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Javier E

Inequality in America and Norway - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...512735

inequality norway US redistribution luck fairness psychology

shared by Javier E on 12 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Norway, like many European states, has public offerings many Americans would consider political fantasy. There is lengthy paid maternity leave, free university education, and long-term unemployment benefits
  • What is it about the Norwegian state—or about Scandinavian countries in general—that leads their populations to support redistribution policies in a way that Americans don’t?
  • A group of Scandinavian researchers recently did an experiment trying to tease that out. Their goal: to find out how social attitudes towards inequality in the U.S. and Norway differ, in an effort to explain why the two countries have such different redistribution policies. The difference, they discovered, hinges on how people think about luck and fairness.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • “In Norway, people very much disapprove of inequalities that are due to bad luck,”
  • “People in the U.S. are more willing to accept inequality, even if it reflects pure good luck for some and pure bad luck for others.”
  • The purpose of setting up the experiment this way, Tungodden told me, was to find out spectators’ views about different sources of inequality. In the first setting, inequality was a result of luck: The workers both did the task well, but one just got lucky and received a bonus. In the second, inequality was a result of merit: One worker did the task better. And the third was to assess whether people were willing to eradicate inequality created by luck if doing so had costs: The bonus was lower if the spectators chose to redistribute it more fairly.
  • In the experiment, Americans were more willing to accept inequality if it’s a result of luck than Norwegians were. When both workers did the task well, but only one got the bonus (the first setting), half of Americans said they wanted to redistribute the bonus equally. By contrast, 78 percent of Norwegians did. “It’s an enormous difference in exactly the same situation in a willingness to accept brute luck,” Tungodden said. “Americans hold this view of, whatever comes to you, good for you.”
  • When inequality was a result of merit, on the other hand, people in both countries were willing to accept it. Just 15 percent of people in the U.S. and 36 percent of people in Norway redistributed the bonus in the second situation.
  • Together, this helps explain why Norway has a more robust welfare state than the U.S. does, Tungodden said. Norwegians believe that when someone is, by bad luck, born into a poor family, or is, by bad luck, thrust into poverty, that person should have help from others. U.S. residents are more split on this idea
  • This could be because Americans admire wealth and would be hesitant to implement policies that would hurt people who, by luck, are wealthy.
  • There were some differences in which demographics in each country were willing to redistribute the bonuses.
  • white Americans tend to be more withholding when it comes to welfare if they believe the money is going to black Americans. It would be illuminating for another, similar study to be performed that looks at whether white people perceive luck as more or less fair if the beneficiary (or loser, as the case may be) is black.
  • Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, both Americans and Norwegians seemed willing to weather some costs of wealth redistribution. In the third setting, when spectators were told that the inequality was the result of luck, but that redistributing the bonus would have a significant cost, about equal numbers of Americans and Norwegians decided to redistribute
  • it shows that people in both countries are more concerned about whether inequalities are fair than about whether there are costs to redistribution.
  • Debates about the costs of a welfare state and redistribution in America, then, may be besides the point. Costs don’t seem to be Americans’ big hang-up with redistribution. Rather, their opposition seems to go to an underlying acceptance of fate and the fortunes it brings.
tonycheng6

Covid Vaccine Deaths Rise in Norway Among Older People - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...people-75-and-older-rise-to-29

shared by tonycheng6 on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Norway expressed increasing concern about the safety of the Pfizer Inc. vaccine on elderly people with serious underlying health conditions after raising an estimate of the number who died after receiving inoculations to 29.
  • the vaccine produced by Pfizer and BioNTech SE was the only one available in Norway, and “all deaths are thus linked to this vaccine,”
  • “There are 13 deaths that have been assessed, and we are aware of another 16 deaths that are currently being assessed,”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Norway’s experience doesn’t mean that younger, healthier people should avoid being vaccinated.
  • All the reported deaths related to “elderly people with serious basic disorders,”
  • Official reports of allergic reactions have been rare as governments rush to roll out vaccines to try to contain the global pandemic.
  • The first people to be immunized in many places have been older than that as countries rush to inoculate nursing-home residents at high risk from the virus.
  • for those with the most severe frailty, even relatively mild vaccine side effects can have serious consequences. For those who have a very short remaining life span anyway, the benefit of the vaccine may be marginal or irrelevant.
  • This does not mean that there is a causal link between vaccination and death.
catbclark

True or False: Scandinavians Are Practically Perfect in Every Way - 0 views

news.nationalgeographic.com/...den-denmark-culture-ngbooktalk

shared by catbclark on 05 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Thanks to big government and high taxes, Scandinavia is a success story—mostly
  • as an example of everything wrong with Big Government, the Scandinavian countries are, in fact, some of the richest, most successful societies on Earth, with exceptionally high levels of education, health care, and safety.
  • Britain and America fell in love with Nordic noir is that they look different
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • In numerous polls over the past decade, Denmark has ranked as the "happiest" country in the worl
  • . (The U.S. is number 17.) The country also has the second highest consumption of antidepressants. Are these two statistics connected?
  • They also have among the highest levels of alcohol consumption, eat the most candy in the world, and have among the highest consumption of pork product
  • The New York Times called Denmark the best place to be laid off. Why does anyone bother to work?
  • supported people from cradle to grave. If you get sick or lose your job or just fall by the wayside in some way, it's there to pick you up. As a result, there is a disincentive for people to take menial, low-pay jobs.
  • Danes also work fewer hours than anybody else
  • Norway now has, not just per capita but in absolute terms, the biggest pot of gold in the world. It's called the sovereign wealth fund, but it's nicknamed the oil fund, and it's up at something like $600 billion to $700 billion.
margogramiak

Louisiana Man Sentenced To 25 Years For Torching 3 Black Churches | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...hes_n_5fa0d251c5b63dc9a5c00468

shared by margogramiak on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • admitted to burning down three predominantly African American churches
  • admitted to burning down three predominantly African American churches
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      Oh my god that's horrible
  • in an effort to raise his profile as a ‘Black Metal’ musician by copying similar crimes committed in Norway in the 1990s,”
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      That's horrifying. You have to be a different kind of horrible to use pain and suffering to promote yourself.. that's sick.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • sentenced Monday to 25 years in prison and ordered to pay the churches $2.6 million.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      Not that I have any knowledge of how to sentence criminals, but it seems like they could have been more harsh with this.
  • he was deeply sorry and wanted them to know he had recovered his faith in God
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      Sorry doesn't really cut it here.
  • race was not considered a motive,
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      How could it not be? It's a coincident that he burnt down three specifically black churches?
  • Church Arson Prevention Act
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      It's pretty scary that that's an act that had be put in place at all. It's horrifying that we need specific laws against church arson.
  • Summerhays ordered him to pay $1.1 million in restitution to Mt. Pleasant Missionary Baptist Church and $970,213.30 to Greater Union Baptist Church, both in Opelousas, and $590,246 to St. Mary Missionary Baptist Church in Port Barre.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      How will those churches get the money they deserve if he can't pay it though?
  • no one was injured.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      thank goodness
  • The music has been linked, in some instances, to fires at Christian churches in Norway.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      So there's history to it?
  • “The churches survived for nearly 150 years but did not survive this defendant’s warped act of hatred.”
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      So sad
  • The judge asked the Bureau of Prisons to put Matthews in a prison near his family and to ensure that he gets substance abuse counseling and mental health treatment, KATC-TV reported.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 03 Nov 20
       
      I guess that's good. He clearly needs help.
Javier E

Climate Change: The Technologies That Could Make All the Difference - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-make-a-difference-11650656071

climate change technology research development

shared by Javier E on 25 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • The modularity of DAC systems implies that costs for CO2 removal might drop 90% to 95% over a couple of decades, just like the recent cost declines for other modular solutions such as wind turbines, solar panels and lithium-ion batteries.
  • Unlike other pollutants, what matters with carbon dioxide isn’t the location of its release but the total atmospheric accumulation. Releasing greenhouse gases in industrial corridors and then removing them from the atmosphere in remote locations has essentially the same net effect as if the carbon wasn’t emitted in the first place. That means we can deploy DAC systems wherever the energy for their operation is cheapest, ecosystem impacts are lowest, and the economic activity would be welcome.
  • A solar microgrid, which generates, stores and distributes clean energy to homes and facilities in a local network, provides a strong answer to these needs and wants. It can integrate with the main electric grid or disconnect and operate autonomously if the main grid is stressed or goes down. The physical pieces—solar panels, batteries and inverters—have been improving for a while. What’s new and coming, though, is the ability to orchestrate these different pieces into agile electric grids.
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  • With digital tools and data science, demand for energy can now be sculpted locally to match available resources, reducing the number of power plants that utilities need to keep in reserve.
  • The key is giving consumers the ability to separate flexible energy uses—say, operating a Jacuzzi—from essential needs, which can now be done with phone apps for smart appliances and service panels.
  • Meanwhile, connections between groups of customers can be opened and closed as needed with modern, communicating circuit switchgear.
  • The good news is that record amounts of batteries are being installed in U.S. homes and on the electric grid, despite supply-chain bottlenecks.
  • The bad news is that current battery technology only offers a few hours of storage. What’s needed are more-powerful battery systems that can extend the length or scale of storing, which could be even more enabling to sun and wind power.
  • Two such solutions are on the horizon. Stationary metal-air batteries, such as iron-air batteries, don’t hold as much energy per kilogram as lithium-ion batteries so it takes a larger, heavier battery to do the job. But they are cheaper, iron is a plentiful metal, and the batteries, whose chemistry works via interaction of the metal with air, can be sized and installed to store and discharge a large level of electricity over days or weeks.
  • improved large iron-air batteries are poised to become a great new backup for renewable energy within the next couple of years to address those times of year when drops in renewable energy production can last for days and not hours.
  • For households, a battery configuration called a virtual power plant also holds huge potential to extend the use of renewables. These systems allow a local utility or electricity distributor to collect excess energy stored in multiple households’ battery systems and feed it back to the grid when there is a surge in demand or generation shortfall.
  • Electrification is a good choice for smaller vessels on short voyages, like the world’s largest all-electric ferry launched in Norway in 2021. It isn’t yet a viable option for ships on transoceanic voyages because batteries are still too large and heavy, though innovative approaches for battery swapping are being explored.
  • Greener Shipping
  • For longer voyages, e-ammonia, a hydrogen-derived fuel made with renewable energy, has been identified as a prime candidate, although work is needed to ensure safety. Ammonia has a higher energy density than some other options, making it a more economical option for powering large ships across oceans.
  • Among ammonia projects in the works, MAN Energy Solutions is developing engines that can run on conventional fossil fuel or ammonia, a coalition of Nordic partners is designing the world’s first ammonia-powered vessel, and Singapore is evaluating how to bunker the fuel.
  • Some EV makers such as Tesla are now embracing an older, less-expensive battery technology known as lithium-iron-phosphate, or LFP, used originally in scooters and small EVs in China
  • . It draws entirely on cheap and abundant minerals and is less flammable. The power density of LFP is less than NMC, but that disadvantage can be overcome by advances in vehicle design.
  • One approach being tested eliminates the outer packaging of the batteries altogether and directly installs cells, packed in layers, into a cavity in the EV’s body chassis.
  • Eventually, solid-state batteries—with a solid electrolyte made from common minerals like glass or ceramics—could become a key EV battery technology.
  • The solid electrolyte is more chemically stable, lighter, recharges faster and has many more lifetime recharging cycles than lithium-ion batteries, which depend on heavy liquid electrolytes.
  • these innovations are good news for those hoping to speed up EV adoption. They also suggest that batteries, far from becoming a standardized commodity, are going to be customized as auto makers create their own vehicle designs and battery makers develop proprietary platforms.
Emily Horwitz

Scientists to Seek Clues to Violence in Genome of Gunman in Newtown, Conn. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...of-gunman-in-newtown-conn.html

genetics newtown biology nytimes science knowledge bias

shared by Emily Horwitz on 27 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • In a move likely to renew a longstanding ethical controversy, geneticists are quietly making plans to study the DNA of Adam Lanza, 20, who killed 20 children and seven adults in Newtown, Conn. Their work will be an effort to discover biological clues to extreme violence.
  • other experts speculated that the geneticists might look for mutations that might be associated with mental illnesses and ones that might also increase the risk for violence.
  • But whatever they do, this apparently is the first time researchers will attempt a detailed study of the DNA of a mass killer.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Dr. Arthur Beaudet, a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and the chairman of its department of molecular and human genetics, applaud the effort. He believes that the acts committed by men like Mr. Lanza and the gunmen in other rampages in recent years — at Columbine High School and in Aurora, Colo., in Norway, in Tucson and at Virginia Tech — are so far off the charts of normal behavior that there must be genetic changes driving them.
  • Everything known about mental illness, these skeptics say, argues that there are likely to be hundreds of genes involved in extreme violent behavior, not to mention a variety of environmental influences, and that all of these factors can interact in complex and unpredictable ways.
  • The National Institutes of Health was embroiled in controversy about 20 years ago simply for proposing to study the biological underpinnings of violence. Critics accused researchers of racism and singling out minorities, especially black men.
  • Studies of people at the far end of a bell curve can be especially informative, because the genetic roots of their conditions can be stark and easy to spot, noted J. H. Pate Skene, a Duke University neurobiologist. “I think doing research on outliers, people at an end of a spectrum on something of concern like violent behavior, is certainly a good idea,” he said, but he advised tempering expectations.
  • “If we know someone has a 2 percent chance or a 10 percent chance or a 20 percent chance of violent behavior, what would you do with that person?” Dr. Skene said. “They have not been convicted of anything — have not done anything wrong.”
  • Ultimately, understanding the genetics of violence might enable researchers to find ways to intervene before a person commits a horrific crime. But that goal would be difficult to achieve, and the pursuit of it risks jeopardizing personal liberties.
sissij

Norway Is the World's Happiest Country, Survey Finds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...worlds-happiest-countries.html

new york times social media research psychology

shared by sissij on 20 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Norwegians have one more reason to smile, not that they need it.
  • The authors of the report found that a half-dozen socioeconomic factors explain much of the difference in happiness among countries, but that social factors play an underappreciated role.
  • As evidence, they cite periods of substantial economic growth that were nonetheless matched by declining happiness in China and the United States, which ranked 14th.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Still, there are outliers.
  • Humanity is about halfway up the ladder, with an average global score of 5.3, based on hundreds of thousands of surveys conducted by Gallup over those years.
  • The authors found that three-quarters of the variation among countries can be explained by six economic and social factors: gross domestic product per capita (a basic measure of national wealth); healthy years of life expectancy; social support (having someone to rely on during times of trouble); trust (a perceived absence of corruption in government and business); the perceived freedom to make life choices; and generosity (measured by donations).
  • “We’re getting richer, but our social capital is deteriorating,” Dr. Sachs said.
  • To fix that social fraying, Dr. Sachs argues policy makers should work toward campaign finance reform, reducing income and wealth inequality, improving social relations between native-born and immigrant populations, overcoming the national culture of fear induced by the Sept. 11 attacks, and improving the educational system.
  • sissij on 20 Mar 17
     
    As we learned in TOK, human social science is far more complicated than natural sciences as they are multiple factors leading to a phenomenon and the standard scientific method used in natural sciences are useless when applied in social sciences. The results of some social study are often found out of our expectation. For example, in tis article, the research find out that the growth in substantial economic is probably inversely proportional to the happiness of the residences. And in some cases, economics alone did not explain the high rates of happiness. As many countries put the improvement in GDP as their first priority, they should really consider improving other aspects such as social equality, educational system, and etc so  residences can feel happy from the bottom of their heart. --Sissi (3/20/2017)
clairemann

Just 2.5% of Pandemic Response Spending So Far is Green | Time - 0 views

time.com/...vid-19-recovery-climate-change

science research knowledge pandemic

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • “build back better,” promising to use economic recovery funds to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels and create societies that are more resilient to extreme weather and other climate-related shocks.
  • “Governments in many cases are just trying to return to the old normal,” he told a launch event for the report. “It seems like the world is trying to put out a house fire with a garden hose when a perfectly good fire hydrant is available just next door.”
  • Still, the report “clearly shows that we are not yet building back better when it comes to recovery spending,”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • But that hasn’t happened yet. A study published March 10 by the U.N. Environment Program, in partnership with the University of Oxford, found that of the $14.6 trillion committed by governments of the world’s 50 largest economies in 2020, just 2.5% was on programs likely to decrease greenhouse-gas emissions, lower pollution or restoring degraded natural systems.
  • Based on proportion of GDP, Spain, South Korea, and the U.K. led on green spending during the pandemic—though that is partly because these countries have announced the allocations of greater shares of their recovery plans than most countries so far. But when considering green spending as a proportion of recovery funds so far announced, Denmark, Finland, Germany, France, Norway, and Poland led.
  • “Trillions in fiscal spending [still to be announced] provide the greatest opportunity in decades to reorient for the future,” it reads. “Citizens, businesses, policy makers, and politicians must hold each other to account to ensure that the opportunity is not wasted.”
Javier E

Ian Hacking, Eminent Philosopher of Science and Much Else, Dies at 87 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ian-hacking-dead.html

philosopher knowledge bias language

shared by Javier E on 28 May 23 - No Cached
  • In an academic career that included more than two decades as a professor in the philosophy department of the University of Toronto, following appointments at Cambridge and Stanford, Professor Hacking’s intellectual scope seemed to know no bounds. Because of his ability to span multiple academic fields, he was often described as a bridge builder.
  • “Ian Hacking was a one-person interdisciplinary department all by himself,” Cheryl Misak, a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto, said in a phone interview. “Anthropologists, sociologists, historians and psychologists, as well as those working on probability theory and physics, took him to have important insights for their disciplines.”
  • Professor Hacking wrote several landmark works on the philosophy and history of probability, including “The Taming of Chance” (1990), which was named one of the best 100 nonfiction books of the 20th century by the Modern Library.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • “I have long been interested in classifications of people, in how they affect the people classified, and how the effects on the people in turn change the classifications,” he wrote in “Making Up People
  • His work in the philosophy of science was groundbreaking: He departed from the preoccupation with questions that had long concerned philosophers. Arguing that science was just as much about intervention as it was about representation, be helped bring experimentation to center stage.
  • Regarding one such question — whether unseen phenomena like quarks and electrons were real or merely the theoretical constructs of physicists — he argued for reality in the case of phenomena that figured in experiments, citing as an example an experiment at Stanford that involved spraying electrons and positrons into a ball of niobium to detect electric charges. “So far as I am concerned,” he wrote, “if you can spray them, they’re real.”
  • His book “The Emergence of Probability” (1975), which is said to have inspired hundreds of books by other scholars, examined how concepts of statistical probability have evolved over time, shaping the way we understand not just arcane fields like quantum physics but also everyday life.
  • “I was trying to understand what happened a few hundred years ago that made it possible for our world to be dominated by probabilities,” he said in a 2012 interview with the journal Public Culture. “We now live in a universe of chance, and everything we do — health, sports, sex, molecules, the climate — takes place within a discourse of probabilities.”
  • Whatever the subject, whatever the audience, one idea that pervades all his work is that “science is a human enterprise,” Ragnar Fjelland and Roger Strand of the University of Bergen in Norway wrote when Professor Hacking won the Holberg Prize. “It is always created in a historical situation, and to understand why present science is as it is, it is not sufficient to know that it is ‘true,’ or confirmed. We have to know the historical context of its emergence.”
  • Hacking often argued that as the human sciences have evolved, they have created categories of people, and that people have subsequently defined themselves as falling into those categories. Thus does human reality become socially constructed.
  • In 2000, he became the first Anglophone to win a permanent position at the Collège de France, where he held the chair in the philosophy and history of scientific concepts until he retired in 2006.
  • “I call this the ‘looping effect,’” he added. “Sometimes, our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before.”
  • In “Why Race Still Matters,” a 2005 article in the journal Daedalus, he explored how anthropologists developed racial categories by extrapolating from superficial physical characteristics, with lasting effects — including racial oppression. “Classification and judgment are seldom separable,” he wrote. “Racial classification is evaluation.”
  • Similarly, he once wrote, in the field of mental health the word “normal” “uses a power as old as Aristotle to bridge the fact/value distinction, whispering in your ear that what is normal is also right.”
  • In his influential writings about autism, Professor Hacking charted the evolution of the diagnosis and its profound effects on those diagnosed, which in turn broadened the definition to include a greater number of people.
  • Encouraging children with autism to think of themselves that way “can separate the child from ‘normalcy’ in a way that is not appropriate,” he told Public Culture. “By all means encourage the oddities. By no means criticize the oddities.”
  • His emphasis on historical context also illuminated what he called transient mental illnesses, which appear to be so confined 0cto their time 0c 0cthat they can vanish when times change.
  • “hysterical fugue” was a short-lived epidemic of compulsive wandering that emerged in Europe in the 1880s, largely among middle-class men who had become transfixed by stories of exotic locales and the lure of trave
  • His intellectual tendencies were unmistakable from an early age. “When he was 3 or 4 years old, he would sit and read the dictionary,” Jane Hacking said. “His parents were completely baffled.”
  • He wondered aloud, the interviewer noted, if the whole universe was governed by nonlocality — if “everything in the universe is aware of everything else.”“That’s what you should be writing about,” he said. “Not me. I’m a dilettante. My governing word is ‘curiosity.’”
Javier E

Scientists Can No Longer Ignore Ancient Flooding Tales - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671681

flood legend geology confirmation

shared by Javier E on 13 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • It wasn’t long after Henry David Inglis arrived on the island of Jersey, just northwest of France, that he heard the old story. Locals eagerly told the 19th-century Scottish travel writer how, in a bygone age, their island had been much more substantial, and that folks used to walk to the French coast. The only hurdle to their journey was a river—one easily crossed using a short bridge.
  • there had been a flood. A big one. Between roughly 15,000 and 6,000 years ago, massive flooding caused by melting glaciers raised sea levels around Europe. That flooding is what eventually turned Jersey into an island.
  • Rather than being a ridiculous claim not worthy of examination, perhaps the old story was true—a whisper from ancestors who really did walk through now-vanished lands
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • That’s exactly what the geographer Patrick Nunn and the historian Margaret Cook at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia have proposed in a recent paper.
  • In their work, the pair describe colorful legends from northern Europe and Australia that depict rising waters, peninsulas becoming islands, and receding coastlines during that period of deglaciation thousands of years ago. Some of these stories, the researchers say, capture historical sea-level rise that actually happened—often several thousand years ago. For scholars of oral history, that makes them geomyths.
  • “The first time I read an Aboriginal story from Australia that seemed to recall the rise of sea levels after the last ice age, I thought, No, I don’t think this is correct,” Nunn says. “But then I read another story that recalled the same thing.
  • For Jo Brendryen, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Bergen in Norway who has studied the effects of deglaciation in Europe following the end of the last ice age, the idea that traditional oral histories preserve real accounts of sea-level rise is perfectly plausible.
  • During the last ice age, he says, the sudden melting of ice sheets induced catastrophic events known as meltwater pulses, which caused sudden and extreme sea-level rise. Along some coastlines in Europe, the ocean may have risen as much as 10 meters in just 200 years. At such a pace, it would have been noticeable to people across just a few human generations.
  • “These are stories based in trauma, based in catastrophe.”
  • That, he suggests, is why it may have made sense for successive generations to pass on tales of geological upheaval. Ancient societies may have sought to broadcast their warning: Beware, these things can happen!
  • the old stories still have things to teach us. As Nunn says, “The fact that our ancestors have survived those periods gives us hope that we can survive this.”
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