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Javier E

How To Look Smart, Ctd - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...how-to-look-smart-ctd-2.html

reading intelligence testing

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Tuesday, February 8, 2011Tuesday, February 8, 2011 Go Follow the Atlantic » Politics Presented by When Ronald Reagan Endorsed Ron Paul Joshua Green Epitaph for the DLC Marc Ambinder A Hard Time Raising Concerns About Egypt Chris Good Business Presented by Could a Hybrid Mortgage System Work? Daniel Indiviglio Fighting Bias in Academia Megan McArdle The Tech Revolution For Seniors Derek Thompson Culture Presented By 'Tiger Mother' Creates a New World Order James Fallows Justin Bieber: Daydream Believer James Parker <!-- /li
  • these questions tend to overlook the way IQ tests are designed. As a neuropsychologist who has administered hundreds of these measures, I can tell you that their structures reflect a deeply embedded bias toward intelligence as a function of reading skills
Javier E

What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right' | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump

post-truth disinformation fascism rationality far right social media manipulation press alt-right psychology

shared by Javier E on 02 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Gamergate
  • The 2014 hashtag campaign, ostensibly founded to protest about perceived ethical failures in games journalism, clearly thrived on hate – even though many of those who aligned themselves with the movement either denied there was a problem with harassment, or wrote it off as an unfortunate side effect
  • ure, women, minorities and progressive voices within the industry were suddenly living in fear. Sure, those who spoke out in their defence were quickly silenced through exhausting bursts of online abuse. But that wasn’t why people supported it, right? They were disenfranchised, felt ignored, and wanted to see a systematic change.
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  • Is this all sounding rather familiar now? Does it remind you of something?
  • it quickly became clear that the GamerGate movement was a mess – an undefined mission to Make Video Games Great Again via undecided means.
  • fter all, the culture war that began in games now has a senior representative in The White House. As a founder member and former executive chair of Brietbart News, Steve Bannon had a hand in creating media monster Milo Yiannopoulos, who built his fame and Twitter following by supporting and cheerleading Gamergate. This hashtag was the canary in the coalmine, and we ignored it.
  • Gamergate was an online movement that effectively began because a man wanted to punish his ex girlfriend. Its most notable achievement was harassing a large number of progressive figures - mostly women – to the point where they felt unsafe or considered leaving the industry
  • The similarities between Gamergate and the far-right online movement, the “alt-right”, are huge, startling and in no way a coincidence
  • These figures gave Gamergate a new sense of direction – generalising the rhetoric: this was now a wider war between “Social Justice Warriors” (SJWs) and everyday, normal, decent people. Games were simply the tip of the iceberg – progressive values, went the argument, were destroying everything
  • In 2016, new wave conservative media outlets like Breitbart have gained trust with their audience by painting traditional news sources as snooty and aloof. In 2014, video game YouTube stars, seeking to appear in touch with online gaming communities, unscrupulously proclaimed that traditional old-media sources were corrupt. Everything we’re seeing now, had its precedent two years ago.
  • With 2014’s Gamergate, Breitbart seized the opportunity to harness the pre-existing ignorance and anger among disaffected young white dudes. With Trump’s movement in 2016, the outlet was effectively running his campaign: Steve Bannon took leave of his role at the company in August 2016 when he was hired as chief executive of Trump’s presidential campaign
  • young men converted via 2014’s Gamergate, are being more widely courted now. By leveraging distrust and resentment towards women, minorities and progressives, many of Gamergate’s most prominent voices – characters like Mike Cernovich, Adam Baldwin, and Milo Yiannopoulos – drew power and influence from its chaos
  • no one in the movement was willing to be associated with the abuse being carried out in its name. Prominent supporters on Twitter, in subreddits and on forums like 8Chan, developed a range of pernicious rhetorical devices and defences to distance themselves from threats to women and minorities in the industry: the targets were lying or exaggerating, they were too precious; a language of dismissal and belittlement was formed against them. Safe spaces, snowflakes, unicorns, cry bullies. Even when abuse was proven, the usual response was that people on their side were being abused too. These techniques, forged in Gamergate, have become the standard toolset of far-right voices online
  • The majority of people who voted for Trump will never take responsibility for his racist, totalitarian policies, but they’ll provide useful cover and legitimacy for those who demand the very worst from the President Elect. Trump himself may have disavowed the “alt-right”, but his rhetoric has led to them feeling legitimised. As with Gamergate, the press risks being manipulated into a position where it has to tread a respectful middle ground that doesn’t really exist.
  • Using 4chan (and then the more sympathetic offshoot 8Chan) to plan their subversions and attacks made Gamergate a terribly sloppy operation, leaving a trail of evidence that made it quite clear the whole thing was purposefully, plainly nasty. But the video game industry didn’t have the spine to react, and allowed the movement to coagulate – forming a mass of spiteful disappointment that Breitbart was only more than happy to coddle
  • Historically, that seems to be Breitbart’s trick - strongly represent a single issue in order to earn trust, and then gradually indoctrinate to suit wider purposes. With Gamergate, they purposefully went fishing for anti-feminists. 2016’s batch of fresh converts – the white extremists – came from enticing conspiracy theories about the global neoliberal elite secretly controlling the world.
  • The greatest strength of Gamergate, though, was that it actually appeared to represent many left-leaning ideals: stamping out corruption in the press, pushing for better ethical practices, battling for openness.
  • There are similarities here with many who support Trump because of his promises to put an end to broken neo-liberalism, to “drain the swamp” of establishment corruption. Many left-leaning supporters of Gamergate sought to intellectualise their alignment with the hashtag, adopting familiar and acceptable labels of dissent – identifying as libertarian, egalitarian, humanist.
  • At best they unknowingly facilitated abuse, defending their own freedom of expression while those who actually needed support were threatened and attacked.
  • Genuine discussions over criticism, identity and censorship were paralysed and waylaid by Twitter voices obsessed with rhetorical fallacies and pedantic debating practices. While the core of these movements make people’s lives hell, the outer shell – knowingly or otherwise – protect abusers by insisting that the real problem is that you don’t want to talk, or won’t provide the ever-shifting evidence they politely require.
  • In 2017, the tactics used to discredit progressive game critics and developers will be used to discredit Trump and Bannon’s critics. There will be gaslighting, there will be attempts to make victims look as though they are losing their grip on reality, to the point that they gradually even start to believe it. The “post-truth” reality is not simply an accident – it is a concerted assault on the rational psyche.
  • The strangest aspect of Gamergate is that it consistently didn’t make any sense: people chose to align with it, and yet refused responsibility. It was constantly demanded that we debate the issues, but explanations and facts were treated with scorn. Attempts to find common ground saw the specifics of the demands being shifted: we want you to listen to us; we want you to change your ways; we want you to close your publication down. This movement that ostensibly wanted to protect free speech from cry bully SJWs simultaneously did what it could to endanger sites it disagreed with, encouraging advertisers to abandon support for media outlets that published stories critical of the hashtag. The petulance of that movement is disturbingly echoed in Trump’s own Twitter feed.
  • Looking back, Gamergate really only made sense in one way: as an exemplar of what Umberto Eco called “eternal fascism”, a form of extremism he believed could flourish at any point in, in any place – a fascism that would extol traditional values, rally against diversity and cultural critics, believe in the value of action above thought and encourage a distrust of intellectuals or experts – a fascism built on frustration and machismo. The requirement of this formless fascism would – above all else – be to remain in an endless state of conflict, a fight against a foe who must always be portrayed as impossibly strong and laughably weak
  • 2016 has presented us with a world in which our reality is being wilfully manipulated. Fake news, divisive algorithms, misleading social media campaigns.
  • The same voices moved into other geek communities, especially comics, where Marvel and DC were criticised for progressive storylines and decisions. They moved into science fiction with the controversy over the Hugo awards. They moved into cinema with the revolting kickback against the all-female Ghostbusters reboot.
  • Perhaps the true lesson of Gamergate was that the media is culturally unequipped to deal with the forces actively driving these online movements. The situation was horrifying enough two years ago, it is many times more dangerous now.
Emily Freilich

All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines - Nicholas ... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...309516

automation knowledge technology psychology

shared by Emily Freilich on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • We rely on computers to fly our planes, find our cancers, design our buildings, audit our businesses. That's all well and good. But what happens when the computer fails?
  • On the evening of February 12, 2009, a Continental Connection commuter flight made its way through blustery weather between Newark, New Jersey, and Buffalo, New York.
  • The Q400 was well into its approach to the Buffalo airport, its landing gear down, its wing flaps out, when the pilot’s control yoke began to shudder noisily, a signal that the plane was losing lift and risked going into an aerodynamic stall. The autopilot disconnected, and the captain took over the controls. He reacted quickly, but he did precisely the wrong thing: he jerked back on the yoke, lifting the plane’s nose and reducing its airspeed, instead of pushing the yoke forward to gain velocity.
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • The crash, which killed all 49 people on board as well as one person on the ground, should never have happened.
  • aptain’s response to the stall warning, the investigators reported, “should have been automatic, but his improper flight control inputs were inconsistent with his training” and instead revealed “startle and confusion.
  • Automation has become so sophisticated that on a typical passenger flight, a human pilot holds the controls for a grand total of just three minutes.
  • We humans have been handing off chores, both physical and mental, to tools since the invention of the lever, the wheel, and the counting bead.
  • And that, many aviation and automation experts have concluded, is a problem. Overuse of automation erodes pilots’ expertise and dulls their reflexes,
  • No one doubts that autopilot has contributed to improvements in flight safety over the years. It reduces pilot fatigue and provides advance warnings of problems, and it can keep a plane airborne should the crew become disabled. But the steady overall decline in plane crashes masks the recent arrival of “a spectacularly new type of accident,”
  • “We’re forgetting how to fly.”
  • The experience of airlines should give us pause. It reveals that automation, for all its benefits, can take a toll on the performance and talents of those who rely on it. The implications go well beyond safety. Because automation alters how we act, how we learn, and what we know, it has an ethical dimension. The choices we make, or fail to make, about which tasks we hand off to machines shape our lives and the place we make for ourselves in the world.
  • What pilots spend a lot of time doing is monitoring screens and keying in data. They’ve become, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say, computer operators.
  • Examples of complacency and bias have been well documented in high-risk situations—on flight decks and battlefields, in factory control rooms—but recent studies suggest that the problems can bedevil anyone working with a computer
  • That may leave the person operating the computer to play the role of a high-tech clerk—entering data, monitoring outputs, and watching for failures. Rather than opening new frontiers of thought and action, software ends up narrowing our focus.
  • A labor-saving device doesn’t just provide a substitute for some isolated component of a job or other activity. It alters the character of the entire task, including the roles, attitudes, and skills of the people taking part.
  • when we work with computers, we often fall victim to two cognitive ailments—complacency and bias—that can undercut our performance and lead to mistakes. Automation complacency occurs when a computer lulls us into a false sense of security. Confident that the machine will work flawlessly and handle any problem that crops up, we allow our attention to drift.
  • Automation bias occurs when we place too much faith in the accuracy of the information coming through our monitors. Our trust in the software becomes so strong that we ignore or discount other information sources, including our own eyes and ears
  • Automation is different now. Computers can be programmed to perform complex activities in which a succession of tightly coordinated tasks is carried out through an evaluation of many variables. Many software programs take on intellectual work—observing and sensing, analyzing and judging, even making decisions—that until recently was considered the preserve of humans.
  • Automation turns us from actors into observers. Instead of manipulating the yoke, we watch the screen. That shift may make our lives easier, but it can also inhibit the development of expertise.
  • Since the late 1970s, psychologists have been documenting a phenomenon called the “generation effect.” It was first observed in studies of vocabulary, which revealed that people remember words much better when they actively call them to mind—when they generate them—than when they simply read them.
  • When you engage actively in a task, you set off intricate mental processes that allow you to retain more knowledge. You learn more and remember more. When you repeat the same task over a long period, your brain constructs specialized neural circuits dedicated to the activit
  • What looks like instinct is hard-won skill, skill that requires exactly the kind of struggle that modern software seeks to alleviate.
  • In many businesses, managers and other professionals have come to depend on decision-support systems to analyze information and suggest courses of action. Accountants, for example, use the systems in corporate audits. The applications speed the work, but some signs suggest that as the software becomes more capable, the accountants become less so.
  • You can put limits on the scope of automation, making sure that people working with computers perform challenging tasks rather than merely observing.
  • Experts used to assume that there were limits to the ability of programmers to automate complicated tasks, particularly those involving sensory perception, pattern recognition, and conceptual knowledge
  • Who needs humans, anyway? That question, in one rhetorical form or another, comes up frequently in discussions of automation. If computers’ abilities are expanding so quickly and if people, by comparison, seem slow, clumsy, and error-prone, why not build immaculately self-contained systems that perform flawlessly without any human oversight or intervention? Why not take the human factor out of the equation?
  • The cure for imperfect automation is total automation.
  • That idea is seductive, but no machine is infallible. Sooner or later, even the most advanced technology will break down, misfire, or, in the case of a computerized system, encounter circumstances that its designers never anticipated. As automation technologies become more complex, relying on interdependencies among algorithms, databases, sensors, and mechanical parts, the potential sources of failure multiply. They also become harder to detect.
  • conundrum of computer automation.
  • Because many system designers assume that human operators are “unreliable and inefficient,” at least when compared with a computer, they strive to give the operators as small a role as possible.
  • People end up functioning as mere monitors, passive watchers of screens. That’s a job that humans, with our notoriously wandering minds, are especially bad at
  • people have trouble maintaining their attention on a stable display of information for more than half an hour. “This means,” Bainbridge observed, “that it is humanly impossible to carry out the basic function of monitoring for unlikely abnormalities.”
  • a person’s skills “deteriorate when they are not used,” even an experienced operator will eventually begin to act like an inexperienced one if restricted to just watching.
  • You can program software to shift control back to human operators at frequent but irregular intervals; knowing that they may need to take command at any moment keeps people engaged, promoting situational awareness and learning.
  • What’s most astonishing, and unsettling, about computer automation is that it’s still in its early stages.
  • most software applications don’t foster learning and engagement. In fact, they have the opposite effect. That’s because taking the steps necessary to promote the development and maintenance of expertise almost always entails a sacrifice of speed and productivity.
  • Learning requires inefficiency. Businesses, which seek to maximize productivity and profit, would rarely accept such a trade-off. Individuals, too, almost always seek efficiency and convenience.
  • Abstract concerns about the fate of human talent can’t compete with the allure of saving time and money.
  • The small island of Igloolik, off the coast of the Melville Peninsula in the Nunavut territory of northern Canada, is a bewildering place in the winter.
  • , Inuit hunters have for some 4,000 years ventured out from their homes on the island and traveled across miles of ice and tundra to search for game. The hunters’ ability to navigate vast stretches of the barren Arctic terrain, where landmarks are few, snow formations are in constant flux, and trails disappear overnight, has amazed explorers and scientists for centuries. The Inuit’s extraordinary way-finding skills are born not of technological prowess—they long eschewed maps and compasses—but of a profound understanding of winds, snowdrift patterns, animal behavior, stars, and tides.
  • The Igloolik hunters have begun to rely on computer-generated maps to get around. Adoption of GPS technology has been particularly strong among younger Inuit, and it’s not hard to understand why.
  • But as GPS devices have proliferated on Igloolik, reports of serious accidents during hunts have spread. A hunter who hasn’t developed way-finding skills can easily become lost, particularly if his GPS receiver fails.
  • The routes so meticulously plotted on satellite maps can also give hunters tunnel vision, leading them onto thin ice or into other hazards a skilled navigator would avoid.
  • An Inuit on a GPS-equipped snowmobile is not so different from a suburban commuter in a GPS-equipped SUV: as he devotes his attention to the instructions coming from the computer, he loses sight of his surroundings. He travels “blindfolded,” as Aporta puts it
  • A unique talent that has distinguished a people for centuries may evaporate in a generation.
  • Computer automation severs the ends from the means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing. As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face an existential question: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want?
  • Emily Freilich on 01 Nov 13
     
    Automation increases efficiency and speed of tasks, but decreases the individual's knowledge of a task and decrease's a human's ability to learn. 
grayton downing

Retracing Steps | The Scientist Magazine® - 1 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38241/title/Retracing-Steps/

scientist research science

shared by grayton downing on 11 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • growing body of research has highlighted scientists’ inability to reproduce one another’s results, including a 2012 study that found only 11 percent of “landmark” cancer studies investigated could be independently confirmed.
  • “Some communities have standards requiring raw data to be deposited at or before publication, but the computer code is generally not made available, typically due to the time it takes to prepare it for release,”
  • Sage’s solution? An open-source computational platform, called Synapse, which enables seamless collaboration among geographically dispersed scientific teams—providing them with the tools to share data, source code, and analysis methods on specific research projects or on any of the 10,000 datasets in the organization’s massive data corpus. Key to these collaborations are tools embedded in Synapse that allow for everything from data “freezing” and versioning controls to graphical provenance records—delineating who did what to which dataset, for example.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • It was indeed the connecting data framework that held the entire project together,” said Josh Stuart, professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is part of the TCGA-led project.
  • “It provides a framework for the science to be extended upon, instead of publication as a finite endpoint for research,”
Javier E

The Problem With History Classes - The Atlantic - 3 views

www.theatlantic.com/...387823

history historiography teaching memory AP myth American idea bias

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The passion and urgency with which these battles are fought reflect the misguided way history is taught in schools. Currently, most students learn history as a set narrative—a process that reinforces the mistaken idea that the past can be synthesized into a single, standardized chronicle of several hundred pages. This teaching pretends that there is a uniform collective story, which is akin to saying everyone remembers events the same.
  • Yet, history is anything but agreeable. It is not a collection of facts deemed to be "official" by scholars on high. It is a collection of historians exchanging different, often conflicting analyses.
  • rather than vainly seeking to transcend the inevitable clash of memories, American students would be better served by descending into the bog of conflict and learning the many "histories" that compose the American national story.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Perhaps Fisher offers the nation an opportunity to divorce, once and for all, memory from history. History may be an attempt to memorialize and preserve the past, but it is not memory; memories can serve as primary sources, but they do not stand alone as history. A history is essentially a collection of memories, analyzed and reduced into meaningful conclusions—but that collection depends on the memories chosen.
  • Memories make for a risky foundation: As events recede further into the past, the facts are distorted or augmented by entirely new details
  • people construct unique memories while informing perfectly valid histories. Just as there is a plurality of memories, so, too, is there a plurality of histories.
  • Scholars who read a diverse set of historians who are all focused on the same specific period or event are engaging in historiography
  • This approach exposes textbooks as nothing more than a compilation of histories that the authors deemed to be most relevant and useful.
  • In historiography, the barrier between historian and student is dropped, exposing a conflict-ridden landscape. A diplomatic historian approaches an event from the perspective of the most influential statesmen (who are most often white males), analyzing the context, motives, and consequences of their decisions. A cultural historian peels back the objects, sights, and sounds of a period to uncover humanity’s underlying emotions and anxieties. A Marxist historian adopts the lens of class conflict to explain the progression of events. There are intellectual historians, social historians, and gender historians, among many others. Historians studying the same topic will draw different interpretations—sometimes radically so, depending on the sources they draw from
  • Jacoba Urist points out that history is "about explaining and interpreting past events analytically." If students are really to learn and master these analytical tools, then it is absolutely essential that they read a diverse set of historians and learn how brilliant men and women who are scrutinizing the same topic can reach different conclusions
  • Rather than constructing a curriculum based on the muddled consensus of boards, legislatures, and think tanks, schools should teach students history through historiography. The shortcomings of one historian become apparent after reading the work of another one on the list.
  • Although, as Urist notes, the AP course is "designed to teach students to think like historians," my own experience in that class suggests that it fails to achieve that goal.
  • The course’s framework has always served as an outline of important concepts aiming to allow educators flexibility in how to teach; it makes no reference to historiographical conflicts. Historiography was an epiphany for me because I had never before come face-to-face with how historians think and reason
  • When I took AP U.S. History, I jumbled these diverse histories into one indistinct narrative. Although the test involved open-ended essay questions, I was taught that graders were looking for a firm thesis—forcing students to adopt a side. The AP test also, unsurprisingly, rewards students who cite a wealth of supporting details
  • By the time I took the test in 2009, I was a master at "checking boxes," weighing political factors equally against those involving socioeconomics and ensuring that previously neglected populations like women and ethnic minorities received their due. I did not know that I was pulling ideas from different historiographical traditions. I still subscribed to the idea of a prevailing national narrative and served as an unwitting sponsor of synthesis, oblivious to the academic battles that made such synthesis impossible.
  • Although there may be an inclination to seek to establish order where there is chaos, that urge must be resisted in teaching history. Public controversies over memory are hardly new. Students must be prepared to confront divisiveness, not conditioned to shoehorn agreement into situations where none is possible
  • When conflict is accepted rather than resisted, it becomes possible for different conceptions of American history to co-exist. There is no longer a need to appoint a victor.
  • More importantly, the historiographical approach avoids pursuing truth for the sake of satisfying a national myth
  • The country’s founding fathers crafted some of the finest expressions of personal liberty and representative government the world has ever seen; many of them also held fellow humans in bondage. This paradox is only a problem if the goal is to view the founding fathers as faultless, perfect individuals. If multiple histories are embraced, no one needs to fear that one history will be lost.
  • History is not indoctrination. It is a wrestling match. For too long, the emphasis has been on pinning the opponent. It is time to shift the focus to the struggle itself
  • There is no better way to use the past to inform the present than by accepting the impossibility of a definitive history—and by ensuring that current students are equipped to grapple with the contested memories in their midst.
Javier E

The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices - Derek ... - 4 views

www.theatlantic.com/...267255

rational choice rationality psychology consumer economics

shared by Javier E on 20 May 15 - No Cached
  • Atlantic.displayRandomElement('#header li.business .sponsored-dropdown-item'); Derek Thompson - Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage for the website. More Derek has also written for Slate, BusinessWeek, and the Daily Beast. He has appeared as a guest on radio and television networks, including NPR, the BBC, CNBC, and MSNBC. All Posts RSS feed Share Share on facebook Share on linkedin Share on twitter « Previous Thompson Email Print Close function plusOneCallback () { $(document).trigger('share'); } $(document).ready(function() { var iframeUrl = "\/ad\/thanks-iframe\/TheAtlanticOnline\/channel_business;src=blog;by=derek-thompson;title=the-irrational-consumer-why-economics-is-dead-wrong-about-how-we-make-choices;pos=sharing;sz=640x480,336x280,300x250"; var toolsClicked = false; $('#toolsTop').click(function() { toolsClicked = 'top'; }); $('#toolsBottom').click(function() { toolsClicked = 'bottom'; }); $('#thanksForSharing a.hide').click(function() { $('#thanksForSharing').hide(); }); var onShareClickHandler = function() { var top = parseInt($(this).css('top').replace(/px/, ''), 10); toolsClicked = (top > 600) ? 'bottom' : 'top'; }; var onIframeReady = function(iframe) { var win = iframe.contentWindow; // Don't show the box if there's no ad in it if (win.$('.ad').children().length == 1) { return; } var visibleAds = win.$('.ad').filter(function() { return !($(this).css('display') == 'none'); }); if (visibleAds.length == 0) { // Ad is hidden, so don't show return; } if (win.$('.ad').hasClass('adNotLoaded')) { // Ad failed to load so don't show return; } $('#thanksForSharing').css('display', 'block'); var top; if(toolsClicked == 'bottom' && $('#toolsBottom').length) { top = $('#toolsBottom')[0].offsetTop + $('#toolsBottom').height() - 310; } else { top = $('#toolsTop')[0].offsetTop + $('#toolsTop').height() + 10; } $('#thanksForSharing').css('left', (-$('#toolsTop').offset().left + 60) + 'px'); $('#thanksForSharing').css('top', top + 'px'); }; var onShare = function() { // Close "Share successful!" AddThis plugin popup if (window._atw && window._atw.clb && $('#at15s:visible').length) { _atw.clb(); } if (iframeUrl == null) { return; } $('#thanksForSharingIframe').attr('src', "\/ad\/thanks-iframe\/TheAtlanticOnline\/channel_business;src=blog;by=derek-thompson;title=the-irrational-consumer-why-economics-is-dead-wrong-about-how-we-make-choices;pos=sharing;sz=640x480,336x280,300x250"); $('#thanksForSharingIframe').load(function() { var iframe = this; var win = iframe.contentWindow; if (win.loaded) { onIframeReady(iframe); } else { win.$(iframe.contentDocument).ready(function() { onIframeReady(iframe); }) } }); }; if (window.addthis) { addthis.addEventListener('addthis.ready', function() { $('.articleTools .share').mouseover(function() { $('#at15s').unbind('click', onShareClickHandler); $('#at15s').bind('click', onShareClickHandler); }); }); addthis.addEventListener('addthis.menu.share', function(evt) { onShare(); }); } // This 'share' event is used for testing, so one can call // $(document).trigger('share') to get the thank you for // sharing box to appear. $(document).bind('share', function(event) { onShare(); }); if (!window.FB || (window.FB && !window.FB._apiKey)) { // Hook into the fbAsyncInit function and register our listener there var oldFbAsyncInit = (window.fbAsyncInit) ? window.fbAsyncInit : (function() { }); window.fbAsyncInit = function() { oldFbAsyncInit(); FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(response) { // to hide the facebook comments box $('#facebookLike span.fb_edge_comment_widget').hide(); onShare(); }); }; } else if (window.FB) { FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(response) { // to hide the facebook comments box $('#facebookLike span.fb_edge_comment_widget').hide(); onShare(); }); } }); The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices By Derek Thompson he
  • First, making a choice is physically exhausting, literally, so that somebody forced to make a number of decisions in a row is likely to get lazy and dumb.
  • Second, having too many choices can make us less likely to come to a conclusion. In a famous study of the so-called "paradox of choice", psychologists Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar found that customers presented with six jam varieties were more likely to buy one than customers offered a choice of 24.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Many of our mistakes stem from a central "availability bias." Our brains are computers, and we like to access recently opened files, even though many decisions require a deep body of information that might require some searching. Cheap example: We remember the first, last, and peak moments of certain experiences.
  • The third check against the theory of the rational consumer is the fact that we're social animals. We let our friends and family and tribes do our thinking for us
  • neurologists are finding that many of the biases behavioral economists perceive in decision-making start in our brains. "Brain studies indicate that organisms seem to be on a hedonic treadmill, quickly habituating to homeostasis," McFadden writes. In other words, perhaps our preference for the status quo isn't just figuratively our heads, but also literally sculpted by the hand of evolution inside of our brains.
  • The popular psychological theory of "hyperbolic discounting" says people don't properly evaluate rewards over time. The theory seeks to explain why many groups -- nappers, procrastinators, Congress -- take rewards now and pain later, over and over again. But neurology suggests that it hardly makes sense to speak of "the brain," in the singular, because it's two very different parts of the brain that process choices for now and later. The choice to delay gratification is mostly processed in the frontal system. But studies show that the choice to do something immediately gratifying is processed in a different system, the limbic system, which is more viscerally connected to our behavior, our "reward pathways," and our feelings of pain and pleasure.
  • the final message is that neither the physiology of pleasure nor the methods we use to make choices are as simple or as single-minded as the classical economists thought. A lot of behavior is consistent with pursuit of self-interest, but in novel or ambiguous decision-making environments there is a good chance that our habits will fail us and inconsistencies in the way we process information will undo us.
  • Our brains seem to operate like committees, assigning some tasks to the limbic system, others to the frontal system. The "switchboard" does not seem to achieve complete, consistent communication between different parts of the brain. Pleasure and pain are experienced in the limbic system, but not on one fixed "utility" or "self-interest" scale. Pleasure and pain have distinct neural pathways, and these pathways adapt quickly to homeostasis, with sensation coming from changes rather than levels
  • Social networks are sources of information, on what products are available, what their features are, and how your friends like them. If the information is accurate, this should help you make better choices. On the other hand, it also makes it easier for you to follow the crowd rather than engaging in the due diligence of collecting and evaluating your own information and playing it against your own preferences
Javier E

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”.
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  • “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.
karenmcgregor

Is ComputerNetworkAssignmentHelp.com a Legitimate Source for Network Security Assignmen... - 0 views

In the dynamic landscape of academic support services, finding a trustworthy platform for network security assignment writing help is crucial. Today, we'll delve into the legitimacy of https://www....

#networksecurityassignmentwritinghelp #networksecurity #onlineassignmenthelp education

started by karenmcgregor on 08 Jan 24 no follow-up yet
Javier E

The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson From Auschwitz - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-dangers-of-certainty

ascent science tolerance fundamentalism certainty uncertainty

shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • in 1973, the BBC aired an extraordinary documentary series called “The Ascent of Man,” hosted by one Dr. Jacob Bronowski
  • It was not an account of human biological evolution, but cultural evolution — from the origins of human life in the Rift Valley to the shifts from hunter/gatherer societies, &nbsp;to nomadism and then settlement and civilization, from agriculture and metallurgy to the rise and fall of empires: Assyria, Egypt, Rome.
  • The tone of the programs was rigorous yet permissive, playful yet precise, and always urgent, open and exploratory. I remember in particular the programs on the trial of Galileo, Darwin’s hesitancy about publishing his theory of evolution and the dizzying consequences of Einstein’s theory of relativity.
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  • For Bronowski, science and art were two neighboring mighty rivers that flowed from a common source: the human imagination.
  • For Dr. Bronowski, there was no absolute knowledge and anyone who claims it — whether a scientist, a politician or a religious believer — opens the door to tragedy. All scientific information is imperfect and we have to treat it with humility. Such, for him, was the human condition.
  • This is the condition for what we can know, but it is also, crucially, a moral lesson. It is the lesson of 20th-century painting from Cubism onwards, but also that of quantum physics. All we can do is to push deeper and deeper into better approximations of an ever-evasive reality
  • Errors are inextricably bound up with pursuit of human knowledge, which requires not just mathematical calculation but insight, interpretation and a personal act of judgment for which we are responsible.
  • Dr. Bronowski insisted that the principle of uncertainty was a misnomer, because it gives the impression that in science (and outside of it) we are always uncertain. But this is wrong. Knowledge is precise, but that precision is confined within a certain toleration of uncertainty.
  • The emphasis on the moral responsibility of knowledge was essential for all of Dr. Bronowski’s work. The acquisition of knowledge entails a responsibility for the integrity of what we are as ethical creatures.
  • Pursuing knowledge means accepting uncertainty. Heisenberg’s principle has the consequence that no physical events can ultimately be described with absolute certainty or with “zero tolerance,” as it were. The more we know, the less certain we are.
  • Our relations with others also require a principle of tolerance. We encounter other people across a gray area of negotiation and approximation. Such is the business of listening and the back and forth of conversation and social interaction.
  • For Dr. Bronowski, the moral consequence of knowledge is that we must never judge others on the basis of some absolute, God-like conception of certainty. All knowledge, all information that passes between human beings, can be exchanged only within what we might call “a play of tolerance,” whether in science, literature, politics or religion.
  • The play of tolerance opposes the principle of monstrous certainty that is endemic to fascism and, sadly, not just fascism but all the various faces of fundamentalism. When we think we have certainty, when we aspire to the knowledge of the gods, then Auschwitz can happen and can repeat itself.
  • The pursuit of scientific knowledge is as personal an act as lifting a paintbrush or writing a poem, and they are both profoundly human. If the human condition is defined by limitedness, then this is a glorious fact because it is a moral limitedness rooted in a faith in the power of the imagination, our sense of responsibility and our acceptance of our fallibility. We always have to acknowledge that we might be mistaken.
Javier E

How to Make Your Own Luck | Brain Pickings - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...how-to-make-your-own-luck

creativity journals habit luck openness risk career expertise innovation

shared by Javier E on 07 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • editor Jocelyn Glei and her team at Behance’s 99U pull together another package of practical wisdom from 21 celebrated creative entrepreneurs. Despite the somewhat self-helpy, SEO-skewing title, this compendium of advice is anything but contrived. Rather, it’s a no-nonsense, experience-tested, life-approved cookbook for creative intelligence, exploring everything from harnessing the power of habit to cultivating meaningful relationships that enrich your work to overcoming the fear of failure.
  • If the twentieth-century career was a ladder that we climbed from one predictable rung to the next, the twenty-first-century career is more like a broad rock face that we are all free-climbing. There’s no defined route, and we must use our own ingenuity, training, and strength to rise to the top. We must make our own luck.
  • Lucky people take advantage of chance occurrences that come their way. Instead of going through life on cruise control, they pay attention to what’s happening around them and, therefore, are able to extract greater value from each situation… Lucky people are also open to novel opportunities and willing to try things outside of their usual experiences. They’re more inclined to pick up a book on an unfamiliar subject, to travel to less familiar destinations, and to interact with people who are different than themselves.
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  • the primary benefit of a diary as a purely pragmatic record of your workday productivity and progress — while most dedicated diarists would counter that the core benefits are spiritual and psychoemotional — it does offer some valuable insight into the psychology of how journaling elevates our experience of everyday life:
  • We can’t, however, simply will ourselves into better habits. Since willpower is a limited resource, whenever we’ve overexerted our self-discipline in one domain, a concept known as “ego depletion” kicks in and renders us mindless automata in another
  • the key to changing a habit is to invest heavily in the early stages of habit-formation so that the behavior becomes automated and we later default into it rather than exhausting our willpower wrestling with it. Young also cautions that it’s a self-defeating strategy to try changing several habits at once. Rather, he advises, spend one month on each habit alone before moving on to the next
  • a diary boosts your creativity
  • This is one of the most important reasons to keep a diary: it can make you more aware of your own progress, thus becoming a wellspring of joy in your workday.
  • The second reason is focalism. When we contemplate failure from afar, according to Gilbert and Wilson, we tend to overemphasize the focal event (i.e., failure) and overlook all the other episodic details of daily life that help us move on and feel better. The threat of failure is so vivid that it consumes our attention
  • the authors point to a pattern that reveals the single most important motivator: palpable progress on meaningful work: On the days when these professionals saw themselves moving forward on something they cared about — even if the progress was a seemingly incremental “small win” — they were more likely to be happy and deeply engaged in their work. And, being happier and more deeply engaged, they were more likely to come up with new ideas and solve problems creatively.
  • Although the act of reflecting and writing, in itself, can be beneficial, you’ll multiply the power of your diary if you review it regularly — if you listen to what your life has been telling you. Periodically, maybe once a month, set aside time to get comfortable and read back through your entries. And, on New Year’s Day, make an annual ritual of reading through the previous year.
  • This, they suggest, can yield profound insights into the inner workings of your own mind — especially if you look for specific clues and patterns, trying to identify the richest sources of meaning in your work and the types of projects that truly make your heart sing. Once you understand what motivates you most powerfully, you’ll be able to prioritize this type of work in going forward. Just as important, however, is cultivating a gratitude practice and acknowledging your own accomplishments in the diary:
  • Fields argues that if we move along the Uncertainty Curve either too fast or too slowly, we risk either robbing the project of its creative potential and ending up in mediocrity. Instead, becoming mindful of the psychology of that process allows us to pace ourselves better and master that vital osmosis between freedom and constraint.
  • Schwalbe reminds us of the “impact bias” — our tendency to greatly overestimate the intensity and extent of our emotional reactions, which causes us to expect failures to be more painful than they actually are and thus to fear them more than we should.
  • When we think about taking a risk, we rarely consider how good we will be at reframing a disappointing outcome. In short, we underestimate our resilience.
  • what you do every day is best seen as an iceberg, with a small fraction of conscious decision sitting atop a much larger foundation of habits and behaviors.
  • don’t let yourself forget that the good life, the meaningful life, the truly fulfilling life, is the life of presence, not of productivity.
Javier E

Young Minds in Critical Condition - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ng-minds-in-critical-condition

liberal arts critical thinking skepticism university youth cynicism

shared by Javier E on 12 May 14 - No Cached
  • Our best college students are very good at being critical. In fact being smart, for many, means being critical. Having strong critical skills shows that you will not be easily fooled. It is a sign of sophistication, especially when coupled with an acknowledgment of one’s own “privilege.”
  • The combination of resistance to influence and deflection of responsibility by confessing to one’s advantages is a sure sign of one’s ability to negotiate the politics of learning on campus.
  • Taking things apart, or taking people down, can provide the satisfactions of cynicism. But this is thin gruel.
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  • In overdeveloping the capacity to show how texts, institutions or people fail to accomplish what they set out to do, we may be depriving students of the chance to learn as much as possible from what they study.
  • As debunkers, they contribute to a cultural climate that has little tolerance for finding or making meaning — a culture whose intellectuals and cultural commentators get “liked” by showing that somebody else just can’t be believed.
  • Liberal education in America has long been characterized by the intertwining of two traditions: of critical inquiry in pursuit of truth and exuberant performance in pursuit of excellence. In the last half-century, though, emphasis on inquiry has become dominant, and it has often been reduced to the ability to expose error and undermine belief.
  • fetishizing disbelief as a sign of intelligence has contributed to depleting our cultural resources. Creative work, in whatever field, depends upon commitment, the energy of participation and the ability to become absorbed in works of literature, art and science. That type of absorption is becoming an endangered species of cultural life, as our nonstop, increasingly fractured technological existence wears down our receptive capacities.
  • Liberal learning depends on absorption in compelling work. It is a way to open ourselves to the various forms of life in which we might actively participate. When we learn to read or look or listen intensively, we are, at least temporarily, overcoming our own blindness by trying to understand an experience from another’s point of view.
  • we are learning to activate potential, and often to instigate new possibilities.
  • Liberal education must not limit itself to critical thinking and problem solving; it must also foster openness, participation and opportunity. It should be designed to take us beyond the campus to a life of ongoing, pragmatic learning that finds inspiration in unexpected sources, and increases our capacity to understand and contribute to the world
anonymous

Her Film on Sex Assault Depicts Her Own and Fuels a #MeToo Moment - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-stajnfeld-hold-me-right.html

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Her Film on Sex Assault Depicts Her Own and Fuels a #MeToo Moment
  • Danijela Stajnfeld included her account of being assaulted in a film that has led to contentious debate in Serbia and prompted other women to come forward to say they were sexually abused.
  • Her face graced billboards in Belgrade. She appeared regularly in Serbian movies, magazines and television shows
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  • Trained at the prestigious Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, Danijela Stajnfeld had, by the age of 26 in 2011, won two major theater prizes
  • The following year, she abruptly and mysteriously dropped from public view. It wasn’t until last summer that she publicly revealed why.
  • In her documentary, “Hold Me Right,” about victims and perpetrators of sexual assault, Stajnfeld said that she too had been sexually assaulted eight years earlier by a powerful Serbian man, which had prompted her move to the United States.
  • “I thought no one remembered me, I didn’t keep in touch with anyone in Serbia,” she said in an interview.
  • Stajnfeld’s face was suddenly all over the Serbian press again. Television and online commentators praised her for speaking out or savaged her for not disclosing the man’s name.
  • She said she did not identify the man because she wanted the film to focus on survivors and healing, rather than singling out a perpetrator
  • Critics questioned her motives. “Sick!” read one headline. “Actress made up the rape to advertise her film.”
  • While the country has taken steps to advance the cause of women’s rights in recent years — in 2013 it ratified a human rights convention addressing gender-based violence — in Serbia, as in the surrounding region, sexual harassment and assaults are still only rarely reported, and victim shaming abounds.
  • A longer version, he said, would reveal the broader context, that they were merely improvising dialogue, and that she was possibly claiming he assaulted her to gain publicity for her film.
  • In January, several other Serbian actresses came out publicly with allegations that they had been raped, and a MeToo-like movement roared to life in this region where the culture of calling out abusers had yet to gain a foothold.
  • Using the hashtag #NisiSama, which means “You are not alone,” and on the Facebook page Nisam Trazila, or “I didn’t ask for it,” which has 40,000 followers, supporters urged that victims of sexual harassment be believed and perpetrators be held to account.
  • “After opening up, it was so liberating; I thought the narrative was in my hands,” Stajnfeld said. “But it caused even more unsafety and ridiculous dehumanization.”
  • Only weeks ago, he had spoken out against sexual assault.
  • “When a woman says no, that’s the end of it. I don’t understand that someone can’t control their urges,” he told one Serbian newspaper.
  • “I have never had sexual contact with her. Everything else would be a lie!” Lecic wrote in a WhatsApp message.
  • But Stajnfeld provided prosecutors and members of the media with an audio recording of her confronting him in a Belgrade restaurant in December 2016
  • Lecic said what happened ought to “feel like an honor, not to put you in jeopardy.” “Who do you think I am?” he continued. “As if I don’t respect who I am.”
  • In the recording, Lecic also pushed back on Stajnfeld’s assertion that if she says no, she means no. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said, later adding, “Life is unpredictable, like a game.”
  • Last week Stajnfeld, who lives in New York, flew to Serbia, met with the police and prosecutors and identified the man who she said assaulted her as Branislav Lecic.
  • “Maybe she was expecting something more, maybe it’s because nothing happened that she wants revenge, and maybe she wants to build her story through me,” he wrote. “Bad marketing is also marketing.”
  • When they began rehearsing the play, Stajnfeld said she viewed Lecic as a mentor and a friend, until he began propositioning her to have sex. Then, one day, in his dressing room, she said he abruptly shoved his hand up her dress. Stajnfeld said she pulled away and fled, stunned, but opted not to tell the director because she was worried she wouldn’t be believed, and that it could hurt her career. Lecic denied any sexual encounter took place.
  • “In that moment, I was so tortured,” she continued. “He was asking me to do stuff for him. I wanted to do anything for this torture to stop. I couldn’t move my arms, my mouth, I couldn’t stop crying,” she said.
  • “For the sake of justice, for the sake of my healing, for the sake of other victims in the region, I’m speaking out now,
  • After the premiere of Stajnfeld’s film last summer, media commentators said she should be ashamed, that she had slept with a man to get a role, that she should name him or else be prosecuted, that she dishonored women who had really been raped, and that she looked too happy in a recent televised interview to have been a victim.
  • “Danijela’s case gave wings to other women, actresses, to talk about what happened to them,” said Dragana Grncarski, a former model and public figure. “Coming out in the open, they prevent things like that from happening to other women.”
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: Is There a Way to Acknowledge Our Progress? - 0 views

nymag.com/...-acknowledge-our-progress.html

perception threat progress human psychology bias perspective pessimism

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • 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?
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • a recent psychological study suggests a simpler explanation. Its core idea is what you might call “oppression creep” or, more neutrally, “prevalence-induced concept change.” The more progress we observe, the greater the remaining injustices appear.
  • We seem incapable of keeping a concept stable over time when the prevalence of that concept declines.
  • lthough modern societies have made extraordinary progress in solving a wide range of social problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and infant mortality, the majority of people believe that the world is getting worse. The fact that concepts grow larger when their instances grow smaller may be one source of that pessimism.
  • “In other words, when the prevalence of blue dots decreased, participants’ concept of blue expanded to include dots that it had previously excluded.”
  • When blue dots became rare, purple dots began to look blue; when threatening faces became rare, neutral faces began to appear threatening … This happened even when the change in the prevalence of instances was abrupt, even when participants were explicitly told that the prevalence of instances would change, and even when participants were instructed and paid to ignore these changes.
  • We seem to be wired to assume a given threat remains just as menacing even when its actual prevalence has declined:
  • We see relatively, not absolutely. We change our standards all the time, depending on context.
  • This study may help explain why, in the midst of tremendous gains for gays, women, and racial minorities, we still insist more than ever that we live in a patriarchal, misogynist, white supremacist, homophobic era.
  • We never seem to be able to say: “Okay, we’re done now, we’ve got this, politics has done all it reasonably could, now let’s move on with our lives.” We can only ever say: “It’s worse than ever!” And fe
  • whatever the cause, the result is that we steadfastly refuse to accept the fact of progress, in a cycle of eternal frustration at what injustices will always remain
  • picking someone who has bent the truth so often about so many things — her ancestry, her commitment to serving a full term as senator, the schools her kids went to, the job her father had (according to her brother), or the time she was “fired” for being pregnant — is an unnecessary burden.
  • The Democrat I think is most likely to lose to Trump is Elizabeth Warren.I admire her ambition and grit and aggression, but nominating a woke, preachy Harvard professor plays directly into Trump’s hands
  • Pete Buttigieg’s appeal has waned for me.
  • over time, the combination of his perfect résumé, his actorly ability to change register as he unpacks a sentence, and his smoothness and self-love have begun to worry me. My fear is that his appeal will fade
  • Klobuchar, to my mind, is the better midwestern option. She is an engaging and successful politician. But there’s a reason she seemingly can’t get more traction. She just doesn’t command a room
  • I so want Biden to be ten years younger. I can’t help but be very fond of the man, and he does have a mix of qualities that appeal to both African-Americans and white working-class midwesterners. What I worry about is his constant stumbling in his speech, his muddling of words, those many moments when his eyes close, and his face twitches, as he tries to finish a sentence
  • Sanders has been on the far left all his life, and the oppo research the GOP throws at him could be brutal. He’s a man, after all, who sided with a Marxist-Leninist party that supported Ayatollah Khomeini during the hostage crisis in 1979. He loved the monstrous dictator Fidel Castro and took his 1988 honeymoon in the Soviet Union, no less, where he openly and publicly criticized his own country and praised many aspects of the Soviet system
  • On two key issues, immigration and identity politics, Bernie has sensibilities and instincts that could neutralize these two strong points for Trump. Sanders has always loathed the idea of open borders and the effect they have on domestic wages, and he doesn’t fit well with the entire woke industry. He still believes in class struggle, not the culture war
  • Biden has an advantage because of Obama, his appeal to the midwestern voters (if he wins back Pennsylvania, that would work wonders), and his rapport with African-Americans. But he also seems pretty out of it.
blythewallick

How Do Personality Traits Influence Values and Well-Being? | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...nfluence-values-and-well-being

science psychology research brain science

shared by blythewallick on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Personality traits are characteristics that relate to the factory settings of our motivational system.
  • Values are factors that drive what we find to be important. Research by Schwartz and his colleagues suggests that there is a universal set of values.
  • Researchers are interested in understanding how these two sources of stability in a person over time are inter-related and whether changes in one factor (like personality) create changes in another (like values). This question was addressed in a paper in the August 2019 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The advantage of having many different waves of data from the same people is that it enables researchers to speculate on whether changes in one characteristic cause changes in another. This can be done by asking whether changes at one time in one factor predict another more strongly than the reverse
  • irst, as we might expect, people’s personality characteristics and values are fairly stable. People’s responses to both the personality inventory and the values scale did not change much over time. However, the responses to the personality inventory changed less than the responses to the values survey.
  • Overall, some personality characteristics and some values are related. Agreeableness was correlated with the value of being prosocial (that is, wanting to engage in positive actions for society). Conscientiousness was correlated with conformity (which reflects that conscientious people tend to want to follow rules including societal rules). Extraversion was related to the value of enjoyment. Openness correlated with the value of self-direction. There were no strong correlations between neuroticism and any of the values.
  • In addition, personality traits appeared to influence&nbsp;a variety of measures of well-being. People&nbsp;high in agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness tended to show higher measures of well-being while being high in neuroticism was linked&nbsp;to decreased measures of well-being.
  • First, in an era in which key findings fail to replicate, this study solidifies the relationship between personality characteristics and values that have been observed before. It also demonstrates that both personality characteristics and values change slowly.
  • Second, this work suggests that changes in personality characteristics (which reflect people’s underlying motivation) have a bigger impact on values than changes in values have on people’s personality characteristics.
  • Third, this work suggests that both personality characteristics and values are related to people’s sense of well-being. However, personality characteristics seem to have a broad impact. Changes in personality can precede changes in well-being, but it appears that changes in well-being may actually have an impact on people’s values.
Javier E

He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ics-greece-rome-whiteness.html

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Padilla laid out an indictment of his field. “If one were intentionally to design a discipline whose institutional organs and gatekeeping protocols were explicitly aimed at disavowing the legitimate status of scholars of color,” he said, “one could not do better than what classics has done.”
  • Padilla believes that classics is so entangled with white supremacy as to be inseparable from it. “Far from being extrinsic to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity,” he has written, “the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of classics.”
  • Rather than kowtowing to criticism, Williams said, “maybe we should start defending our discipline.” She protested that it was imperative to stand up for the classics as the political, literary and philosophical foundation of European and American culture: “It’s Western civilization. It matters because it’s the West.” Hadn’t classics given us the concepts of liberty, equality and democracy?
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  • Williams ceded the microphone, and Padilla was able to speak. “Here’s what I have to say about the vision of classics that you outlined,” he said. “I want nothing to do with it. I hope the field dies that you’ve outlined, and that it dies as swiftly as possible.”
  • “I believe in merit. I don’t look at the color of the author.” She pointed a finger in Padilla’s direction. “You may have got your job because you’re Black,” Williams said, “but I would prefer to think you got your job because of merit.”
  • What he did find was a slim blue-and-white textbook titled “How People Lived in Ancient Greece and Rome.” “Western civilization was formed from the union of early Greek wisdom and the highly organized legal minds of early Rome,” the book began. “The Greek belief in a person’s ability to use his powers of reason, coupled with Roman faith in military strength, produced a result that has come to us as a legacy, or gift from the past.” Thirty years later, Padilla can still recite those opening lines.
  • In 2017, he published a paper in the journal Classical Antiquity that compared evidence from antiquity and the Black Atlantic to draw a more coherent picture of the religious life of the Roman enslaved. “It will not do merely to adopt a pose of ‘righteous indignation’ at the distortions and gaps in the archive,” he wrote. “There are tools available for the effective recovery of the religious experiences of the enslaved, provided we work with these tools carefully and honestly.”
  • Padilla sensed that his pursuit of classics had displaced other parts of his identity, just as classics and “Western civilization” had displaced other cultures and forms of knowledge. Recovering them would be essential to dismantling the white-supremacist framework in which both he and classics had become trapped. “I had to actively engage in the decolonization of my mind,” he told me.
  • He also gravitated toward contemporary scholars like José Esteban Muñoz, Lorgia García Peña and Saidiya Hartman, who speak of race not as a physical fact but as a ghostly system o
  • In response to rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and the United States, Mary Beard, perhaps the most famous classicist alive, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the Romans “would have been puzzled by our modern problems with migration and asylum,” because the empire was founded on the “principles of incorporation and of the free movement of people.”
  • In November 2015, he wrote an essay for Eidolon, an online classics journal, clarifying that in Rome, as in the United States, paeans to multiculturalism coexisted with hatred of foreigners. Defending a client in court, Cicero argued that “denying foreigners access to our city is patently inhumane,” but ancient authors also recount the expulsions of whole “suspect” populations, including a roundup of Jews in 139 B.C., who were not considered “suitable enough to live alongside Romans.”
  • The job of classicists is not to “point out the howlers,” he said on a 2017 panel. “To simply take the position of the teacher, the qualified classicist who knows things and can point to these mistakes, is not sufficient.”
  • Dismantling structures of power that have been shored up by the classical tradition will require more than fact-checking; it will require writing an entirely new story about antiquity, and about who we are today
  • To find that story, Padilla is advocating reforms that would “explode the canon” and “overhaul the discipline from nuts to bolts,” including doing away with the label “classics” altogether.
  • . “What I want to be thinking about in the next few weeks,” he told them, “is how we can be telling the story of the early Roman Empire not just through a variety of sources but through a variety of persons.” He asked the students to consider the lives behind the identities he had assigned them, and the way those lives had been shaped by the machinery of empire, which, through military conquest, enslavement and trade, creates the conditions for the large-scale movement of human beings.
  • ultimately, he decided that leaving enslaved characters out of the role play was an act of care. “I’m not yet ready to turn to a student and say, ‘You are going to be a slave.’”
  • Privately, even some sympathetic classicists worry that Padilla’s approach will only hasten the field’s decline. “I’ve spoken to undergrad majors who say that they feel ashamed to tell their friends they’re studying classics,”
  • “I very much admire Dan-el’s work, and like him, I deplore the lack of diversity in the classical profession,” Mary Beard told me via email. But “to ‘condemn’ classical culture would be as simplistic as to offer it unconditional admiration.”
  • In a 2019 talk, Beard argued that “although classics may become politicized, it doesn’t actually have a politics,” meaning that, like the Bible, the classical tradition is a language of authority — a vocabulary that can be used for good or ill by would-be emancipators and oppressors alike.
  • Over the centuries, classical civilization has acted as a model for people of many backgrounds, who turned it into a matrix through which they formed and debated ideas about beauty, ethics, power, nature, selfhood, citizenship and, of course, race
  • Anthony Grafton, the great Renaissance scholar, put it this way in his preface to “The Classical Tradition”: “An exhaustive exposition of the ways in which the world has defined itself with regard to Greco-Roman antiquity would be nothing less than a comprehensive history of the world.”
  • Classics as we know it today is a creation of the 18th and 19th centuries. During that period, as European universities emancipated themselves from the control of the church, the study of Greece and Rome gave the Continent its new, secular origin story. Greek and Latin writings emerged as a competitor to the Bible’s moral authority, which lent them a liberatory power
  • Historians stress that such ideas cannot be separated from the discourses of nationalism, colorism and progress that were taking shape during the modern colonial period, as Europeans came into contact with other peoples and their traditions. “The whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is,” Winkelmann wrote.
  • While Renaissance scholars were fascinated by the multiplicity of cultures in the ancient world, Enlightenment thinkers created a hierarchy with Greece and Rome, coded as white, on top, and everything else below.
  • Jefferson, along with most wealthy young men of his time, studied classics at college, where students often spent half their time reading and translating Greek and Roman texts. “Next to Christianity,” writes Caroline Winterer, a historian at Stanford, “the central intellectual project in America before the late 19th century was classicism.
  • Of the 2.5 million people living in America in 1776, perhaps only 3,000 had gone to college, but that number included many of the founders
  • They saw classical civilization as uniquely educative — a “lamp of experience,” in the words of Patrick Henry, that could light the path to a more perfect union. However true it was, subsequent generations would come to believe, as Hannah Arendt wrote in “On Revolution,” that “without the classical example … none of the men of the Revolution on either side of the Atlantic would have possessed the courage for what then turned out to be unprecedented action.”
  • Comparisons between the United States and the Roman Empire became popular as the country emerged as a global power. Even after Latin and Greek were struck from college-entrance exams, the proliferation of courses on “great books” and Western civilization, in which classical texts were read in translation, helped create a coherent national story after the shocks of industrialization and global warfare.
  • even as the classics were pulled apart, laughed at and transformed, they continued to form the raw material with which many artists shaped their visions of modernity.
  • Over the centuries, thinkers as disparate as John Adams and Simone Weil have likened classical antiquity to a mirror. Generations of intellectuals, among them feminist, queer and Black scholars, have seen something of themselves in classical texts, flashes of recognition that held a kind of liberatory promise
  • The language that is used to describe the presence of classical antiquity in the world today — the classical tradition, legacy or heritage — contains within it the idea of a special, quasi-genetic relationship. In his lecture “There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilization,” Kwame Anthony Appiah (this magazine’s Ethicist columnist) mockingly describes the belief in such a kinship as the belief in a “golden nugget” of insight — a precious birthright and shimmering sign of greatness — that white Americans and Europeans imagine has been passed down to them from the ancients.
  • To see classics the way Padilla sees it means breaking the mirror; it means condemning the classical legacy as one of the most harmful stories we’ve told ourselves
  • Padilla is wary of colleagues who cite the radical uses of classics as a way to forestall change; he believes that such examples have been outmatched by the field’s long alliance with the forces of dominance and oppression.
  • Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together. Classics deserves to survive only if it can become “a site of contestation” for the communities who have been denigrated by it in the past.
  • if classics fails his test, Padilla and others are ready to give it up. “I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.”
  • One way to get rid of classics would be to dissolve its faculties and reassign their members to history, archaeology and language departments.
  • many classicists are advocating softer approaches to reforming the discipline, placing the emphasis on expanding its borders. Schools including Howard and Emory have integrated classics with Ancient Mediterranean studies, turning to look across the sea at Egypt, Anatolia, the Levant and North Africa. The change is a declaration of purpose: to leave behind the hierarchies of the Enlightenment and to move back toward the Renaissance model of the ancient world as a place of diversity and mixture.
  • Ian Morris put it more bluntly. “Classics is a Euro-American foundation myth,” Morris said to me. “Do we really want that sort of thing?”
  • There’s a more interesting story to be told about the history of what we call the West, the history of humanity, without valorizing particular cultures in it,” said Josephine Quinn, a professor of ancient history at Oxford. “It seems to me the really crucial mover in history is always the relationship between people, between cultures.”
  • “In some moods, I feel that this is just a moment of despair, and people are trying to find significance even if it only comes from self-accusation,” he told me. “I’m not sure that there is a discipline that is exempt from the fact that it is part of the history of this country. How distinctly wicked is classics? I don’t know that it is.”
  • “One of the dubious successes of my generation is that it did break the canon,” Richlin told me. “I don’t think we could believe at the time that we would be putting ourselves out of business, but we did.” She added: “If they blew up the classics departments, that would really be the end.”
  • Padilla, like Douglass, now sees the moment of absorption into the classical, literary tradition as simultaneous with his apprehension of racial difference; he can no longer find pride or comfort in having used it to bring himself out of poverty.
  • “Claiming dignity within this system of structural oppression,” Padilla has said, “requires full buy-in into its logic of valuation.” He refuses to “praise the architects of that trauma as having done right by you at the end.”
  • Last June, as racial-justice protests unfolded across the nation, Padilla turned his attention to arenas beyond classics. He and his co-authors — the astrophysicist Jenny Greene, the literary theorist Andrew Cole and the poet Tracy K. Smith — began writing their open letter to Princeton with 48 proposals for reform. “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America,” the letter began. “Indifference to the effects of racism on this campus has allowed legitimate demands for institutional support and redress in the face of microaggression and outright racist incidents to go long unmet.”
  • Padilla believes that the uproar over free speech is misguided. “I don’t see things like free speech or the exchange of ideas as ends in themselves,” he told me. “I have to be honest about that. I see them as a means to the end of human flourishing.”
  • “There is a certain kind of classicist who will look on what transpired and say, ‘Oh, that’s not us,’” Padilla said when we spoke recently. “What is of interest to me is why is it so imperative for classicists of a certain stripe to make this discursive move? ‘This is not us.’
  • Joel Christensen, the Brandeis professor, now feels that it is his “moral and ethical and intellectual responsibility” to teach classics in a way that exposes its racist history. “Otherwise we’re just participating in propaganda,”
  • Christensen, who is 42, was in graduate school before he had his “crisis of faith,” and he understands the fear that many classicists may experience at being asked to rewrite the narrative of their life’s work. But, he warned, “that future is coming, with or without Dan-el.”
  • On Jan. 6, Padilla turned on the television minutes after the windows of the Capitol were broken. In the crowd, he saw a man in a Greek helmet with TRUMP 2020 painted in white. He saw a man in a T-shirt bearing a golden eagle on a fasces — symbols of Roman law and governance — below the logo 6MWE, which stands for “Six Million Wasn’t Enough,
Javier E

The Constitution of Knowledge - Persuasion - 0 views

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constitution knowledge persuasion psychology

shared by Javier E on 25 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • But ideas in the marketplace do not talk directly to each other, and for the most part neither do individuals.
  • It is a good metaphor as far as it goes, yet woefully incomplete. It conjures up an image of ideas being traded by individuals in a kind of flea market, or of disembodied ideas clashing and competing in some ethereal realm of their own
  • When Americans think about how we find truth amid a world full of discordant viewpoints, we usually turn to a metaphor, that of the marketplace of ideas
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  • Rather, our conversations are mediated through institutions like journals and newspapers and social-media platforms. They rely on a dense network of norms and rules, like truthfulness and fact-checking. They depend on the expertise of professionals, like peer reviewers and editors. The entire system rests on a foundation of values: a shared understanding that there are right and wrong ways to make knowledge.
  • Those values and rules and institutions do for knowledge what the U.S. Constitution does for politics: They create a governing structure, forcing social contestation onto peaceful and productive pathways.
  • I call them, collectively, the Constitution of Knowledge. If we want to defend that system from its many persistent attackers, we need to understand it—and its very special notion of reality.
  • What reality really is
  • The question “What is reality?” may seem either too metaphysical to answer meaningfully or too obvious to need answering
  • The whole problem is that humans have no direct access to an objective world independent of our minds and senses, and subjective certainty is no guarantee of truth. Faced with those problems and others, philosophers and practitioners think of reality as a set of propositions (or claims, or statements) that have been validated in some way, and that have thereby been shown to be at least conditionally true—true, that is, unless debunked
  • Some propositions reflect reality as we perceive it in everyday life (“The sky is blue”). Others, like the equations on a quantum physicist’s blackboard, are incomprehensible to intuition. Many fall somewhere in between.
  • a phrase I used a few sentences ago, “validated in some way,” hides a cheat. In epistemology, the whole question is, validated in what way? If we care about knowledge, freedom, and peace, then we need to stake a strong claim: Anyone can believe anything, but liberal science—open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network—is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, at least in the reality-based community.
  • That is a very bold, very broad, very tough claim, and it goes down very badly with lots of people and communities who feel ignored or oppressed by the Constitution of Knowledge: creationists, Christian Scientists, homeopaths, astrologists, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, birthers, 9/11 truthers, postmodern professors, political partisans, QAnon followers, and adherents of any number of other belief systems and religions.
  • But, like the U.S. Constitution’s claim to exclusivity in governing (“unconstitutional” means “illegal,” period), the Constitution of Knowledge’s claim to exclusivity is its sine qua non.
  • Rules for reality
  • The specific proposition does not matter. What does matter is that the only way to validate it is to submit it to the reality-based community. Otherwise, you could win dominance for your proposition by, say, brute force, threatening and jailing and torturing and killing those who see things differently—a standard method down through history
  • Say you believe something (X) to be true, and you believe that its acceptance as true by others is important or at least warranted
  • Or you and your like-minded friends could go off and talk only to each other, in which case you would have founded a cult—which is lawful but socially divisive and epistemically worthless.
  • Or you could engage in a social-media campaign to shame and intimidate those who disagree with you—a very common method these days, but one that stifles debate and throttles knowledge (and harms a lot of people).
  • What the reality-based community does is something else again. Its distinctive qualities derive from two core rules:&nbsp;
  • what counts is the way the rule directs us to behave: You must assume your own and everyone else’s fallibility and you must hunt for your own and others’ errors, even if you are confident you are right. Otherwise, you are not reality-based.
  • The fallibilist rule: No one gets the final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it.
  • The empirical rule: No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement
  • Who you are does not count; the rules apply to everybody and persons are interchangeable. If your method is valid only for you or your affinity group or people who believe as you do, then you are not reality-based.
  • Whatever you do to check a proposition must be something that anyone can do, at least in principle, and get the same result. Also, no one proposing a hypothesis gets a free pass simply because of who she is or what group she belongs to.
  • Both rules have very profound social implications. “No final say” insists that to be knowledge, a statement must be checked; and it also says that knowledge is always provisional, standing only as long as it withstands checking.
  • “No personal authority” adds a crucial second step by defining what properly counts as checking. The point, as the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce emphasized more than a century ago, is not that I look or you look but that we look; and then we compare, contest, and justify our views. Critically, then, the empirical rule is a social principle that forces us into the same conversation—a requirement that all of us, however different our viewpoints, agree to discuss what is in principle only one reality.
  • By extension, the empirical rule also dictates what does not count as checking: claims to authority by dint of a personally or tribally privileged perspective.
  • In principle, persons and groups are interchangeable. If I claim access to divine revelation, or if I claim the support of miracles that only believers can witness, or if I claim that my class or race or historically dominant status or historically oppressed status allows me to know and say things that others cannot, then I am breaking the empirical rule by exempting my views from contestability by others.
  • Though seemingly simple, the two rules define a style of social learning that prohibits a lot of the rhetorical moves we see every day.
  • Claiming that a conversation is too dangerous or blasphemous or oppressive or traumatizing to tolerate will almost always break the fallibilist rule.
  • Claims which begin “as a Jew,” or “as a queer,” or for that matter “as minister of information” or “as Pope” or “as head of the Supreme Soviet,” can be valid if they provide useful information about context or credentials; but if they claim to settle an argument by appealing to personal or tribal authority, rather than earned authority, they violate the empirical rule.&nbsp;
  • “No personal authority” says nothing against trying to understand where people are coming from. If we are debating same-sex marriage, I may mention my experience as a gay person, and my experience may (I hope) be relevant.
  • But statements about personal standing and interest inform the conversation; they do not control it, dominate it, or end it. The rule acknowledges, and to an extent accepts, that people’s social positions and histories matter; but it asks its adherents not to burrow into their social identities, and not to play them as rhetorical trump cards, but to bring them to the larger project of knowledge-building and thereby transcend them.
  • the fallibilist and empirical rules are the common basis of science, journalism, law, and all the other branches of today’s reality-based community. For that reason, both rules also attract hostility, defiance, interference, and open warfare from those who would rather manipulate truth than advance it.
Javier E

If We Knew Then What We Know Now About Covid, What Would We Have Done Differently? - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...covid-lessons-learned-9dd5566f

politics us history crisis culture policy trump pandemic response science psychology

shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • For much of 2020, doctors and public-health officials thought the virus was transmitted through droplets emitted from one person’s mouth and touched or inhaled by another person nearby. We were advised to stay at least 6 feet away from each other to avoid the droplets
  • A small cadre of aerosol scientists had a different theory. They suspected that Covid-19 was transmitted not so much by droplets but by smaller infectious aerosol particles that could travel on air currents way farther than 6 feet and linger in the air for hours. Some of the aerosol particles, they believed, were small enough to penetrate the cloth masks widely used at the time.
  • The group had a hard time getting public-health officials to embrace their theory. For one thing, many of them were engineers, not doctors.
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  • “My first and biggest wish is that we had known early that Covid-19 was airborne,”
  • ,&nbsp;“Once you’ve realized that, it informs an entirely different strategy for protection.” Masking, ventilation and air cleaning become key, as well as avoiding high-risk encounters with strangers, he says.
  • Instead of washing our produce and wearing hand-sewn cloth masks, we could have made sure to avoid superspreader events and worn more-effective N95 masks or their equivalent. “We could have made more of an effort to develop and distribute N95s to everyone,” says&nbsp;Dr. Volckens. “We could have had an Operation Warp Speed for masks.”
  • We didn’t realize how important clear, straight talk would be to maintaining public trust. If we had, we could have explained the biological nature of a virus and warned that Covid-19 would change in unpredictable ways. &nbsp;
  • We didn’t know how difficult it would be to get the basic data needed to make good public-health and medical decisions. If we’d had the data, we could have more effectively allocated scarce resources
  • In the face of a pandemic, he says, the public needs an early basic and blunt lesson in virology
  • and mutates, and since we’ve never seen this particular virus before, we will need to take unprecedented actions and we will make mistakes, he says.
  • Since the public wasn’t prepared, “people weren’t able to pivot when the knowledge changed,”
  • By the time the vaccines became available, public trust had been eroded by myriad contradictory messages—about the usefulness of masks, the ways in which the virus could be spread, and whether the virus would have an end date.
  • , the absence of a single, trusted source of clear information meant that many people gave up on trying to stay current or dismissed the different points of advice as partisan and untrustworthy.
  • “The science is really important, but if you don’t get the trust and communication right, it can only take you so far,”
  • people didn’t know whether it was OK to visit elderly relatives or go to a dinner party.
  • Doctors didn’t know what medicines worked. Governors and mayors didn’t have the information they needed to know whether to require masks. School officials lacked the information needed to know whether it was safe to open schools.
  • Had we known that even a mild case of Covid-19 could result in long Covid and other serious chronic health problems, we might have calculated our own personal risk differently and taken more care.
  • just months before the outbreak of the pandemic, the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists released a white paper detailing the urgent need to modernize the nation’s public-health system still reliant on manual data collection methods—paper records, phone calls, spreadsheets and faxes.
  • While the U.K. and Israel were collecting and disseminating Covid case data promptly, in the U.S. the CDC couldn’t. It didn’t have a centralized health-data collection system like those countries did, but rather relied on voluntary reporting by underfunded state and local public-health systems and hospitals.
  • doctors and scientists say they had to depend on information from Israel, the U.K. and South Africa to understand the nature of new variants and the effectiveness of treatments and vaccines. They relied heavily on private data collection efforts such as a dashboard at Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center that tallied cases, deaths and vaccine rates globally.
  • For much of the pandemic, doctors, epidemiologists, and state and local governments had no way to find out in real time how many people were contracting Covid-19, getting hospitalized and dying
  • To solve the data problem, Dr. Ranney says, we need to build a&nbsp;public-health system that can collect and disseminate data and acts like an electrical grid. The power company sees a storm coming and lines up repair crews.
  • If we’d known how damaging lockdowns would be to mental health, physical health and the economy, we could have taken a more strategic approach to closing businesses and keeping people at home.
  • t many doctors say they were crucial at the start of the pandemic to give doctors and hospitals a chance to figure out how to accommodate and treat the avalanche of very sick patients.
  • The measures reduced deaths, according to many studies—but at a steep cost.
  • The lockdowns didn’t have to be so harmful, some scientists say. They could have been more carefully tailored to protect the most vulnerable, such as those in nursing homes and retirement communities, and to minimize widespread disruption.
  • Lockdowns could, during Covid-19 surges, close places such as bars and restaurants where the virus is most likely to spread, while allowing other businesses to stay open with safety precautions like masking and ventilation in place. &nbsp;
  • The key isn’t to have the lockdowns last a long time, but that they are deployed earlier,
  • If England’s March 23, 2020, lockdown&nbsp;had begun one week earlier, the measure would have nearly halved the estimated 48,600 deaths in the first wave of England’s pandemic
  • If the lockdown had begun a week later, deaths in the same period would have more than doubled
  • It is possible to avoid lockdowns altogether. Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong—all countries&nbsp;experienced at handling disease outbreaks such as SARS in 2003 and MERS—avoided lockdowns by widespread masking, tracking the spread of the virus through testing and contact tracing and quarantining infected individuals.
  • With good data, Dr. Ranney says, she could have better managed staffing and taken steps to alleviate the strain on doctors and nurses by arranging child care for them.
  • Early in the pandemic, public-health officials were clear: The people at increased risk for severe Covid-19 illness were older, immunocompromised, had chronic kidney disease, Type 2 diabetes or serious heart conditions
  • t had the unfortunate effect of giving a false sense of security to people who weren’t in those high-risk categories. Once case rates dropped, vaccines became available and fear of the virus wore off, many people let their guard down, ditching masks, spending time in crowded indoor places.
  • it has become clear that even people with mild cases of Covid-19 can develop long-term serious and debilitating diseases. Long Covid, whose symptoms include months of persistent fatigue, shortness of breath, muscle aches and brain fog, hasn’t been the virus’s only nasty surprise
  • In February 2022, a study found that, for at least a year, people who had Covid-19 had a substantially increased risk of heart disease—even people who were younger and had not been hospitalized
  • respiratory conditions.
  • Some scientists now suspect that Covid-19 might be capable of affecting nearly every organ system in the body. It may play a role in the activation of dormant viruses and latent autoimmune conditions people didn’t know they had
  • &nbsp;A blood test, he says,&nbsp;would tell&nbsp;people if they are at higher risk of long Covid and whether they should have antivirals on hand to take right away should they contract Covid-19.
  • If the risks of long Covid had been known, would people have reacted differently, especially given the confusion over masks and lockdowns and variants? Perhaps. At the least, many people might not have assumed they were out of the woods just because they didn’t have any of the risk factors.
Javier E

Fixation on Fake News Overshadows Waning Trust in Real Reporting - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...g-trust-in-real-reporting.html

fake news facebook culture crisis informed citizenry reporting social media

shared by Javier E on 19 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • It misunderstands a new media world in which every story, and source, is at risk of being discredited, not by argument but by sheer force.
  • During the months I spent talking to partisan Facebook page operators for a magazine article this year, it became clear that while the ecosystem contained easily identifiable and intentional fabrication, it contained much, much more of something else.
  • I recall a conversation with a fact checker about how to describe a story, posted on a pro-Trump website and promoted on a pro-Trump Facebook page — and, incidentally, copied from another pro-Trump site by overseas contractors. It tried to cast suspicion on Khizr Khan, the father of a slain American soldier, who had spoken out against Donald J. Trump.
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  • The overarching claims of the story were disingenuous and horrifying; the facts it included had been removed from all useful context and placed in a new, sinister one; its insinuating mention of “Muslim martyrs,” in proximity to mentions of Mr. Khan’s son, and its misleading and strategic mention of Shariah law, amounted to a repulsive smear. It was a story that appealed to bigoted ideas and that would clearly appeal to those who held them.
  • This was a story the likes of which was an enormous force in this election, clearly designed to function well within Facebook’s economy of sharing. And it probably would not run afoul of the narrow definition of “fake news.”
  • Stories like that one get to the heart of the rhetorical and strategic risk of holding up “fake news” as a broad media offensive position, especially after an election cycle characterized by the euphoric inversion of rhetoric by some of Mr. Trump’s supporters, and by the candidate himself
  • This tactic was used on the language of social justice, which was appropriated by opponents and redeployed nihilistically, in an open effort to sap its power while simultaneously taking advantage of what power it retained
  • Anti-racists were cast as the real racists. Progressives were cast as secretly regressive on their own terms
  • This was not a new tactic, but it was newly effective. It didn’t matter that its targets knew that it was a bad-faith maneuver, a clear bid for power rather than an attempt to engage or reason. The referees called foul, but nobody could hear them over the roar of the crowds. Or maybe they could, but realized that nobody could make them listen.
  • This wide formulation of “fake news” will be applied back to the traditional news media, which does not yet understand how threatened its ability is to declare things true, even when they are.
  • the worst identified defenders make their money outside Facebook anyway.
  • Another narrow response from Facebook could be to assert editorial control over external forces
  • Facebook is a place where people construct and project identities to friends, family and peers. It is a marketplace in which news is valuable mainly to the extent that it serves those identities. It is a system built on ranking and vetting and votin
  • Fake news operations are closely aligned with the experienced incentives of the Facebook economy
  • the outrage is at risk of being misdirected, and will be followed by the realization that the colloquial “fake news” — the newslike media, amateur and professional, for which truth is defined first in personal and political terms, and which must only meet the bar of not being obviously, inarguably, demonstrably false — will continue growing apace, gaining authority by sheer force
  • Media companies have spent years looking to Facebook, waiting for the company to present a solution to their mounting business concerns
  • Those who expect the operator of the dominant media ecosystem of our time, in response to getting caught promoting lies, to suddenly return authority to the companies it has superseded are in for a similar surprise.
Javier E

The decline effect and the scientific method : The New Yorker - 3 views

www.newyorker.com/...101213fa_fact_lehrer

science empiricism philosophy scientific method decline research statistics method bias truth

shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 12 - Cached
  • The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.
  • But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable.
  • This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.
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  • If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe?
  • Schooler demonstrated that subjects shown a face and asked to describe it were much less likely to recognize the face when shown it later than those who had simply looked at it. Schooler called the phenomenon “verbal overshadowing.”
  • The most likely explanation for the decline is an obvious one: regression to the mean. As the experiment is repeated, that is, an early statistical fluke gets cancelled out. The extrasensory powers of Schooler’s subjects didn’t decline—they were simply an illusion that vanished over time.
  • yet Schooler has noticed that many of the data sets that end up declining seem statistically solid—that is, they contain enough data that any regression to the mean shouldn’t be dramatic. “These are the results that pass all the tests,” he says. “The odds of them being random are typically quite remote, like one in a million. This means that the decline effect should almost never happen. But it happens all the time!
  • this is why Schooler believes that the decline effect deserves more attention: its ubiquity seems to violate the laws of statistics
  • In 2001, Michael Jennions, a biologist at the Australian National University, set out to analyze “temporal trends” across a wide range of subjects in ecology and evolutionary biology. He looked at hundreds of papers and forty-four meta-analyses (that is, statistical syntheses of related studies), and discovered a consistent decline effect over time, as many of the theories seemed to fade into irrelevance.
  • Jennions admits that his findings are troubling, but expresses a reluctance to talk about them
  • publicly. “This is a very sensitive issue for scientists,” he says. “You know, we’re supposed to be dealing with hard facts, the stuff that’s supposed to stand the test of time. But when you see these trends you become a little more skeptical of things.”
  • While publication bias almost certainly plays a role in the decline effect, it remains an incomplete explanation. For one thing, it fails to account for the initial prevalence of positive results among studies that never even get submitted to journals. It also fails to explain the experience of people like Schooler, who have been unable to replicate their initial data despite their best efforts.
  • Jennions, similarly, argues that the decline effect is largely a product of publication bias, or the tendency of scientists and scientific journals to prefer positive data over null results, which is what happens when no effect is found. The bias was first identified by the statistician Theodore Sterling, in 1959, after he noticed that ninety-seven per cent of all published psychological studies with statistically significant data found the effect they were looking for
  • Sterling saw that if ninety-seven per cent of psychology studies were proving their hypotheses, either psychologists were extraordinarily lucky or they published only the outcomes of successful experiments.
  • One of his most cited papers has a deliberately provocative title: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
  • suspects that an equally significant issue is the selective reporting of results—the data that scientists choose to document in the first place. Palmer’s most convincing evidence relies on a statistical tool known as a funnel graph. When a large number of studies have been done on a single subject, the data should follow a pattern: studies with a large sample size should all cluster around a common value—the true result—whereas those with a smaller sample size should exhibit a random scattering, since they’re subject to greater sampling error. This pattern gives the graph its name, since the distribution resembles a funnel.
  • after Palmer plotted every study of fluctuating asymmetry, he noticed that the distribution of results with smaller sample sizes wasn’t random at all but instead skewed heavily toward positive results. Palmer has since documented a similar problem in several other contested subject areas. “Once I realized that selective reporting is everywhere in science, I got quite depressed,” Palmer told me. “As a researcher, you’re always aware that there might be some nonrandom patterns, but I had no idea how widespread it is.”
  • Palmer summarized the impact of selective reporting on his field: “We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some—perhaps many—cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their biological significance and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs often repeated.”
  • Palmer emphasizes that selective reporting is not the same as scientific fraud. Rather, the problem seems to be one of subtle omissions and unconscious misperceptions, as researchers struggle to make sense of their results. Stephen Jay Gould referred to this as the “sho
  • horning” process.
  • “A lot of scientific measurement is really hard,” Simmons told me. “If you’re talking about fluctuating asymmetry, then it’s a matter of minuscule differences between the right and left sides of an animal. It’s millimetres of a tail feather. And so maybe a researcher knows that he’s measuring a good male”—an animal that has successfully mated—“and he knows that it’s supposed to be symmetrical. Well, that act of measurement is going to be vulnerable to all sorts of perception biases. That’s not a cynical statement. That’s just the way human beings work.”
  • For Simmons, the steep rise and slow fall of fluctuating asymmetry is a clear example of a scientific paradigm, one of those intellectual fads that both guide and constrain research: after a new paradigm is proposed, the peer-review process is tilted toward positive results. But then, after a few years, the academic incentives shift—the paradigm has become entrenched—so that the most notable results are now those that disprove the theory.
  • John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, argues that such distortions are a serious issue in biomedical research. “These exaggerations are why the decline has become so common,” he says. “It’d be really great if the initial studies gave us an accurate summary of things. But they don’t. And so what happens is we waste a lot of money treating millions of patients and doing lots of follow-up studies on other themes based on results that are misleading.”
  • In 2005, Ioannidis published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that looked at the forty-nine most cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals.
  • the data Ioannidis found were disturbing: of the thirty-four claims that had been subject to replication, forty-one per cent had either been directly contradicted or had their effect sizes significantly downgraded.
  • the most troubling fact emerged when he looked at the test of replication: out of four hundred and thirty-two claims, only a single one was consistently replicable. “This doesn’t mean that none of these claims will turn out to be true,” he says. “But, given that most of them were done badly, I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
  • According to Ioannidis, the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls “significance chasing,” or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance—the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher.
  • One of the classic examples of selective reporting concerns the testing of acupuncture in different countries. While acupuncture is widely accepted as a medical treatment in various Asian countries, its use is much more contested in the West. These cultural differences have profoundly influenced the results of clinical trials.
  • The problem of selective reporting is rooted in a fundamental cognitive flaw, which is that we like proving ourselves right and hate being wrong.
  • “It feels good to validate a hypothesis,” Ioannidis said. “It feels even better when you’ve got a financial interest in the idea or your career depends upon it. And that’s why, even after a claim has been systematically disproven”—he cites, for instance, the early work on hormone replacement therapy, or claims involving various vitamins—“you still see some stubborn researchers citing the first few studies
  • That’s why Schooler argues that scientists need to become more rigorous about data collection before they publish. “We’re wasting too much time chasing after bad studies and underpowered experiments,”
  • The current “obsession” with replicability distracts from the real problem, which is faulty design.
  • “Every researcher should have to spell out, in advance, how many subjects they’re going to use, and what exactly they’re testing, and what constitutes a sufficient level of proof. We have the tools to be much more transparent about our experiments.”
  • Schooler recommends the establishment of an open-source database, in which researchers are required to outline their planned investigations and document all their results. “I think this would provide a huge increase in access to scientific work and give us a much better way to judge the quality of an experiment,”
  • scientific research will always be shadowed by a force that can’t be curbed, only contained: sheer randomness. Although little research has been done on the experimental dangers of chance and happenstance, the research that exists isn’t encouraging.
  • The disturbing implication of the Crabbe study is that a lot of extraordinary scientific data are nothing but noise. The hyperactivity of those coked-up Edmonton mice wasn’t an interesting new fact—it was a meaningless outlier, a by-product of invisible variables we don’t understand.
  • The problem, of course, is that such dramatic findings are also the most likely to get published in prestigious journals, since the data are both statistically significant and entirely unexpected
  • This suggests that the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion. While Karl Popper imagined falsification occurring with a single, definitive experiment—Galileo refuted Aristotelian mechanics in an afternoon—the process turns out to be much messier than that.
  • Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests.
  • Even the law of gravity hasn’t always been perfect at predicting real-world phenomena. (In one test, physicists measuring gravity by means of deep boreholes in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data.)
  • Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren’t surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.)
  • The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe. ♦
Javier E

'Messages of Shame Are Organized Around Gender' - The Atlantic - 3 views

www.theatlantic.com/...275322

gender shame vulnerability men weakness psychology

shared by Javier E on 19 May 16 - No Cached
  • Brown is a bestselling author and research professor who studies "vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame,
  • I recognized the culture she described in which institutionalized, nagging shame can cause people to put on so much emotional armor that they can't connect with others or access their authentic selves. I might have called those repressive forces "fear," or "self-doubt," or "insecurity," but, yeah, "shame" kind of covers all the bases.
  • the antidote to crippling shame is vulnerability. We tend to think of vulnerability as weakness; but in fact, she argues, it is the highest form of courage. To admit fear and pain, to reach out to others for help, to quiet the "gremlins" that tell us to keep our mouths shut and soldier on: this is how we become engaged, make human connections, and live "wholeheartedly."
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • "messages of shame are organized around gender." For women, she said, there are whole constellations of often contradictory expectations that, if not met, are sources of shame.
  • But for men, the overarching message is that any weakness is shameful. And since vulnerability is often perceived as weakness, it is especially risky for men to practice vulnerability.
  • men's shame is not primarily inflicted by other men. Instead, it is the women in their lives who tend to be repelled when men show the chinks in their armor.
  • Ironically, she explained, men are often pressured to open up and talk about their feelings, and they are criticized for being emotionally walled-off; but if they get too real, they are met with revulsion. She recalled the first time she realized that she had been complicit in the shaming: "Holy Shit!" she said. "I am the patriarchy!"
  • there are three main practices men, in particular, need to engage in. The first is asking for help. The second is setting boundaries; for example, not taking on work or activities that you don't want to do. And the third is apologizing and "owning it" when you are wrong.
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