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katherineharron

Screen time: Mental health menace or scapegoat? - CNN - 0 views

  • (CNN)"Have smartphones destroyed a generation?" Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, asked in an adapted excerpt of her controversial book, "iGen."In the book, she argues that those born after 1995 are on the "brink of a mental-health crisis" -- and she believes it can be linked to growing up with their noses pressed against a screen.
  • For those who responded 10 to 19 hours per week, that number was about 18%. For those who spent 40 or more hours a week using social media, that number approached 24%.
  • By the twelfth grade, however, the negative correlations between screen time and teen psychology had somewhat dissipated. In addition, less is not always more: Teens with zero hours of screen time had higher rates of unhappiness than their peers who logged in a few hours a week.
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  • Twenge recognizes that her study shows only a correlation between screen use and "psychological well-being," which is measured using survey questions about self-esteem, life satisfaction and happiness. The surveys can't say whether screen time directly changes teens' mental health, the research states.
  • "I spent my career in technology. I wasn't prepared for its effect on my kids," philanthropist Melinda Gates, whose three children were also born after 1995, wrote August in the Washington Post. "Phones and apps aren't good or bad by themselves, but for adolescents who don't yet have the emotional tools to navigate life's complications and confusions, they can exacerbate the difficulties of growing up."
  • At the same time, she said, kids are learning on their devices and connecting in novel ways. "Marginalized groups such as gay and lesbian students (are) finding support they never had before through social networks," said Gates.
  • Other studies have explored the connection between social media and isolation and how "likes" activate the brain's reward center. Some analyses have found that moderate use of these technologies is "not intrinsically harmful" and can even improve social skills and develop resilience.
johnsonel7

Opinion | Do heuristics help us make good decisions in uncertain times? - 0 views

  • Do heuristics, the shortcuts that the brain takes, support efficient decision making or does it impede efficient decision making?
  • Humans have neither unlimited resources nor unlimited time to take decisions. So, the brain has always developed smart heuristics, shortcuts to take efficient decisions.
  • One other key thought put forward by Gigerenzer is that there is a big difference between risk and uncertainty. We are dealing with risk when you know all the alternatives, outcomes and their probabilities. We are dealing with uncertainty when you don’t know all the alternatives, outcomes or their probabilities.
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  • It has been found that if doctors are trained how to translate conditional probabilities into natural frequencies, the ability of the doctors to communicate the risk to their patients goes up dramatically. Just imagine the huge difference this can make to customer satisfaction in the healthcare business.
krystalxu

Why People Play Video Games - 0 views

  • video games are one of the most seductive of all of these activities because they fulfill our psychological needs more efficiently than almost any other activity.
    • krystalxu
       
      But drug and drink can also bring us the same effect.
  • A game’s narrative makes our choices feel significant enough that we buy into the game emotionally, and the feedback system encourages us to keep working.
  • These highly tuned feedback systems are the key to turning video games into an indispensable tool for bettering our future.
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  • Games are more consistent at rewarding us for the choices we make, and they also provide a diversity of choice that the real world doesn’t provide.
  • Many modern – even violent – games might be better teaching tools than we realize.
  • “I think games can provide a framework for understanding contemporary issues such as governmental budgets and spending,”
  • Building blocks of a better world
  • Aside from the physical benefits of gaming, video games excel at setting clear goals and showing a player’s progression towards those goals.
  • The playful nature of video games lowers the barrier of entry for people to get behind new social causes.
  • When used correctly, video games hold the potential to show us the world through a different set of lenses
  • to craft experiences that engage our mind both cognitively and socially, and ultimately make us feel like an active participant in shaping our destiny.
    • krystalxu
       
      ppl can find more effective ways to achieve these goals. It is like the say "do some work while watching TV" to safe time. How about just stop watching TV and do work more efficiently and in more volume?
  • those who play games feel a need to break free from the mundane slavery of their reality.
  • how they encourage or discourage violence, inspire creativity, or nurture laziness.
  • the human ability to play is so powerful.
  • ones more fantastical than our own
  • enjoy retreats to other realities
  • Immersyve’s complex needs-satisfaction metrics narrow down to three basic categories.
  • desire to seek out control or to feel mastery over a situation.
  • need for competence
  • People like to feel successful, and we like to feel like we’re growing and progressing in our knowledge and accomplishments.
  • video games make us feel more accomplished.
  • need is autonomy
  • the desire to feel independent or have a certain amount of control over our actions.
  • need is relatedness.
  • gamers can fulfill this need for relatedness by playing games with friends online,
  • make us feel more competent, more autonomous, and more related because these experiences make us feel good and keep us mentally healthy.
manhefnawi

The Art of Sympathetic Enthusiasm: Goethe on the Only Opinion Worth Voicing About the L... - 0 views

  • “Construction and destruction alike satisfy the will to power,” Bertrand Russell wrote in contemplating human nature, “but construction is more difficult as a rule, and therefore gives more satisfaction to the person who can achieve it.”
tongoscar

Three quarters of refugees feel welcome in Germany | News | DW | 18.02.2020 - 0 views

shared by tongoscar on 19 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Around three-quarters of refugees in Germany feel welcome in the country, according to a recent survey conducted by Germany's Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF). The survey, which was published on Tuesday, claimed that key factors determining overall life satisfaction for refugees in Germany depended on their family situation and health, residence status and housing, employment status, and the extent of social interaction with local Germans.
  • "All in all, the refugees assessed their living conditions in Germany rather positively," project manager Nina Rother said. "The feeling of being welcomed in Germany also plays an important role."
  • The joint study was conducted in collaboration with Germany's Institute for Employment Research (IAB). The report interviewed a total of 7,950 refugees who came to Germany between 2013 and 2016. According to the researchers, a good level of German is a central prerequisite for professional and social integration.
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  • The survey stated that 44% of the refugees now rate their German language skills as "good" or "very good." In 2017, the figure stood at 35% and in the first survey in 2016, at only 22%. The proportion of respondents without any knowledge of German has fallen to 5%.
Javier E

An Ode to Low Expectations - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Strive for excellence, by all means. My God, please strive for excellence. Excellence alone will haul us out of the hogwash. But lower the bar, and keep it low, when it comes to your personal attachment to the world.
  • Gratification? Satisfaction? Having your needs met? Fool’s gold. If you can get a buzz of animal cheer from the rubbishy sandwich you’re eating, the daft movie you’re watching, the highly difficult person you’re talking to, you’re in business.
  • And when trouble comes, you’ll be fitter for it.
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  • Revise your expectations downward. Extend forgiveness to your idiot friends; extend forgiveness to your idiot self. Make it a practice. Come to rest in actuality.
Javier E

Where We Went Wrong | Harvard Magazine - 0 views

  • John Kenneth Galbraith assessed the trajectory of America’s increasingly “affluent society.” His outlook was not a happy one. The nation’s increasingly evident material prosperity was not making its citizens any more satisfied. Nor, at least in its existing form, was it likely to do so
  • One reason, Galbraith argued, was the glaring imbalance between the opulence in consumption of private goods and the poverty, often squalor, of public services like schools and parks
  • nother was that even the bountifully supplied private goods often satisfied no genuine need, or even desire; a vast advertising apparatus generated artificial demand for them, and satisfying this demand failed to provide meaningful or lasting satisfaction.
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  • economist J. Bradford DeLong ’82, Ph.D. ’87, looking back on the twentieth century two decades after its end, comes to a similar conclusion but on different grounds.
  • DeLong, professor of economics at Berkeley, looks to matters of “contingency” and “choice”: at key junctures the economy suffered “bad luck,” and the actions taken by the responsible policymakers were “incompetent.”
  • these were “the most consequential years of all humanity’s centuries.” The changes they saw, while in the first instance economic, also “shaped and transformed nearly everything sociological, political, and cultural.”
  • DeLong’s look back over the twentieth century energetically encompasses political and social trends as well; nor is his scope limited to the United States. The result is a work of strikingly expansive breadth and scope
  • labeling the book an economic history fails to convey its sweeping frame.
  • The century that is DeLong’s focus is what he calls the “long twentieth century,” running from just after the Civil War to the end of the 2000s when a series of events, including the biggest financial crisis since the 1930s followed by likewise the most severe business downturn, finally rendered the advanced Western economies “unable to resume economic growth at anything near the average pace that had been the rule since 1870.
  • d behind those missteps in policy stood not just failures of economic thinking but a voting public that reacted perversely, even if understandably, to the frustrations poor economic outcomes had brought them.
  • Within this 140-year span, DeLong identifies two eras of “El Dorado” economic growth, each facilitated by expanding globalization, and each driven by rapid advances in technology and changes in business organization for applying technology to economic ends
  • from 1870 to World War I, and again from World War II to 197
  • fellow economist Robert J. Gordon ’62, who in his monumental treatise on The Rise and Fall of American Economic Growth (reviewed in “How America Grew,” May-June 2016, page 68) hailed 1870-1970 as a “special century” in this regard (interrupted midway by the disaster of the 1930s).
  • Gordon highlighted the role of a cluster of once-for-all-time technological advances—the steam engine, railroads, electrification, the internal combustion engine, radio and television, powered flight
  • Pessimistic that future technological advances (most obviously, the computer and electronics revolutions) will generate productivity gains to match those of the special century, Gordon therefore saw little prospect of a return to the rapid growth of those halcyon days.
  • DeLong instead points to a series of noneconomic (and non-technological) events that slowed growth, followed by a perverse turn in economic policy triggered in part by public frustration: In 1973 the OPEC cartel tripled the price of oil, and then quadrupled it yet again six years later.
  • For all too many Americans (and citizens of other countries too), the combination of high inflation and sluggish growth meant that “social democracy was no longer delivering the rapid progress toward utopia that it had delivered in the first post-World War II generation.”
  • Frustration over these and other ills in turn spawned what DeLong calls the “neoliberal turn” in public attitudes and economic policy. The new economic policies introduced under this rubric “did not end the slowdown in productivity growth but reinforced it.
  • the tax and regulatory changes enacted in this new climate channeled most of what economic gains there were to people already at the top of the income scale
  • Meanwhile, progressive “inclusion” of women and African Americans in the economy (and in American society more broadly) meant that middle- and lower-income white men saw even smaller gains—and, perversely, reacted by providing still greater support for policies like tax cuts for those with far higher incomes than their own.
  • Daniel Bell’s argument in his 1976 classic The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Bell famously suggested that the very success of a capitalist economy would eventually undermine a society’s commitment to the values and institutions that made capitalism possible in the first plac
  • In DeLong’s view, the “greatest cause” of the neoliberal turn was “the extraordinary pace of rising prosperity during the Thirty Glorious Years, which raised the bar that a political-economic order had to surpass in order to generate broad acceptance.” At the same time, “the fading memory of the Great Depression led to the fading of the belief, or rather recognition, by the middle class that they, as well as the working class, needed social insurance.”
  • what the economy delivered to “hard-working white men” no longer matched what they saw as their just deserts: in their eyes, “the rich got richer, the unworthy and minority poor got handouts.”
  • As Bell would have put it, the politics of entitlement, bred by years of economic success that so many people had come to take for granted, squeezed out the politics of opportunity and ambition, giving rise to the politics of resentment.
  • The new era therefore became “a time to question the bourgeois virtues of hard, regular work and thrift in pursuit of material abundance.”
  • DeLong’s unspoken agenda would surely include rolling back many of the changes made in the U.S. tax code over the past half-century, as well as reinvigorating antitrust policy to blunt the dominance, and therefore outsize profits, of the mega-firms that now tower over key sectors of the economy
  • He would also surely reverse the recent trend moving away from free trade. Central bankers should certainly behave like Paul Volcker (appointed by President Carter), whose decisive action finally broke the 1970s inflation even at considerable economic cost
  • Not only Galbraith’s main themes but many of his more specific observations as well seem as pertinent, and important, today as they did then.
  • What will future readers of Slouching Towards Utopia conclude?
  • If anything, DeLong’s narratives will become more valuable as those events fade into the past. Alas, his description of fascism as having at its center “a contempt for limits, especially those implied by reason-based arguments; a belief that reality could be altered by the will; and an exaltation of the violent assertion of that will as the ultimate argument” will likely strike a nerve with many Americans not just today but in years to come.
  • what about DeLong’s core explanation of what went wrong in the latter third of his, and our, “long century”? I predict that it too will still look right, and important.
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