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blythewallick

Nobody Really Knows Why We Dream | JSTOR Daily - 0 views

daily.jstor.org/body-really-knows-why-we-dream

science psychology research knowledge brain science

shared by blythewallick on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • In an extensive 2012 literature review, the psychologist Matthew Merced notes that, even though nobody knows for certain why we dream, advances in the technology and techniques of brain research have at least helped explain how we dream. Humans, at least, dream a lot, multiple times a night, and the brain is very active during dream periods. Dreaming must be important, even if it remains mysterious.
  • Early dreaming studies were, frankly, pretty primitive. Researchers would wait for the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep to begin, then wake the subject up and ask about any dreams. Dreaming occurs during non-REM (NREM) sleep as well, but those dreams tend to be less vivid. Now, thanks to PET scans, it is known that large areas of the brain, covering such functions as motor control and sensory processing, all become active during dreams. Chemical changes occur as well, especially during REM: acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that fires up the brain and forces muscles to contract, ramps up production. Unsurprisingly, areas of the brain controlling awareness and consciousness remain dormant.
  • Assuming there is a purpose, natural selection suggests that dreaming must provide some sort of survival benefit. Why spend energy on involuntary movements and brain activation if nothing is being achieved? One possibility is that dreams are kind of a virtual reality world, a space where humans can safely practice coping with threats (being chased, for example, is pretty common). REM sleep and dreaming may also help process important or traumatic memories. Finally, there is a theory that dreams are a way for the brain to rid itself of information it isn’t using, a sort of “psychic disk cleanup.” According to Merced, any of these explanations could be correct. Sweet dreams to all, humans and octopuses alike!
sanderk

Council Post: How Your Emotions Influence Your Decisions - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...tions-influence-your-decisions

decisions emotions influence psychology knowledge

shared by sanderk on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • emotions influence, skew or sometimes completely determine the outcome of a large number of decisions we are confronted with in a day. Therefore, it behooves all of us who want to make the best, most objective decisions to know all we can about emotions and their effect on our decision-making.
  • First, every feeling begins with an external stimulus, whether it's what someone said or a physical event.
  • stimuli, then emotions, then hormones and, finally, feelings. In other words, your emotions impact your decision-making process by creating certain feelings.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  •  when we feel threatened by something, the initial emotion is labeled “fear." That fear, by means of hormones, results in the production of fight-or-flight responsive feelings, allowing our body to react quickly and appropriately for its own self-preservation.
  • To continue with our fear to frightened/inferior example above, we can look at the Emotion Wheel to more clearly visualize that "fear" on the inner circle is different from "frightened" on the outer one. Or, to switch our focus to the positive, we can use the Emotion Wheel to see that the emotion of “happy” on the inner circle can result in a feeling of “joyful," “powerful” or even “proud” on the outside circle.
  • The payoff is in understanding that the six emotions are only broad categories with little specificity, while the feelings are more akin to how we actually and specifically describe what’s going on in our brains and bodies.
  • After you have identified and selected an item from the outer circle, track that feeling inward through the two rings until you have reached the basic emotion (inner circle). Using this process, you can see that while you think you are experiencing a feeling, you are really dealing with an emotion.
  • you do need to consider exactly what the problem is and the ramifications of your proposed solution.
  • Recognize and name all feelings you are experiencing in connection with the decision
  • Be aware of whether you want to make a decision from this specific emotion or if you want to adjust the course.
cartergramiak

Google searches for CBD expected to hit record high this year - ABC News - 0 views

abcnews.go.com/...story

science

shared by cartergramiak on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Nationwide, searches for CBD outstripped queries for other popular health topics, like veganism, vaccination and marijuana.
  • Clearly there's a demand for information, but details about the product itself is frustratingly limited. CBD, which is derived from cannabis plants, isn't psychoactive, meaning unlike the other well-known ingredient in marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), it doesn't get you high.
  • "When people are allowed to market CBD by saying anything, is it surprising that demand for it is so high?" Ayers asked.
johnsonel7

Perception vs. Reality | IMS Technology Services - 0 views

www.imsts.com/perception-vs-reality

perception reality business

shared by johnsonel7 on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Each individual has his or her own perception of reality. The implication is that because each of us perceives the world through our own eyes, reality itself changes from person to person.
  • When it comes to your company’s costs, perception is reality. About 72% of people say that the reputation of a company or product can impact their decision to buy or not to buy.
  • Reality is fact. Reality is truth. Reality, however, is not always a known
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • You’ve probably heard it said that a happy customer only influences a handful of others, while an unhappy customer will influence dozens about a negative experience they had with your event, venue or service.
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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  • “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.”
  • 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.”
  • 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 Cancel Culture Checklist - Persuasion - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...e-cancel-culture-checklist-c63

psychology bias language social media cancel culture criticism

shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • a third of Americans say that they are personally worried about losing their jobs or missing out on career opportunities if they express their real political opinions.
  • Cancel culture now poses a real threat to intellectual freedom in the United States.
  • Americans in all walks of life have been publicly shamed, pressured into ritualistic apologies or summarily fired
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • But critics of the critics of cancel culture make a powerful retort. Accusing others of canceling can, they claim, be a way to stigmatize legitimate criticism. As Hannah Giorgis writes in the Atlantic, “critical tweets are not censorship.”
  • So what, exactly, does a cancellation consist of? And how does it differ from the exercise of free speech and robust critical debate?
  • At a conceptual level, the difference is clear. Criticism marshals evidence and arguments in a rational effort to persuade.
  • Canceling, by contrast, seeks to organize and manipulate the social or media environment in order to isolate, deplatform or intimidate ideological opponents
  • its intent—or at least its predictable outcome—is to coerce conformity and reduce the scope for forms of criticism that are not sanctioned by the prevailing consensus of some local majority.
  • In practice, however, telling canceling apart from criticism can be difficult because both take the form of criticizing others.
  • The more signs you see, the more certain you can be that you are looking at a cancel campaign.
  • A better approach might therefore be diagnostic. Like the symptoms of cancer, the hallmarks of a cancellation are many. Though not all instances involve every single characteristic, they all involve some of its key attribute
  • Six warning signs make up my personal checklist for cancel culture.
  • Punitiveness
  • A critical culture seeks to correct rather than punish. In science, the penalty for being wrong is not that you lose your job or your friends. Normally, the only penalty is that you lose the argument
  • Canceling, by contrast, seeks to punish rather than correct—and often for a single misstep rather than a long track record of failure
  • Deplatforming
  • A critical culture tolerates dissent rather than silencing it. It understands that dissent can seem obnoxious, harmful, hateful and, yes, unsafe.
  • Canceling, by contrast, seeks to shut up and shout down its targets. Cancelers often define the mere act of disagreeing with them as a threat to their safety or even an act of violence
  • Organization
  • Critical culture relies on persuasion. The way to win an argument is to convince others that you are right.
  • By contrast, it’s common to see cancelers organize hundreds of petition-signers or thousands of social media users to dig up and prosecute an indictment.
  • Secondary Boycotts
  • With its commitments to exploring a wide range of ideas and correcting rather than coercing the errant, a critical culture sees no value in instilling a climate of fear
  • But instilling fear is what canceling is all about. By choosing targets unpredictably (almost anything can trigger a campaign), providing no safe harbors (even conformists can get hit), and implicitly threatening anyone who sides with those who are targeted, canceling sends the message: “you could be next.”
  • Moral Grandstanding
  • Precisely because speech can be hurtful, critical culture discourages extreme rhetoric. It encourages people to listen to each other, to use evidence and argumentation, to behave reasonably and to avoid personal attacks.
  • Cancel culture is much more invested in what philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke call “moral grandstanding”: the display of moral outrage to impress one’s peer group, dominate others, or both
  • Truthiness
  • Concern for accuracy is the north star of a critical culture. Not everyone gets every fact right, nor do people always agree on what is true; and yet people in a critical culture try to present their own and others’ viewpoints honestly and accurately.
  • canceling is not about seeking truth or persuading others; it is a form of information warfare, in which truthiness suffices if it serves the cause.
  • Those are my six warning signs. If you spot one or two, you should fear that a canceling may be happening; if you see five or six, you can be sure.
  • Though our critics like to claim that those of us who worry about cancel culture just don’t like being criticized on the internet, cancel culture is all too real. And though it may at times bear a superficial resemblance to critical culture, the two are diametrically opposed—and not so very difficult to tell apart.
Javier E

How Wittgenstein and Other Thinkers Dealt With a Decade of Crisis - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...egger-wolfram-eilenberger.html

philosopher 20th century 1920s language knowledge

shared by Javier E on 16 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Cassirer was responding to the same crisis that animated the other three of Eilenberger’s magicians — a sense that the old ways of philosophizing had failed to keep up with the reality of lived experience.
  • Eilenberger quotes Max Scheler, another German philosopher, who put it this way: “Ours is the first period when man has become completely and totally problematical to himself, when he no longer knows what he is, but at the same time knows that he knows nothing.”
  • Language was implicated in this plight, and the responses among the figures in this book were varied and often strange
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  • Cassirer’s understanding of language was capacious, incorporating not only German and English but also myth, religion, technology and art. Different languages offered different ways of seeing the world. His pluralistic outlook seemed to provide him with an escape valve. As he wrote to his wife, “I can express everything I need without difficulty.”
  • Cassirer was the only one of the four to speak up publicly for the embattled Weimar Republic. He was also the only democrat.
  • In 1929, a debate between Cassirer and Heidegger amid the snowy peaks of Davos clarified the stakes: Reject your distracting anxiety, per Cassirer, and embrace the liberation offered by culture; or reject your distracting culture, per Heidegger, and embrace the liberation offered by your anxiety.
  • Eilenberger is a terrific storyteller, unearthing vivid details that show how the philosophies of these men weren’t the arid products of abstract speculation but vitally connected to their temperaments and experiences.
  • By May 1933, Heidegger would be a member of the Nazi Party, and Cassirer, an assimilated Jew, would leave Germany forever, eventually settling in the United States
  • Cassirer’s unwavering decency made him a stalwart defender of Weimar’s democratic ideals, but it had also kept him imperturbable and optimistic until it was almost too late.
  • “When we first heard of the political myths we found them so absurd and incongruous, so fantastic and ludicrous that we could hardly be prevailed upon to take them seriously,” Cassirer would later write, before his death in 1945. “By now it has become clear to all of us that this was a great mistake.”
Javier E

A Coded Word From the Far Right Roils France's Political Mainstream - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vagement-far-right-racism.html

language bias france

shared by Javier E on 05 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • As with many things in France, an unresolved colonial history lies below the surface of the battle over the word ensauvagement.
  • The word is a direct outgrowth of France’s colonial and slave-trading past, a history that the French have yet to come to terms with and that they have often preferred to ignore, said Pascal Blanchard, a historian on French colonialism and its enduring impact on French society.
  • More than any other imperial power, France justified colonialism by describing it as a “civilizing mission,” Mr. Blanchard said.
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  • “The idea of guiding savages out of the darkness into the light was omnipresent in France’s discourse,” he said. “The idea of the savage is still deeply rooted in French society.”
  • “The word benefits from ambiguity and works in France’s collective consciousness by letting the person using it avoid being directly called a racist,
  • “Césaire goes further by saying that Nazism was the product of the ensauvagement of Europe,” said Pap Ndiaye, a historian who led efforts to establish Black studies in France, adding that a genocide committed by Germans in their former African colony in what is now Namibia in the early 20th century is widely regarded as a precursor of the Holocaust.
  • But stripped of its historical meaning, ensauvagement can literally mean, in French, the state of becoming wild.
  • Aimé Césaire, the anticolonial writer from Martinique, even tried to turn the word ensauvagement against Europe in the 1950s. In “Discourse on Colonialism,” he wrote that Europeans had dehumanized themselves through the brutality of colonialism in Africa and that they themselves had turned into savages.
  • That is why the word appeared to have slipped into the mainstream recently, he said.
  • “It is necessary to stop the ensauvagement of a certain part of the society,” Mr. Darmanin, the interior minister, told the newspaper Le Figaro in late July.
  • “There are no savages in France,” Sacha Houlié, a lawmaker, told the minister in Parliament. “There are only citizens.”
  • The minister defended himself, saying that his use of the word had nothing to do with immigration or ethnicity, adding, “I’m miles away from that.”
  • In an interview this week, Mr. Houlié said that Mr. Macron and his party came to power in 2017 promising to reconcile the French. But by using ensauvagement, he said, “We recreate divisions, we create new fractures.”
  • The justice minister, Eric Dupont-Moretti, told a French radio station on Monday that he would not use the term because “ensauvagement is a word that fuels the feeling of insecurity.”
  • The very same day, Marlène Schiappa, a junior minister for equality, said, “It doesn’t bother me to talk about an ensauvagement of society, because it’s a reality, quite simply.”
  • Mr. Darmanin hardened his position by insisting its usage was legitimate — a stance considered especially significant because he oversees the national police as interior minister
  • “Ensauvagement is coded language to mean young, violent youths of sub-Saharan or North African origin,” Mr. Ndiaye said. “And that opens the door to policies on immigration, police checkpoints, and it could be used to justify police violence.”
  • “If police officers are dealing with savages, well, then, it’s legitimate that they use violent means to control these so-called savages,” he said
Javier E

On the Shortness of Life 2.0 - by Peter Juul - The Liberal Patriot - 0 views

theliberalpatriot.substack.com/...on-the-shortness-of-life-20

time management organization life planning mission balance ethics personal virtue good life

shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • It’s a deft and eclectic synthesis of ancient and modern thinking about how humanity can come to terms with our limited time on Earth – the title derives from the length of the average human lifespan – ranging intellectually from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers like Seneca to modern-day Buddhist and existentialist thinkers. Stuffed with valuable and practical insights on life and how we use – or misuse – it, Four Thousand Weeks is an impressive and compact volume well worth the time and attention of even the most casual readers.
  • As Burkeman notes, our preoccupation with productivity allows us to evade “the anxiety that might arise if we were to ask ourselves whether we’re on the right path.” The end result is a lot of dedicated and talented people in politics and policy burning themselves out for no discernable or meaningful purpose.
  • Then there’s social media, defined by Burkeman as “a machine for misusing your life.” Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook don’t just distract us from more important matters, he argues, “they change how we’re defining ‘important matters’ in the first place.”
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  • Social media also amounts to “a machine for getting you to care about too many things, even if they’re each indisputably worthwhile.” Hence the urge to depict every policy problem as an urgent if not existential crisis
  • social media has turned all of us into “angrier, less empathetic, more anxious or more numbed out” versions of ourselves.
  • Finally, our political and policy debates tend towards what Burkeman calls “paralyzing grandiosity” – the false notion that in the face of problems like climate change, economic inequality, and ongoing threats to democracy “only the most revolutionary, world-transforming causes are worth fighting for.” It’s a sentiment that derives from and reinforces catastrophism and absolutism as ways of thinking about politics and policy
  • That sentiment also often results in impotent impatience, which in turn leads to frustration, anger, and cynicism when things don’t turn out exactly as we’ve hoped. But it also allows us to avoid hard choices required in order to pull together the political coalitions necessary to effect actual change.
  • Four Thousand Weeks is filled to the brim with practical advice
  • Embrace “radical incrementalism.”
  • Burkeman suggests we find some hobby we enjoy for its own sake, not because there’s some benefit we think we can derive from it
  • Take a break
  • rest for rest’s sake, “to spend some of our time, that is, on activities in which the only thing we’re trying to get from them is the doing itself.”
  • we should cultivate the patience to see our goals through step-by-step over the long term. We’ve got to resist the need for speed and desire for rapid resolution of problems, letting them instead take the time they take.
  • “To make a difference,” Burkeman argues, “you must focus your finite capacity for care.”
  • “Consolidate your caring” and think small.
  • it’s perfectly fine to dedicate your time to a limited subset of issues that you care deeply about. We’re only mortal, and as Burkeman points out it’s important to “consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics.”
  • our lives are just as meaningful and worthwhile if we spend our time “on, say caring for an elderly relative with dementia or volunteering at the local community garden” as they are if we’re up to our eyeballs in the minutiae of politics and policy. What matters is that we make things slightly better with our contributions and actions
  • once we give up on the illusion of perfection, Burkeman observes, we “get to roll up [our] sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.”
Javier E

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

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

climate change technology research development

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

The Great PowerPoint Panic of 2003 - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...674797

media presentation critique effects technology

shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • if all of those bad presentations really led to broad societal ills, the proof is hard to find.
  • Some scientists have tried to take a formal measure of the alleged PowerPoint Effect, asking whether the software really influences our ability to process information. Sebastian Kernbach, a professor of creativity and design at the University of St. Gallen, in Switzerland, has co-authored multiple reviews synthesizing this literature. On the whole, he told me, the research suggests that Tufte was partly right, partly wrong. PowerPoint doesn’t seem to make us stupid—there is no evidence of lower information retention or generalized cognitive decline, for example, among those who use it—but it does impose a set of assumptions about how information ought to be conveyed: loosely, in bullet points, and delivered by presenters to an audience of passive listeners. These assumptions have even reshaped the physical environment for the slide-deck age, Kernbach said: Seminar tables, once configured in a circle, have been bent, post-PowerPoint, into a U-shape to accommodate presenters.
  • When I spoke with Kernbach, he was preparing for a talk on different methods of visual thinking to a group of employees at a large governmental organization. He said he planned to use a flip chart, draw on blank slides like a white board, and perhaps even have audience members do some drawing of their own. But he was also gearing up to use regular old PowerPoint slides. Doing so, he told me, would “signal preparation and professionalism” for his audience. The organization was NASA.
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  • The fact that the American space agency still uses PowerPoint should not be surprising. Despite the backlash it inspired in the press, and the bile that it raised in billionaires, and the red alert it caused within the military, the corporate-presentation juggernaut rolls on. The program has more monthly users than ever before, according to Shawn Villaron, Microsoft’s vice president of product for PowerPoint—well into the hundreds of millions. If anything, its use cases have proliferated. During lockdown, people threw PowerPoint parties on Zoom. Kids now make PowerPoint presentations for their parents when they want to get a puppy or quit soccer or attend a Niall Horan meet and greet. If PowerPoint is evil, then evil rules the world.
  • it’s tempting to entertain counterfactuals and wonder how things might have played out if Tufte and the rest of us had worried about social media back in 2003 instead of presentation software. Perhaps a timely pamphlet on The Cognitive Style of Friendster or a Wired headline asserting that “LinkedIn Is Evil” would have changed the course of history. If the social-media backlash of the past few years had been present from the start, maybe Facebook would never have grown into the behemoth it is now, and the country would never have become so hopelessly divided.
  • it could be that nothing whatsoever would have changed. No matter what their timing, and regardless of their aptness, concerns about new media rarely seem to make a difference. Objections get steamrolled. The new technology takes over. And years later, when we look back and think, How strange that we were so perturbed, the effects of that technology may well be invisible.
peterconnelly

Indigenous and local knowledge can help build effective environmental policies: Calgary... - 0 views

globalnews.ca/...e-environment-policies-calgary

knowledge environmental

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Meaningful integration and co-production of Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) can help accelerate effective environmental policies, a new University of Calgary study said.
  • Indigenous and local knowledge often provide sustainable and holistic perspectives on nature that are often ignored in Western science.
  • “For Indigenous communities, including my own, humans are perceived to be equal to the lands, and this concept of sustainability is embedded in many Indigenous worldviews,” Sidorova said.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “Indigenous knowledge provides a very unique perspective because it provides a more respectful and reciprocal view on nature and animals, and these are passed from generation to generation.”
  • But Sidorova notes that the integration of ILK is only a first step and should not be used to tokenize Indigenous communities.
  • Sidorova says policymakers, governments and organizations need to adequately fund Indigenous-led CBEM and research programs to ensure partnerships with Indigenous and local communities last long term.
  • The programs should also focus on Indigenous languages because Indigenous roles have spiritual elements that show connections to the land that can’t necessarily be fully translated into English, she added.
peterconnelly

Opinion | Elon Musk's Tesla Management Is a Bad Sign for Twitter - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...elon-musk-tesla-twitter.html

tesla management new york times

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • His promises to preserve free speech, ban spam bots and dramatically boost revenue may have earned the blessing of the company’s founder, Jack Dorsey, but with Twitter’s stock falling well below his offer price, Mr. Musk appears to be reneging on a deal that has made even Wall Street grow skeptical.
  • The way that he has managed and marketed his businesses from Tesla’s early days reveals a dysfunction behind the automaker’s veneer of technofuturism and past stock market successes.
  • The way that he has managed and marketed his businesses from Tesla’s early days reveals a dysfunction behind the automaker’s veneer of technofuturism and past stock market successes.
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  • he forces his employees to bridge the enormous gap between technological reality and his dreams. This disconnect fosters a negligent and sometimes cruel workplace, to disastrous effect.
  • That fully self-driving announcement that so delighted his fans came as a far more jarring revelation to the project’s engineers, who found out about their staggering new mission when Mr. Musk tweeted about it.
  • This is the fundamental weakness of every organization run as a cult of personality: The dear leader can’t be everywhere or make every decision but often fails to provide the clear code of values that allows managers to independently shape their decisions around common goals.
  • Lawsuits by workers and California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing allege that Black workers were tasked with menial physical labor in parts of the factory nicknamed “the plantation,” where they were subjected to racist slurs and graffiti.
  • lantatio
  • Female workers have sued, alleging a pervasive culture of sexual harassment and groping by supervisors. Mr. Musk was indifferent, emailing workers who experienced abuse that “it is important to be thick-skinned.”
  • He ultimately gave up and cobbled together a manual-labor-intensive production line in an open-air tent.
  • Mr. Musk’s reliance on hype is especially jarring.
  • By moving to buy Twitter, Mr. Musk has not only added another distraction to his long list but has also already shown the same drive to announce sweeping decisions in public.
  • Ultimately Mr. Musk’s goals for Twitter, as they are for Tesla, are not about making the right decisions for his companies or the people who make them possible.
  • They are about playing to the crowd and burnishing the legend that keeps fresh bodies and minds moving through the businesses that chew them up and spit them out.
  • peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22
     
    Elon Musk's management at Tesla and his buying of Twitter
peterconnelly

Ghana: How these companies going green could pay off for the country and the planet - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

ghana companies cnn

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Across Ghana's industries, from energy to agriculture, companies are using tech to go green. Earlier this year, the country's government pledged to create up to $2 billion in green bonds, which it says will help pay for environmental priorities and pave the road to sustainability.
  • the Accra-based company has turned over 40 million plastic sachets (small bags filled with drinking water) into products such as laptop covers, pencil cases and grocery bags since 2007.
  • "If it's good for the planet, then it's good for business."
peterconnelly

Opinion: Want to keep your employees happy? Offer these 5 things - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • To attract workers in today's tight labor market, companies are touting better workplace amenities. Amazon is running ads about the company's pay and benefits. Levi Strauss is offering to cover travel costs for workers seeking abortions. Airbnb is allowing its employees to permanently work remotely. This is a workers' paradise in the making.
  • People crave predictability. Surprises make it harder for employees to plan their lives and have peace of mind. When constant change is inflicted on them, without a chance to anticipate it or participate in decisions about it, people get anxious and passive, and dream of escape.
  • Now, increasing numbers of people demand the ability to choose when, where and how to work.
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  • This made the employee feel like remote work was just another set of disempowering rules.
  • Workers clearly felt empowered by having more control over their own work life. Companies must give people choices that match their unique work and life needs.
  • But they also made clear that willingness to stay with the current employer is also a matter of whether their direct managers can deliver on five other factors beyond the paycheck that keep people happy, productive and on the team.
  • For instance, workers who get unexpected spot bonuses sometimes feel that they don't know what to count on when calculating their future compensation; they'd rather have a predictable total package.
  • People thrive when their value is acknowledged by getting more responsibility, recognition and stature, such as a bigger title.
  • Jobs that convey a sense of purpose and meaning are more likely to exercise an emotional hold on people. Whether or not the company overall thinks it stands for social responsibility, people want to see that chance to make a difference in their immediate work experience.
  • Conventional wisdom holds that the best way to improve employment circumstances is to get an offer from a new company. That shouldn't have to be the case. Managers who want to retain people should act as if they are just now hiring them.
  • The best labor pool could be the one companies already have. They should treat their people as a precious resource and give them what they want from work. Rewarding them will reward the business.
peterconnelly

Why You Need To Beat Confirmation Bias To Win Your Customers - 0 views

martechseries.com/...ion-bias-to-win-your-customers

bias

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret information in a way that is always consistent with existing beliefs. Simply, it occurs when someone views information in a positive, affirming light, even though the information could be telling a drastically different story.
  • While confirmation bias can often be chalked up to human nature, in a business setting, failure to adequately evaluate and respond to information can be a legitimate issue for a company, and particularly its marketing team.
  • This is where confirmation bias can be dangerous because it’s easy for brands to assume customers view the company through the same lens they do and have a similar opinion of the company, but this isn’t necessarily true.
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  • To beat confirmation bias, it’s vital for brands to face reality when measuring the success of their campaigns and gauging customer brand perception.
  • As a marketer, it can be easy to fall victim to simply measuring customer behavioural data (like click-through rates, ad engagement, unsubscribes, etc.). However, the best marketing teams lean on an outside-in perspective to improve customer experiences and create a better brand reputation.
  • Additionally, marketing teams would be wise to connect with potential customers who did not convert. They will be most able to point out the pain points in a marketing campaign that are dissuading buyers. It’s just as important to ask consumers why they didn’t interact with a brand as it is to ask why they do.
  • Obtaining these insights allows marketers to gauge specifics into how their competitors are beating them out, and conversely, how they can improve their product and boost customer retention.
  • At the end of the day, customers want to know that their feedback is valued and has the power to drive change. Companies that choose to neglect customer feedback are prime examples of the dangers of confirmation bias.
  • It doesn’t matter how marketing teams or their company define success, it’s up to the customer.
  • For example, in industries like video tech and security, where the community is extremely tight knit, marketing teams must have a deep understanding of their audience’s business needs to have any chance of selling to them. Brands that understand consumer perception and needs, will be able to personalize messages to their target audience and create a more positive customer experience. By gauging and adapting to direct feedback, marketing teams can avoid the dangers of confirmation bias, and make wholesale changes that will turn customers into brand champions.
peterconnelly

Where Will We Be in 20 Years? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ture-society-demographics.html

new york times

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • “Demographics are destiny.”It is a phrase, often attributed to the French philosopher Auguste Comte, that suggests much of the future is preordained by the very simple trend lines of populations. Want to understand how the power dynamic between the United States and China will change over the next 20 years? An economist would tell you to look at the demographics of both countries. (China’s economy is likely to overtake the U.S. economy by 2028, but remain smaller on a per capita basis.)
  • About 70 percent of the world population is expected to live in urban areas by 2050, according to data from the United Nations.
  • More people around the world had more disposable income and increasingly chose to live closer to cities with greater access to airports. That, married with the human condition that people like to be around other people, makes forecasting certain elements of the future almost mathematical.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • One aspect of the future that demographics can’t help predict are technological innovations.
  • Predicting the future may be a fool’s errand. But using demographic data to assess the opportunities and challenges of the next two decades is something that business and political leaders don’t do enough. We’re all too swept up in the here and now, the next quarter and the next year.
  • The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that the world will need about 28 percent more energy in 2040 than it did in 2015 based on the number of people in the country and consumption patterns; on our current trajectory, about 42 percent of electricity in the United States will come from renewable sources.
  • Technology has led us to expect that goods and services will be delivered at the push of a button, often within minutes.
  • Entrepreneurs, industry leaders and policymakers are already at work solving some of the problems that demographic data suggest are ahead of us, whether it’s figuring out how to incentivize farmers to sequester carbon, use insurance as a tool for reducing coal production, reinvent the motors that power heavy industry so they use less energy, or write laws that help govern code.
  • What about the metaverse? Or crypto technology? Or robots taking our jobs? Or A.I. taking over everything? Demographics can’t answer those questions. All of those things may happen, but life in 2041 may also look a lot like it does today — maybe with the exception of those flying cars.
peterconnelly

Opinion | What to Do About Americans Who Love Their Guns - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...anti-gun-ad-campaign.html

guns new york times opinion

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Coming of age in the 1970s and ’80s, a kid took in a fair number of public service messages.
  • Obviously, not everyone transformed into responsible citizens while imbibing these messages between doses of Sugar Pops and “Scooby-Doo.”
  • But simple messages stick, and when done well — particularly when lives are at stake — have proven highly effective.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Not only does this country have more guns than people, but over the last 30 years, Americans have grown less supportive of stricter gun laws. Astonishingly, in 1959, 60 percent of Americans favored a ban on handguns except those used by police officers and other authorized persons; today that figure is 19 percent.
  • Bearing in mind that the killers in Texas and Buffalo were both only 18, we could try to get through to the next generation.
  • Make guns less cool, less acceptable, less a part of the supposedly “American way of life.” Scare people. Gross them out. Even try humor.
  • Or it could go personal, using a testimonial from a child who lost his sister in a school shooting or a teenager whose friend committed suicide at 14 using a weapon kept in the house by his own parents.
  • Public education and creative P.S.A.s helped reduce teenage cigarette use significantly. While in the pocket of the tobacco industry, Hollywood played a key role in glamorizing smoking, but then later, after paid tobacco product placement was banned, clamped down on the appearance of smoking on film and TV. Those efforts are ongoing.
  • Sometimes, of course, a cigarette, like a gun, is key to a movie’s story line or characters
  • Through technology and schools, it could bring kids into creating and disseminating the message.
peterconnelly

Sheryl Sandberg's Legacy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sheryl-sandberg-legacy.html

new york times

shared by peterconnelly on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • It’s not clear how history will judge Sheryl Sandberg.
  • Sandberg, who said on Wednesday that she was quitting Meta after 14 years as the company’s second in command, leaves behind a complicated professional and personal legacy.
  • But Sandberg was also partly responsible for Facebook’s failures during crucial moments, notably when the company initially denied and deflected blame for Russia-backed trolls that were abusing the site to inflame divisions among Americans ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The 23-year-old Zuckerberg hired Sandberg in 2008 to figure out how to build Facebook into a large and lasting business.
  • Sandberg spearheaded a plan to build from scratch a more sophisticated system of advertising that was largely based on what she had helped develop at Google. Ads on Facebook were tied to people’s activities and interests on the site. As at Google, many advertisers bought Facebook ads online rather than through sales personnel, as had been typical for TV or newspaper ads. Later, Sandberg cultivated new systems for Facebook advertisers to pinpoint their potential customers with even more precision.
  • Google and Facebook transformed product marketing from largely an art to a sometimes creepy science, and Sandberg is among the architects of that change. She shares in the credit (or blame) for developing two of the most successful, and perhaps least defensible, business models in internet history.
  • All the anxiety today about apps snooping on people to glean every morsel of activity to better pitch us dishwashers — that’s partly Sandberg’s doing. So are Facebook and Google’s combined $325 billion in annual advertising sales and those of all other online companies that make money from ads.
  • In their 2021 book, “An Ugly Truth,” Sheera and Cecilia wrote that to Sandberg’s detractors, her response was part of a pattern of trying to preserve the company’s reputation or her own rather than do the right thing.
marvelgr

THE BASES OF THE MIND:THE RELATIONSHIP OF LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT | by Koç Unive... - 0 views

medium.com/...guage-and-thought-a0bf30375528

shared by marvelgr on 13 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • We can talk about three different interactions when we investigate the complex relationships between language and thinking. First, the existence of language as a cognitive process affects the system of thinking. Second, thinking comes before language, and the learning of a language interacts with the conceptual process that is formed before language use. Third, each language spoken may affect the system of thinking. Here we will discuss these three interactions under these subsections: “thinking without language,” “thinking before language,” and “thinking with language.”
  • Babies can categorize objects and actions, understand the cause and effect relationship between events, and see the goals in a movement. Recent studies on action representation and spatial concepts have shown that babies’ universal and language-general action representation productively changes with the learning of the mother tongue. For example, languages use prepositions to express the relationship between objects, i.e., in, on, under. However, languages also vary how they use these relations. One of the most significant studies suggests that babies can differentiate between concepts expressed with prepositions such as containment (in) and support (on). The Korean language specifies the nature of these containment and support relationships using the tightness of the relationship between objects: tight or loose. For example, a pencil in a pencil-size box represents a tight relationship, while a pencil in a big basket represents a loose relationship.
  • In the late 1800s, anthropologist Franz Boas laid the foundations of cultural relativity. According to this point of view, individuals see and perceive the world within the boundaries of their cultures. The role of anthropology is to investigate how people are conditioned by their culture and how they interact with the world in different ways. To understand such mechanisms, it suggests, implications in culture and language should be studied. The reflection of this view in the relationship between language and thought is the linguistic determinism hypothesis advanced by Eric Safir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. This hypothesis suggests that thought emerges only with the effect of language and concepts that are believed to exist even in infancy fade away due to the language learned.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In conclusion, there is a nested relationship between language and thought. In the interaction processes mentioned above, the role of language changes. Even though the limits of our language are different from the limits of our thinking, it is inevitable that people prioritize concepts in their languages. This, however, does not mean that they cannot comprehend or think about concepts that do not exist in their language.
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