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there is a really simple way of thinking of the debate over net neutrality: Is access to the Internet more like access to electricity, or more like cable television service?

For all the technical complexity of generating electricity and distributing it to millions of people, the economic arrangement is very simple: I give them money. They give me electricity. I do with it what I will.

One theory of the case, and the one that the Obama administration embraced Monday, is that the Internet is like electricity. It is fundamental to the 21st century economy, as essential to functioning in modern society as electricity. It is a public utility. “We cannot allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas,” the president said in his written statement.

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

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

It does three things—1) explains what motivated reasoning is; 2) explains how it’s threatening to the legal system (because motivated/biased interpretations of court findings and opinions by opposed groups of citizens threaten the very idea of court neutrality); and 3) takes a look at the Supreme Court’s 2010 term (and one bizarre Scalia dissent in particular) in this context.

There is thus an inherent risk that citizens will perceive decisions that threaten their group commitments to be a product of judicial bias. The outcomes might strike them as so patently inconsistent with the facts, or with controlling legal principles, that they are impelled to infer bad faith.

Kahan suggests it undermines the justice system if battling groups of advocates (say, the American Constitution Society and the Federalist Society) are constantly blasting court opinions from diametrically opposed perspectives, and using motivated reasoning to do so. At some point, as this continues, you wind up legitimating the claim that really, courts don’t know anything special or have any particular expertise—it’s all just opinion, and biased opinion at that. This precipitates a “neutrality crisis” over whether courts can really judge fairly.

an idea many philosophers and logicians have about the function of logic in our cognitive life, our inquiries and debates

It isn’t a player. Rather, it’s an umpire, a neutral arbitrator between opposing theories, imposing some basic rules on all sides in a dispute. The picture is that logic has no substantive conten

The idea that logic is uninformative strikes me as deeply mistaken,

In a preregistered large-sample controlled experiment, I randomly assigned participants to receive information about the endorsement of Joe Biden by the scientific journal Nature during the COVID-19 pandemic. The endorsement message caused large reductions in stated trust in Nature among Trump supporters. This distrust lowered the demand for COVID-related information provided by Nature, as evidenced by substantially reduced requests for Nature articles on vaccine efficacy when offered. The endorsement also reduced Trump supporters’ trust in scientists in general. The estimated effects on Biden supporters’ trust in Nature and scientists were positive, small and mostly statistically insignificant. I found little evidence that the endorsement changed views about Biden and Trump.

These results suggest that political endorsement by scientific journals can undermine and polarize public confidence in the endorsing journals and the scientific community.

... scientists don’t have any special expertise on questions of values and policy. “Sticking to the science” keeps scientists speaking on issues precisely where they ought to be trusted by the public.

NEW ORLEANS — Ever reacted to the sight of a cute puppy or darling infant by squealing, "I want to eat you up!"? Or maybe you can't help but want to pinch your grandbaby's adorable cheeks. You're not alone. New research finds that seemingly strange aggressive responses to cuteness are actually the norm.

In the study, presented Friday (Jan. 18) here at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found that people watching a slideshow of adorable pictures popped more bubbles on a sheet of bubble wrap than did people viewing funny or neutral pictures.

The participants rated the pictures on cuteness and funniness, as well as on how much they felt the pictures made them lose control — for example, if they agreed with statements such as "I can't handle it!" The participants also rated the extent to which the pictures made them "want to say something like 'grr!'" and "want to squeeze something." Sure enough, the cuter the animal, the less control and more desire to "grrr" and squeeze something that people felt. Cute animals produced this feeling significantly more strongly than did funny animals. The funny critters in turn produced the feeling more strongly than did neutral animals, perhaps because the funny animals were perceived as cute, too, Dyer said.

The ones that really nettle them come from Syrians.

Opposition activists and citizen journalists pop up everywhere: in hotel lobbies, on sidewalks, even at a breakfast table overlooking snowcapped mountains.

Here in neutral and secure Switzerland, Syrian government delegates used to meeting journalists only inside a government-controlled bubble are finding that almost anyone can come up to them anytime, anywhere, and ask anything.

the "haves" in higher education have quite a lot; the "have nots" struggle mightily. And this economic chasm is seriously influenced by gender, race and social class -- issues on which the College Scorecard is silent, but which affect just about every factoid presented

The reality is that even smart wonks educated at some of the best of the "haves" can be blind to social reality; their monument to algorithmic gymnastics in the College Scorecard obscures some of the most important and painful facts about college life and American society today.

The administration presents the collegiate earnings data as if it were value-neutral, not only with no reference to the mission of institutions that may have different values from those the administration apparently exalts, but even more devastatingly, with no reference to the pernicious effects of gender and race discrimination on career opportunities and earnings.

ft of recent books have been full of the need for renewed rage against the oppression of women. The demonization of “white men” has intensified just as many working-class white men face a bleak economic future and as men are disappearing from the workforce. It is as if the less gender discrimination there is, the angrier you should become.

You see it in the gay-rights movement too. I get fundraising emails all the time reminding me how we live in a uniquely perilous moment for LGBTQ Americans and that this era, in the words of Human Rights Campaign spokesperson Charlotte Clymer, is one “that has seen unprecedented attacks on LGBTQ people.

Might I suggest some actual precedents: when all gay sex was criminal, when many were left by their government to die of AIDS, when no gay relationships were recognized in the law, when gay service members were hounded out of their mission, when the federal government pursued a purge of anyone suspected of being gay. All but the last one occurred in my adult lifetime. But today we’re under “unprecedented” assault?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee tells Tech Tent that he has become less optimistic about the beneficial effects of his creation - but the web's founder is up for a fight about what he regards as a vital principle, net neutrality.

Both he and other web pioneers were hugely optimistic about its potential to foster collaboration and an open exchange of views. "Humanity once connected by technology would do wonderful things," he says.

In the United States the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has moved to scrap the net neutrality regulation brought in by the Obama administration.

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing," Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning, "the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."

"To the European," Frankl wrote, "it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.'"

during the last decade, the pendulum of scientific thought has begun its inevitable swing in the other direction. These days, general cognitive mechanisms, not language-specific ones, are all the rage. We humans are really smart. We’re fantastic at recognizing patterns in our environments—patterns that may have nothing to do with language. Who says that the same abilities that allow us to play the violin aren’t also sufficient for learning subject-verb agreement? Perhaps speech isn’t genetically privileged so much as babies are just really motivated to learn to communicate.

If the brain did evolve for language, how did it do so? An idea favored by some scholars is that better communicators may also have been more reproductively successful. Gradually, as the prevalence of these smooth talkers’ offspring increased in the population, the concentration of genes favorable to linguistic communication may have increased as well.

two recent articles, one published in 2009 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences and a 2012 follow-up in PLOS ONE (freely available), rebut this approach

power essentially comes in three varieties: the ability to compel people to do what they don’t want to do; the capability to stop them doing what they want to do; and the power to shape the way they think

This last is the kind of power exercised by our mass media. They can shape the public (and therefore the political) agenda by choosing the news that people read, hear or watch; and they can shape the ways in which that news is presented.

For a long time, Google was the 800lb gorilla in this domain, because its dominance of search determined what people could find in the unimaginable wastelands of cyberspace

According to Hegel, history is idea-driven.

Ideas for him are public, rather than in our heads, and serve to coordinate behavior. They are, in short, pragmatically meaningful words.  To say that history is “idea driven” is to say that, like all cooperation, nation building requires a common basic vocabulary.

One prominent component of America’s basic vocabulary is ”individualism.”

Astra Taylor, a cultural critic and the director of the documentaries Zizek! and Examined Life, challenges the notion that the Internet has brought us into an age of cultural democracy. While some have hailed the medium as a platform for diverse voices and the free exchange of information and ideas, Taylor shows that these assumptions are suspect at best. Instead, she argues, the new cultural order looks much like the old: big voices overshadow small ones, content is sensationalist and powered by advertisements, quality work is underfunded, and corporate giants like Google and Facebook rule. The Internet does offer promising tools, Taylor writes, but a cultural democracy will be born only if we work collaboratively to develop the potential of this powerful resource

Most people don’t realize how little information can be conveyed in a feature film. The transcripts of both of my movies are probably equivalent in length to a Harper’s cover story.

why should Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google get a free pass? Why should we expect them to behave any differently over the long term? The tradition of progressive media criticism that came out of the Frankfurt School, not to mention the basic concept of political economy (looking at the way business interests shape the cultural landscape), was nowhere to be seen, and that worried me. It’s not like political economy became irrelevant the second the Internet was invented.

Wikipedia editors, all volunteers, present opposing views on politics, history and traditional Chinese culture — in essence, different versions of China. Compounding the issue are language differences: Mandarin is the official language in mainland China and Taiwan, while the majority in Hong Kong speak Cantonese. But mainland China uses simplified characters, while Taiwan and Hong Kong use traditional script.

users across the region have experienced “some form of cultural shock,” which triggers arguments. “Users from different areas have received different education, and have been influenced by different political ideologies,” Mr. Wong said. “We discovered that the things we learned as a kid were totally different from each other.”

Today, the site has five settings: simplified Chinese for mainland China; orthodox Chinese for Taiwan; traditional Chinese for Hong Kong; traditional Chinese for Macau; and simplified Chinese for Singapore and Malaysia.

One of the most interesting things about studying fear is looking at the social constructions of fear, and learned fears versus those fears that appear to be more innate, or even genetic

Through fear conditioning (connecting a neutral stimulus with a negative consequence) we can link pretty much anything to a fear response.

So we know that we can learn to fear, and this means our socialization and the society in which we are raised is going to have a lot to do with what we find scary.

"Faith is not a theory that one can take up or lay aside. It is something very concrete: It is the criterion that decides our lifestyle. In an age in which hostility and greed have become superpowers, an age in which we witness the abuse of religion to the point of culminating in hatred, neutral rationality on its own is unable to protect us."

This attack on reason as a neutral way of understanding the world is what makes Benedict an ally of the fundamentalisms we see colliding and resurging around us. As humans, we only have reason to temper the passions and the demands of religion.

Speaking of ideology versus reality, there is, it seems to me, a parallel on the left. That is the current attempt to deny the profound natural differences between men and women, and to assert, with a straight and usually angry face, that gender is in no way rooted in sex, and that sex is in no way rooted in biology.

This unscientific product of misandrist feminism and confused transgenderism is striding through the culture, and close to no one in the elite is prepared to resist it.

And so we have the establishment of gender-neutral birth certificates in Canada; and, in England, that lovely old phrase, “Ladies and Gentlemen,” is being removed from announcements on the Tube

The NYU professor was surely prophetic. “Our own tribe is undergoing a vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to the magic of electronics,” he cautioned.

“We face the rapid dissolution of the assumptions of an education organised around the slow-moving printed word, and the equally rapid emergence of a new education based on the speed-of-light electronic message.”

What Postman perceived in television has been dramatically intensified by smartphones and social media