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peterconnelly

An Extinct, Head-Butting Animal May Help Explain Giraffes' Long Necks | Smart News| Smi... - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...-giraffes-long-necks-180980193

smithsonian

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Charles Darwin held up giraffes as a prime example of natural selection, his theory that’s often summarized as “survival of the fittest.” Giraffes with comparably longer necks could reach food high up in trees, which gave them an advantage over other animals and members of their own species with shorter necks. These longer-necked individuals thrived and reproduced more, leading to generations of giraffes with their signature lengthened anatomy.
  • Yes, giraffes may have evolved to be able to reach food at higher elevations, but their long necks may also be the result of fierce competition for mates
  • For many years, researchers simply called the mysterious animal “guài shòu,” or “strange beast.” Now, scientists have given the mammal a name—Discokeryx xiezhi—and they’ve pieced together a rough outline of how the animal may have lived some 16.9 million years ago.
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  • Discokeryx xiezhi was an early relative of today’s giraffes, but more like a cousin and not a direct ancestor.
  • “To the best of our knowledge, D. xiezhi exhibits the most optimized head-butting adaptation in vertebrate evolution,” the researchers write in the paper.
  • The discovery of Discokeryx xiezhi suggests this fighting style and competition for mates may be a contributing factor in their long-neck evolution.
  • “In reality, it was likely a combination of natural selection ... for a particular dietary preference and sexual selection in that lineage that drove the evolution of modern giraffe necks and limbs,” Advait Jukar, a paleobiologist at Yale University who was not involved in the study tells Scientific American’s Rachel Nuwer.
Javier E

Opinion | Trump, Musk and Kanye Are Twitter Poisoned - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-musk-kanye-twitter.html

twitter poison corruption infantilization social media psychology conditioning

shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • By Jaron LanierMr. Lanier is a computer scientist and an author of several books on technology’s impact on people.
  • I have observed a change, or really a narrowing, in the public behavior of people who use Twitter or other social media a lot.
  • When I compare Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and Ye, I see a convergence of personalities that were once distinct. The garish celebrity playboy, the obsessive engineer and the young artist, as different from one another as they could be, have all veered not in the direction of becoming grumpy old men, but into being bratty little boys in a schoolyard. Maybe we should look at what social media has done to these men.
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  • I believe “Twitter poisoning” is a real thing. It is a side effect that appears when people are acting under an algorithmic system that is designed to engage them to the max. It’s a symptom of being part of a behavior-modification scheme.
  • The same could be said about any number of other figures, including on the left. Examples are found in the excesses of cancel culture and joyless orthodoxies in fandom, in vain attention competitions and senseless online bullying.
  • The human brain did not evolve to handle modern chemicals or modern media technology and is vulnerable to addiction. That is true for me and for us all.
  • Behavioral changes occur as a side effect of something called operant conditioning, which is the underlying mechanism of social media addiction. This is the core mechanism analogous to the role alcohol plays in alcoholism.
  • In the case of digital platforms, the purpose is usually “engagement,” a concept that is hard to distinguish from addiction. People receive little positive and negative jolts of social feedback — getting followed or liked, or being ignored or even humiliated.
  • Before social media, that kind of tight feedback loop had rarely been present in human communications outside of laboratories or marriages. (This is part of why marriage can be hard, I suspect.)  
  • was around when Google and other companies that operate on the personalized advertising model were created, and I can say that at least in the early days, operant conditioning was not part of the plan.
  • What happened was that the algorithms that optimized the individualized advertising model found their way into it automatically, unintentionally rediscovering methods that had been tested on dogs and pigeons.
  • There is a childish insecurity, where before there was pride. Instead of being above it all, like traditional strongmen throughout history, the modern social media-poisoned alpha male whines and frets.
  • What do I think are the symptoms of Twitter poisoning?
  • o be clear, whiners are much better than Stalins. And yet there have been plenty of more mature and gracious leaders who are better than either
  • When we were children, we all had to negotiate our way through the jungle of human power relationships at the playground
  • When we feel those old humiliations, anxieties and sadisms again as adults — over and over, because the algorithm has settled on that pattern as a powerful way to engage us — habit formation restimulates old patterns that had been dormant. We become children again, not in a positive, imaginative sense, but in a pathetic way.
  • Twitter poisoning makes sufferers feel more oppressed than is reasonable in response to reasonable rules. The scope of fun is constricted to transgressions.
  • Unfortunately, scale changes everything. Taunts become dangerous hate when amplified. A Twitter-poisoned soul will often complain of a loss of fun when someone succeeds at moderating the spew of hate.
  • the afflicted lose all sense of proportion about their own powers. They can come to believe they have almost supernatural abilities
  • The degree of narcissism becomes almost absolute. Everything is about what someone else thinks of you.
  • These observations should inform our concerns about TikTok. The most devastating way China might use TikTok is not to misdirect our elections or to prefer pro-China posts, but to generally ramp up social media disease, so as to make Americans more divided, less able to talk to one another and less able to put up a coordinated, unified front.
  • uide society. Whether that idea appeals or not, when technology degrades the minds of those same engineers, then the result can only be dysfunction.
  • Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist who pioneered research in virtual reality and whose books include “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.” He is Microsoft’s “prime unifying scientist” but does not speak for the company.
Javier E

Opinion | The Last Thatcherite - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...z-truss-kwasi-kwarteng-uk.html

politics history crisis economics policy culture uk Thatcher market fundamentalism psychology

shared by Javier E on 19 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • The world has just witnessed one of the most extraordinary political immolations of recent times. Animated by faith in a fantasy version of the free market, Prime Minister Liz Truss of Britain set off a sequence of events that has forced her to fire her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, and led her to the brink of being ousted by her own party.
  • There’s something tragicomic, if not tragic, about capitalist revolutionaries Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng laid low by the mechanisms of capitalism itself. Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng may be the last of the Thatcherites, defeated by the very system they believed they were acting in fidelity to.
  • Thatcherism began in the 1970s. Defined early as the belief in “the free economy and the strong state,” Thatcherism condemned the postwar British welfare economy and sought to replace it with virtues of individual enterprise and religious morality.
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  • Over the subsequent four decades, Thatcherites at think tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies (which Margaret Thatcher helped set up) described the struggle against both the Labour Party and the broader persistence of Socialism in the Communist and non-Communist world as a “war of ideas.”
  • Thatcherites, known collectively as the ultras, gained fresh blood in the 2010s as a group of Gen Xers too young to experience Thatcherism in its insurgent early years — including the former home secretary Priti Patel, the former foreign secretary Dominic Raab, the former minister of state for universities Chris Skidmore, Mr. Kwarteng and Ms. Truss — attempted to reboot her ideology for the new millennium.
  • They followed their idol not only in her antagonism to organized labor but also in her less-known fascination with Asian capitalism. In 2012’s “Britannia Unchained,” a book co-written by the group that remains a Rosetta Stone for the policy surprises of the last month, they slammed the Britons for their eroded work ethic and “culture of excuses” and the “cosseted” public sector unions. They praised China, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kon
  • “Britannia Unchained” expressed a desire to go back to the future by restoring Victorian values of hard work, self-improvement and bootstrapping.
  • While the Gen X Thatcherites didn’t scrimp on data, they also saw something ineffable at the root of British malaise. “Beyond the statistics and economic theories,” they wrote, “there remains a sense in which many of Britain’s problems lie in the sphere of cultural values and mind-set.”
  • As Thatcher herself put it, “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.” Britain needed a leap of faith to restore itself.
  • Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng seemed to have believed that by patching together all of the most radical policies of Thatcherism (while conveniently dropping the need for spending cuts), they would be incanting a kind of magic spell, an “Open sesame” for “global Britain.” This was their Reagan moment, their moment when, as their favorite metaphors put it, a primordial repressed force would be “unchained,” “unleashed” or “unshackled.”But as a leap of faith, it broke the diver’s neck.
  • the money markets were not waiting for an act of faith in Laffer Curve fundamentalism after all. This was “Reaganism without the dollar.” Without the confidence afforded to the global reserve currency, the pound went into free fall.
  • ince the 1970s, the world of think tanks had embraced a framing of the world in terms of discrete spaces that could become what they called laboratories for new policies
  • The mini-budget subjected the entire economy to experimental treatment. This was put in explicit terms in a celebratory post by a Tory journalist and think tanker claiming that Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng had been “incubated” by the Institute of Economic Affairs in their early years and “Britain is now their laboratory.”
  • The scientists at the bench discovered that the money markets would not only punish left-wing experiments in changing the balance between states and markets, but they were also sensitive to experiments that pushed too far to the right. A cowed Ms. Truss apologized, and Mr. Kwarteng’s successor has reversed almost all of the planned cuts and limited the term for energy supports.
Javier E

The Disneyfication of Prince Harry | The Spectator - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...disneyfication-of-prince-harry

infantilization uk royals culture psychology education

shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Watching these films appears to be a childhood habit Harry never gave up – and several of the strands of the story he has so publicly told about himself seem to have echoes of these cartoons The original Lion King came out in 1994, shortly after Harry’s tenth birthday, so he was its prime target audience. The film tells the story of a boy prince, Simba, who is haunted by guilt over the death of a parent, detailing his struggles to find a pathway into adulthood – which he accomplishes through a judicious mixture of martial action and emotional sensitivity, becoming heroic in the process. 
  • So much of Harry’s turmoil is foreshadowed in Disney, it seems. Perhaps even in remaining true to his childhood vision of the world and its realities he is the boy who never grew up – Peter Pan.
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