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Javier E

Praising Andy Warhol - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Peter Schjeldahl, for example, calls Warhol a “genius” and a “great artist” and even says that “the gold standard of Warhol exposes every inflated value in other currencies.”
  •   If Warhol is a great artist and these boxes are among his most important works, what am I missing?
  • this explanation of Warhol’s greatness, contrary to the first one, makes art appreciation once again a matter of esoteric knowledge and taste, now focused on subtle philosophical puzzles about the nature of art.
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  • Warhol’s boxes are praised for subverting the distinction between mundane objects of everyday life and “art” in a museum.  As a result, we can enjoy and appreciate the things that make up our everyday life just as much as what we see in museums (and with far less effort).  Whereas the joys of traditional art typically require an initiation into an esoteric world of historical information and refined taste, Warhol’s “Pop Art” reveals the joys of what we all readily understand and appreciate.  As Danto put it, “Warhol’s intuition was that nothing an artist could do would give us more of what art sought than reality already gave us.”
  • Warhol’s work is also praised for posing a crucial philosophical question about art.  As Danto puts it: “Given two objects that look exactly alike, how is it possible for one of them to be a work of art and the other just an ordinary object?”  Answering this question requires realizing that there are no perceptual qualities that make something a work of art.  This in turn implies that anything, no matter how it looks, can be a work of art.
  • According to Danto, whether an object is a work of art depends on its relation to an “art world”:  “an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art” that exists at a particular time.
  • Appreciations of Warhol’s boxes typically emphasize their effects rather than their appearance.  These appreciations take two quite different forms.
  • it was Danto, not Warhol, who provided the intellectual/aesthetic excitement by formulating and developing a brilliant answer to the question.  To the extent that the philosophical question had artistic value in the context of the contemporary artworld,  Danto was more the artist than Warhol.
  • I agree that Warhol — along with many other artists from the 1950s on — opened up new ways of making art that traditional “high art” had excluded.  But new modes of artistic creation — commercial design techniques, performances, installations, conceptual art — do not guarantee a new kind or a higher quality of aesthetic experience. 
  • anything can be presented as a work of art.   But it does not follow that anything can produce a satisfying aesthetic experience.  The great works of the tradition do not circumscribe the sorts of things that can be art, but they are exemplars of what we expect a work of art to do to us.  (This is the sense in which, according to Kant, originally beautiful works of art are exemplary, yet without providing rules for further such works of art.)
  • Praise of Andy Warhol often emphasizes the new possibilities of artistic creation his work opened up.  That would make his work important in the history of art and for that reason alone of considerable interest.
  • as Jerrold Levinson and others have pointed out, a work can be an important artistic achievement without being an important aesthetic achievement.  This, I suggest, is how we should think about Warhol’s Brillo boxes.
Javier E

Raising a Moral Child - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Surveys reveal that in the United States, parents from European, Asian, Hispanic and African ethnic groups all place far greater importance on caring than achievement. These patterns hold around the world:
  • teaching children to care about others is no simple task. In an Israeli study of nearly 600 families, parents who valued kindness and compassion frequently failed to raise children who shared those values.
  • For the past decade, I’ve been studying the surprising success of people who frequently help others without any strings attached.
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  • Genetic twin studies suggest that anywhere from a quarter to more than half of our propensity to be giving and caring is inherited. That leaves a lot of room for nurture, and the evidence on how parents raise kind and compassionate c
  • By age 2, children experience some moral emotions — feelings triggered by right and wrong. To reinforce caring as the right behavior, research indicates, praise is more effective than rewards.
  • when faced with more opportunities to give and share, the children were much more generous after their character had been praised than after their actions had been. Praising their character helped them internalize it as part of their identities.
  • Cheating was cut in half when instead of, “Please don’t cheat,” participants were told, “Please don’t be a cheater.” When our actions become a reflection of our character, we lean more heavily toward the moral and generous choices. Over time it can become part of us.
  • Tying generosity to character appears to matter most around age 8, when children may be starting to crystallize notions of identity.
  • When children cause harm, they typically feel one of two moral emotions: shame or guilt. Despite the common belief that these emotions are interchangeable, research led by the psychologist June Price Tangney reveals that they have very different causes and consequences.
  • Shame is a negative judgment about the core self, which is devastating: Shame makes children feel small and worthless, and they respond either by lashing out at the target or escaping the situation
  • Shame is the feeling that I am a bad person, whereas guilt is the feeling that I have done a bad thing
  • In contrast, guilt is a negative judgment about an action, which can be repaired by good behavior. When children feel guilt, they tend to experience remorse and regret, empathize with the person they have harmed, and aim to make it right.
  • If we want our children to care about others, we need to teach them to feel guilt rather than shame when they misbehave.
  • shame emerges when parents express anger, withdraw their love, or try to assert their power through threats of punishment
  • The most effective response to bad behavior is to express disappointment.
  • parents raise caring children by expressing disappointment and explaining why the behavior was wrong, how it affected others, and how they can rectify the situation. This enables children to develop standards for judging their actions, feelings of empathy and responsibility for others, and a sense of moral identity, which are conducive to becoming a helpful person.
  • As parents, we want to be proactive in communicating our values to our children. Yet many of us do this the wrong way.
  • When the adult acted generously, students gave the same amount whether generosity was preached or not — they donated 85 percent more than the norm in both cases. When the adult preached selfishness, even after the adult acted generously, the students still gave 49 percent more than the norm. Children learn generosity not by listening to what their role models say, but by observing what they do.
  • in the long run, preaching is less effective than giving while saying nothing at all.
  • As the psychologist Karl Weick is fond of asking, “How can I know who I am until I see what I do? How can I know what I value until I see where I walk?”
anonymous

How to Do School When Motivation Has Gone Missing - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Educational psychologists recognize two main kinds of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic.
  • Intrinsic motivation takes over when we have a deep and genuine interest in a task or topic and derive satisfaction from the work or learning itself.
  • Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, gets us to work by putting the outcome — like a paycheck or a good grade — in mind.
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  • When what we’re doing feels fascinating, such as reading a book we can’t put down, we’re propelled by intrinsic motivation; when we pay attention in a class or meeting by promising ourselves 10 minutes of online shopping for seeing it through, we’re summoning extrinsic motivation.
  • Should adults be cheerleaders for our teenagers? Opinion is split. Some researchers contend that praise helps to cultivate intrinsic motivation, while others say that it undermines it by introducing an extrinsic reward
  • It’s also true that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation aren’t mutually exclusive
  • In practice, this means that young people should be given as much say over their learning as possible, such as giving them options for how to solve problems, approach unfamiliar topics or practice new skills.
  • Young people may find themselves intrinsically motivated on Mondays, but not Fridays, or at the start of an evening study session but not as the night wears o
  • There is, however, an area of consensus: the utility of praise depends on how it’s done. Specifically, praise fosters intrinsic motivation when it’s sincere, celebrates effort rather than talent (“you worked really hard,” vs. “you’re so smart”) and communicates encouragement, not pressure (“you’re doing really well,” vs. “you’re doing really well, as I hoped you would”)
  • Adults should be ready to stand back and admire the fantastic solutions that young people land upon themselves.
  • I recently learned of a 10th-grader who makes time-lapse videos of herself while she does her homework. Knowing that she’s on camera keeps her focused, and having a record of her efforts (and the amusing faces she makes while concentrating) turns out to be a powerful reward. While intrinsic motivation has its upsides, there should be no shame in the external motivation game. It’s about getting the work done.
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    This tells of some tactics for parents to use to keep kids motivated, and some methods teens themselves use.
tornekm

How 'Everything' Became the Highest Form of Praise - The New York Times - 0 views

  • the profusion of “everything” spins the head. “This tiny pig dancing in the grass is everything.”
  • religiously and philosophically inclined take to Facebook and Tumblr to pronounce their dictums:
  • Everything” is a fudge, a word we apply to the unknowable.
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  • It is also, nearly always, an exaggeration.
  • The “everything” that holds sway online exaggerates the exaggeration, by eliminating any notion of uncertainty, any qualification.
  • The result is rhetorical gold — ideal, in any case, for social-­media banter, which places a premium on pithy hyperbole, on outsize statements delivered with minimal keystrokes.
  • “Everything” is a hawker’s cry, a hard sell. Which makes perfect sense. The Internet is the most dizzying marketplace in human history, a seething bazaar that barrages us relentlessly and from all angles.
Laura Gates

Lavishing Kids With Praise Can Make Them Feel Worse About Themselves - 0 views

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    Interesting article about perceiving words that are actually counter-productive in young children
Javier E

What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage - New York Times - 0 views

  • like many wives before me, I ignored a library of advice books and set about improving him. By nagging, of course, which only made his behavior worse: he'd drive faster instead of slower; shave less frequently, not more; and leave his reeking bike garb on the bedroom floor longer than ever.
  • For a book I was writing about a school for exotic animal trainers, I started commuting from Maine to California, where I spent my days watching students do the seemingly impossible: teaching hyenas to pirouette on command, cougars to offer their paws for a nail clipping, and baboons to skateboard.
  • The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.
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  • I was using what trainers call "approximations," rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. You can't expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can't expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock.
  • With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.
  • Enlightened trainers learn all they can about a species, from anatomy to social structure, to understand how it thinks, what it likes and dislikes, what comes easily to it and what doesn't.
Javier E

The Shame Culture - The New York Times - 5 views

  • Some sort of moral system is coming into place. Some new criteria now exist, which people use to define correct and incorrect action. The big question is: What is the nature of this new moral system?
  • The ultimate sin today, Crouch argues, is to criticize a group, especially on moral grounds. Talk of good and bad has to defer to talk about respect and recognition.
  • the omnipresence of social media has created a new sort of shame culture. The world of Facebook, Instagram and the rest is a world of constant display and observation. The desire to be embraced and praised by the community is intense. People dread being exiled and condemned. Moral life is not built on the continuum of right and wrong; it’s built on the continuum of inclusion and exclusion.
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  • First, members of a group lavish one another with praise
  • This creates a set of common behavior patterns.
  • Second, there are nonetheless enforcers within the group who build their personal power and reputation by policing the group and condemning those who break the group code
  • Third, people are extremely anxious that their group might be condemned or denigrated. They demand instant respect and recognition for their group
  • Campus controversies get so hot so fast because even a minor slight to a group is perceived as a basic identity threat.
  • In a guilt culture you know you are good or bad by what your conscience feels. In a shame culture you know you are good or bad by what your community says about you, by whether it honors or excludes you. In a guilt culture people sometimes feel they do bad things; in a shame culture social exclusion makes people feel they are bad.
  • this shame culture is different from the traditional shame cultures, the ones in Asia, for example. In traditional shame cultures the opposite of shame was honor or “face” — being known as a dignified and upstanding citizen
  • In the new shame culture, the opposite of shame is celebrity — to be attention-grabbing and aggressively unique on some media platform.
  • On the positive side, this new shame culture might rebind the social and communal fabric. It might reverse, a bit, the individualistic, atomizing thrust of the past 50 years.
  • On the other hand, everybody is perpetually insecure in a moral system based on inclusion and exclusion. There are no permanent standards, just the shifting judgment of the crowd. It is a culture of oversensitivity, overreaction and frequent moral panics, during which everybody feels compelled to go along.
  • 26 Comments If we’re going to avoid a constant state of anxiety, people’s identities have to be based on standards of justice and virtue that are deeper and more permanent than the shifting fancy of the crowd
  • In an era of omnipresent social media, it’s probably doubly important to discover and name your own personal True North, vision of an ultimate good, which is worth defending even at the cost of unpopularity and exclusion.
  • The guilt culture could be harsh, but at least you could hate the sin and still love the sinner. The modern shame culture allegedly values inclusion and tolerance, but it can be strangely unmerciful to those who disagree and to those who don’t fit in.
caelengrubb

The future's in the past | Culture | The Guardian - 1 views

  • Whenever the importance of history is discussed, epigrams and homilies come tripping easily off our tongues: How can we understand our present or glimpse our future if we cannot understand our past? How can we know who we are if we don't know who we were?
  • While history may be condemned to repeat itself, historians are condemned to repeat themselves. History is bunk or possibly bunkum.
  • Historians, more than any other class, spend a great deal of time justifying their trade, defining it and aphorising it, seeming to lavish more attention on historiography than history.
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  • Historians are no longer grandees at the centre of a fixed civilisation; they are simply journalists writing about celebrities who haven't got the grace to be alive any more
  • There are those who wonder if the whole of history is now valuable only as a politically correct lesson in the stupidity and cruelty of monarchs, aristocrats, industrialists and generals
  • You don't even have to dignify it with ideological abstractions any more; history is really the story of a series of subjugations, oppressions, exploitations and abuses.
  • The biggest challenge facing the great teachers and communicators of history is not to teach history itself, nor even the lessons of history, but why history matters.
  • A history in which historians have to stand on one side of an argument or another, for, in between, they are nothing but dry-as-dust statisticians
  • we measure the exponential growth in the public appetite for history
  • History, then, as one long, grovelling apology or act of self-abasement and self-laceration.
  • After all, isn't that what poetry and novels show, that humanity is best comprehended by understanding humans rather than ideas? But for some, this leads to the worry that history can now only mean witness
  • Certainly, history is popular in grand traditional forms, but new subgenres of history have, for the last 20 years, exploded in popularity, too.
  • We haven't arrived at our own moral and ethical imperatives by each of us working them out from first principles; we have inherited them and they were born out of blood and suffering, as all human things and human beings are.
  • This does not stop us from admiring and praising the progressive heroes who got there early and risked their lives to advance causes that we now take for granted.
  • In the end, I suppose history is all about imagination rather than facts
  • If you cannot feel what our ancestors felt when they cried: 'Wilkes and Liberty!' or, indeed, cried: 'Death to Wilkes!', if you cannot feel with them, then all you can do is judge them and condemn them, or praise them and over-adulate them.
  • History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier
  • History is memory
Javier E

A Note on Sentimentality « Kenyon Review Blog - 0 views

  • One of the underdiscussed aspects of literary taste is the principle of exclusion: Not what is welcomed in a work, but what is disallowed.
  • In the world of contemporary fiction, one of the biggest no-no’s is what goes by the name “sentimentality.” It’s hard to perceive it for what it is, when you’re on the inside, but this is actually an arbitrary allergy on our part; it’s analogous to the Victorian one against “immorality” in literature.
  • You can’t assert on a factual basis that sentimentality is wrong or false, that it somehow misrepresents the human experience—because mushy-gushy moments are an actual part of real lived life
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  • “Good” artists instinctively exclude elements of what they know to be part of real life if they feel it may be “bad,” artistically speaking. The prudish Victorians regarded sexual language in fiction that way. Charles Dickens, obviously, knew that people have sex, but he would never spell such a thing out in a novel, even though he knew dirty language was part of real life (especially among the lowlifes he sometimes wrote about, like Fagin and company). It was “bad.” It may have been “bad” in a different sense—as in indecent, improper—but it was “bad” artistically as well, in that his sense of his audience kept him from being too graphic or explicit, either in scenes or dialogue. Meanwhile, Dickens was at liberty to engineer a scene in which, say, a tuberculosis-stricken orphan switches places at the guillotine with a virginal seamstress. Today, you can put all sorts of explicit sexual references in fiction, and the average critic won’t chide you for immorality or indecency; sentimentality will get you panned every time.
  • The critical temperament of an age shapes an age’s creativity not just in the supply-demand way, motivating writers to produce what is praised and valued by critics and readers. The critical temperament actually blocks off areas of life to create a portrayal of the world that fits its idea of the world. So a prudish era like the Victorian will target immorality—and a cynical or ironic era like ours will target sentimentality.
Javier E

Hollywood Seeks to Slow Cultural Shift to TV - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • a steady push toward viewing on phones and tablets is shrinking the spirit of films. In the past, he said — citing “A Man for All Seasons,” “8 ½,” and “The Searchers” — there was a grandeur to films that delivered long-form storytelling on very large screens.
  • the prospect that a film will embed itself into the cultural and historical consciousness of the American public in the way of “Gone With the Wind” or the “Godfather” series seems greatly diminished in an era when content is consumed in thinner slices, and the films that play broadly often lack depth.
  • After six weeks in theaters “The Master,” a 70-millimeter character study much praised by critics, has been seen by about 1.9 million viewers. That is significantly smaller than the audience for a single hit episode of a cable show like “Mad Men” or “The Walking Dead.”
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  • The weakness in movies has multiple roots. Films, while in theaters, live behind a pay wall; television is free, once the monthly subscription is paid.
  • a collapse in home video revenue, caused partly by piracy, drove film salaries down. Television, meanwhile, raised its pay
  • But the number of films released by specialty divisions of the major studios, which have backed Oscar winners like “Slumdog Millionaire,” from Fox Searchlight, fell to just 37 pictures last year, down 55 percent from 82 in 2002,
  • “So, what does that mean for us as a culture?” Ms. Sylte asked of a vacuum that might occur if the better films went away. The hole, Mr. Gazzale said, to whom the question was relayed, would be a large one. “Movies remind us of our common heartbeat,” he said.
Javier E

Campus Suicide and the Pressure of Perfection - The New York Times - 1 views

  • It also recognized a potentially life-threatening aspect of campus culture: Penn Face. An apothegm long used by students to describe the practice of acting happy and self-assured even when sad or stressed, Penn Face is so widely employed that it has showed up in skits performed during freshman orientation.
  • While the appellation is unique to Penn, the behavior is not. In 2003, Duke jolted academe with a report describing how its female students felt pressure to be “effortlessly perfect”: smart, accomplished, fit, beautiful and popular, all without visible effort. At Stanford, it’s called the Duck Syndrome. A duck appears to glide calmly across the water, while beneath the surface it frantically, relentlessly paddles.
  • Citing a “perception that one has to be perfect in every academic, cocurricular and social endeavor,” the task force report described how students feel enormous pressure that “can manifest as demoralization, alienation or conditions like anxiety or depression.”
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  • While she says her parents are not overbearing, she relishes their praise for performing well. “Hearing my parents talk about me in a positive way, or hearing other parents talk about their kids doing well in academics or extracurriculars, that’s where I got some of the expectations for myself,” she said. “It was like self-fulfillment: I’d feel fulfilled and happy when other people were happy with what I’m doing, or expectations they have are met.”
  • Getting a B can cause some students to fall apart, she said. “What you and I would call disappointments in life, to them feel like big failures.”
  • a shift in how some young adults cope with challenges. “A small setback used to mean disappointment, or having that feeling of needing to try harder next time,” he said. Now? “For some students, a mistake has incredible meaning.”
  • The existential question “Why am I here?” is usually followed by the equally confounding “How am I doing?” In 1954, the social psychologist Leon Festinger put forward the social comparison theory, which posits that we try to determine our worth based on how we stack up against others.
  • In the era of social media, such comparisons take place on a screen with carefully curated depictions that don’t provide the full picture. Mobile devices escalate the comparisons from occasional to nearly constant.
  • When students remark during a counseling session that everyone else on campus looks happy, he tells them: “I walk around and think, ‘That one’s gone to the hospital. That person has an eating disorder. That student just went on antidepressants.’ As a therapist, I know that nobody is as happy or as grown-up as they seem on the outside.”
  • Madison Holleran’s suicide provided what might be the ultimate contrast between a shiny Instagram feed and interior darkness. Ms. Holleran posted images that show her smiling, dappled in sunshine or kicking back at a party. But according to her older sister, Ashley, Madison judged her social life as inferior to what she saw in the online posts of her high school friends
  • These cultural dynamics of perfectionism and overindulgence have now combined to create adolescents who are ultra-focused on success but don’t know how to fail.
  • Julie Lythcott-Haims watched the collision of these two social forces up close. In meetings with students, she would ask what she considered simple questions and they would become paralyzed, unable to express their desires and often discovering midconversation that they were on a path that they didn’t even like.
  • “They could say what they’d accomplished, but they couldn’t necessarily say who they were,”
  • She was also troubled by the growing number of parents who not only stayed in near-constant cellphone contact with their offspring but also showed up to help them enroll in classes, contacted professors and met with advisers (illustrating the progression from helicopter to lawn mower parents, who go beyond hovering to clear obstacles out of their child’s way). But what she found most disconcerting was that students, instead of being embarrassed, felt grateful. Penn researchers studying friendship have found that students’ best friends aren’t classmates or romantic partners, but parents.
  • Eventually she came to view her students’ lack of self-awareness, inability to make choices and difficulty coping with setbacks as a form of “existential impotence,” a direct result of a well-meaning but misguided approach to parenting that focuses too heavily on external measures of character.
  • “The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self.” In the book, published in 1979 and translated into 30 languages, Ms. Miller documents how some especially intelligent and sensitive children can become so attuned to parents’ expectations that they do whatever it takes to fulfill those expectations — at the expense of their own feelings and needs. This can lead to emotional emptiness and isolation
  • “In what is described as depression and experienced as emptiness, futility, fear of impoverishment, and loneliness,” she wrote, “can usually be recognized as the tragic loss of the self in childhood.”
anonymous

Faith in science and religion: Truth, authority, and the orderliness of nature. - 0 views

  • A common tactic of those who claim that science and religion are compatible is to argue that science, like religion, rests on faith: faith in the accuracy of what we observe, in the laws of nature, or in the value of reason
  • Such statements imply that science and religion are not that different because both seek the truth and use faith to find it
  • science is often described as a kind of religion.
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  • Indeed, there is no evidence beyond revelation, authority, and scripture to support the religious claims above, and most of the world’s believers would reject at least one of them
  • faith involves pretending to know things you don’t
  • faith doesn’t mean “belief without good evidence,” but “confidence derived from scientific tests and repeated, documented experience.”
  • You have faith (i.e., confidence) that the sun will rise tomorrow because it always has, and there’s no evidence that the Earth has stopped rotating or the sun has burnt out.
  • We know no more now about the divine than we did 1,000 years ago.
  • The conflation of faith as “unevidenced belief” with faith as “justified confidence” is simply a word trick used to buttress religion.
  • The constant scrutiny of our peers ensures that science is largely self-correcting, so that we really can approach the truth about our universe
  • There is strong evidence for the Higgs boson, whose existence was confirmed last year by two independent teams using a giant accelerator and rigorous statistical analysis. But there isn’t, and never will be, any evidence for that sea of milk.
  • Two objects of scientific faith are said to be physical laws and reason. Doing science, it is said, requires unevidenced faith in the “orderliness of nature” and an “unexplained set of physical laws,” as well as in the value of reason in determining truth. Both claims are wrong.
  • The orderliness of nature—the set of so-called natural laws—is not an assumption but an observation
  • We take nature as we find it, and sometimes it behaves predictably.
  • Reason—the habit of being critical, logical, and of learning from experience—is not an a priori assumption but a tool that’s been shown to work
  • Finally, isn’t science at least based on the faith that it’s good to know the truth? Hardly.
  • So the next time you hear someone described as a “person of faith,” remember that although it’s meant as praise, it’s really an insult.
dicindioha

Democrats skeptical about SEC nominee's ties to Wall Street - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Jay Clayton, on Thursday defended his ability to regulate Wall Street despite spending decades helping big banks weather government scrutiny
  • Clayton said, he would make sure “our markets are fair, open, orderly, and efficient and . . . that investors are protected
  • New York lawyer's deep connections to Wall Street, particularly Goldman Sachs, and inexperience with corporate prosecutions drew skepticism from Democrats
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  • Clayton, who made more than $7 million last year, is among six people with ties to Goldman Sachs chosen by Trump to serve in his administration.
  • He was warmly received by Republicans on the committee, who praised his financial industry experience.
  • It seems a little surprising to me that a person's success in a field in which we are asking them to now lead an agency could be a criticism,” said Sen. Mike Crapo
  • It should be easier, and cheaper, for companies to sell stock on the public markets, Clayton told them.
  • he said. U.S. markets are “less attractive to business than in the past,” and that should change.
  • Advising on the deal was Clayton.
  • In those cases, Warren said, if the rest of SEC's four commissioners vote along partisan lines, the investigations would stall and the firms could escape being held responsible.
  • “I think individual prosecutions, particularly in the white-collar area, have a significant effect on behavior,” Clayton said. “I want to be clear: Companies should be held responsible.”
  • Warren said she wants the SEC chair to look into and “put a stop to” any trading advantages Icahn might reap while serving in his new role.
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    This article talks about Trump's pick for the SEC, who formerly advised on the deal where Warren Buffet salvaged Goldmann and Sachs with a $5 billion dollar investment. The article says some question his ability, then, to make sure that companies are held responsible for mistakes in the market. He wants to ensure our markets are "fair" which we know is not a term associated with efficiency, so it will be interesting to see if this occurs.
Javier E

AGNI Online: Open to Influence: Jonathan Lethem on Reading, Writing and Concepts of Ori... - 0 views

  • I think originality is a word of praise for things that have been expressed in a marvelous way and that make points of origin for any particular element beside the point.  When you read Saul Bellow or listen to Bob Dylan sing, you can have someone point to various cribbings and it won’t matter, because something has been arrived at which subsumes and incorporates and transcends these matters.  In that way, sourcing and originality are two sides of the same coin, they’re a nested partnership.  I don’t think originality has any value as a description of process.  In that regard it’s as meaningless a process word as beauty is.  No artist says, “Let me sit down and do some beauty now.”
Javier E

What Have We Learned, If Anything? by Tony Judt | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

  • During the Nineties, and again in the wake of September 11, 2001, I was struck more than once by a perverse contemporary insistence on not understanding the context of our present dilemmas, at home and abroad; on not listening with greater care to some of the wiser heads of earlier decades; on seeking actively to forget rather than remember, to deny continuity and proclaim novelty on every possible occasion. We have become stridently insistent that the past has little of interest to teach us. Ours, we assert, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent.
  • the twentieth century that we have chosen to commemorate is curiously out of focus. The overwhelming majority of places of official twentieth-century memory are either avowedly nostalgo-triumphalist—praising famous men and celebrating famous victories—or else, and increasingly, they are opportunities for the recollection of selective suffering.
  • The problem with this lapidary representation of the last century as a uniquely horrible time from which we have now, thankfully, emerged is not the description—it was in many ways a truly awful era, an age of brutality and mass suffering perhaps unequaled in the historical record. The problem is the message: that all of that is now behind us, that its meaning is clear, and that we may now advance—unencumbered by past errors—into a different and better era.
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  • Today, the “common” interpretation of the recent past is thus composed of the manifold fragments of separate pasts, each of them (Jewish, Polish, Serb, Armenian, German, Asian-American, Palestinian, Irish, homosexual…) marked by its own distinctive and assertive victimhood.
  • The resulting mosaic does not bind us to a shared past, it separates us from it. Whatever the shortcomings of the national narratives once taught in school, however selective their focus and instrumental their message, they had at least the advantage of providing a nation with past references for present experience. Traditional history, as taught to generations of schoolchildren and college students, gave the present a meaning by reference to the past: today’s names, places, inscriptions, ideas, and allusions could be slotted into a memorized narrative of yesterday. In our time, however, this process has gone into reverse. The past now acquires meaning only by reference to our many and often contrasting present concerns.
  • the United States thus has no modern memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries. But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed
  • Today, the opposite applies. Most people in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa have access to a near infinity of data. But in the absence of any common culture beyond a small elite, and not always even there, the fragmented information and ideas that people select or encounter are determined by a multiplicity of tastes, affinities, and interests. As the years pass, each one of us has less in common with the fast-multiplying worlds of our contemporaries, not to speak of the world of our forebears.
  • What is significant about the present age of transformations is the unique insouciance with which we have abandoned not merely the practices of the past but their very memory. A world just recently lost is already half forgotten.
  • In the US, at least, we have forgotten the meaning of war. There is a reason for this. I
  • Until the last decades of the twentieth century most people in the world had limited access to information; but—thanks to national education, state-controlled radio and television, and a common print culture—within any one state or nation or community people were all likely to know many of the same things.
  • it was precisely that claim, that “it’s torture, and therefore it’s no good,” which until very recently distinguished democracies from dictatorships. We pride ourselves on having defeated the “evil empire” of the Soviets. Indeed so. But perhaps we should read again the memoirs of those who suffered at the hands of that empire—the memoirs of Eugen Loebl, Artur London, Jo Langer, Lena Constante, and countless others—and then compare the degrading abuses they suffered with the treatments approved and authorized by President Bush and the US Congress. Are they so very different?
  • American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.
  • the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies—seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance.
  • That same contrast may account for the distinctive quality of much American writing on the cold war and its outcome. In European accounts of the fall of communism, from both sides of the former Iron Curtain, the dominant sentiment is one of relief at the closing of a long, unhappy chapter. Here in the US, however, the story is typically recorded in a triumphalist key.5
  • For many American commentators and policymakers the message of the twentieth century is that war works. Hence the widespread enthusiasm for our war on Iraq in 2003 (despite strong opposition to it in most other countries). For Washington, war remains an option—on that occasion the first option. For the rest of the developed world it has become a last resort.6
  • Ignorance of twentieth-century history does not just contribute to a regrettable enthusiasm for armed conflict. It also leads to a misidentification of the enemy.
  • This abstracting of foes and threats from their context—this ease with which we have talked ourselves into believing that we are at war with “Islamofascists,” “extremists” from a strange culture, who dwell in some distant “Islamistan,” who hate us for who we are and seek to destroy “our way of life”—is a sure sign that we have forgotten the lesson of the twentieth century: the ease with which war and fear and dogma can bring us to demonize others, deny them a common humanity or the protection of our laws, and do unspeakable things to them.
  • How else are we to explain our present indulgence for the practice of torture? For indulge it we assuredly do.
  • “But what would I have achieved by proclaiming my opposition to torture?” he replied. “I have never met anyone who is in favor of torture.”8 Well, times have changed. In the US today there are many respectable, thinking people who favor torture—under the appropriate circumstances and when applied to those who merit it.
  • As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today
  • We are slipping down a slope. The sophistic distinctions we draw today in our war on terror—between the rule of law and “exceptional” circumstances, between citizens (who have rights and legal protections) and noncitizens to whom anything can be done, between normal people and “terrorists,” between “us” and “them”—are not new. The twentieth century saw them all invoked. They are the selfsame distinctions that licensed the worst horrors of the recent past: internment camps, deportation, torture, and murder—those very crimes that prompt us to murmur “never again.” So what exactly is it that we think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can build its very own internment camp and torture people there?
  • We need to learn again—or perhaps for the first time—how war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonize our enemies in order to justify that war’s indefinite continuance.
Duncan H

Rick Santorum Campaigning Against the Modern World - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • As a journalist who covered Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania for years, I can understand the Tea Party’s infatuation with him. It’s his anger. It is in perfect synch with the constituency he is wooing.
  • Even at the height of his political success, when he had a lot to be happy about, Santorum was an angry man. I found it odd. I was used to covering politicians who had good dispositions — or were good at pretending they had good dispositions.
  • You could easily get him revved by bringing up the wrong topic or taking an opposing point of view. His nostrils would flare, his eyes would glare and he would launch into a disquisition on how, deep down, you were a shallow guy who could not grasp the truth and rightness of his positions.
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  • “It’s just a curious bias of the media around here. It’s wonderful. One person says something negative and the media rushes and covers that. The wonderful balanced media that I love in this community.”
  • Santorum had reason to be peeved. He was running against the Democrat Bob Casey. He was trailing by double digits and knew he was going to lose. He was not a happy camper, but then he rarely is.
  • As he has shown in the Republican debates, Santorum can be equable. The anger usually flares on matters closest to his heart: faith, family and morals. And if, by chance, you get him started on the role of religion in American life, get ready for a Vesuvius moment.
  • Outside of these areas, he was more pragmatic. Then and now, Santorum held predictably conservative views, but he was astute enough to bend on some issues and be — as he put it in the Arizona debate — “a team player.”
  • In the Senate, he represented a state with a relentlessly moderate-to-centrist electorate so when campaigning he emphasized the good deeds he did in Washington. Editorial board meetings with Santorum usually began with him listing federal money he had brought in for local projects.People who don’t know him — and just see the angry Rick — don’t realize what a clever politician Santorum is. He didn’t rise to become a Washington insider through the power of prayer. He may say the Rosary, but he knows his Machiavelli.
  • That said, Santorum’s anger is not an act.  It is genuine. It has its roots in the fact that he had the misfortune to be born in the second half of the 20th century. In his view, it was an era when moral relativism and anti-religious feeling held sway, where traditional values were ignored or mocked, where heretics ruled civic and political life. If anything, it’s gotten worse in the 21st, with the election of Barack Obama.Leave it to Santorum to attack Obama on his theology, of all things. He sees the president as an exemplar of mushy, feel-good Christianity that emphasizes tolerance over rectitude, and the love of Jesus over the wrath of God.
  • Like many American Catholics, I struggle with the church’s teachings as they apply to the modern world. Santorum does not.
  • I once wrote that Santorum has one of the finest minds of the 13th century. It was meant to elicit a laugh, but there’s truth behind the remark. No Vatican II for Santorum. His belief system is the fixed and firm Catholicism of the Council of Trent in the mid-16th century. And Santorum is a warrior for those beliefs.
  • During the campaign, he has regularly criticized the media for harping on his public statements on homosexuality, contraception, abortion, the decline in American morals. Still, he can’t resist talking about them. These are the issues that get his juices flowing, not the deficit or federal energy policy.
  • Santorum went to Houston not to praise Kennedy but to bash him. To Santorum, the Kennedy speech did permanent damage because it led to secularization of American politics. He said it laid the foundation for attacks on religion by the secular left that has led to denial of free speech rights to religious people. “John F. Kennedy chose not to just dispel fear,” Santorum said, “he chose to expel faith.”
  • Ultimately Kennedy’s attempt to reassure Protestants that the Catholic Church would not control the government and suborn its independence advanced a philosophy of strict separation that would create a purely secular public square cleansed of all religious wisdom and the voice of religious people of all faiths. He laid the foundation for attacks on religious freedom and freedom of speech by the secular left and its political arms like the A.C.L.U and the People for the American Way. This has and will continue to create dissension and division in this country as people of faith increasingly feel like second-class citizens.One consequence of Kennedy’s speech, Santorum said,is the debasement of our First Amendment right of religious freedom. Of all the great and necessary freedoms listed in the First Amendment, freedom to exercise religion (not just to believe, but to live out that belief) is the most important; before freedom of speech, before freedom of the press, before freedom of assembly, before freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances, before all others. This freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, is the trunk from which all other branches of freedom on our great tree of liberty get their life.As so it went for 5,000 words. It is a revelatory critique of the modern world and Santorum quoted G.K. Chesterton, Edmund Burke, St. Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther King to give heft to his assertions.That said, it was an angry speech, conjuring up images of people of faith cowering before leftist thought police. Who could rescue us from this predicament? Who could banish the secularists and restore religious morality to its throne?
  •  
    An interesting critique of Santorum and his religious beliefs.
grayton downing

So What If Everyone at Harvard Gets an A? - Eleanor Barkhorn - The Atlantic - 1 views

  • Yesterday, we ran a story about a rather astonishing fact that the Harvard Crimson uncovered: The most common grade at Harvard is an A.
  • Kids these days—especially high-achieving kids who end up at elite colleges—are so conditioned to expect praise that they fall apart when they face failure.
  • patting its students on the head rather than truly challenging them. "Everyone gets a trophy," Ryan Foster tweeted in response to the story. "Everyone is special!,
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  • Come meet our students, & you will not be surprised—(or resentful)—that they receive high grades. Possibly, you will be impressed.
  • "Grade inflation" a code term like "affirmative action."
  • These students should be A's. 
  • At large universities where thousands are admitted, bell-curve grading is used to "flunk out" many freshmen. Very different in Ivy League. Bell-curve grading, which assures a percent of low grades & failures, is a cruel academic necessity in some quarters. Encourages cheating.  
  • And while I did find most of my classmates to be "excellent"—that is: smart, compassionate, well-read, curious—a lot of us weren't especially hard-working.
  • saw our time at Princeton as a reward, not an opportunity to push ourselves again, even harder. The university's relatively lax grading policies only encouraged that mentality.
  • Starting my junior fall, professors could give out only a limited number of A-range grades. The change prompted lots of anxiety and indignation from the student body—and now, nine years later, it may be rolled back. But for me, "grade deflation" was a much-needed kick in the pants. I started reading more carefully, taking more diligent notes, developing relationships with my professors and their teaching assistants. I ended up learning a lot more
  • Yes, hard-working students should be rewarded with good grades. But a very good way to inspire students to work hard in the first place is to make good grades worth something.
Javier E

Learning to Love Criticism - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • two differences between workplace performance reviews given to men and women. Across 248 reviews from 28 companies, managers, whether male or female, gave female employees more negative feedback than they gave male employees. Second, 76 percent of the negative feedback given to women included some kind of personality criticism, such as comments that the woman was “abrasive,” “judgmental” or “strident.” Only 2 percent of men’s critical reviews included negative personality comments.
  • The study speaks to the impossible tightrope women must walk to do their jobs competently and to make tough decisions while simultaneously coming across as nice to everyone, all the time
  • If a woman wants to do substantive work of any kind, she’s going to be criticized — with comments not just about her work but also about herself. She must develop a way of experiencing criticism that allows her to persevere in the face of it.
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  • I’ve found that the fundamental shift for women happens when we internalize the fact that all substantive work brings both praise and criticism.
  • Criticism stings for all of us, but women have been socialized to not rock the boat, to be, above all else, likable. By the time a girl reaches adolescence, she’ll most likely have watched hundreds of films, television shows and advertisements in which a woman’s destiny is determined not by her own choices but by how she is perceived by others. In those hundreds of stories, we get the message: What other people think and say about us matters, a lot.
  • Being likable, or at least acceptable to stronger, more powerful others, was one of our primary available survival strategies. For many women around the world, this is still the reality, but all women inherit the psychological legacy of that history. Disapproval, criticism and the withdrawal of others’ approval can feel so petrifying for us at times — life-threatening even — because for millenniums, it was.
  • We need to retrain our minds to expect and accept this.There are a number of effective ways to do this.
  • A woman can identify another woman whose response to criticism she admires. In challenging situations, she can imagine how the admired woman might respond
  • Women can also benefit from interpreting feedback as providing information about the preferences and point of view of the person giving the feedback, rather than information about themselves.
Javier E

The Benefits of 'Binocularity' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Will advances in neuroscience move reasonable people to abandon the idea that criminals deserve to be punished?
  • if the idea of deserving punishment depends upon the idea that criminals freely choose their actions, and if neuroscience reveals that free choice is an illusion, then we can see that the idea of deserving punishment is nonsense
  • “new neuroscience will undermine people’s common sense, libertarian conception of free will and the retributivist thinking that depends on it, both of which have heretofore been shielded by the inaccessibility of sophisticated thinking about the mind and its neural basis.”
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  • when university students learn about “the neural basis of behavior” — quite simply, the brain activity underlying human actions —they become less supportive of the idea that criminals deserve to be punished.
  • To see what is right — and wrong — with the notion that neuroscience will transform our idea of just deserts, and, more generally, our idea of what it means to be human, it can help to step back and consider
  • British philosopher Jonathan Glover. He said that if we want to understand what sorts of beings we are in depth, we need to achieve a sort of intellectual “binocularity.”
  • Glover was saying that, just as we need two eyes that integrate slightly different information about one scene to achieve visual depth perception, being able see ourselves though two fundamentally different lenses, and integrate those two sources of information, can give us a greater depth of understanding of ourselves.
  • Through one lens we see that we are “subjects” (we act) who have minds and can have the experience of making free choices. Through the other we see that we are “objects” or bodies (we are acted upon), and that our experiences or movements are determined by an infinitely long chain of natural and social forces.
  • intellectual binocularity itself is not easy to achieve. While visual binocularity comes naturally, intellectual binocularity requires effort. In fact — and this is one source of the trouble we so often have when we try to talk about the sorts of beings we are — we can’t actually achieve perfect binocular understanding.
  • We can’t actually see ourselves as subjects and as objects at the same time any more than we can see Wittgenstein’s famous duck-rabbit figure as a duck and as a rabbit at once. Rather, we have to accept the necessity of oscillating between the lenses or ways of seeing, fully aware that, not only are we unable to use both at once, but that there is no algorithm for knowing when to use which.
  • When I said in the beginning that there’s something right about the reasoning of those researchers who reject the idea that our choices are “spontaneous” and not determined by prior events, I was referring to their rejection of the idea that our choices are rooted in some God-given, extra-natural, bodyless stuff.
  • My complaint is that they slip from making the reasonable claim that such extra-natural stuff is an illusion to speaking in ways that suggest that free will is an illusion, full stop. To suggest that our experience of choosing is wholly an illusion is as unhelpful as to suggest that, to explain the emergence of that experience, we need to appeal to extra-natural phenomena.
  • Using either lens alone can lead to pernicious mistakes. When we use only the subject lens, we are prone to a sort of inhumanity where we ignore the reality of the natural and social forces that bear down on all of us to make our choices.
  • When we use only the object lens, however, we are prone to a different, but equally noxious sort of inhumanity, where we fail to appreciate the reality of the experience of making choices freely and of knowing that we can deserve punishment — or praise.
carolinewren

'God made science': Louisiana teachers are literally using the Bible as science textboo... - 0 views

  • students in Louisiana literally use the Bible as their science textbook, according to recently obtained records
  • State law permits teachers to promote classroom discussion on evolution, but critics say the Louisiana Science Education Act allows creationism to be taught in public schools.
  • students read the Book of Genesis to learn creationism in biology class.
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  • “We will read in Genesis and them [sic] some supplemental material debunking various aspects of evolution from which the students will present,”
  • A teacher at Caddo Parish schools wrote a newspaper column saying that her job is to present both evolution and creationism.
  • God made science,” wrote fifth-grade teacher Charlotte Hinson.
  • “pushing her twisted religious beliefs onto the class,” another praised biology teacher Michael Stacy because he “discussed evolution and creationism in a full spectrum of thought.”
  • state law, passed in 2008, allows science teachers to introduce supplemental materials to “critique” scientific theories – lessons on creationism are still illegal under federal law.
  • schools are also violating prohibitions on teacher-led prayer in school.
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