the kinds of planets that Theo’s science is turning up and asking this question, what would life look like if it was able to get started here?
Javier E

Movie Review: Inside Job - Barron's - 0 views

  • On the outsize role of the GSEs and other federal agencies in high-risk mortgages, figures compiled by former Fannie Mae Chief Credit Officer Edward Pinto show that as of mid-2008, more than 70% were accounted for by the federal government in one way or another, with nearly two-thirds of that held by Fannie and Freddie.
  • As has been documented, for example, in a forthcoming book on the GSEs called Guaranteed to Fail, there was a steady increase in affordable housing mandates imposed on these enterprises by Congress, one of several reasons why they were hardly like other capitalist enterprises, but tools and beneficiaries of government.
  • I asked Ferguson why Inside Job made such brief mention of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and even then without noting that they are government-sponsored enterprises, subject to special protection by the federal government—which their creditors clearly appreciated, given the unusually low interest rates their debt commanded.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Ferguson replied that their role in subprime mortgages was not very significant, and that in any case their behavior was not much different from that of other capitalist enterprises.
  • We get no inkling that Rajan's views on what made the world riskier, as set forth in his book, veer quite radically from those of Inside Job. They include, as he has written, "the political push for easy housing credit in the United States and the lax monetary policy [by the Federal Reserve] in the years 2003-2005."
  • Rajan, author of Fault Lines, a recent book on the debacle, speaks with special authority to fans of Inside Job. Not only is he in the movie—one of the talking heads speaking wisdom about what occurred—he is accurately presented as having anticipated the meltdown in a 2005 paper called "Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?" But the things he is quoted as saying in the film are restricted to serving its themes.
  • Yet it's impossible to understand what happened without grasping the proactive role played by government. "The banking sector did not decide out of the goodness of its heart to extend mortgages to poor people," commented University of Chicago Booth School of Business Finance Professor Raghuram Rajan in a telephone interview last week. "Politicians did that, and they would have taken great umbrage if the regulator stood in the way of more housing credit."
  • THE STORY RECOUNTED in Inside Job is that principles like safety and soundness were flouted by greedy Wall Street capitalists who brought down the economy with the help of certain politicians, political appointees and corrupt academicians. Despite the attempts and desires of some, including Barney Frank, to regulate the mania, the juggernaut prevails to this day, under the presidency of Barack Obama.
  • This version of the story contains some elements of truth.
  • Text Size Regular Medium Large "A MASTERPIECE OF INVESTIGATIVE nonfiction moviemaking," wrote the film critic of the Boston Globe. "Rests its outrage on reason, research and careful argument," opined the New York Times. The "masterpiece" referred to was the recently released Inside Job, a documentary film that focuses on the causes of the 2008 financial crisis.
Javier E

The Huxleyan Warning-Postman.pdf - 1 views

  • There -are two ways by which the spirit of a culture. may be shriveled. In the first-the Orwellian_;,.;_culture becomes a prison~ In the second-the Huxleyan-culture becomes a burlesque.
  • What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate.
  • When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when· cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-tal,tc, when, in
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • short, a people become an audience and their public business a -~ vaudeville a_c~, _then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear poss1b1hty.
  • what. is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology. No Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto announced its coming. It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conve~sation. But it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance.
  • As nowhere else in the world, Americans have moved far and fast in bringing to a close the age of the slaw~moving printed word, and have granted to television sovereignty over all of their institutions.
  • Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion.
  • The problem, in any case, does not reside in what people 1 watch. The problem is in that we watch. The solution must be 1 _found in how we watch.
  • Introdu~e the printing press with movable type, and you do the same.
  • Introduce speed-of-light , transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without
  • words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.
  • there are near insurmountable difficulties for anyone who has written such a book as this, and who wishes to end it with some remedies for the affliction. In the first place, not everyone believes a cure is needed, and in the second, there probably isn't any.
  • no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are.
  • what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?
  • What is information? Or more precisely, what are iriformation? What are its various forms? What conceptions of intelligence, wisdom and learning does each form insist upon? What conceptions does each form neglect or mock? What are the main psychic effects of each form?
  • only through a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information, through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any other medium.
  • What is 'the kind of information that est facilitates thinking?
  • it is an acknowledged task of the schools to assist the young in learning how to interpret the symbols of their culture. That this task should now require that they learn how to distance themselves from their forms of information is not s6 bizarre an enterprise that we cannot hope for its inclusion in the curriculum;
  • What I suggest here as a solution is what Aldous Huxley suggested, as well.
  • The desperate answer is to rely on the only inass medium of communication that, in theory, is capable of addressing the problem: our schools.
  • in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.
Javier E

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

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

The Atheist's Belief In Medicine « The Dish - 1 views

  • Hitchens’s beliefs about his advanced cancer and its treatment were, for a man whose fame rested on his scepticism, uncharacteristically optimistic. I hesitate to use the word delusional, as he admitted that he would be very lucky to survive, but he clearly steadfastly hoped, right to the end, that his particular case of advanced cancer might lie on the sparsely populated right side of the bell-shaped curve of outcome statistics.
  • I wonder if all that medicine – which was, in fact, a form of poison – was worth it. David got ten more years, and two young children. But he also endured a disfiguring, disabling, brutal physical battering from the surgeries and chemo-sessions that tackling a tough brain tumor allow for. I say “allow for” because “required” is not the right word. What the chemo did to Christopher was beyond description – and what’s left of your body, even if the chemo works, can be extremely vulnerable to infections and diseases that can be worse than the cancer.
  • It seems odder to me for Christians to be as exercized by life-extension as the atheist. Put that down to the strange extremism of Ratzinger’s innovations on the question of “life”.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • our culture’s gradual alienation from the fact of our deaths – our distancing ourselves even from the old and infirm in ways previous cultures didn’t and couldn’t – is not, in my view a healthy thing.
  • No one should seek to die or give in to a disease they can legitimately fight. God knows how many pills I take a day to keep the virus – and all its and their side-effects at bay. But I get to live healthily and meaningfully. The way some elaborate and cutting edge treatments all but kill the patient in order to save her troubles me. It’s a loss of perspective as well as immensely expensive for the entire system.
  • these sophisticated treatments are taking healthcare money away from the young, taking up more and more of our collective healthcare resources, and extending lives only be perpetuating continuous agony and nausea and pain for the patient and devastating consequences for families and friends.
  • We will all die. We should not seek it. But we should not flee from it for ever.
  • at some point what seems to me to matter more is not the length of our lives but the content of them and the manner of our deaths.
  • At some point, medicine is a function of a social disease of modernity: the flight from our own mortality. But fleeing it does not defuse it. Only facing it does.
Javier E

Coping with Chaos in the White House - Medium - 0 views

  • I am not a professional and this is not a diagnosis. My post is not intended to persuade anyone or provide a comprehensive description of NPD. I am speaking purely from decades of dealing with NPD and sharing strategies that were helpful for me in coping and predicting behavior.
  • Here are a few things to keep in mind:
  • 1) It’s not curable and it’s barely treatable. He is who he is. There is no getting better, or learning, or adapting. He’s not going to “rise to the occasion” for more than maybe a couple hours. So just put that out of your mind.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • 2) He will say whatever feels most comfortable or good to him at any given time. He will lie a lot, and say totally different things to different people. Stop being surprised by this. While it’s important to pretend “good faith” and remind him of promises, as Bernie Sanders and others are doing, that’s for his supporters, so *they* can see the inconsistency as it comes. He won’t care. So if you’re trying to reconcile or analyze his words, don’t. It’s 100% not worth your time. Only pay attention to and address his actions.
  • 3) You can influence him by making him feel good. There are already people like Bannon who appear ready to use him for their own ends. The GOP is excited to try. Watch them, not him.
  • 4) Entitlement is a key aspect of the disorder. As we are already seeing, he will likely not observe traditional boundaries of the office. He has already stated that rules don’t apply to him. This particular attribute has huge implications for the presidency and it will be important for everyone who can to hold him to the same standards as previous presidents.
  • 5) We should expect that he only cares about himself and those he views as extensions of himself, like his children. (People with NPD often can’t understand others as fully human or distinct.) He desires accumulation of wealth and power because it fills a hole.
  • He will have no qualms *at all* about stealing everything he can from the country, and he’ll be happy to help others do so, if they make him feel good. He won’t view it as stealing but rather as something he’s entitled to do. This is likely the only thing he will intentionally accomplish.
  • 6) It’s very, very confusing for non-disordered people to experience a disordered person with NPD. While often intelligent, charismatic and charming, they do not reliably observe social conventions or demonstrate basic human empathy. It’s very common for non-disordered people to lower their own expectations and try to normalize the behavior. DO NOT DO THIS
  • 7) People with NPD often recruit helpers, referred to in the literature as “enablers” when they allow or cover for bad behavior and “flying monkeys” when they perpetrate bad behavior
  • 8) People with NPD often foster competition for sport in people they control. Expect lots of chaos, firings and recriminations. He will probably behave worst toward those closest to him, but that doesn’t mean (obviously) that his actions won’t have consequences for the rest of us. He will punish enemies.
  • 9) Gaslighting — where someone tries to convince you that the reality you’ve experienced isn’t true — is real and torturous. He will gaslight, his followers will gaslight.
  • Learn the signs and find ways to stay focused on what you know to be true. Note: it is typically not helpful to argue with people who are attempting to gaslight. You will only confuse yourself. Just walk away.
  • 10) Whenever possible, do not focus on the narcissist or give him attention. Unfortunately we can’t and shouldn’t ignore the president, but don’t circulate his tweets or laugh at him — you are enabling him and getting his word out.
kirkpatrickry

Making virtual real: How to hack human perception | The Drum - 0 views

  • Everything we do and see is real. It’s all experiential. Nobody has a dream and wakes up feeling like a victim of fraud. It really happened in the sense that we had a genuine dream. So when we talk about virtual reality, what is real and what is virtually real?
  • Suspension of disbelief, what we experienced essential in all mediums before, is not necessary in VR anymore. It’s what all prior mediums require and what VR, when done right, completely circumvents
  • Each and every facet of VR production relies on craft to properly convey an experience to the user and make it enjoyable and believable.
Javier E

Quote For The Day II « The Dish - 0 views

  • I think I’m pretty good at keeping my moral compass while recognizing that I am a product of original sin. And every morning and every night I’m taking measure of my actions against the options and possibilities available to me, understanding that there are going to be mistakes that I make
  • and that there’s going to be tragedy out there and, by occupying this office, I am part of that tragedy
  • I think we are born into this world and inherit all the grudges and rivalries and hatreds and sins of the past. But we also inherit the beauty and the joy and goodness of our forebears. And we’re on this planet a pretty short time, so that we cannot remake the world entirely during this little stretch that we have,” – president Barack Obama,
Javier E

"Breaking Bad" By Niccolo Machiavelli « The Dish - 0 views

  • If a man is truly a man through force and fraud and nerve, then Walter becomes the man he always wanted to be. He trounces every foe; he gains a huge fortune; he dies a natural death. Compared with being a high school chemistry teacher? Niccolo would scoff at the comparison. “I did it for me.”
  • Walt is consumed all along by justified resentment of the success others stole from him, and by a rage that his superior mind was out-foxed by unscrupulous colleagues. He therefore lived and died his final years for human honor – for what <img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-150262" alt="466px-Portrait_of_Niccolò_Machiavelli_by_Santi_di_Tito" src="http://sullydish.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/466px-portrait_of_niccolocc80_machiavelli_by_santi_di_tito.jpg?w=233&h=300" width="233" height="300" />Machiavelli calls virtu, a caustic, brutal inversion of Christian virtue
  • his skills were eventually proven beyond any measure in ways that would never have happened if he had never broken bad. And breaking bad cannot mean putting a limit on what you are capable of doing. What Machiavelli insisted upon was that a successful power-broker know how to be “altogether bad.”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • the cost-benefit analysis of “breaking bad” when the alternative is imminently “dying alone” is rigged in favor of the very short term, i.e. zero-sum evil. If Walt had had to weigh a long, unpredictable lifetime of unending fear and constant danger for his family and himself, he would have stopped cooking meth.
  • was he happy? Yes, but in a way that never really reflects any inner peace. He is happy in a way that all millionaires and tyrants are happy.
  • Machiavelli differs from later realists like Hobbes—and more contemporary “neorealists” like the late Kenneth Waltz—in recognizing that human agency matters as much as the structural fact of international anarchy in determining both foreign policy behavior and ultimate outcomes in world politics.
  • It should be taught because it really does convey the egoist appeal of evil, of acting ruthlessly in the world
  • The benefits only work if your life is nasty, brutish and short. The costs are seen in the exhausted, broken eyes of Skyler, the betrayal of an only painfully faithful son, the murder of a brother-in-law, the grisly massacre of dozens, the endless nervous need to be on the alert, to run and hide and lie and lie and lie again, until life itself becomes merely a means to achieve temporary security.
  • Breaking Bad should be taught alongside Machiavelli – as a riveting companion piece.
  • a leader’s choices can have a pivotal impact on politics, both domestic and international.
  • Though fortune be capricious and history contingent, the able leader may shape his fate and that of his state through the exercise of virtu. This is not to be mistaken for “virtue”, as defined by Christian moral teaching (implying integrity, charity, humility, and the like). Rather, it denotes the human qualities prized in classical antiquity, including knowledge, courage, cunning, pride, and strength.
Javier E

Book Club: A Guide To Living « The Dish - 0 views

  • He proves nothing that he doesn’t simultaneously subvert a little; he makes no over-arching argument about the way humans must live; he has no logician’s architecture or religious doctrine. He slips past all those familiar means of telling other people what’s good for them, and simply explains what has worked for him and others and leaves the reader empowered to forge her own future
  • You can see its eccentric power by considering the alternative ways of doing what Montaigne was doing. Think of contemporary self-help books – and all the fake certainty and rigid formulae they contain. Or think of a hideous idea like “the purpose-driven life” in which everything must be forced into the box of divine guidance in order to really live at all. Think of the stringency of Christian disciplines – say, the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola – and marvel at how Montaigne offers an entirely different and less compelling way to live. Think of the rigidity of Muslim practice and notice how much lee-way Montaigne gives to sin
  • This is a non-philosophical philosophy. It is a theory of practical life as told through one man’s random and yet not-so-random reflections on his time on earth. And it is shot through with doubt. Even the maxims that Montaigne embraces for living are edged with those critical elements of Montaigne’s thought that say “as far as I know”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Is this enough? Or is it rather a capitulation to relativism, a manifesto for political quietism, a worldview that treats injustice as something to be abhorred but not constantly fought against? This might be seen as the core progressive objection to the way of Montaigne. Or is his sensibility in an age of religious terror and violence and fanaticism the only ultimate solution we have?
  • here’s what we do know. We are fallible beings; we have nothing but provisional knowledge; and we will die. And this is enough. This does not mean we should give up inquiring or seeking to understand. Skepticism is not nihilism. It doesn’t posit that there is no truth; it merely notes that if truth exists, it is inherently beyond our ultimate grasp. And accepting those limits is the first step toward sanity, toward getting on with life. This is what I mean by conservatism.
  • you can find in philosophy any number of clues about how to live; you can even construct them into an ideology that explains all of human life and society – like Marxism or free market fundamentalism or a Nietzschean will to power. But as each totalist system broke down upon my further inspection, I found myself returning to Montaigne and the tradition of skepticism he represents
  • If I were to single out one theme of Montaigne’s work that has stuck with me, it would be this staring of death in the face, early and often, and never flinching. It is what our culture refuses to do much of the time, thereby disempowering us in the face of our human challenges.
Javier E

The World Is Yours, the World Is Mine - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • History is often held hostage by the highest bidder — whoever gets to tell the story ends up defining what happened. What happened in 2014? What mattered in 2014? It depends whom you ask.
  • Historical narratives recount political, economic or social events, but rarely tell stories of the everyday. The mundane nuances of life are often ignored precisely because they are so personal. But private stories are usually the ones that we connect with most
  • Modes of storytelling like painting and rap allow us to engage with those personal stories, becoming the vehicles through which history passes.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • For years, the form had been ignored by many Pakistani artists. I found it ripe with potential — to change its status and its narrative and to deconstruct its stereotypes. What others saw as enslavement to tradition, I recognized as a path to expanding the medium from within, embracing the complexities of craft and rigor in order to open up possibilities for dialogue.
  • My interest in juxtaposing hip-hop and Indo-Persian miniature painting, the primary medium through which I have told stories, is in taking these two disparate narrative forms and letting the dissonance find a detour.
  • Much in the way that hip-hop’s place in popular culture was diminishing by the time Nas took it up in the early 1990s, Indo-Persian miniature painting fell from relevance in Pakistani culture. The practice shifted so dramatically after the fall of the Mughal Empire and the rise of colonial rule in South Asia during the 19th century that when I began engaging with the miniature in my work in the late 1980s and early ’90s at the National College of Arts in Lahore, it was regarded as tourist kitsch and derided as a craft technique.
  • My work over the past 20 years has both borrowed and departed from traditional modes of miniature painting. One of these elements, the hair of Gopis — the female consorts of the Hindu god Krishna — appears in this painting, circling around the central axis. Over the past 15 years, I have been experimenting by divorcing their signature hairstyles from the rest of their bodies as a means of identifying them. The Gopi hair, in its many transformed and recontextualized iterations, takes on the appearance of bats, particles or elements of a moving mass. In this painting, the Gopis swirl around Africa and move outward. In their clusters around the central glowing orb of Africa, the Gopis coalesce and overlap, suggesting a symbol that became ubiquitous in 2014: the biohazard sign.
  • My process is driven by my interest in exploring and rediscovering cultural and political boundaries, and using that space to create new frameworks for dialogue and visual narrative. Contemporaneity is about remaining relevant by challenging the status quo, not by clinging to past successes. This is at odds with the standards set up in the worlds of commercial art and music, which are more interested in branding and often hold an artist hostage to one idea or form.
Javier E

The Tech Industry's Psychological War on Kids - Member Feature Stories - Medium - 0 views

  • she cried, “They took my f***ing phone!” Attempting to engage Kelly in conversation, I asked her what she liked about her phone and social media. “They make me happy,” she replied.
  • Even though they were loving and involved parents, Kelly’s mom couldn’t help feeling that they’d failed their daughter and must have done something terribly wrong that led to her problems.
  • My practice as a child and adolescent psychologist is filled with families like Kelly’s. These parents say their kids’ extreme overuse of phones, video games, and social media is the most difficult parenting issue they face — and, in many cases, is tearing the family apart.
  • ...88 more annotations...
  • What none of these parents understand is that their children’s and teens’ destructive obsession with technology is the predictable consequence of a virtually unrecognized merger between the tech industry and psychology.
  • Dr. B.J. Fogg, is a psychologist and the father of persuasive technology, a discipline in which digital machines and apps — including smartphones, social media, and video games — are configured to alter human thoughts and behaviors. As the lab’s website boldly proclaims: “Machines designed to change humans.”
  • These parents have no idea that lurking behind their kids’ screens and phones are a multitude of psychologists, neuroscientists, and social science experts who use their knowledge of psychological vulnerabilities to devise products that capture kids’ attention for the sake of industry profit.
  • psychology — a discipline that we associate with healing — is now being used as a weapon against children.
  • This alliance pairs the consumer tech industry’s immense wealth with the most sophisticated psychological research, making it possible to develop social media, video games, and phones with drug-like power to seduce young users.
  • Likewise, social media companies use persuasive design to prey on the age-appropriate desire for preteen and teen kids, especially girls, to be socially successful. This drive is built into our DNA, since real-world relational skills have fostered human evolution.
  • Called “the millionaire maker,” Fogg has groomed former students who have used his methods to develop technologies that now consume kids’ lives. As he recently touted on his personal website, “My students often do groundbreaking projects, and they continue having impact in the real world after they leave Stanford… For example, Instagram has influenced the behavior of over 800 million people. The co-founder was a student of mine.”
  • Persuasive technology (also called persuasive design) works by deliberately creating digital environments that users feel fulfill their basic human drives — to be social or obtain goals — better than real-world alternatives.
  • Kids spend countless hours in social media and video game environments in pursuit of likes, “friends,” game points, and levels — because it’s stimulating, they believe that this makes them happy and successful, and they find it easier than doing the difficult but developmentally important activities of childhood.
  • While persuasion techniques work well on adults, they are particularly effective at influencing the still-maturing child and teen brain.
  • “Video games, better than anything else in our culture, deliver rewards to people, especially teenage boys,” says Fogg. “Teenage boys are wired to seek competency. To master our world and get better at stuff. Video games, in dishing out rewards, can convey to people that their competency is growing, you can get better at something second by second.”
  • it’s persuasive design that’s helped convince this generation of boys they are gaining “competency” by spending countless hours on game sites, when the sad reality is they are locked away in their rooms gaming, ignoring school, and not developing the real-world competencies that colleges and employers demand.
  • Persuasive technologies work because of their apparent triggering of the release of dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter involved in reward, attention, and addiction.
  • As she says, “If you don’t get 100 ‘likes,’ you make other people share it so you get 100…. Or else you just get upset. Everyone wants to get the most ‘likes.’ It’s like a popularity contest.”
  • there are costs to Casey’s phone obsession, noting that the “girl’s phone, be it Facebook, Instagram or iMessage, is constantly pulling her away from her homework, sleep, or conversations with her family.
  • Casey says she wishes she could put her phone down. But she can’t. “I’ll wake up in the morning and go on Facebook just… because,” she says. “It’s not like I want to or I don’t. I just go on it. I’m, like, forced to. I don’t know why. I need to. Facebook takes up my whole life.”
  • B.J. Fogg may not be a household name, but Fortune Magazine calls him a “New Guru You Should Know,” and his research is driving a worldwide legion of user experience (UX) designers who utilize and expand upon his models of persuasive design.
  • “No one has perhaps been as influential on the current generation of user experience (UX) designers as Stanford researcher B.J. Fogg.”
  • the core of UX research is about using psychology to take advantage of our human vulnerabilities.
  • As Fogg is quoted in Kosner’s Forbes article, “Facebook, Twitter, Google, you name it, these companies have been using computers to influence our behavior.” However, the driving force behind behavior change isn’t computers. “The missing link isn’t the technology, it’s psychology,” says Fogg.
  • UX researchers not only follow Fogg’s design model, but also his apparent tendency to overlook the broader implications of persuasive design. They focus on the task at hand, building digital machines and apps that better demand users’ attention, compel users to return again and again, and grow businesses’ bottom line.
  • the “Fogg Behavior Model” is a well-tested method to change behavior and, in its simplified form, involves three primary factors: motivation, ability, and triggers.
  • “We can now create machines that can change what people think and what people do, and the machines can do that autonomously.”
  • Regarding ability, Fogg suggests that digital products should be made so that users don’t have to “think hard.” Hence, social networks are designed for ease of use
  • Finally, Fogg says that potential users need to be triggered to use a site. This is accomplished by a myriad of digital tricks, including the sending of incessant notifications
  • moral questions about the impact of turning persuasive techniques on children and teens are not being asked. For example, should the fear of social rejection be used to compel kids to compulsively use social media? Is it okay to lure kids away from school tasks that demand a strong mental effort so they can spend their lives on social networks or playing video games that don’t make them think much at all?
  • Describing how his formula is effective at getting people to use a social network, the psychologist says in an academic paper that a key motivator is users’ desire for “social acceptance,” although he says an even more powerful motivator is the desire “to avoid being socially rejected.”
  • the startup Dopamine Labs boasts about its use of persuasive techniques to increase profits: “Connect your app to our Persuasive AI [Artificial Intelligence] and lift your engagement and revenue up to 30% by giving your users our perfect bursts of dopamine,” and “A burst of Dopamine doesn’t just feel good: it’s proven to re-wire user behavior and habits.”
  • Ramsay Brown, the founder of Dopamine Labs, says in a KQED Science article, “We have now developed a rigorous technology of the human mind, and that is both exciting and terrifying. We have the ability to twiddle some knobs in a machine learning dashboard we build, and around the world hundreds of thousands of people are going to quietly change their behavior in ways that, unbeknownst to them, feel second-nature but are really by design.”
  • Programmers call this “brain hacking,” as it compels users to spend more time on sites even though they mistakenly believe it’s strictly due to their own conscious choices.
  • Banks of computers employ AI to “learn” which of a countless number of persuasive design elements will keep users hooked
  • A persuasion profile of a particular user’s unique vulnerabilities is developed in real time and exploited to keep users on the site and make them return again and again for longer periods of time. This drives up profits for consumer internet companies whose revenue is based on how much their products are used.
  • “The leaders of Internet companies face an interesting, if also morally questionable, imperative: either they hijack neuroscience to gain market share and make large profits, or they let competitors do that and run away with the market.”
  • Social media and video game companies believe they are compelled to use persuasive technology in the arms race for attention, profits, and survival.
  • Children’s well-being is not part of the decision calculus.
  • one breakthrough occurred in 2017 when Facebook documents were leaked to The Australian. The internal report crafted by Facebook executives showed the social network boasting to advertisers that by monitoring posts, interactions, and photos in real time, the network is able to track when teens feel “insecure,” “worthless,” “stressed,” “useless” and a “failure.”
  • The report also bragged about Facebook’s ability to micro-target ads down to “moments when young people need a confidence boost.”
  • These design techniques provide tech corporations a window into kids’ hearts and minds to measure their particular vulnerabilities, which can then be used to control their behavior as consumers. This isn’t some strange future… this is now.
  • The official tech industry line is that persuasive technologies are used to make products more engaging and enjoyable. But the revelations of industry insiders can reveal darker motives.
  • Revealing the hard science behind persuasive technology, Hopson says, “This is not to say that players are the same as rats, but that there are general rules of learning which apply equally to both.”
  • After penning the paper, Hopson was hired by Microsoft, where he helped lead the development of the Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online gaming system
  • “If game designers are going to pull a person away from every other voluntary social activity or hobby or pastime, they’re going to have to engage that person at a very deep level in every possible way they can.”
  • This is the dominant effect of persuasive design today: building video games and social media products so compelling that they pull users away from the real world to spend their lives in for-profit domains.
  • Persuasive technologies are reshaping childhood, luring kids away from family and schoolwork to spend more and more of their lives sitting before screens and phones.
  • “Since we’ve figured to some extent how these pieces of the brain that handle addiction are working, people have figured out how to juice them further and how to bake that information into apps.”
  • Today, persuasive design is likely distracting adults from driving safely, productive work, and engaging with their own children — all matters which need urgent attention
  • Still, because the child and adolescent brain is more easily controlled than the adult mind, the use of persuasive design is having a much more hurtful impact on kids.
  • But to engage in a pursuit at the expense of important real-world activities is a core element of addiction.
  • younger U.S. children now spend 5 ½ hours each day with entertainment technologies, including video games, social media, and online videos.
  • Even more, the average teen now spends an incredible 8 hours each day playing with screens and phones
  • U.S. kids only spend 16 minutes each day using the computer at home for school.
  • Quietly, using screens and phones for entertainment has become the dominant activity of childhood.
  • Younger kids spend more time engaging with entertainment screens than they do in school
  • teens spend even more time playing with screens and phones than they do sleeping
  • kids are so taken with their phones and other devices that they have turned their backs to the world around them.
  • many children are missing out on real-life engagement with family and school — the two cornerstones of childhood that lead them to grow up happy and successful
  • persuasive technologies are pulling kids into often toxic digital environments
  • A too frequent experience for many is being cyberbullied, which increases their risk of skipping school and considering suicide.
  • And there is growing recognition of the negative impact of FOMO, or the fear of missing out, as kids spend their social media lives watching a parade of peers who look to be having a great time without them, feeding their feelings of loneliness and being less than.
  • The combined effects of the displacement of vital childhood activities and exposure to unhealthy online environments is wrecking a generation.
  • as the typical age when kids get their first smartphone has fallen to 10, it’s no surprise to see serious psychiatric problems — once the domain of teens — now enveloping young kids
  • Self-inflicted injuries, such as cutting, that are serious enough to require treatment in an emergency room, have increased dramatically in 10- to 14-year-old girls, up 19% per year since 2009.
  • While girls are pulled onto smartphones and social media, boys are more likely to be seduced into the world of video gaming, often at the expense of a focus on school
  • it’s no surprise to see this generation of boys struggling to make it to college: a full 57% of college admissions are granted to young women compared with only 43% to young men.
  • Economists working with the National Bureau of Economic Research recently demonstrated how many young U.S. men are choosing to play video games rather than join the workforce.
  • The destructive forces of psychology deployed by the tech industry are making a greater impact on kids than the positive uses of psychology by mental health providers and child advocates. Put plainly, the science of psychology is hurting kids more than helping them.
  • Hope for this wired generation has seemed dim until recently, when a surprising group has come forward to criticize the tech industry’s use of psychological manipulation: tech executives
  • Tristan Harris, formerly a design ethicist at Google, has led the way by unmasking the industry’s use of persuasive design. Interviewed in The Economist’s 1843 magazine, he says, “The job of these companies is to hook people, and they do that by hijacking our psychological vulnerabilities.”
  • Marc Benioff, CEO of the cloud computing company Salesforce, is one of the voices calling for the regulation of social media companies because of their potential to addict children. He says that just as the cigarette industry has been regulated, so too should social media companies. “I think that, for sure, technology has addictive qualities that we have to address, and that product designers are working to make those products more addictive, and we need to rein that back as much as possible,”
  • “If there’s an unfair advantage or things that are out there that are not understood by parents, then the government’s got to come forward and illuminate that.”
  • Since millions of parents, for example the parents of my patient Kelly, have absolutely no idea that devices are used to hijack their children’s minds and lives, regulation of such practices is the right thing to do.
  • Another improbable group to speak out on behalf of children is tech investors.
  • How has the consumer tech industry responded to these calls for change? By going even lower.
  • Facebook recently launched Messenger Kids, a social media app that will reach kids as young as five years old. Suggestive that harmful persuasive design is now honing in on very young children is the declaration of Messenger Kids Art Director, Shiu Pei Luu, “We want to help foster communication [on Facebook] and make that the most exciting thing you want to be doing.”
  • the American Psychological Association (APA) — which is tasked with protecting children and families from harmful psychological practices — has been essentially silent on the matter
  • APA Ethical Standards require the profession to make efforts to correct the “misuse” of the work of psychologists, which would include the application of B.J. Fogg’s persuasive technologies to influence children against their best interests
  • Manipulating children for profit without their own or parents’ consent, and driving kids to spend more time on devices that contribute to emotional and academic problems is the embodiment of unethical psychological practice.
  • “Never before in history have basically 50 mostly men, mostly 20–35, mostly white engineer designer types within 50 miles of where we are right now [Silicon Valley], had control of what a billion people think and do.”
  • Some may argue that it’s the parents’ responsibility to protect their children from tech industry deception. However, parents have no idea of the powerful forces aligned against them, nor do they know how technologies are developed with drug-like effects to capture kids’ minds
  • Others will claim that nothing should be done because the intention behind persuasive design is to build better products, not manipulate kids
  • similar circumstances exist in the cigarette industry, as tobacco companies have as their intention profiting from the sale of their product, not hurting children. Nonetheless, because cigarettes and persuasive design predictably harm children, actions should be taken to protect kids from their effects.
  • in a 1998 academic paper, Fogg describes what should happen if things go wrong, saying, if persuasive technologies are “deemed harmful or questionable in some regard, a researcher should then either take social action or advocate that others do so.”
  • I suggest turning to President John F. Kennedy’s prescient guidance: He said that technology “has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man.”
  • The APA should begin by demanding that the tech industry’s behavioral manipulation techniques be brought out of the shadows and exposed to the light of public awareness
  • Changes should be made in the APA’s Ethics Code to specifically prevent psychologists from manipulating children using digital machines, especially if such influence is known to pose risks to their well-being.
  • Moreover, the APA should follow its Ethical Standards by making strong efforts to correct the misuse of psychological persuasion by the tech industry and by user experience designers outside the field of psychology.
  • It should join with tech executives who are demanding that persuasive design in kids’ tech products be regulated
  • The APA also should make its powerful voice heard amongst the growing chorus calling out tech companies that intentionally exploit children’s vulnerabilities.
Javier E

David Hare: A Political and Personal Playwright - Lantern Theater Company: Searchlight ... - 0 views

  • The Vertical Hour was Hare’s next play after Stuff Happens, making the global machinations of the Iraq War and the related decisions and consequences intensely personal. This, too, is a hallmark of Hare’s work. His plays are populated by damaged idealists trying to find a way to live right in a world of broken and corrupt institutions, but they are never content to offer just one view — even if the playwright himself passionately holds one opinion.
  • Working to bridge the political left and right, or at least to locate the places where they overlap, is a core component of his work, and specifically of The Vertical Hour
  • “I was very interested in the position of the pro-war liberals. They had a very strong moral case for intervention. It was part of something that had been building up over the previous 10 or 15 years in Africa, in Yugoslavia, where a whole lot of well-intentioned liberals came to believe that the West had a moral duty to intervene when there was great deal of suffering. Although I was against the war, I could see that there was a virtuous case.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Giving all sides a hearing is not just a political tactic in his plays, though; it is essential to crafting work that highlights contemporary issues through finely realized and deeply felt characters
  • Hare’s work, populated by those who want to help, those who want to exploit broken institutions, and those caught in the morass of contemporary life, aims to make a tangible difference in those lives and institutions.
  • Beckett said that famous thing, the number of tears in the world is constant, meaning, whatever you do, there is such a thing called the human condition and it’s always the same,” Hare said to NPR.
  • “I don’t believe that. I believe things are very different in one country to another and at one time and another, and you can actually relieve the number of tears in the world. And you can make them less and that the job of making them less is a noble job and something worth undertaking.”
Javier E

Guns, Germs, and The Future of Us - Wyatt Edward Gates - Medium - 0 views

  • ared Daimond’s seminal work Guns, Germs, and Steel has many flaws, but it provides some useful anecdotes about how narrative and consciousness shapes human organization progresses
  • Past critical transformations of thought can help us see how we need to transform ourselves now in order to survive the future.
  • something both ancient and immediate: the way we define who is in our tribe plays a critical role in what kind of social organization we can build and maintain
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • You can’t have a blood family of 300 million, nor even a large enough one to do things like build an agrarian society
  • In order to have large cities built on agrarianism it was necessary not only to innovate technology, but to transform our very consciousness as it related to how we defined what a person was, both ourselves and others
  • Instead of needing to have real, flowing blood with common DNA from birth, it was merely necessary to be among the same abstract family organized under a king of some kind — a kind of stand in for the father or patriarch. We developed law and law enforcement as abstract disembodied voices of the father. This allowed total strangers without any family ties to interact in the same society in a constructive and organized way. Thus: civilization as we know it
  • Those ancient polities have developed finally into the Nation, a kind of tribe so fully abstracted that you can be of any blood and language and religion and still function within it.
  • So, too, are all other forms of human separation — and the opposition and conflicts they spawn — illusory in nature. We moved beyond blood, but then it was language or religion or fealty that made it impossible to work together, and we warred over that
  • we’re told these borders mean everything, that they are real and urgent and demand constant sacrifice to maintain.
  • why is that border there? Why borders?
  • We’re stuck in a mode of thinking that’s no longer sensible. There isn’t a reason for borders. There never really was, but now more than ever we have no utility for them, no need for them
  • What humanity has to do is wake up to the reality of post-tribalism. This means seeing through all these invented borders to the truth that we are all people, we are all fundamentally the same, and we can all learn to live with one another.
  • It was the idea of necessary conflict based on blood that preceded the fights that appeared to justify the belief in that blood-based conflict.
  • Nations have saturated the entire globe. There are no more frontiers. It’s all Nations butting up against one another.
  • We are all people of a similar nature and we do have the option to relate to one another as people for the sake of saving our shared homes and futures. We all hunger and thirst and become lonely, we all laugh and weep in the same language. Stripped of confounding symbols we are undivided.
  • There are a lot of people upset about the illusion of borders. They want a different reality, one in which there are Good Tribes (their tribe) and Bad Tribes (all the other ones).
  • but the world is already so mixed together they can’t draw those borders anymore. Hence: fascism.
  • There are no firm foundations for defining this tribe, however, so he’s left to cobble together some kind of ad hoc notion of in- and out-group. Like a magpie he collects ways of dividing people as appeals to his caprice: race, sex, Nation, etc., but there’s no greater sense to it, so it’s all arbitrary, all a mess.
  • No amount of magical thinking from conservatives can change the reality of globalism, however; what one Nation does to pollute will affect us all, and that is according to the laws of physics. No political movement can change those physics. We have to adapt or perish.
  • a key part of it is a simple lack of imagination. He just doesn’t realize there’s an option to not have borders, because his entire consciousness is married to the idea of of-me and not-of-me, Us and Them, and if there is no Them there can’t be an Us, and therefore life stops making sense
  • What has to be true if there are no tribes? We have no need to discriminate among who we may love. Loving and caring for all people as if they were blood family is the path forward
  • There needs to be a new story for us to share. It’s not enough to stop believing in the old way of borders, we have to actively seek out a new way of thinking and speaking and living that reflects the world as it is and as it can be.
  • there are others who have more tangible investments in borders: Those who have grown fat off the conflicts driven by these invented borders don’t want us to see how pointless it all is. These billionaires and presidents and kings want us to keep fighting against one another over the borders they so lazily define because it gives them a means of power and control.
  • We have to be ready for their opposition, however. They’ll do what they can to force us to act as if their borders are real. We don’t need to listen, though we do need to be ready to sacrifice.
  • Without a globally-coordinated response we can’t resolve a globally-driven problem such as climate change. If we can grant the humanity of all people we can start to imagine ways of relating to one another that aren’t opposed and antagonistic, but which are cooperative and aimed at harmony.
  • This transformation of consciousness must happen in our own hearts and minds before it can happen in concert.
  • the Nation has already been shown to be unnecessary because of social globalism. Pick a major city on earth and you’ll find every kind of person living together in peace! Not perfect peace, but not constant and unavoidable war, and that is what counts.
  • We can’t keep pretending as if borders matter when we can so clearly see that they don’t, but we can’t just have no story at all, there must be a way of contextualizing a future without borders. I don’t know what that story is, exactly, but I believe it is something like love writ large. Once we’re ready to start telling it we can start living it.
1 - 20 of 97 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page