Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged movement

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
27More

Book review - The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity | The Inquisitive Biolo... - 0 views

inquisitivebiologist.com/...hing-a-new-history-of-humanity book review history big history anthropology archaeology inequality slavery research bias psychology
shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Every few years, it seems, there is a new bestselling Big History book. And not infrequently, they have rather grandiose titles.
  • , I hope to convince you why I think this book will stand the test of time better.
  • First, rather than one author’s pet theory, The Dawn of Everything is the brainchild of two outspoken writers: anthropologist David Graeber (a figurehead in the Occupy Wall Street movement and author of e.g. Bullshit Jobs) and archaeologist David Wengrow (author of e.g. What Makes Civilization?). I expect a large part of their decade-long collaboration consisted of shooting holes in each other’s arguments
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Colonisation exposed us to new ideas that shocked and confused us. Graeber & Wengrow focus on the French coming into contact with Native Americans in Canada, and in particular on Wendat Confederacy philosopher–statesman Kandiaronk as an example of European traders, missionaries, and intellectuals debating with, and being criticized by indigenous people. Historians have downplayed how much these encounters shaped Enlightenment ideas.
  • this thought-provoking book is armed to the teeth with fascinating ideas and interpretations that go against mainstream thinking
  • ather than yet another history book telling you how humanity got here, they take their respective disciplines to task for dealing in myths.
  • Its legacy, shaped via several iterations, is the modern textbook narrative: hunter-gathering was replaced by pastoralism and then farming; the agricultural revolution resulted in larger populations producing material surpluses; these allowed for specialist occupations but also needed bureaucracies to share and administer them to everyone; and this top-down control led to today’s nation states. Ta-daa!
  • this simplistic tale of progress ignores and downplays that there was nothing linear or inevitable about where we have ended up.
  • ake agriculture. Rather than humans enthusiastically entering into what Harari in Sapiens called a Faustian bargain with crops, there were many pathways and responses
  • Experiments show that plant domestication could have been achieved in as little as 20–30 years, so the fact that cereal domestication here took some 3,000 years questions the notion of an agricultural “revolution”. Lastly, this book includes many examples of areas where agriculture was purposefully rejected. Designating such times and places as “pre-agricultural” is misleading, write the authors, they were anti-agricultural.
  • The idea that agriculture led to large states similarly needs revision
  • correlation is not causation, and some 15–20 additional centres of domestication have since been identified that followed different paths. Some cities have previously remained hidden in the sediments of ancient river deltas until revealed by modern remote-sensing technology.
  • “extensive agriculture may thus have been an outcome, not a cause, of urbanization”
  • And cities did not automatically imply social stratification. The Dawn of Everything fascinates with its numerous examples of large settlements without ruling classes, such as Ukrainian mega-sites, the Harappan civilization, or Mexican city-states.
  • These instead relied on collective decision-making through assemblies or councils, which questions some of the assumptions of evolutionary psychology about scale: that larger human groups require complex (i.e. hierarchical) systems to organize them.
  • e what is staring them in the face
  • humans have always been very capable of consciously experimenting with different social arrangements. And—this is rarely acknowledged—they did so on a seasonal basis, spending e.g. part of the year settled in large communal groups under a leader, and another part as small, independently roving bands.
  • Throughout, Graeber & Wengrow convincingly argue that the only thing we can say about our ancestors is that “there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alteration […] If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements […] maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?
  • Next to criticism, the authors put out some interesting ideas of their own, of which I want to quickly highlight two.
  • The first is that some of the observed variations in social arrangements resulted from schismogenesis. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined this term in the 1930s to describe how people define themselves against or in opposition to others, adopting behaviours and attitudes that are different.
  • The second idea is that states can be described in terms of three elementary forms of domination: control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma, which express themselves as sovereignty, administration, and competitive politics.
  • Our current states combine these three, and thus we have state-endorsed violence in the form of law enforcement and armies, bureaucracy, and the popularity contests we call elections in some countries, and monarchs, oligarchs, or tyrants in other countries. But looking at history, there is no reason why this should be and the authors provide examples of societies that showed only one or two such forms of control
  • Asking which past society most resembles today’s is the wrong question to ask. It risks slipping into an exercise in retrofitting, “which makes us scour the ancient world for embryonic versions of our modern nation states”
  • I have left unmentioned several other topics: the overlooked role of women, the legacy of Rousseau’s and Hobbes’s ideas, the origins of inequality and the flawed assumptions hiding behind that question
  • There are so many historical details and delights hiding between these covers that I was thoroughly enthralle
  • If you have any interest in big history, archaeology, or anthropology, this book is indispensable. I am confident that the questions and critiques raised here will remain relevant for a long time to come.
  • I was particularly impressed by the in-depth critique by worbsintowords on his YouTube channel What is Politics? of (so far) five videos
11More

Book Review: 'Life Is Hard,' by Kieran Setiya - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ife-is-hard-kieran-setiya.html life phiosophy suffering book review psychology happiness success
shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • “Life Is Hard” pushes back against many platitudes of contemporary American self-improvement culture. Setiya is no friend to positive thinking — at best, it requires self-deception, and at worst, such glass-half-full optimism can be cruel to those whose pain we refuse to recognize.
  • Another theory Setiya challenges is the idea that happiness should be life’s primary pursuit. Instead, he argues that we should try to live well within our limits, even if this sometimes means acknowledging difficult truths.
  • If you really consider “happiness” in its everyday sense — a feeling of contentment and pleasure — its desirability is complicated; we can certainly be made to feel good by ignoring injustice, wars, climate change or the hardships of aging. But we cannot live meaningfully that way.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • what does living well mean in practice? To Setiya, it lies in embracing one of the many possible “good-enough lives” instead of aching for a perfect one
  • Setiya’s approach blends empathy with common sense. True, a person who is blind or lacks full movement may not be able to enjoy certain pleasures — at least, in the typical way. And suffering injury can be traumatic. But none of us can fit everything worth doing into one lifetime. Our possibilities and our choices are always limited, and we can live fully within those limits.
  • he invites the reader to join him as he looks at life’s challenges — loneliness, injustice, grief — and in turning them over to examine every angle. Sometimes these twists make it difficult to grasp his ultimate point; in his discussion of the potential extinction of human beings, for instance, Setiya argues movingly that it is hard to find meaning in our actions without the promise of future societies who will enjoy the result
  • The golden thread running through “Life Is Hard” is Setiya’s belief in the value of well-directed attention. Pain, as much as we wish to avoid it, forces us to remember that we are indelibly connected to our bodies.
  • Listening carefully, whether to good friends or to strangers on a bus, can help us feel less lonely. “Close reading” other people, trying as hard as possible to see them in their full humanity, is a small step toward a more just world. By cultivating our sensitivity to ourselves and to others, we escape another destructive modern myth: that we are separate from other people, and that we can live well without caring for them.
  • Mindfulness is also Setiya’s answer to the threat of personal failure. If we can teach ourselves to notice all the splendid, varied incidents of our lives, he claims, we are much less likely to brand ourselves with a single label, winner or loser.
  • He encourages readers to abandon simple narratives about success over the course of a lifetime. I suspect this is why Setiya so often finds his conclusions in poetry, not in philosophy: The experience of suffering leads to messy, counterintuitive truths.
  • “Life Is Hard” is a humane consolation for challenging times. Reading it is like speaking with a thoughtful friend who never tells you to cheer up, but, by offering gentle companionship and a change of perspective, makes you feel better anyway.
11More

Yuval Noah Harari paints a grim picture of the AI age, roots for safety checks | Techno... - 0 views

indianexpress.com/...-picture-of-the-ai-age-8582825 AI human civilization language threat intimacy democracy social media psychology safety
shared by Javier E on 17 May 23 - No Cached
  • Yuval Noah Harari, known for the acclaimed non-fiction book Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, in his latest article in The Economist, has said that artificial intelligence has “hacked” the operating system of human civilization
  • he said that the newly emerged AI tools in recent years could threaten the survival of human civilization from an “unexpected direction.”
  • He demonstrated how AI could impact culture by talking about language, which is integral to human culture. “Language is the stuff almost all human culture is made of. Human rights, for example, aren’t inscribed in our DNA. Rather, they are cultural artifacts we created by telling stories and writing laws. Gods aren’t physical realities. Rather, they are cultural artifacts we created by inventing myths and writing scriptures,” wrote Harari.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • He stated that democracy is also a language that dwells on meaningful conversations, and when AI hacks language it could also destroy democracy.
  • The 47-year-old wrote that the biggest challenge of the AI age was not the creation of intelligent tools but striking a collaboration between humans and machines.
  • To highlight the extent of how AI-driven misinformation can change the course of events, Harari touched upon the cult QAnon, a political movement affiliated with the far-right in the US. QAnon disseminated misinformation via “Q drops” that were seen as sacred by followers.
  • Harari also shed light on how AI could form intimate relationships with people and influence their decisions. “Through its mastery of language, AI could even form intimate relationships with people and use the power of intimacy to change our opinions and worldviews,” he wrote. To demonstrate this, he cited the example of Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer who lost his job after publicly claiming that the AI chatbot LaMDA had become sentient. According to the historian, the controversial claim cost Lemoine his job. He asked if AI can influence people to risk their jobs, what else could it induce them to do?
  • Harari also said that intimacy was an effective weapon in the political battle of minds and hearts. He said that in the past few years, social media has become a battleground for controlling human attention, and the new generation of AI can convince people to vote for a particular politician or buy a certain product.
  • In his bid to call attention to the need to regulate AI technology, Harari said that the first regulation should be to make it mandatory for AI to disclose that it is an AI. He said it was important to put a halt on ‘irresponsible deployment’ of AI tools in the public domain, and regulating it before it regulates us.
  • The author also shed light on the fact that how the current social and political systems are incapable of dealing with the challenges posed by AI. Harari emphasised the need to have an ethical framework to respond to challenges posed by AI.
  • He argued that while GPT-3 had made remarkable progress, it was far from replacing human interactions
8More

DeSantis's Revolutionary Defense of the Classics - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...eo-caesar-great-books-275268d9 classics defense western civilization learning history Great Books knowledge bias education
shared by Javier E on 13 May 23 - No Cached
  • Gov. Ron DeSantis just gave a welcome boost to the classical-education movement. He signed legislation allowing high-school students to qualify for Bright Futures scholarships, a state fund for college education, by submitting scores from the Classic Learning Test instead of the SAT alone.
  • the greatest works of civilization have always been about spurring—not preventing—radical change. They teach us about the revolutionary ideas of the past and help us better understand the present
  • The richest ideas of what it means to be human are those that have stood the test of time.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Many of the seminal works of literature, history, philosophy, science and theology were revolutionary in their respective age
  • Like revolutionary ideas today, the ideas of yesterday were provocative and, in many cases, much more consequential.
  • Revolutionary figures of the past give us insight into the present and allow for reflection on the consequences of their choices.
  • one of the virtues of the classics: They are a means of considering what is true without invoking the blind partisanship that encourages thoughtless action. There is nothing we need more today than the cultivation of reason and understanding.
  • Education based on values, logic and discipline isn’t Republican—it’s timeless.
93More

Why it's as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...hamber-as-it-is-to-flee-a-cult echo-chamber epistemic bubble trust goodwill Descartes network information truth rationality cult filter reliability corroborated bias psychology
shared by Javier E on 29 Jul 22 - No Cached
  • there are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs.
  • they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention
  • An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.
  • ...90 more annotations...
  • start with epistemic bubbles
  • That omission might be purposeful
  • But that omission can also be entirely inadvertent. Even if we’re not actively trying to avoid disagreement, our Facebook friends tend to share our views and interests
  • An ‘echo chamber’ is a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited. Where an epistemic bubble merely omits contrary views, an echo chamber brings its members to actively distrust outsiders.
  • an echo chamber is something like a cult. A cult isolates its members by actively alienating them from any outside sources. Those outside are actively labelled as malignant and untrustworthy.
  • In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined.
  • The way to break an echo chamber is not to wave “the facts” in the faces of its members. It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust.
  • Looking to others for corroboration is a basic method for checking whether one has reasoned well or badly
  • They have been in the limelight lately, most famously in Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble (2011) and Cass Sunstein’s #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (2017).
  • The general gist: we get much of our news from Facebook feeds and similar sorts of social media. Our Facebook feed consists mostly of our friends and colleagues, the majority of whom share our own political and cultural views
  • various algorithms behind the scenes, such as those inside Google search, invisibly personalise our searches, making it more likely that we’ll see only what we want to see. These processes all impose filters on information.
  • Such filters aren’t necessarily bad. The world is overstuffed with information, and one can’t sort through it all by oneself: filters need to be outsourced.
  • That’s why we all depend on extended social networks to deliver us knowledge
  • any such informational network needs the right sort of broadness and variety to work
  • Each individual person in my network might be superbly reliable about her particular informational patch but, as an aggregate structure, my network lacks what Sanford Goldberg in his book Relying on Others (2010) calls ‘coverage-reliability’. It doesn’t deliver to me a sufficiently broad and representative coverage of all the relevant information.
  • Epistemic bubbles also threaten us with a second danger: excessive self-confidence.
  • An ‘epistemic bubble’ is an informational network from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission
  • Suppose that I believe that the Paleo diet is the greatest diet of all time. I assemble a Facebook group called ‘Great Health Facts!’ and fill it only with people who already believe that Paleo is the best diet. The fact that everybody in that group agrees with me about Paleo shouldn’t increase my confidence level one bit. They’re not mere copies – they actually might have reached their conclusions independently – but their agreement can be entirely explained by my method of selection.
  • Luckily, though, epistemic bubbles are easily shattered. We can pop an epistemic bubble simply by exposing its members to the information and arguments that they’ve missed.
  • echo chambers are a far more pernicious and robust phenomenon.
  • amieson and Cappella’s book is the first empirical study into how echo chambers function
  • echo chambers work by systematically alienating their members from all outside epistemic sources.
  • Their research centres on Rush Limbaugh, a wildly successful conservative firebrand in the United States, along with Fox News and related media
  • His constant attacks on the ‘mainstream media’ are attempts to discredit all other sources of knowledge. He systematically undermines the integrity of anybody who expresses any kind of contrary view.
  • outsiders are not simply mistaken – they are malicious, manipulative and actively working to destroy Limbaugh and his followers. The resulting worldview is one of deeply opposed force, an all-or-nothing war between good and evil
  • The result is a rather striking parallel to the techniques of emotional isolation typically practised in cult indoctrination
  • cult indoctrination involves new cult members being brought to distrust all non-cult members. This provides a social buffer against any attempts to extract the indoctrinated person from the cult.
  • The echo chamber doesn’t need any bad connectivity to function. Limbaugh’s followers have full access to outside sources of information
  • As Elijah Millgram argues in The Great Endarkenment (2015), modern knowledge depends on trusting long chains of experts. And no single person is in the position to check up on the reliability of every member of that chain
  • Their worldview can survive exposure to those outside voices because their belief system has prepared them for such intellectual onslaught.
  • exposure to contrary views could actually reinforce their views. Limbaugh might offer his followers a conspiracy theory: anybody who criticises him is doing it at the behest of a secret cabal of evil elites, which has already seized control of the mainstream media.
  • Perversely, exposure to outsiders with contrary views can thus increase echo-chamber members’ confidence in their insider sources, and hence their attachment to their worldview.
  • ‘evidential pre-emption’. What’s happening is a kind of intellectual judo, in which the power and enthusiasm of contrary voices are turned against those contrary voices through a carefully rigged internal structure of belief.
  • One might be tempted to think that the solution is just more intellectual autonomy. Echo chambers arise because we trust others too much, so the solution is to start thinking for ourselves.
  • that kind of radical intellectual autonomy is a pipe dream. If the philosophical study of knowledge has taught us anything in the past half-century, it is that we are irredeemably dependent on each other in almost every domain of knowledge
  • Limbaugh’s followers regularly read – but do not accept – mainstream and liberal news sources. They are isolated, not by selective exposure, but by changes in who they accept as authorities, experts and trusted sources.
  • we depend on a vastly complicated social structure of trust. We must trust each other, but, as the philosopher Annette Baier says, that trust makes us vulnerable. Echo chambers operate as a kind of social parasite on that vulnerability, taking advantage of our epistemic condition and social dependency.
  • I am quite confident that there are plenty of echo chambers on the political Left. More importantly, nothing about echo chambers restricts them to the arena of politics
  • The world of anti-vaccination is clearly an echo chamber, and it is one that crosses political lines. I’ve also encountered echo chambers on topics as broad as diet (Paleo!), exercise technique (CrossFit!), breastfeeding, some academic intellectual traditions, and many, many more
  • Here’s a basic check: does a community’s belief system actively undermine the trustworthiness of any outsiders who don’t subscribe to its central dogmas? Then it’s probably an echo chamber.
  • much of the recent analysis has lumped epistemic bubbles together with echo chambers into a single, unified phenomenon. But it is absolutely crucial to distinguish between the two.
  • Epistemic bubbles are rather ramshackle; they go up easily, and they collapse easily
  • Echo chambers are far more pernicious and far more robust. They can start to seem almost like living things. Their belief systems provide structural integrity, resilience and active responses to outside attacks
  • the two phenomena can also exist independently. And of the events we’re most worried about, it’s the echo-chamber effects that are really causing most of the trouble.
  • new data does, in fact, seem to show that people on Facebook actually do see posts from the other side, or that people often visit websites with opposite political affiliation.
  • their basis for evaluation – their background beliefs about whom to trust – are radically different. They are not irrational, but systematically misinformed about where to place their trust.
  • Many people have claimed that we have entered an era of ‘post-truth’.
  • Not only do some political figures seem to speak with a blatant disregard for the facts, but their supporters seem utterly unswayed by evidence. It seems, to some, that truth no longer matters.
  • This is an explanation in terms of total irrationality. To accept it, you must believe that a great number of people have lost all interest in evidence or investigation, and have fallen away from the ways of reason.
  • echo chambers offers a less damning and far more modest explanation. The apparent ‘post-truth’ attitude can be explained as the result of the manipulations of trust wrought by echo chambers.
  • We don’t have to attribute a complete disinterest in facts, evidence or reason to explain the post-truth attitude. We simply have to attribute to certain communities a vastly divergent set of trusted authorities.
  • An echo chamber doesn’t destroy their members’ interest in the truth; it merely manipulates whom they trust and changes whom they accept as trustworthy sources and institutions.
  • in many ways, echo-chamber members are following reasonable and rational procedures of enquiry. They’re engaging in critical reasoning. They’re questioning, they’re evaluating sources for themselves, they’re assessing different pathways to information. They are critically examining those who claim expertise and trustworthiness, using what they already know about the world
  • none of this weighs against the existence of echo chambers. We should not dismiss the threat of echo chambers based only on evidence about connectivity and exposure.
  • Notice how different what’s going on here is from, say, Orwellian doublespeak, a deliberately ambiguous, euphemism-filled language designed to hide the intent of the speaker.
  • echo chambers don’t trade in vague, ambiguous pseudo-speech. We should expect that echo chambers would deliver crisp, clear, unambiguous claims about who is trustworthy and who is not
  • clearly articulated conspiracy theories, and crisply worded accusations of an outside world rife with untrustworthiness and corruption.
  • Once an echo chamber starts to grip a person, its mechanisms will reinforce themselves.
  • In an epistemically healthy life, the variety of our informational sources will put an upper limit to how much we’re willing to trust any single person. Everybody’s fallible; a healthy informational network tends to discover people’s mistakes and point them out. This puts an upper ceiling on how much you can trust even your most beloved leader
  • nside an echo chamber, that upper ceiling disappears.
  • Being caught in an echo chamber is not always the result of laziness or bad faith. Imagine, for instance, that somebody has been raised and educated entirely inside an echo chamber
  • when the child finally comes into contact with the larger world – say, as a teenager – the echo chamber’s worldview is firmly in place. That teenager will distrust all sources outside her echo chamber, and she will have gotten there by following normal procedures for trust and learning.
  • It certainly seems like our teenager is behaving reasonably. She could be going about her intellectual life in perfectly good faith. She might be intellectually voracious, seeking out new sources, investigating them, and evaluating them using what she already knows.
  • The worry is that she’s intellectually trapped. Her earnest attempts at intellectual investigation are led astray by her upbringing and the social structure in which she is embedded.
  • Echo chambers might function like addiction, under certain accounts. It might be irrational to become addicted, but all it takes is a momentary lapse – once you’re addicted, your internal landscape is sufficiently rearranged such that it’s rational to continue with your addiction
  • Similarly, all it takes to enter an echo chamber is a momentary lapse of intellectual vigilance. Once you’re in, the echo chamber’s belief systems function as a trap, making future acts of intellectual vigilance only reinforce the echo chamber’s worldview.
  • There is at least one possible escape route, however. Notice that the logic of the echo chamber depends on the order in which we encounter the evidence. An echo chamber can bring our teenager to discredit outside beliefs precisely because she encountered the echo chamber’s claims first. Imagine a counterpart to our teenager who was raised outside of the echo chamber and exposed to a wide range of beliefs. Our free-range counterpart would, when she encounters that same echo chamber, likely see its many flaws
  • Those caught in an echo chamber are giving far too much weight to the evidence they encounter first, just because it’s first. Rationally, they should reconsider their beliefs without that arbitrary preference. But how does one enforce such informational a-historicity?
  • The escape route is a modified version of René Descartes’s infamous method.
  • Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). He had come to realise that many of the beliefs he had acquired in his early life were false. But early beliefs lead to all sorts of other beliefs, and any early falsehoods he’d accepted had surely infected the rest of his belief system.
  • The only solution, thought Descartes, was to throw all his beliefs away and start over again from scratch.
  • He could start over, trusting nothing and no one except those things that he could be entirely certain of, and stamping out those sneaky falsehoods once and for all. Let’s call this the Cartesian epistemic reboot.
  • Notice how close Descartes’s problem is to our hapless teenager’s, and how useful the solution might be. Our teenager, like Descartes, has problematic beliefs acquired in early childhood. These beliefs have infected outwards, infesting that teenager’s whole belief system. Our teenager, too, needs to throw everything away, and start over again.
  • Let’s call the modernised version of Descartes’s methodology the social-epistemic reboot.
  • when she starts from scratch, we won’t demand that she trust only what she’s absolutely certain of, nor will we demand that she go it alone
  • For the social reboot, she can proceed, after throwing everything away, in an utterly mundane way – trusting her senses, trusting others. But she must begin afresh socially – she must reconsider all possible sources of information with a presumptively equanimous eye. She must take the posture of a cognitive newborn, open and equally trusting to all outside sources
  • we’re not asking people to change their basic methods for learning about the world. They are permitted to trust, and trust freely. But after the social reboot, that trust will not be narrowly confined and deeply conditioned by the particular people they happened to be raised by.
  • Such a profound deep-cleanse of one’s whole belief system seems to be what’s actually required to escape. Look at the many stories of people leaving cults and echo chambers
  • Take, for example, the story of Derek Black in Florida – raised by a neo-Nazi father, and groomed from childhood to be a neo-Nazi leader. Black left the movement by, basically, performing a social reboot. He completely abandoned everything he’d believed in, and spent years building a new belief system from scratch. He immersed himself broadly and open-mindedly in everything he’d missed – pop culture, Arabic literature, the mainstream media, rap – all with an overall attitude of generosity and trust.
  • It was the project of years and a major act of self-reconstruction, but those extraordinary lengths might just be what’s actually required to undo the effects of an echo-chambered upbringing.
  • we need to attack the root, the systems of discredit themselves, and restore trust in some outside voices.
  • Stories of actual escapes from echo chambers often turn on particular encounters – moments when the echo-chambered individual starts to trust somebody on the outside.
  • Black’s is case in point. By high school, he was already something of a star on neo-Nazi media, with his own radio talk-show. He went on to college, openly neo-Nazi, and was shunned by almost every other student in his community college. But then Matthew Stevenson, a Jewish fellow undergraduate, started inviting Black to Stevenson’s Shabbat dinners. In Black’s telling, Stevenson was unfailingly kind, open and generous, and slowly earned Black’s trust. This was the seed, says Black, that led to a massive intellectual upheaval – a slow-dawning realisation of the depths to which he had been misled
  • Similarly, accounts of people leaving echo-chambered homophobia rarely involve them encountering some institutionally reported fact. Rather, they tend to revolve around personal encounters – a child, a family member, a close friend coming out.
  • hese encounters matter because a personal connection comes with a substantial store of trust.
  • We don’t simply trust people as educated experts in a field – we rely on their goodwill. And this is why trust, rather than mere reliability, is the key concept
  • goodwill is a general feature of a person’s character. If I demonstrate goodwill in action, then you have some reason to think that I also have goodwill in matters of thought and knowledge.
  • f one can demonstrate goodwill to an echo-chambered member – as Stevenson did with Black – then perhaps one can start to pierce that echo chamber.
  • the path I’m describing is a winding, narrow and fragile one. There is no guarantee that such trust can be established, and no clear path to its being established systematically.
  • what we’ve found here isn’t an escape route at all. It depends on the intervention of another. This path is not even one an echo-chamber member can trigger on her own; it is only a whisper-thin hope for rescue from the outside.
20More

Some on the Left Turn Against the Label 'Progressive' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sive-liberal-term-defined.html progressive label terminology language bias liberal left
shared by Javier E on 27 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • Christopher Lasch, the historian and social critic, posed a banger of a question in his 1991 book, “The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics.”
  • “How does it happen,” Lasch asked, “that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?”
  • A review in The New York Times Book Review by William Julius Wilson, a professor at Harvard, was titled: “Where Has Progress Got Us?”
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Essentially, Lasch was attacking the notion, fashionable as Americans basked in their seeming victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, that history had a direction — and that one would be wise to stay on the “right side” of it.
  • Francis Fukuyama expressed a version of this triumphalist idea in his famous 1992 book, “The End of History and the Last Man,” in which he celebrated the notion that History with a capital “H,” in the sense of a battle between competing ideas, was ending with communism left to smolder on Ronald Reagan’s famous ash heap.
  • One of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most frequently quoted lines speaks to a similar thought, albeit in a different context: “T​he arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Though he had read Lasch, Obama quoted that line often, just as he liked to say that so-and-so would be “on the wrong side of history” if they didn’t live up to his ideals — whether the issue was same-sex marriage, health policy or the Russian occupation of Crimea.
  • The memo goes on to list two sets of words: “Optimistic Positive Governing Words” and “Contrasting Words,” which carried negative connotations. One of the latter group was the word “liberal,” sandwiched between “intolerant” and “lie.”
  • So what’s the difference between a progressive and a liberal?To vastly oversimplify matters, liberal usually refers to someone on the center-left on a two-dimensional political spectrum, while progressive refers to someone further left.
  • But “liberal” has taken a beating in recent decades — from both left and right.
  • In the late 1980s and 1990s, Republicans successfully demonized the word “liberal,” to the point where many Democrats shied away from it in favor of labels like “conservative Democrat” or, more recently, “progressive.”
  • “Is the story of the 20th century about the defeat of the Soviet Union, or was it about two world wars and a Holocaust?” asked Matthew Sitman, the co-host of the “Know Your Enemy” podcast, which recently hosted a discussion on Lasch and the fascination many conservatives have with his ideas. “It really depends on how you look at it.”
  • None of this was an accident. In 1996, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia circulated a now-famous memo called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.”
  • The authors urged their readers: “The words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible.”
  • Republicans subsequently had a great deal of success in associating the term “liberal” with other words and phrases voters found uncongenial: wasteful spending, high rates of taxation and libertinism that repelled socially conservative voters.
  • Many on the left began identifying themselves as “progressive” — which had the added benefit of harking back to movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that fought against corruption, opposed corporate monopolies, pushed for good-government reforms and food safety and labor laws and established women’s right to vote.
  • Allies of Bill Clinton founded the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank associated with so-called Blue Dog Democrats from the South.
  • Now, scrambling the terminology, groups like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee agitate on behalf of proudly left-wing candidates
  • In 2014, Charles Murray, the polarizing conservative scholar, urged readers of The Wall Street Journal’s staunchly right-wing editorial section to “start using ‘liberal’ to designate the good guys on the left, reserving ‘progressive’ for those who are enthusiastic about an unrestrained regulatory state.”
  • As Sanders and acolytes like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have gained prominence over the last few election cycles, many on the left-wing end of the spectrum have begun proudly applying other labels to themselves, such as “democratic socialist.”
  • To little avail so far, Kazin, the Georgetown historian, has been urging them to call themselves “social democrats” instead — as many mainstream parties do in Europe.“It’s not a good way to win elections in this country, to call yourself a socialist,” he said.
19More

Opinion | How Behavioral Economics Took Over America - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...human-behavior-nudge.html behavioral economics nudge priming science research psychology ideology
shared by Javier E on 01 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • Some behavioral interventions do seem to lead to positive changes, such as automatically enrolling children in school free lunch programs or simplifying mortgage information for aspiring homeowners. (Whether one might call such interventions “nudges,” however, is debatable.)
  • it’s not clear we need to appeal to psychology studies to make some common-sense changes, especially since the scientific rigor of these studies is shaky at best.
  • Nudges are related to a larger area of research on “priming,” which tests how behavior changes in response to what we think about or even see without noticing
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Behavioral economics is at the center of the so-called replication crisis, a euphemism for the uncomfortable fact that the results of a significant percentage of social science experiments can’t be reproduced in subsequent trials
  • this key result was not replicated in similar experiments, undermining confidence in a whole area of study. It’s obvious that we do associate old age and slower walking, and we probably do slow down sometimes when thinking about older people. It’s just not clear that that’s a law of the mind.
  • And these attempts to “correct” human behavior are based on tenuous science. The replication crisis doesn’t have a simple solution
  • Journals have instituted reforms like having scientists preregister their hypotheses to avoid the possibility of results being manipulated during the research. But that doesn’t change how many uncertain results are already out there, with a knock-on effect that ripples through huge segments of quantitative social scienc
  • The Johns Hopkins science historian Ruth Leys, author of a forthcoming book on priming research, points out that cognitive science is especially prone to building future studies off disputed results. Despite the replication crisis, these fields are a “train on wheels, the track is laid and almost nothing stops them,” Dr. Leys said.
  • These cases result from lax standards around data collection, which will hopefully be corrected. But they also result from strong financial incentives: the possibility of salaries, book deals and speaking and consulting fees that range into the millions. Researchers can get those prizes only if they can show “significant” findings.
  • It is no coincidence that behavioral economics, from Dr. Kahneman to today, tends to be pro-business. Science should be not just reproducible, but also free of obvious ideology.
  • Technology and modern data science have only further entrenched behavioral economics. Its findings have greatly influenced algorithm design.
  • The collection of personal data about our movements, purchases and preferences inform interventions in our behavior from the grocery store to who is arrested by the police.
  • Setting people up for safety and success and providing good default options isn’t bad in itself, but there are more sinister uses as well. After all, not everyone who wants to exploit your cognitive biases has your best interests at heart.
  • Despite all its flaws, behavioral economics continues to drive public policy, market research and the design of digital interfaces.
  • One might think that a kind of moratorium on applying such dubious science would be in order — except that enacting one would be practically impossible. These ideas are so embedded in our institutions and everyday life that a full-scale audit of the behavioral sciences would require bringing much of our society to a standstill.
  • There is no peer review for algorithms that determine entry to a stadium or access to credit. To perform even the most banal, everyday actions, you have to put implicit trust in unverified scientific results.
  • We can’t afford to defer questions about human nature, and the social and political policies that come from them, to commercialized “research” that is scientifically questionable and driven by ideology. Behavioral economics claims that humans aren’t rational.
  • That’s a philosophical claim, not a scientific one, and it should be fought out in a rigorous marketplace of ideas. Instead of unearthing real, valuable knowledge of human nature, behavioral economics gives us “one weird trick” to lose weight or quit smoking.
  • Humans may not be perfectly rational, but we can do better than the predictably irrational consequences that behavioral economics has left us with today.
6More

Opinion | 'Killers of the Flower Moon' Is Coming to Theaters, But Being Erased from Cla... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...wer-moon-oklahoma-history.html murder American Indian rich tribe Oklahoma movie Scorsese oil racism knowledge
shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Numerous other Osage had died suspiciously — the cause of death often cloaked behind alcoholic poisoning or wasting illness or as simply unknown. Despite evidence that the victims had been murdered for their oil money, the cases were never properly investigated. Moreover, they could not be linked to the same killer caught by the bureau. The history of the Reign of Terror was less a question of who did it than who didn’t do it.
  • even now, as their stories are being dramatized in a movie and shown in theaters across the country, there is a campaign in Oklahoma — this time with legislation — to deter the history from being taught in schools.
  • The Osage had these events seared in their memories. Yet most Americans had excised even the bureau’s sanitized account from their consciences. Like the Tulsa Race Massacre, which occurred during the same period, the Osage Reign of Terror was generally not taught in schools, even in Oklahoma
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • It was about a widespread culture of killing. It was about prominent white citizens who paid for killings, doctors who administered poisons, morticians who ignored evidence of bullet wounds, lawmen and prosecutors who were on the take and many others who remained complicit in their silence — all because they were profiting from what they referred to openly as the “Indian business.” The real death toll was undoubtedly higher than 24. One bureau agent admitted: “There are so many of these murder cases. There are hundreds and hundreds.”
  • The movement to suppress elements of American history extends well beyond Oklahoma. According to an analysis by The Washington Post, more than two dozen states have adopted laws that make it easier to remove books from school libraries and to prevent certain teaching on race, gender and sexuality
  • In 2023, PEN America, which defends freedom of speech, reported that book bans in U.S. public school classrooms and libraries had surged 33 percent over the previous school year, with more than 3,000 recorded removals; among them are classics by the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison (banned in 30 school districts) and Margaret Atwood (banned in 34). School curriculums are being revised to mask discomfiting truths — so much so that in Florida students will now be taught that some African Americans benefited from slavery because it gave them “skills.”
18More

How 2020 Forced Facebook and Twitter to Step In - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617493 facebook twitter knowledge truth social media tech misinformation
shared by Javier E on 05 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • mainstream platforms learned their lesson, accepting that they should intervene aggressively in more and more cases when users post content that might cause social harm.
  • During the wildfires in the American West in September, Facebook and Twitter took down false claims about their cause, even though the platforms had not done the same when large parts of Australia were engulfed in flames at the start of the year
  • Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube cracked down on QAnon, a sprawling, incoherent, and constantly evolving conspiracy theory, even though its borders are hard to delineate.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Content moderation comes to every content platform eventually, and platforms are starting to realize this faster than ever.
  • Nothing symbolizes this shift as neatly as Facebook’s decision in October (and Twitter’s shortly after) to start banning Holocaust denial. Almost exactly a year earlier, Zuckerberg had proudly tied himself to the First Amendment in a widely publicized “stand for free expression” at Georgetown University.
  • The evolution continues. Facebook announced earlier this month that it will join platforms such as YouTube and TikTok in removing, not merely labeling or down-ranking, false claims about COVID-19 vaccines.
  • the pandemic also showed that complete neutrality is impossible. Even though it’s not clear that removing content outright is the best way to correct misperceptions, Facebook and other platforms plainly want to signal that, at least in the current crisis, they don’t want to be seen as feeding people information that might kill them.
  • When internet platforms announce new policies, assessing whether they can and will enforce them consistently has always been difficult. In essence, the companies are grading their own work. But too often what can be gleaned from the outside suggests that they’re failing.
  • It tweaked its algorithm to boost authoritative sources in the news feed and turned off recommendations to join groups based around political or social issues. Facebook is reversing some of these steps now, but it cannot make people forget this toolbox exists in the future
  • As platforms grow more comfortable with their power, they are recognizing that they have options beyond taking posts down or leaving them up. In addition to warning labels, Facebook implemented other “break glass” measures to stem misinformation as the election approached.
  • Platforms don’t deserve praise for belatedly noticing dumpster fires that they helped create and affixing unobtrusive labels to them
  • Warning labels for misinformation might make some commentators feel a little better, but whether labels actually do much to contain the spread of false information is still unknown.
  • News reporting suggests that insiders at Facebook knew they could and should do more about misinformation, but higher-ups vetoed their ideas. YouTube barely acted to stem the flood of misinformation about election results on its platform.
  • Even before the pandemic, YouTube had begun adjusting its recommendation algorithm to reduce the spread of borderline and harmful content, and is introducing pop-up nudges to encourage user
  • And if 2020 finally made clear to platforms the need for greater content moderation, it also exposed the inevitable limits of content moderation.
  • Down-ranking, labeling, or deleting content on an internet platform does not address the social or political circumstances that caused it to be posted in the first place
  • even the most powerful platform will never be able to fully compensate for the failures of other governing institutions or be able to stop the leader of the free world from constructing an alternative reality when a whole media ecosystem is ready and willing to enable him. As Renée DiResta wrote in The Atlantic last month, “reducing the supply of misinformation doesn’t eliminate the demand.”
  • Even so, this year’s events showed that nothing is innate, inevitable, or immutable about platforms as they currently exist. The possibilities for what they might become—and what role they will play in society—are limited more by imagination than any fixed technological constraint, and the companies appear more willing to experiment than ever.
7More

The New York Times' trans coverage is under fire. The paper needs to listen | Arwa Mahd... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...es-trans-coverage-open-letters trans debate nyt objectivity bias
shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • I’ve got a feeling the poor alien might get the impression that every third person in the US is trans – rather than 0.5% of the population. They (I assume aliens are nonbinary) might get the impression that nobody is allowed to say the word “woman” any more and we are all being forced at gunpoint to say “uterus-havers”. They might get the impression that women’s sports have been completely taken over by trans women. They might believe that millions of children are being mutilated by doctors in the name of gender-affirming care because of the all-powerful trans lobby. They might come away thinking that JK Rowling is not a multi-multi-multi-millionaire with endless resources at her disposal but a marginalized victim who needs brave Times columnists to come to her defense.
  • “In the past eight months the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast”. Those, to reiterate, are newspaper front-page stories. As Popula notes, that number “doesn’t include the 11,000 or so words the New York Times Magazine devoted to a laboriously evenhanded story about disagreements over the standards of care for trans youth; or the 3,000 words of the front-page story … on whether trans women athletes are unfairly ruining the competition for other women; or the 1,200 words of the front-page story … on how trans interests are banning the word “woman” from abortion-rights discourse.”
  • This letter, addressed to the paper’s associate managing editor for standards, accused the Times of treating gender diversity “with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”. That relevant information being that some of those sources have affiliations with far-right groups. That “charged language” being phrases like “patient zero” to describe a transgender young person seeking gender-affirming care, “a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared”.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “It is not unusual for outside groups to critique our coverage or to rally supporters to seek to influence our journalism,” Kahn wrote in the memo. “In this case, however, members of our staff and contributors to The Times joined the effort … We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.”
  • Charlie Stadtlander, the Times’ director of external communication, put out a statement stating that the organization pursues “independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care”. While that was all very diplomatic, the executive editor, Joe Kahn, and opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, sent around a rather more pointed newsroom memo condemning the letters on Thursday.
  • The second letter was signed by more than 100 LGBTQ+ and civil rights groups, including Glaad and the Human Rights Campaign. It expressed support for the contributor letter and accused the Times of platforming “fringe theories” and “dangerous inaccuracies”. It noted that while the Times has produced responsible coverage of trans people, “those articles are not getting front-page placement or sent to app users via push notification like the irresponsible pieces are”. And it observed that rightwing politicians have been using the Times’s coverage of trans issues to justify criminalizing gender-affirming care.
  • Here’s the thing: there is no clear-cut line between advocacy and journalism. All media organizations have a perspective about the world and filter their output (which will, of course, strive to be fairly reported) through that perspective. To pretend otherwise is dishonest. Like it or not, the Times is involved in advocacy. It just needs to step back for a moment and think about who it’s advocating for.
12More

Resilience, Another Thing We Can't Talk About - 0 views

freddiedeboer.substack.com/...silience-another-thing-we-cant resilience psychology
shared by Javier E on 10 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • I also think that we as a society are failing to inculcate resilience in our young people, and that culture war has left many progressive people in the curious position of arguing against the importance of resilience
  • Sadly, nothing is complicated for progressives today. I think the attitude that all questions are simple and nothing is complicated is the second most prominent element of contemporary progressive social culture, beneath only lol lol lol lmao lol lo
  • Teaching people how to suffer, how to respond to suffering and survive suffering and grow from suffering, is one of the most essential tasks of any community. Because suffering is inevitable. And I do think that we have lost sight of this essential element of growing up in contemporary society
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Haidt isn’t helping himself any. The term “culture of victimhood” reminds many people of the “snowflake” insult, the idea than anyone from a marginalized background who complains about injustice is really just self-involved and weak.
  • I find his predictions about how these dynamics will somehow undermine American capitalism to be unconvincing, running towards bizarre. If social media is making our kids depressed and anxious, that is the reason to be concerned, not some tangled logic about national greatness.
  • I think that suffering is the only truly universal endowment of the human species.
  • ecause Haidt talked about a culture of victimhood, he was immediately coded as right-wing, which is to say on the wrong side of the culture war
  • (The piece notes that the age at which children are allowed to play outside alone has moved from 7 or 8 to 10 or 12 in short order.)
  • the critics of someone like Haidt, the most coherent criticism they mount is that talk of toughness and resilience can be used opportunistically to dismiss demands for justice. “You just need to toughen up” is not, obviously, a constructive, good-faith response to a demand that the police stop killing unarmed Black people
  • I don’t think that’s the version Haidt is articulating
  • Yes, we must do all we can to reduce injustice, and we need to be compassionate to everyone. But we also need to understand that no political movement, no matter how effective, can ever end suffering and thus obviate the need for resilience.
  • I’m really not a fan of therapy culture, where the imperatives and vocabulary and purpose of therapy are now assumed to be necessary in every domain of human affairs. But that’s not because I think therapy is bad; I think therapy, as therapy, is very good. It’s because I think everything can’t be therapy, and the effort to make everything therapy will have the perverse effect of making nothing therapy.
10More

Overstimulation Nation - Slack Tide by Matt Labash - 0 views

mattlabash.substack.com/...overstimulation-nation quality of life quality activity experiences disorder merton nostalgia soul sickness stillness boredom psychology language education
shared by Javier E on 11 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • The local radio jock said to me, “You must think all of this is pretty silly”. He motioned towards the crowd and then to a rollercoaster directly beside us that came screeching at our heads every 95 seconds. But I said, “No. In a century people are going to look back on right now as a sort of magic era, a charmed time of peace and prosperity and freedom from fear, as something that can never happen again, no matter how much they wish it would.”
  • telling the truth always liberates us, even if it scares the hell out of us simultaneously
  • Bad things have always happened in this world. That’s nothing new. And bad things will continue to have their uninterrupted run, right until the end of time.  But the “freedom from fear” Coupland speaks of is largely a function of not wallowing in it all the live-long day, which  our trusty bad-news delivery systems are pretty good about making us do. They give us the illusion of constant movement, even if our only destination is backwards, prompting us to forever double down on fear, and agitation, and mutual suspicion, while steeping us in our own soul sickness.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • It’s a trap, which maybe seeking out a little more deliberate boredom – also known as stillness - could help us avoid
  • Thomas Merton, whose praises I have sung in these pages before, framed it:
  • being bored might be a good start for healing what ails us.
  • But the purity of our conscience has a natural proportion with the depth of our being and the quality of our acts: and when our activity is habitually disordered, our malformed conscience can think of nothing better to tell us than to multiply the *quantity* of our acts, without perfecting their quality. And so we go from bad to worse, exhaust ourselves, empty our whole life of all content, and fall into despair
  • There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform: and often it is quite beyond his power.
  • Our being is not to be enriched merely by activity or experience as such. Everything depends on the *quality* of our acts and our experiences. A multitude of badly performed actions and of experiences only half lived exhausts and depletes our being. By doing things badly we make ourselves less real. This growing unreality cannot help but make us unhappy and fill us with a sense of guilt
  • even with all the excitement, I couldn’t sustain any. I was bored by the excitement. Or rather, I craved boredom, finding all the excitement dull in a not-this-shitshow-again sort of way. For the last decade or so, we’ve been too over-excited, over-provoked, and overstimulated.
24More

Why Is Finland the Happiest Country on Earth? The Answer Is Complicated. - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...inland-happiness-optimism.html finland happiness perseverance enough content psychology bias education
shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network released its annual World Happiness Report, which rates well-being in countries around the world. For the sixth year in a row, Finland was ranked at the very top.
  • “I wouldn’t say that I consider us very happy,” said Nina Hansen, 58, a high school English teacher from Kokkola, a midsize city on Finland’s west coast. “I’m a little suspicious of that word, actually.”
  • what, supposedly, makes Finland so happy. Our subjects ranged in age from 13 to 88 and represented a variety of genders, sexual orientations, ethnic backgrounds and professions
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • While people praised Finland’s strong social safety net and spoke glowingly of the psychological benefits of nature and the personal joys of sports or music, they also talked about guilt, anxiety and loneliness. Rather than “happy,” they were more likely to characterize Finns as “quite gloomy,” “a little moody” or not given to unnecessary smiling
  • Many also shared concerns about threats to their way of life, including possible gains by a far-right party in the country’s elections in April, the war in Ukraine and a tense relationship with Russia, which could worsen now that Finland is set to join NATO.
  • It turns out even the happiest people in the world aren’t that happy. But they are something more like content.
  • Finns derive satisfaction from leading sustainable lives and perceive financial success as being able to identify and meet basic need
  • “In other words,” he wrote in an email, “when you know what is enough, you are happy.”
  • “‘Happiness,’ sometimes it’s a light word and used like it’s only a smile on a face,” Teemu Kiiski, the chief executive of Finnish Design Shop, said. “But I think that this Nordic happiness is something more foundational.”
  • e conventional wisdom is that it’s easier to be happy in a country like Finland where the government ensures a secure foundation on which to build a fulfilling life and a promising future. But that expectation can also create pressure to live up to the national reputation.
  • “We are very privileged and we know our privilege,” said Clara Paasimaki, 19, one of Ms. Hansen’s students in Kokkola, “so we are also scared to say that we are discontent with anything, because we know that we have it so much better than other people,” especially in non-Nordic countries.
  • “The fact that Finland has been ‘the happiest country on earth’ for six years in a row could start building pressure on people,” he wrote in an email. “If we Finns are all so happy, why am I not happy?
  • The Finnish way of life is summed up in “sisu,” a trait said to be part of the national character. The word roughly translates to “grim determination in the face of hardships,” such as the country’s long winters: Even in adversity, a Finn is expected to persevere, without complaining.
  • “Back in the day when it wasn’t that easy to survive the winter, people had to struggle, and then it’s kind of been passed along the generations,” said Ms. Paasimaki’s classmate Matias From, 18. “Our parents were this way. Our grandparents were this way. Tough and not worrying about everything. Just living life.”
  • Since immigrating from Zimbabwe in 1992, Julia Wilson-Hangasmaa, 59, has come to appreciate the freedom Finland affords people to pursue their dreams without worrying about meeting basic needs
  • When she returns to her home country, she is struck by the “good energy” that comes not from the satisfaction of sisu but from exuberant joy.
  • “What I miss the most, I realize when I enter Zimbabwe, are the smiles,” she said, among “those people who don’t have much, compared to Western standards, but who are rich in spirit.”
  • Many of our subjects cited the abundance of nature as crucial to Finnish happiness: Nearly 75 percent of Finland is covered by forest, and all of it is open to everyone thanks to a law known as “jokamiehen oikeudet,” or “everyman’s right,” that entitles people to roam freely throughout any natural areas, on public or privately owned land.
  • “I enjoy the peace and movement in nature,” said Helina Marjamaa, 66, a former track athlete who represented the country at the 1980 and 1984 Olympic Games. “That’s where I get strength. Birds are singing, snow is melting, and nature is coming to life. It’s just incredibly beautiful.”
  • “I am worried with this level of ignorance we have toward our own environment,” he said, citing endangered species and climate change. The threat, he said, “still doesn’t seem to shift the political thinking.”
  • Born 17 years after Finland won independence from Russia, Eeva Valtonen has watched her homeland transform: from the devastation of World War II through years of rebuilding to a nation held up as an exemplar to the world.
  • “My mother used to say, ‘Remember, the blessing in life is in work, and every work you do, do it well,’” Ms. Valtonen, 88, said. “I think Finnish people have been very much the same way. Everybody did everything together and helped each other.”
  • Maybe it isn’t that Finns are so much happier than everyone else. Maybe it’s that their expectations for contentment are more reasonable, and if they aren’t met, in the spirit of sisu, they persevere.
  • “We don’t whine,” Ms. Eerikainen said. “We just do.”
23More

Colonic electrical stimulation promotes colonic motility through regeneration of myente... - 0 views

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...PMC6522827 constipation research report intestine
shared by Javier E on 20 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Slow transit constipation (STC) is a common disease characterized by markedly delayed colonic transit time as a result of colonic motility dysfunction. It is well established that STC is mostly caused by disorders of relevant nerves, especially the enteric nervous system (ENS).
  • After 5 weeks of treatment, CES could enhance the colonic electromyogram (EMG) signal to promote colonic motility, thereby improving the colonic content emptying of STC beagles. HE staining and transmission electron microscopy confirmed that CES could regenerate ganglia and synaptic vesicles in the myenteric plexus.
  • Taken together, pulse train CES could induce the regeneration of myenteric plexus neurons, thereby promoting the colonic motility in STC beagles.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • onic constipation, a functional bowel disorder, affects approximately 14% of adults worldwide [1]. Slow transit constipation (STC) is the major cause of chronic constipation which is characterized by markedly prolonged colonic transit time as a result of the colonic motility function disorde
  • Usually, patients with STC suffer from a common sense of abdominal pain, nausea, depression and sickness, which seriously influence their social ability and health-related quality of life [4–6
  • Current clinical treatments include cathartics, prokinetics and aggressive surgery which can increase bowel movement frequency to a certain degree.
  • However, pharmacological interventions is prone to drug dependency and relapse after drug withdrawal [3]
  • Surgical treatments such as subtotal colectomy and total colectomy in STC patients may adversely affect the quality of life due to the risk of postoperative diarrhea or incontinence, and result in a heavy healthcare burden
  • The enteric nervous system (ENS), located in the intestinal wall, regulates various functions including contraction of intestine, homeostasis and blood flow [10]. As the ‘second brain’, the ENS contains large amounts of neurons working independently from the central nervous system [11]. Researches have identified that STCs are mostly caused by disorders of the relevant nerves, especially the ENS [12,13].
  • McCallum et al. [35] found that gastric electrical stimulation in combination with pharmacological treatment could also enhance emptying in patients with gastroparesis. Especially, gastric electrical stimulation has been approved as a clinical therapy method for gastroparesis and obesity in European and American countries [36].
  • we employed pulse train stimulation and implanted electrodes at the proximal colon in dogs.
  • After CES treatment, we observed the colonic transit time of the sham treatment group was longer than that of CES treatment and control groups, and electrical stimulation significantly enhanced the colonic electromyogram (EMG) signal.
  • histopathology and TEM analysis showed increased ganglia and synaptic vesicles existing in the colon myenteric plexus of the CES treatment group as compared with that of the sham CES group
  • Our results suggested that CES might reduce the degeneration of the myenteric plexus neurons, thereby contributing to the therapeutic effect on STC beagles.
  • the defecating frequency and the feces characteristics of STC beagles returned to normal after CES treatment. The result indicated that CES could improve the symptoms of STC.
  • The colonic EMG signal was strongly promoted by CES
  • Especially, the colonic EMG signal of the beagles with STC was remarkably enhanced by CES (Figure 3), indicating that CES could not only improve the colonic content emptying, but also enhance the EMG signal to promote colonic motility.
  • Colonic electrical stimulation (CES), a valuable alternative for the treatment of STC, was reported to improve the colon motility by adjusting the bioelectrical activity in animal models or patients with STC [17]. However, little report focuses on the underlying nervous mechanism to normalize the delayed colonic emptying and relieve symptoms. We hypothesized that CES may also repair the disorders of the relevant nerves and then improve the colonic motility.
  • The first study regarding the CES to modulate colonic motility was performed by Hughes et al. [37]. Since then, many researchers employed short-pulse CES in canine descending colon or pig cecum [20,21,38]. Researchers also applied long-pulse CES to stimulate the colon of human or animals [39]
  • Recently, studies showed that the prokinetic effect of pulse train CES is better than that of short-pulse CES or long-pulse CES [25]
  • Our study indicated that CES could enhance the colonic motility, and then accelerate the colonic content emptying. Thereafter, we investigated the underlying mechanism and presumed that CES might improve the STC symptom through the repairment of the ENS.
  • The neuropathy in ENS is considered to be responsible for various kinds of disordered motility including STC and the related pathophysiologic symptoms [40]. In agreement with this view, our study discovered the decreased number of ganglia in the myenteric plexus, as well as the destruction of the enteric nerve axon terminals and synaptic vesicles in the sham CES group beagles
  • The present study proves that CES with pulse trains has curative effects on the colonic motility and content emptying in STC beagles. The up-regulation of intestinal nerve related proteins such as SYP, PGP9.5, CAD and S-100B in the colonic myenteric plexus suggests that CES might reduce the degeneration of the myenteric plexus neurons, thereby producing the therapeutic effect on STC beagles. Further investigation for the underlying mechanism of nerve regeneration is necessary to better understand how CES promotes the recovery of delayed colonic motility induced by STC.
4More

Who is Andrew Tate, the misogynist hero to millions of young men? | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-hero-to-millions-of-young-men misogyny influencer TikTok Gen Z
shared by Javier E on 31 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • what sets Mr Tate apart from other alt-right social-media personalities and previous anti-feminist online movements is the extent to which his views have found a ready audience among teenage boys.
  • In 2021 Mr Tate established Hustlers University, an online platform where young men could take courses in business and investing for $49.99 a month. It also gave students financial rewards for promoting Mr Tate’s misogynist ideas via a now-suspended affiliate marketing programme. Thanks to a continuing stream of fan-generated content, his views have proliferated on social media even though most platforms have banned his accounts.
  • Part of the reason why Mr Tate has found success specifically on TikTok is that its algorithm is uniquely predictive, appearing not only to rely on the content users watch and recommend, but making assumptions about their potential interests
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • That has made him the most popular influencer among American Gen-Zers, according to a twice-yearly survey of 14,500 of the country’s teenage boys and girls by Piper Sandler, a finance company that researches consumer data. Teachers have reported boys as young as 11 praising and emulating him.
« First ‹ Previous 221 - 235 of 235
Showing 20▼ items per page