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Javier E

How Social Status Affects Your Health - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tatus-affects-your-health.html

status social health control insurance stress hormone immune psychology

shared by Javier E on 13 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • If you want to see how status affects health, you have to isolate status from material wealth. How to do that? The easiest way is to observe a society in which there is minimal material wealth to contest and where there are limited avenues for status competition.
  • For several years, we studied the Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of Amazonian Bolivia, a small, preindustrial, politically egalitarian society in which status confers no formal privileges (such as coercive authority).
  • we found that even among the Tsimane, higher status was associated with lower levels of stress and better health.
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  • Along the banks of the Maniqui River and in adjacent forests, the Tsimane people hunt, fish and plant plantains, rice and sweet manioc. They live in villages that range in size from 30 to 700 people. During village meetings, decision making is consensus-based. No individual has the right to coerce anyone else.
  • that doesn’t mean there are no status distinctions. When you attend a Tsimane village meeting, you soon notice that the opinions of certain men are more influential during the consensus-building process. These same men are often solicited to mediate disputes or to represent villagers’ interests with outsiders.
  • My colleagues and I measured the social status of all the men from four Tsimane villages (nearly 200 men between the ages of 18 and 83), by asking them to evaluate one another on their informal political influence. The men also provided urine samples and received medical examinations from physicians
  • We found that Tsimane men with less political influence had higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which has many important physiological functions. This result persisted after controlling for other factors that might affect stress levels, including age, body size and personality.
  • Those living just above the poverty line may resent welfare for those living just below it, and a millionaire may envy a multimillionaire more than he envies a billionaire.
  • Studying the same individuals over a four-year period, we also found that for men whose influence declined over time, greater declines were correlated with higher levels of cortisol and respiratory illness. Downward mobility is harmful, it seems, even in an egalitarian society.
  • Why might low status cause such stress for the Tsimane? One possibility is that status offers a greater sense of control.
  • Another is that status acts as a form of social insurance. Influential Tsimane men have more allies and food-production partners, who can be helpful in mitigating conflict, sickness and food shortage. The relative lack of such support may cause psychosocial stress.
  • It is interesting that even in industrialized societies, the status comparisons most consequential for psychosocial stress are often among individuals who live near one another or occupy the same social network, not individuals at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum.
  • In addition, we found that the less influential Tsimane men had a higher risk of respiratory infection, the most common cause of sickness and death in their society. Stress may contribute to this disparity in infection risk; when chronic, stress can dampen immune function.
  • The importance of relative status perceptions may have its roots in the small-scale societies of our ancestors, which were similar to that of the Tsimane. In such societies, both our political competitors and our cooperative partners were likely individuals with whom we interacted regularly.
  • As our society debates the effects of wealth inequality, the Tsimane help us understand why we care so deeply about relative social position — and why our health depends on it.
Javier E

Opinion | The Book That Explains Our Cultural Stagnation - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...status-culture-book.html

art high culture boredom malaise rank status creativity meaning internet c

shared by Javier E on 30 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • The best explanation I’ve read for our current cultural malaise comes at the end of W. David Marx’s forthcoming “Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change,” a book that is not at all boring and that subtly altered how I see the world.
  • Marx posits cultural evolution as a sort of perpetual motion machine driven by people’s desire to ascend the social hierarchy. Artists innovate to gain status, and people unconsciously adjust their tastes to either signal their status tier or move up to a new one.
  • “Status struggles fuel cultural creativity in three important realms: competition between socioeconomic classes, the formation of subcultures and countercultures, and artists’ internecine battles.”
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  • avant-garde composer John Cage. When Cage presented his discordant orchestral piece “Atlas Eclipticalis” at Lincoln Center in 1964, many patrons walked out. Members of the orchestra hissed at Cage when he took his bow; a few even smashed his electronic equipment. But Cage’s work inspired other artists, leading “historians and museum curators to embrace him as a crucial figure in the development of postmodern art,” which in turn led audiences to pay respectful attention to his work
  • “There was a virtuous cycle for Cage: His originality, mystery and influence provided him artist status; this encouraged serious institutions to explore his work; the frequent engagement with his work imbued Cage with cachet among the public, who then received a status boost for taking his work seriously,” writes Marx.
  • the markers of high social rank have become more philistine. When the value of cultural capital is debased, writes Marx, it makes “popularity and economic capital even more central in marking status.”
  • in the age of the internet, taste tells you less about a person. You don’t need to make your way into any social world to develop a familiarity with Cage — or, for that matter, with underground hip-hop, weird performance art, or rare sneakers.
  • people are, obviously, no less obsessed with their own status today than they were during times of fecund cultural production.
  • The internet, Marx writes in his book’s closing section, changes this dynamic. With so much content out there, the chance that others will recognize the meaning of any obscure cultural signal declines
  • there’s “less incentive for individuals to both create and celebrate culture with high symbolic complexity.”
  • It makes more sense for a parvenu to fake a ride on a private jet than to fake an interest in contemporary art. We live in a time of rapid and disorientating shifts in gender, religion and technology. Aesthetically, thanks to the internet, it’s all quite dull.
Javier E

The Myth of Wealthy Men and Beautiful Women - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...374414

myth beauty status partner matchmaking power psychology

shared by Javier E on 06 May 18 - No Cached
  • Experiments that don’t rely on self-reporting regularly show that physical attractiveness is exquisitely, at times incomparably, important to both men and women. Status (however you want to measure it: income, formal education, et cetera) is often not far behind
  • In real-life dating studies, which get closer to genuine intentions, physical attractiveness and earning potential strongly predict romantic attraction.
  • Economically successful women partner with economically successful men, and physically attractive women partner with physically attractive men.
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  • McClintock found that outside of ailing tycoons and Donald Trump, in the practical world it basically doesn’t exist. Where it does, it doesn’t last. The dominant force in mating is matching.
  • What appears to be an exchange of beauty for socioeconomic status is often actually not an exchange, McClintock wrote, but a series of matched virtues
  • when it comes to beauty and income, more is almost always seen as better. On these “consensually-ranked” traits, people seem to aspire to partners who rank more highly than themselves. They don’t want a match so much as a jackpot.
  • Because people of high socioeconomic status are, on average, rated as more physically attractive than people of lower status, many correlations between one partner's appearance and the other partner's status are spurious and misconstrued.
  • “Women spend a lot more time trying to look good than men do,” McClintock said. “That creates a lot of mess in this data. If you don’t take that into account then you actually see there’s a lot of these guys who are partnered with women who are better looking than them, which is just because, on average, women are better looking. Men are partnering 'up' in attractiveness.
  • And men earn more than women—we’ve got that 70-percent wage gap—so women marry 'up' in income. You’ve got to take these things into account before concluding that women are trading beauty for money.”
  • “It would be very hard to separate out class and attractiveness,” McClintock said, “because they’re just so fundamentally linked. I can’t control for that—but I don’t see how anybody could.”
  • “Controlling for both partners’ physical attractiveness may not eliminate the relationship between female beauty and male status,” McClintock wrote, “but it should at least reduce this relationship substantially.”
sissij

Millicent Fawcett Is First Woman to Get Statue in London's Parliament Square - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ent-fawcett-statue-london.html

new york times education language

shared by sissij on 03 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • LONDON — Britain, which has its second female prime minister and a queen who is the world’s longest-reigning monarch, is getting its first statue of a woman in Parliament Square in London, where there are 11 statues of men.
  • It is right and proper that she is honored in Parliament Square alongside former leaders who changed our country. Her statue will stand as a reminder of how politics only has value if it works for everyone in society.”
  • Mrs. Fawcett considered herself a suffragist, a moderate opposed to the sometimes violent protests of campaigners like Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, a mother and daughter who were known as suffragettes.
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  • Mrs. Fawcett inspired a women’s rights charity, the Fawcett Society. Its chief executive, Sam Smethers, said of plans for a statue in her honor: “Her contribution was great, but she has been overlooked and unrecognized until now. By honoring her, we also honor the wider suffrage movement.”
  • sissij on 03 Apr 17
     
    As now we are learning about history in TOK, I think the value of history can be giving us courage. For example, in this article, we can see that how women in the past take hold of the strong pressure possessed on them to be themselves rather than a belonging and property of their husband. I think the history of this woman is very encouraging and valuable for the feminism in nowadays. History gives us inspiration. --Sissi (4/2/2017)
Javier E

How Inequality Hollows Out the Soul - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...nequality-hollows-out-the-soul

inequality psychology mental dominance behavioral system status subordination illness superiority

shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Now that we can compare robust data for different countries, we can see not only what we knew intuitively — that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive — but that it also damages the individual psyche.
  • Our tendency to equate outward wealth with inner worth invokes deep psychological responses, feelings of dominance and subordination, superiority and inferiority. This affects the way we see and treat one another.
  • To compare mental illness rates internationally, the World Health Organization asked people in each country about their mood, tiredness, agitation, concentration, sleeping patterns and self-confidence. These have been found to be good indicators of mental illness.
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  • in developed countries, major and minor mental illnesses were three times as common in societies where there were bigger income differences between rich and poor. In other words, an American is likely to know three times as many people with depression or anxiety problems as someone in Japan or Germany.
  • One, looking at the 50 American states, discovered that after taking account of age, income and educational differences, depression was more common in states with greater income inequality
  • schizophrenia was about three times as common in more unequal societies as it was in more equal ones.
  • a wide range of mental disorders might originate in a “dominance behavioral system.” This part of our evolved psychological makeup, almost universal in mammals, enables us to recognize and respond to social ranking systems based on hierarchy and power. One brain-imaging study discovered that there were particular areas of the brain and neural mechanisms dedicated to processing social rank.
  • psychiatric conditions like mania and narcissism are related to our striving for status and dominance, while disorders such as anxiety and depression may involve responses to the experience of subordination
  • how does increasing inequality factor in? One of the important effects of wider income differences between rich and poor is to intensify the issues of dominance and subordination, and feelings of superiority and inferiority.
  • A new study by Dublin-based researchers of 34,000 people in 31 countries found that in countries with bigger income differences, status anxiety was more common at all levels in the social hierarchy
  • self-enhancement or self-aggrandizement — the tendency to present an inflated view of oneself — occurred much more frequently in more unequal societies.
  • In the United States, research psychologists have shown that narcissism rates, as measured by a standard academic tool known as the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, rose rapidly from the later 1980s, which would appear to track the increases in inequality
  • as larger differences in material circumstances create greater social distances, feelings of superiority and inferiority increase. In short, growing inequality makes us all more neurotic about “image management” and how we are seen by others.
  • Humans instinctively know how to cooperate and create social ties, but we also know how to engage in status competition — how to be snobs and how to talk ourselves up. We use these alternative social strategies almost every day of our lives, but crucially, inequality shifts the balance between them.
  • we become less nice people in more unequal societies. But we are less nice and less happy: Greater inequality redoubles status anxiety, damaging our mental health and distorting our personalities — wherever we are on the social spectrum.
Javier E

Rich People Just Care Less - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...rich-people-just-care-less

psychology privilege status high-status power disparity empathy rich attention

shared by Javier E on 07 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Turning a blind eye. Giving someone the cold shoulder. Looking down on people. Seeing right through them. These metaphors for condescending or dismissive behavior are more than just descriptive. They suggest, to a surprisingly accurate extent, the social distance between those with greater power and those with less
  • A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker.
  • A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain. In 2008, social psychologists from the University of Amsterdam and the University of California, Berkeley, studied pairs of strangers telling one another about difficulties they had been through, like a divorce or death of a loved one. The researchers found that the differential expressed itself in the playing down of suffering. The more powerful were less compassionate toward the hardships described by the less powerful.
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  • research finds that the poor, compared with the wealthy, have keenly attuned interpersonal attention in all directions, in general, those with the most power in society seem to pay particularly little attention to those with the least power. To be sure, high-status people do attend to those of equal rank — but not as well as those low of status do.
  • This has profound implications for societal behavior and government policy. Tuning in to the needs and feelings of another person is a prerequisite to empathy, which in turn can lead to understanding, concern and, if the circumstances are right, compassionate action.
  • In politics, readily dismissing inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing inconvenient truths about them. The insistence by some House Republicans in Congress on cutting financing for food stamps and impeding the implementation of Obamacare, which would allow patients, including those with pre-existing health conditions, to obtain and pay for insurance coverage, may stem in part from the empathy gap.
  • redistricting and gerrymandering have led to the creation of more and more safe districts, in which elected officials don’t even have to encounter many voters from the rival party, much less empathize with them.
  • Social distance makes it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put a negative spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our own. Freud called this “the narcissism of minor differences,”
  • Since the 1970s, the gap between the rich and everyone else has skyrocketed. Income inequality is at its highest level in a century.
  • Apart from the financial inequities, I fear the expansion of an entirely different gap, caused by the inability to see oneself in a less advantaged person’s shoes.
clairemann

How the U.S. Could Sleepwalk into a War with China | Time - 0 views

time.com/...sleepwalk-war-with-china

world war history thinking

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Our assessment is that both nations are rapidly ascending the slope of that metaphorical mountain, and will likely find themselves in a full-blown, Cold War-like status in the near future
  • The two nations are significantly at odds over the status of the South China Sea, which China claims as territorial waters, potentially giving them control over rich oil and gas deposits and dominance over the 40% of the world’s trade that passes through these strategic seas.
  • China; offensive cyber activities undertaken by both sides; widespread human rights violations against the Muslim Uighur population within China; and the status of Hong Kong, where the U.S. believes China to be in violation of the treaty which returned the former British colony to a “special status” within China.
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  • American companies in China who refuse to toe the line on Chinese policy issues (such as the status of Taiwan and the treatment of Uighurs); the devastating results of COVID-19 in the U.S. originating from a virus that first started to spread in Wuhan; and the freedom of Taiwan to decide whether or not to eventually unify politically with China.
  • If such an incident occurred, perhaps in the Taiwan Straits adding in the additional factor of extreme Chinese pride and nationalism over their view of Taiwan as a sovereign part of China, it could easily spark a far larger military exchange than the warning shots and close approaches we have seen thus far.
  • Larger strikes from either side could follow, as could a far broader cyberattack, perhaps against critical infrastructure. Carrier strike groups on both sides could deploy head-to-head. With even more significant losses, the temptation to employ a tactical nuclear weapons – perhaps at sea, thinking it could never then escalate to a strategic exchange – might rise.
  • The chances of the U.S. and China stumbling into a war are real and increasing.
Javier E

FaceApp helped a middle-aged man become a popular younger woman. His fan base has never... - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ker-faceapp-soya-azusagakuyuki

identity authenticity social media fake avatar Japan psychology

shared by Javier E on 12 May 21 - No Cached
  • Soya’s fame illustrated a simple truth: that social media is less a reflection of who we are, and more a performance of who we want to be.
  • It also seemed to herald a darker future where our fundamental senses of reality are under siege: The AI that allows anyone to fabricate a face can also be used to harass women with “deepfake” pornography, invent fraudulent LinkedIn personas and digitally impersonate political enemies.
  • As the photos began receiving hundreds of likes, Soya’s personality and style began to come through. She was relentlessly upbeat. She never sneered or bickered or trolled. She explored small towns, savored scenic vistas, celebrated roadside restaurants’ simple meals.
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  • She took pride in the basic things, like cleaning engine parts. And she only hinted at the truth: When one fan told her in October, “It’s great to be young,” Soya replied, “Youth does not mean a certain period of life, but how to hold your heart.”
  • She seemed, well, happy, and FaceApp had made her that way. Creating the lifelike impostor had taken only a few taps: He changed the “Gender” setting to “Female,” the “Age” setting to “Teen,” and the “Impression” setting — a mix of makeup filters — to a glamorous look the app calls “Hollywood.”
  • Users in the Internet’s early days rarely had any presumptions of authenticity, said Melanie C. Green, a University of Buffalo professor who studies technology and social trust. Most people assumed everyone else was playing a character clearly distinguished from their real life.
  • Nakajima grew his shimmering hair below his shoulders and raided his local convenience store for beauty supplies he thought would make the FaceApp images more convincing: blushes, eyeliners, concealers, shampoos.
  • “When I compare how I feel when I started to tweet as a woman and now, I do feel that I’m gradually gravitating toward this persona … this fantasy world that I created,” Nakajima said. “When I see photos of what I tweeted, I feel like, ‘Oh. That’s me.’ ”
  • The sensation Nakajima was feeling is so common that there’s a term for it: the Proteus effect, named for the shape-shifting Greek god. Stanford University researchers first coined it in 2007 to describe how people inhabiting the body of a digital avatar began to act the part
  • People made to appear taller in virtual-reality simulations acted more assertively, even after the experience ended. Prettier characters began to flirt.
  • What is it about online disguises? Why are they so good at bending people’s sense of self-perception?
  • they tap into this “very human impulse to play with identity and pretend to be someone you’re not.”
  • Soya pouted and scowled on rare occasions when Nakajima himself felt frustrated. But her baseline expression was an extra-wide smile, activated with a single tap.
  • “This identity play was considered one of the huge advantages of being online,” Green said. “You could switch your gender and try on all of these different personas. It was a playground for people to explore.”
  • But wasn’t this all just a big con? Nakajima had tricked people with a “cool girl” stereotype to boost his Twitter numbers. He hadn’t elevated the role of women in motorcycling; if anything, he’d supplanted them. And the character he’d created was paper thin: Soya had no internal complexity outside of what Nakajima had projected, just that eternally superimposed smile.
  • The Web’s big shift from text to visuals — the rise of photo-sharing apps, live streams and video calls — seemed at first to make that unspoken rule of real identities concrete. It seemed too difficult to fake one’s appearance when everyone’s face was on constant display.
  • Now, researchers argue, advances in image-editing artificial intelligence have done for the modern Internet what online pseudonyms did for the world’s first chat rooms. Facial filters have allowed anyone to mold themselves into the character they want to play.
  • researchers fear these augmented reality tools could end up distorting the beauty standards and expectations of actual reality.
  • Some political and tech theorists worry this new world of synthetic media threatens to detonate our concept of truth, eroding our shared experiences and infusing every online relationship with suspicion and self-doubt.
  • Deceptive political memes, conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine hoaxes and other scams have torn the fabric of our democracy, culture and public health.
  • But she also thinks about her kids, who assume “that everything online is fabricated,” and wonders whether the rules of online identity require a bit more nuance — and whether that generational shift is already underway.
  • “Bots pretending to be people, automated representations of humanity — that, they perceive as exploitative,” she said. “But if it’s just someone engaging in identity experimentation, they’re like: ‘Yeah, that’s what we’re all doing.'
  • To their generation, “authenticity is not about: ‘Does your profile picture match your real face?’ Authenticity is: ‘Is your voice your voice?’
  • “Their feeling is: ‘The ideas are mine. The voice is mine. The content is mine. I’m just looking for you to receive it without all the assumptions and baggage that comes with it.’ That’s the essence of a person’s identity. That’s who they really are.”
  • It wasn’t until the rise of giant social networks like Facebook — which used real identities to, among other things, supercharge targeted advertising — that this big game of pretend gained an air of duplicity. Spaces for playful performance shrank, and the biggest Internet watering holes began demanding proof of authenticity as a way to block out malicious intent.
  • Perhaps he should have accepted his irrelevance and faded into the digital sunset, sharing his life for few to see. But some of Soya’s followers have said they never felt deceived: It was Nakajima — his enthusiasm, his attitude about life — they’d been charmed by all along. “His personality,” as one Twitter follower said, “shined through.”
  • In Nakajima’s mind, he’d used the tools of a superficial medium to craft genuine connections. He had not felt real until he had become noticed for being fake.
  • Nakajima said he doesn’t know how long he’ll keep Soya alive. But he said he’s grateful for the way she helped him feel: carefree, adventurous, seen.
dicindioha

After Britain Attack, Trump Unleashes a Twitter Storm - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ttack-trump-twitter-storm.html

shared by dicindioha on 04 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • “We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people,” he wrote on Twitter. “If we don’t get smart it will only get worse.”
  • “Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now?” he wrote on Sunday morning. “That’s because they used knives and a truck!” Advertisement Continue reading the main story On Saturday night, he wrote: “We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!”
  • “You have to be kidding me?!: Terror attacks are part of living in big city, says London Mayor Sadiq Khan,” the younger Mr. Trump wrote at the time.Mr. Trump’s post left the impression that Mr. Khan was minimizing the importance of terrorist attacks. But in fact, he was saying that terrorism was a reality that a big city needed to be prepared to prevent and respond to vigorously.
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  • Asked later during a television interview about the president’s son, Mr. Khan dismissed the post. “I’m not going to respond to a tweet from Donald Trump Jr.,” he said on CNN. “I’ve been doing far more important things over the last 24 hours.”
  • dicindioha on 04 Jun 17
     
    using Twitter is Trump's way of communicating; interesting for a president. it seems it portrays him as a less serious president, unfortunately. social media can be useful, but Trump uses it in ways that are not always appropriate. sometimes it is very difficult to correctly interpret the tone of a statement over the internet when there is no real human voice behind it.
lucieperloff

Amazon Walks a Political Tightrope in Its Union Fight - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...amazon-union-politics.html

science government politics economics

shared by lucieperloff on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • It backs a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. It has pledged to meet all the goals of the Paris climate agreement on reducing emissions. It has met with the administration to discuss how to help with the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines.
  • staying on the good side of Washington’s Democratic leaders while squashing an organizing effort that President Biden has signaled his support for.
  • Approval would be a first for Amazon workers in the United States and could energize the labor movement across the country.
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  • Labor leaders and liberal Democrats have seized on the union drive, saying it shows how Amazon is not as friendly to workers as the company says it is.
  • Lawmakers and regulators — not competitors — are some of its greatest threats, and it has spent significant time and money trying to keep the government away from its business.
  • I think the narrative is cooked now on their status as a monopoly, their status as an abusive employer and their status as one of the biggest spenders on lobbying in Washington, D.C.”
  • we’ve been surprised by some of the negative things we’ve seen certain members say in the press and on social media,”
  • In February, Mr. Biden appeared in a video that didn’t mention Amazon explicitly but was seen as a clear sign of support to the union.
  • When professors at Georgetown and New York Universities asked Americans in 2018 which institutions they had the most confidence in, only the military ranked higher than Amazon
  • They have also attacked Mr. Bezos, the richest person in the world by some measures, for his personal wealth.
  • In the final quarter of last year, Amazon paid Jeff Ricchetti $60,000, according to disclosure forms he filed with the government.
  • He has deep relationships with Mr. Biden’s inner circle, and has played in a garage band with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
  • Amazon has promoted the $15-an-hour minimum in ads in publications frequently used to reach government officials, including Politico and The New York Times. Its lobbyists have pushed for a federal law raising the wage.
  • We really think we are an example of what a U.S. company should be doing for its employees.”
  • That absolutely includes the Amazon workers in Alabama, just like workers in Washington State and across our country.”
  • “I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that’s not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace to our constituents,”
katherineharron

Blackout Tuesday: Why posting a black image with the hashtag #blm is doing more harm th... - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 02 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • It's Blackout Tuesday, a day promoted by activists to observe, mourn and bring about policy change in the wake of the death of George Floyd. This movement has spread on social media, where organizations, brands and individuals are posting solemn messages featuring stark black backgrounds, sometimes tagging the posts with #BlackLivesMatter.
  • Here's the problem. While these posts may be well-intended, several activists and influencers have pointed out that posting a blank black image with a bunch of tags clogs up critical channels of information and updates.
  • One, the actual tags used on Blackout Tuesday posts. Two, the actual purpose of posting a black image in the first place.
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  • one of the most common ways to keep track of all of this is by monitoring or searching tags.
  • it gets automatically added to a searchable feed, which people can find using that tag. It's a common way for people to monitor a situation or interest. And since people have been including the #BlackLivesMAtter tag, in the words of activist Feminista Jones, the protests have been erased from Instagram.
  • "When you check the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, it's no longer videos, helpful information, resources, documentation of the injustice, it's rows of black screens,
  • Blackout Tuesday gained traction from the work of music executives Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang, who led an effort in the music community to pause normal business operations on June 2nd "in observance of the long-standing racism and inequality that exists from the boardroom to the boulevard."
  • However, there's concern that while what amounts to a virtual moment of silence may be a powerful reminder to some, it comes at a time when the voices of black activists and advocates are needed the most.
  • However, some people have taken the call to action to mean a pause on posting about personal things or issues unrelated to Black Lives Matter or the ongoing protests rather than complete silence. Some widely shared posts about the day encourage people to refrain from self-promotion and use their presence on various platforms to uplift members of the black community instead.
katherineharron

FBI arrests spotlight lessons learned after Charlottesville (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • On Thursday, the FBI arrested three men, Patrik J. Mathews, 27, Brian M. Lemley Jr., 33, and William G. Bilbrough IV, 19, with firearms charges, and they had plans, an official said, to attend a Virginia pro-gun rally. This followed Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam's declaration of a temporary state of emergency after authorities learned that extremists hoped to use the anti-gun control rally planned next Monday -- Martin Luther King, Jr. Day -- to incite a violent clash.
  • These arrests add to mounting evidence that a decades-old and violent white-power movement is alive and well, perhaps even gaining strength. White power is a social movement that has united neo-Nazis, Klansmen, skinheads, and militiamen around a shared fear of racial annihilation and cultural change. Since 1983, when movement leaders declared war on the federal government, members of such groups have worked together to bring about a race war.
  • JUST WATCHEDOn GPS: What motivates white power activists?ReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCH position: absol
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  • Silver linings aside, it will take many, many more instances of coordinated response to stop a movement generations in the making. In more than a decade of studying the earlier white power movement, I have become familiar with the themes of underground activity that are today clearly drawing from the earlier movement. In the absence of decisive action across multiple institutions, a rich record of criminal activity and violence will continue to provide these activists with a playbook for further chaos.
  • The Base, furthermore, is what experts call "accelerationist," meaning that its members hope to provoke what they see as an inevitable race war. They have conducted paramilitary training in the Pacific Northwest. Both of these strategies date back to the 1980s, when the Order trained in those forests with hopes of provoking the same race war.
  • One of the men arrested Thursday was formerly a reservist in the Canadian Army, where he received training in explosives and demolition, according to the New York Times. This kind of preparation, too, is common among extremists like these. To take just a few representative examples, in the 1960s, Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Marine trained in demolition, helped fellow members of the United Klans of America to bomb the 16th Street Birmingham Baptist Church, killing four black girls.
  • This news out of Virginia shows that there is a real social benefit when people direct their attention to these events -- and sustain the public conversation about the presence of a renewed white-power movement and what it means for our society.
Javier E

When a Shitposter Runs a Social Media Platform - The Bulwark - 0 views

www.thebulwark.com/r-runs-a-social-media-platform

social media musk radicalization

shared by Javier E on 17 May 23 - No Cached
  • This is an unfortunate and pernicious pattern. Musk often refers to himself as moderate or independent, but he routinely treats far-right fringe figures as people worth taking seriously—and, more troublingly, as reliable sources of information.
  • By doing so, he boosts their messages: A message retweeted by or receiving a reply from Musk will potentially be seen by millions of people.
  • Also, people who pay for Musk’s Twitter Blue badges get a lift in the algorithm when they tweet or reply; because of the way Twitter Blue became a culture war front, its subscribers tend to skew to the righ
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  • The important thing to remember amid all this, and the thing that has changed the game when it comes to the free speech/content moderation conversation, is that Elon Musk himself loves conspiracy theorie
  • The media isn’t just unduly critical—a perennial sore spot for Musk—but “all news is to some degree propaganda,” meaning he won’t label actual state-affiliated propaganda outlets on his platform to distinguish their stories from those of the New York Times.
  • In his mind, they’re engaged in the same activity, so he strikes the faux-populist note that the people can decide for themselves what is true, regardless of objectively very different track records from different sources.
  • Musk’s “just asking questions” maneuver is a classic Trump tactic that enables him to advertise conspiracy theories while maintaining a sort of deniability.
  • At what point should we infer that he’s taking the concerns of someone like Loomer seriously not despite but because of her unhinged beliefs?
  • Musk’s skepticism seems largely to extend to criticism of the far-right, while his credulity for right-wing sources is boundless.
  • This is part of the argument for content moderation that limits the dispersal of bullshit: People simply don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to seek out the boring truth when stimulated by some online outrage.
  • Refuting bullshit requires some technological literacy, perhaps some policy knowledge, but most of all it requires time and a willingness to challenge your own prior beliefs, two things that are in precious short supply online.
  • Brandolini’s Law holds that the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
  • Here we can return to the example of Loomer’s tweet. People did fact-check her, but it hardly matters: Following Musk’s reply, she ended up receiving over 5 million views, an exponentially larger online readership than is normal for her. In the attention economy, this counts as a major win. “Thank you so much for posting about this, @elonmusk!” she gushed in response to his reply. “I truly appreciate it.”
  • the problem isn’t limited to elevating Loomer. Musk had his own stock of misinformation to add to the pile. After interacting with her account, Musk followed up last Tuesday by tweeting out last week a 2021 Federalist article claiming that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had “bought” the 2020 election, an allegation previously raised by Trump and others, and which Musk had also brought up during his recent interview with Tucker Carlson.
  • If Zuckerberg wanted to use his vast fortune to tip the election, it would have been vastly more efficient to create a super PAC with targeted get-out-the-vote operations and advertising. Notwithstanding legitimate criticisms one can make about Facebook’s effect on democracy, and whatever Zuckerberg’s motivations, you have to squint hard to see this as something other than a positive act addressing a real problem.
  • It’s worth mentioning that the refutations I’ve just sketched of the conspiratorial claims made by Loomer and Musk come out to around 1,200 words. The tweets they wrote, read by millions, consisted of fewer than a hundred words in total. That’s Brandolini’s Law in action—an illustration of why Musk’s cynical free-speech-over-all approach amounts to a policy in favor of disinformation and against democracy.
  • Moderation is a subject where Zuckerberg’s actions provide a valuable point of contrast with Musk. Through Facebook’s independent oversight board, which has the power to overturn the company’s own moderation decisions, Zuckerberg has at least made an effort to have credible outside actors inform how Facebook deals with moderation issues
  • Meanwhile, we are still waiting on the content moderation council that Elon Musk promised last October:
  • The problem is about to get bigger than unhinged conspiracy theorists occasionally receiving a profile-elevating reply from Musk. Twitter is the venue that Tucker Carlson, whom advertisers fled and Fox News fired after it agreed to pay $787 million to settle a lawsuit over its election lies, has chosen to make his comeback. Carlson and Musk are natural allies: They share an obsessive anti-wokeness, a conspiratorial mindset, and an unaccountable sense of grievance peculiar to rich, famous, and powerful men who have taken it upon themselves to rail against the “elites,” however idiosyncratically construed
  • f the rumors are true that Trump is planning to return to Twitter after an exclusivity agreement with Truth Social expires in June, Musk’s social platform might be on the verge of becoming a gigantic rec room for the populist right.
  • These days, Twitter increasingly feels like a neighborhood where the amiable guy-next-door is gone and you suspect his replacement has a meth lab in the basement.
  • even if Twitter’s increasingly broken information environment doesn’t sway the results, it is profoundly damaging to our democracy that so many people have lost faith in our electoral system. The sort of claims that Musk is toying with in his feed these days do not help. It is one thing for the owner of a major source of information to be indifferent to the content that gets posted to that platform. It is vastly worse for an owner to actively fan the flames of disinformation and doubt.
Javier E

Elon Musk Doesn't Want Transparency on Twitter - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...672421

twitter transparency musk

shared by Javier E on 09 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • , the Twitter Files do what technology critics have long done: point out a mostly intractable problem that is at the heart of our societal decision to outsource broad swaths of our political discourse and news consumption to corporate platforms whose infrastructure and design were made for viral advertising.
  • The trolling is paramount. When former Facebook CSO and Stanford Internet Observatory leader Alex Stamos asked whether Musk would consider implementing his detailed plan for “a trustworthy, neutral platform for political conversations around the world,” Musk responded, “You operate a propaganda platform.” Musk doesn’t appear to want to substantively engage on policy issues: He wants to be aggrieved.
  • it’s possible that a shred of good could come from this ordeal. Musk says Twitter is working on a feature that will allow users to see if they’ve been de-amplified, and appeal. If it comes to pass, perhaps such an initiative could give users a better understanding of their place in the moderation process. Great!
Javier E

The Class Politics of Instagram Face - Tablet Magazine - 0 views

www.tabletmag.com/...class-politics-instagram-face

face class be beauty cosmetics surgery age women

shared by Javier E on 10 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • by approaching universality, Instagram Face actually secured its role as an instrument of class distinction—a mark of a certain kind of woman. The women who don’t mind looking like others, or the conspicuousness of the work they’ve had done
  • Instagram Face goes with implants, middle-aged dates and nails too long to pick up the check. Batting false eyelashes, there in the restaurant it orders for dinner all the food groups of nouveau riche Dubai: caviar, truffle, fillers, foie gras, Botox, bottle service, bodycon silhouettes. The look, in that restaurant and everywhere, has reached a definite status. It’s the girlfriend, not the wife.
  • Does cosmetic work have a particular class? It has a price tag, which can amount to the same thing, unless that price drops low enough.
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  • Before the introduction of Botox and hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in 2002 and 2003, respectively, aesthetic work was serious, expensive. Nose jobs and face lifts required general anesthesia, not insignificant recovery time, and cost thousands of dollars (in 2000, a facelift was $5,416 on average, and a rhinoplasty $4,109, around $9,400 and $7,000 adjusted).
  • In contrast, the average price of a syringe of hyaluronic acid filler today is $684, while treating, for example, the forehead and eyes with Botox will put you out anywhere from $300 to $600
  • We copied the beautiful and the rich, not in facsimile, but in homage.
  • In 2018, use of Botox and fillers was up 18% and 20% from five years prior. Philosophies of prejuvenation have made Botox use jump 22% among 22- to 37-year-olds in half a decade as well. By 2030, global noninvasive aesthetic treatments are predicted to triple.
  • The trouble is that a status symbol, without status, is common.
  • Beauty has always been exclusive. When someone strikes you as pretty, it means they are something that everyone else is not.
  • It’s a zero-sum game, as relative as our morals. Naturally, we hoard of beauty what we can. It’s why we call grooming tips “secrets.”
  • Largely the secrets started with the wealthy, who possess the requisite money and leisure to spare on their appearances
  • Botox and filler only accelerated a trend that began in the ’70s and ’80s and is just now reaching its saturation point.
  • we didn’t have the tools for anything more than emulation. Fake breasts and overdrawn lips only approximated real ones; a birthmark drawn with pencil would always be just that.
  • Instagram Face, on the other hand, distinguishes itself by its sheer reproducibility. Not only because of those new cosmetic technologies, which can truly reshape features, at reasonable cost and with little risk.
  • built in to the whole premise of reversible, low-stakes modification is an indefinite flux, and thus a lack of discretion.
  • Instagram Face has replicated outward, with trendsetters giving up competing with one another in favor of looking eerily alike. And obviously it has replicated down.
  • Eva looks like Eva. If she has procedures in common with Kim K, you couldn’t tell. “I look at my features and I think long and hard of how I can, without looking different and while keeping as natural as possible, make them look better and more proportional. I’m against everything that is too invasive. My problem with Instagram Face is that if you want to look like someone else, you should be in therapy.”
  • natural looks have always been, and still are, more valuable than artificial ones. Partly because of our urge to legitimize in any way we can the advantages we have over other people. Hotness is a class struggle.
  • As more and more women post videos of themselves eating, sleeping, dressing, dancing, and Only-Fanning online, in a logical bid for economic ascendance, the women who haven’t needed to do that gain a new status symbol.
  • Privacy. A life which is not a ticketed show. An intimacy that does not admit advertisers. A face that does not broadcast its insecurity, or the work undergone to correct it.
  • Upper class, private women get discrete work done. The differences aren’t in the procedures themselves—they’re the same—but in disposition
  • Eva, who lives between central London, Geneva, and the south of France, says: “I do stuff, but none of the stuff I do is at all in my head associated with Instagram Face. Essentially you do similar procedures, but the end goal is completely different. Because they are trying to get the result of looking like another human being, and I’m just beautifying myself.”
  • But the more rapidly it replicates, and the clearer our manuals for quick imitation become, the closer we get to singularity—that moment Kim Kardashian fears unlike any other: the moment when it becomes unclear whether we’re copying her, or whether she is copying us.
  • what he restores is complicated and yet not complicated at all. It’s herself, the fingerprint of her features. Her aura, her presence and genealogy, her authenticity in space and time.
  • Dr. Taktouk’s approach is “not so formulaic.” He aims to give his patients the “better versions of themselves.” “It’s not about trying to be anyone else,” he says, “or creating a conveyor belt of patients. It’s about working with your best features, enhancing them, but still looking like you.”
  • “Vulgar” says that in pursuing indistinguishability, women have been duped into another punishing divide. “Vulgar” says that the subtlety of his work is what signals its special class—and that the women who’ve obtained Instagram Face for mobility’s sake have unwittingly shut themselves out of it.
  • While younger women are dissolving their gratuitous work, the 64-year-old Madonna appeared at the Grammy Awards in early February, looking so tragically unlike herself that the internet launched an immediate postmortem.
  • The folly of Instagram Face is that in pursuing a bionic ideal, it turns cosmetic technology away from not just the reality of class and power, but also the great, poignant, painful human project of trying to reverse time. It misses the point of what we find beautiful: that which is ephemeral, and can’t be reproduced
  • Age is just one of the hierarchies Instagram Face can’t topple, in the history of women striving versus the women already arrived. What exactly have they arrived at?
  • Youth, temporarily. Wealth. Emotional security. Privacy. Personal choices, like cosmetic decisions, which are not so public, and do not have to be defended as empowered, in the defeatist humiliation of our times
  • Maybe they’ve arrived at love, which for women has never been separate from the things I’ve already mentioned.
  • I can’t help but recall the time I was chatting with a plastic surgeon. I began to point to my features, my flaws. I asked her, “What would you do to me, if I were your patient?” I had many ideas. She gazed at me, and then noticed my ring. “Nothing,” she said. “You’re already married.”
aliciathompson1

How Dr. Ben Carson Ruined His Legacy - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...-carson-ruined-his-legacy.html

Political knowledge

shared by aliciathompson1 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • This leads to the salient question of whether being a neurosurgeon is in any way a relevant qualification to seek the highest elected office in the nation.
    • aliciathompson1
      aliciathompson1 on 06 Mar 16
       
      What qualifies someone to be the president?
  • Dr. Carson the scientist would laugh someone off the stage at a conference if they presented such sloppy thinking for review.
  • specifically for the purposes of harvesting that tissue
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • When asked about whether as president he would allow waterboarding, he refused to condemn it and blithely dismissed fighting “politically correct wars.”
  • The sad reality is that the party that gave America Todd Akin and has a bloviating vaccine truther as its front-runner sorely needs the voice Dr. Carson could be lending to its dialogue.
marleen_ueberall

Why Is Language Important to Culture? - 0 views

www.brighthubeducation.com/...nguage-is-important-to-culture

Language Culture Importance

shared by marleen_ueberall on 15 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Why Is Language Important?
  • It is a uniquely human gift which lets us communicate and differentiates us from primates.
  • language is much more than just a means of communication. It is also an inseparable part of our culture.
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  • different cultures have a predominant fashion in which they use their language and they have differences which cannot be underestimated.
  • one of the most well known linguists in the world, argues that all languages are dialects of one language, which is the human language. He says that even though they appear very different, they are in fact very similar.
  • there is no doubt that language and culture are closely connected.
  • In Thai language there are twelve forms of the pronoun “you", which depend of factors such as status or level of intimacy.
  • We are encouraged to be direct and to speak our mind.
  • Asian cultures use an indirect style of communication. Words such as “perhaps" and “maybe" are used much more frequently than “yes", “no" or “for sure".
  • Personal and Contextual Styles
  • Two of the most frequently used words in our culture are “I" and “you".
  • American culture is not very formal, so it is appropriate to say “you" to your boss, to the President, to a stranger, to your spouse or to your child.
  • Direct and Indirect Styles
  • The style of language is focused on speaker and depends on someone’s status and identity.
  • Japanese pay a lot of attention to someone’s status and they use linguistic forms called honorifics, which are used according to the rank of the person who is speaking
  • Untranslatable Words
  • Many people don’t realize that there are plenty of words that cannot be translated from one language to another simply because they don’t exist in another language.
  • The word “shopping", which describes one of the most favorite activities of Americans, doesn’t exist in some other languages (such as for example in Russian) as a noun.
  • Another interesting example is the word “ilunga".
  • Republic of Congo and is considered to be the most untranslatable word in the world.
  • a person who is ready to forgive any transgression a first and a second time, but never for a third time.
  • Language Is Changing Along with the Culture
  • he and his were used generically in English language.
  • Since the United States and most of the English-speaking Western Europe are becoming less and less male-dominant cultures, the grammar rules have been changed and new gender agreement rules were created.
  • Fifty years ago nobody was suspecting that one day in the United States the words “mother" and “father" would become controversial and that some schools would agree to change them both to “parent".
katherineharron

While George W. Bush pleads for unity, Donald Trump plays coronavirus victim (opinion) ... - 0 views

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

crisis

shared by katherineharron on 05 May 20 - No Cached
  • On Saturday, former President George W. Bush released a short, heartfelt video offering words of support for a nation rocked by a staggering loss of lives and livelihoods during the coronavirus pandemic. In less than three minutes, a somber-voiced Bush expressed gratitude to the nation's medical professionals, called on Americans to protect their neighbors by keeping their distance from them and urged us to show empathy and kindness to all.
  • Come Sunday morning, President Donald Trump shared his view on the video in which he, true to form, made it all about himself and his grievances.
  • True, Trump has expressed some concern for the suffering of our fellow Americans and their loved ones -- but at callously low levels.
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  • Trump never misses an opportunity to make any situation about himself. That's even true during the time of a deadly pandemic that has taken the lives of more than 67,000 Americans and where business shutdowns have resulted in likely the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression
  • in the approximately 780 minutes Trump spoke over the past month at press conference he offered less than 300 seconds of empathy to those suffering.
  • And while Trump has tweeted some recognition for first responders -- on March 19 he thanked them for their "dedication and sacrifice" -- just look at Trump's tweets in the last few days. They're all about Trump. On Sunday morning, right around the time he tweeted his complaint about to former President Bush's impeachment response, Trump also slammed the media for not "showing" polls that he believes make him look good -- "The Fake News doesn't show real polls."
  • Over the last few days, Trump reminded us time and time again that he sees himself as the victim in this crisis
Javier E

The Philosopher Redefining Equality | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...hilosopher-redefining-equality

philosophy equality political theory culture

shared by Javier E on 26 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The bank experience showed how you could be oppressed by hierarchy, working in an environment where you were neither free nor equal. But this implied that freedom and equality were bound together in some way beyond the basic state of being unenslaved, which was an unorthodox notion. Much social thought is rooted in the idea of a conflict between the two.
  • If individuals exercise freedoms, conservatives like to say, some inequalities will naturally result. Those on the left basically agree—and thus allow constraints on personal freedom in order to reduce inequality. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the opposition between equality and freedom an “intrinsic, irremovable element in human life.” It is our fate as a society, he believed, to haggle toward a balance between them.
  • What if they weren’t opposed, Anderson wondered, but, like the sugar-phosphate chains in DNA, interlaced in a structure that we might not yet understand?
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  • At fifty-nine, Anderson is the chair of the University of Michigan’s department of philosophy and a champion of the view that equality and freedom are mutually dependent, enmeshed in changing conditions through time.
  • She has built a case, elaborated across decades, that equality is the basis for a free society
  • Because she brings together ideas from both the left and the right to battle increasing inequality, Anderson may be the philosopher best suited to this awkward moment in American life. She builds a democratic frame for a society in which people come from different places and are predisposed to disagree.
  • she sketched out the entry-level idea that one basic way to expand equality is by expanding the range of valued fields within a society.
  • The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one’s identities in other domains?” She paused. “That is what it is to be free.”
  • How do you move from a basic model of egalitarian variety, in which everybody gets a crack at being a star at something, to figuring out how to respond to a complex one, where people, with different allotments of talent and virtue, get unequal starts, and often meet with different constraints along the way?
  • The problem, she proposed, was that contemporary egalitarian thinkers had grown fixated on distribution: moving resources from lucky-seeming people to unlucky-seeming people, as if trying to spread the luck around.
  • Egalitarians should agree about clear cases of blameless misfortune: the quadriplegic child, the cognitively impaired adult, the teen-ager born into poverty with junkie parents. But Anderson balked there, too. By categorizing people as lucky or unlucky, she argued, these egalitarians set up a moralizing hierarchy.
  • In Anderson’s view, the way forward was to shift from distributive equality to what she called relational, or democratic, equality: meeting as equals, regardless of where you were coming from or going to.
  • By letting the lucky class go on reaping the market’s chancy rewards while asking others to concede inferior status in order to receive a drip-drip-drip of redistributive aid, these egalitarians were actually entrenching people’s status as superior or subordinate.
  • To the ugly and socially awkward: . . . Maybe you won’t be such a loser in love once potential dates see how rich you are.
  • . To the stupid and untalented: Unfortunately, other people don’t value what little you have to offer in the system of production. . . . Because of the misfortune that you were born so poorly endowed with talents, we productive ones will make it up to you: we’ll let you share in the bounty of what we have produced with our vastly superior and highly valued abilities. . . 
  • she imagined some citizens getting a state check and a bureaucratic letter:
  • This was, at heart, an exercise of freedom. The trouble was that many people, picking up on libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own actions.
  • To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces, markets, and all the rest).
  • Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences.
  • A society in which everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t something you could simply tax into existence. “People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies,”
  • Her first book, “Value in Ethics and Economics,” appeared that year, announcing one of her major projects: reconciling value (an amorphous ascription of worth that is a keystone of ethics and economics) with pluralism (the fact that people seem to value things in different ways).
  • Philosophers have often assumed that pluralistic value reflects human fuzziness—we’re loose, we’re confused, and we mix rational thought with sentimental responses.
  • She offered an “expressive” theory: in her view, each person’s values could be various because they were socially expressed, and thus shaped by the range of contexts and relationships at play in a life. Instead of positing value as a basic, abstract quality across society (the way “utility” functioned for economists), she saw value as something determined by the details of an individual’s history.
  • Like her idea of relational equality, this model resisted the temptation to flatten human variety toward a unifying standard. In doing so, it helped expand the realm of free and reasoned economic choice.
  • Anderson’s model unseated the premises of rational-choice theory, in which individuals invariably make utility-maximizing decisions, occasionally in heartless-seeming ways. It ran with, rather than against, moral intuition. Because values were plural, it was perfectly rational to choose to spend evenings with your family, say, and have guilt toward the people you left in the lurch at work.
  • The theory also pointed out the limits on free-market ideologies, such as libertarianism.
  • In ethics, it broke across old factional debates. The core idea “has been picked up on by people across quite a range of positions,” Peter Railton, one of Anderson’s longtime colleagues, says. “Kantians and consequentialists alike”—people who viewed morality in terms of duties and obligations, and those who measured the morality of actions by their effects in the world—“could look at it and see something important.”
  • Traditionally, the discipline is taught through a-priori thought—you start with basic principles and reason forward. Anderson, by contrast, sought to work empirically, using information gathered from the world, identifying problems to be solved not abstractly but through the experienced problems of real people.
  • “Dewey argued that the primary problems for ethics in the modern world concerned the ways society ought to be organized, rather than personal decisions of the individual,”
  • In 2004, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy asked Anderson to compose its entry on the moral philosophy of John Dewey, who helped carry pragmatist methods into the social realm. Dewey had an idea of democracy as a system of good habits that began in civil life. He was an anti-ideologue with an eye for pluralism.
  • She started working with historians, trying to hone her understanding of ideas by studying them in the context of their creation. Take Rousseau’s apparent support of direct democracy. It’s rarely mentioned that, at the moment when he made that argument, his home town of Geneva had been taken over by oligarchs who claimed to represent the public. Pragmatism said that an idea was an instrument, which naturally gave rise to such questions as: an instrument for what, and where, and when?
  • In “What Is the Point of Equality?,” Anderson had already started to drift away from what philosophers, following Rawls, call ideal theory, based on an end vision for a perfectly just society. As Anderson began a serious study of race in America, though, she found herself losing faith in that approach entirely.
  • Broadly, there’s a culturally right and a culturally left ideal theory for race and society. The rightist version calls for color blindness. Instead of making a fuss about skin and ethnicity, its advocates say, society should treat people as people, and let the best and the hardest working rise.
  • The leftist theory envisions identity communities: for once, give black people (or women, or members of other historically oppressed groups) the resources and opportunities they need, including, if they want it, civil infrastructure for themselves.
  • In “The Imperative of Integration,” published in 2010, Anderson tore apart both of these models. Sure, it might be nice to live in a color-blind society, she wrote, but that’s nothing like the one that exists.
  • But the case for self-segregation was also weak. Affinity groups provided welcome comfort, yet that wasn’t the same as power or equality, Anderson pointed out. And there was a goose-and-gander problem. Either you let only certain groups self-segregate (certifying their subordinate status) or you also permitted, say, white men to do it,
  • Anderson’s solution was “integration,” a concept that, especially in progressive circles, had been uncool since the late sixties. Integration, by her lights, meant mixing on the basis of equality.
  • in attending to these empirical findings over doctrine, she announced herself as a non-ideal theorist: a philosopher with no end vision of society. The approach recalls E. L. Doctorow’s description of driving at night: “You can see only as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
  • or others, though, a white woman making recommendations on race policy raised questions of perspective. She was engaging through a mostly white Anglo-American tradition. She worked from the premise that, because she drew on folders full of studies, the limits of her own perspective were not constraining.
  • Some philosophers of color welcomed the book. “She’s taking the need for racial justice seriously, and you could hardly find another white political philosopher over a period of decades doing that,”
  • Recently, Anderson changed the way she assigns undergraduate essays: instead of requiring students to argue a position and fend off objections, doubling down on their original beliefs, she asks them to discuss their position with someone who disagrees, and to explain how and why, if at all, the discussion changed their views.
  • The challenge of pluralism is the challenge of modern society: maintaining equality amid difference in a culture given to constant and unpredictable change.
  • Rather than fighting for the ascendancy of certain positions, Anderson suggests, citizens should fight to bolster healthy institutions and systems—those which insure that all views and experiences will be heard. Today’s righteous projects, after all, will inevitably seem fatuous and blinkered from the vantage of another age.
  • Smith saw the markets as an escape from that order. Their “most important” function, he explained, was to bring “liberty and security” to those “who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbours, and of servile dependency upon their superiors.”
  • Anderson zeroed in on Adam Smith, whose “The Wealth of Nations,” published in 1776, is taken as a keystone of free-market ideology. At the time, English labor was subject to uncompensated apprenticeships, domestic servitude, and some measure of clerical dominion.
  • Smith, in other words, was an egalitarian. He had written “The Wealth of Nations” in no small part to be a solution to what we’d now call structural inequality—the intractable, compounding privileges of an arbitrary hierarchy.
  • It was a historical irony that, a century later, writers such as Marx pointed to the market as a structure of dominion over workers; in truth, Smith and Marx had shared a socioeconomic project. And yet Marx had not been wrong to trash Smith’s ideas, because, during the time between them, the world around Smith’s model had changed, and it was no longer a useful tool.
  • mages of free market society that made sense prior to the Industrial Revolution continue to circulate today as ideals, blind to the gross mismatch between the background social assumptions reigning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and today’s institutional realities. We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.
  • Today, people still try to use, variously, both Smith’s and Marx’s tools on a different, postindustrial world:
  • The unnaturalness of this top-heavy arrangement, combined with growing evidence of power abuses, has given many people reason to believe that something is fishy about the structure of American equality. Socialist and anti-capitalist models are again in vogue.
  • Anderson offers a different corrective path. She thinks it’s fine for some people to earn more than others. If you’re a brilliant potter, and people want to pay you more than the next guy for your pottery, great!
  • The problem isn’t that talent and income are distributed in unequal parcels. The problem is that Jeff Bezos earns more than a hundred thousand dollars a minute, while Amazon warehouse employees, many talented and hardworking, have reportedly resorted to urinating in bottles in lieu of a bathroom break. That circumstance reflects some structure of hierarchical oppression. It is a rip in the democratic fabric, and it’s increasingly the norm.
  • Andersonism holds that we don’t have to give up on market society if we can recognize and correct for its limitations—it may even be our best hope, because it’s friendlier to pluralism than most alternatives are.
  • we must be flexible. We must remain alert. We must solve problems collaboratively, in the moment, using society’s ears and eyes and the best tools that we can find.
  • “You can see that, from about 1950 to 1970, the typical American’s wages kept up with productivity growth,” she said. Then, around 1974, she went on, hourly compensation stagnated. American wages have been effectively flat for the past few decades, with the gains of productivity increasingly going to shareholders and to salaries for big bosses.
  • What changed? Anderson rattled off a constellation of factors, from strengthened intellectual-property law to winnowed antitrust law. Financialization, deregulation. Plummeting taxes on capital alongside rising payroll taxes. Privatization, which exchanged modest public-sector salaries for C.E.O. paydays. She gazed into the audience and blinked. “So now we have to ask: What has been used to justify this rather dramatic shift of labor-share of income?”
  • It was no wonder that industrial-age thinking was riddled with contradictions: it reflected what Anderson called “the plutocratic reversal” of classical liberal ideas. Those perversely reversed ideas about freedom were the ones that found a home in U.S. policy, and, well, here we were.
Javier E

Technopoly-Chs. 9,10--Scientism, the great symbol drain - 0 views

scientism science social science narrative objectivity advertising morality authority coherence Postman book notes

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • By Scientism, I mean three interrelated ideas that, taken together, stand as one of the pillars of Technopoly.
  • The first and indispensable idea is, as noted, that the methods of the natural sciences can be applied to the study of human behavior. This idea is the backbone of much of psychology and sociology as practiced at least in America, and largely accounts for the fact that social science, to quote F. A. Hayek, "has cont~ibuted scarcely anything to our understanding of social phenomena." 2
  • The second idea is, as also noted, that social science generates specific principles which can be used to organize society on a rational and humane basis. This implies that technical meansmostly "invisible technologies" supervised by experts-can be designed to control human behavior and set it on the proper course.
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  • The third idea is that faith in science can serve as a comprehensive belief system that gives meaning to life, as well. as a sense of well-being, morality, and even immortality.
  • the spirit behind this scientific ideal inspired several men to believe that the reliable and predictable knowledge that could be obtained about stars and atoms could also be obtained about human behavior.
  • Among the best known of these early "social scientists" were Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, Prosper Enfantin, and, of course, Auguste Comte.
  • They held in common two beliefs to which T echnopoly is deeply indebted: that the natural sciences provide a method to unlock the secrets of both the human heart and the direction of social life; that society can be rationally and humanely reorganized according to principles that social science will uncover. It is with these men that the idea of "social engineering" begins and the seeds of Scientism are planted.
  • Information produced by counting may sometimes be valuable in helping a person get an idea, or, even more so, in providing support for an idea. But the mere activity of counting does not make science.
  • Nor does observing th_ings, though it is sometimes said that if one is empirical, one is scientific. To be empirical means to look at things before drawing conclusions. Everyone, therefore, is an empiricist, with the possible exception of paranoid schizophrenics.
  • What we may call science, then, is the quest to find the immutable and universal laws that govern processes, presuming that there are cause-and-effect relations among these processes. It follows that the quest to understand human behavior and feeling can in no sense except the most trivial be called science.
  • Scientists do strive to be empirical and where possible precise, but it is also basic to their enterprise that they maintain a high degree of objectivity, which means that they study things independently of what people think or do about them.
  • I do not say, incidentally, that the Oedipus complex and God do not exist. Nor do I say that to believe in them is harmful-far from it. I say only that, there being no tests that could, in principle, show them to be false, they fall outside the purview Scientism 151 of science, as do almost all theories that make up the content of "social science."
  • in the nineteenth centu~, novelists provided us with most of the powerful metaphors and images of our culture.
  • This fact relieves the scientist of inquiring into their values and motivations and for this reason alone separates science from what is called social science, consigning the methodology of the latter (to quote Gunnar Myrdal) to the status of the "metaphysical and pseudo-objective." 3
  • The status of social-science methods is further reduced by the fact that there are almost no experiments that will reveal a social-science theory to be false.
  • et us further suppose that Milgram had found that 100 percent of his 1 subjecl:s did what they were told, with or without Hannah Arendt. And now let us suppose that I tell you a story of a Scientism 153 group of people who in some real situation refused to comply with the orders of a legitimate authority-let us say, the Danes who in the face of Nazi occupation helped nine thousand Jews escape to Sweden. Would you say to me that this cannot be so because Milgram' s study proves otherwise? Or would you say that this overturns Milgram's work? Perhaps you would say that the Danish response is not relevant, since the Danes did not regard the Nazi occupation as constituting legitimate autho!ity. But then, how would we explain the cooperative response to Nazi authority of the French, the Poles, and the Lithuanians? I think you would say none of these things, because Milgram' s experiment qoes not confirm or falsify any theory that might be said to postulate a law of human nature. His study-which, incidentally, I find both fascinating and terrifying-is not science. It is something else entirely.
  • Freud, could not imagine how the book could be judged exemplary: it was science or it was nothing. Well, of course, Freud was wrong. His work is exemplary-indeed, monumental-but scarcely anyone believes today that Freud was doing science, any more than educated people believe that Marx was doing science, or Max Weber or Lewis Mumford or Bruno Bettelheim or Carl Jung or Margaret Mead or Arnold Toynbee. What these people were doing-and Stanley Milgram was doing-is documenting the behavior and feelings of people as they confront problems posed by their culture.
  • the stories of social r~searchers are much closer in structure and purpose to what is called imaginative literature; that is to say, both a social researcher and a novelist give unique interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations with examples in various forms. Their interpretations cannot be proved or disproved but will draw their appeal from the power of their language, the depth of their explanations, the relevance of their examples, and the credibility of their themes.
  • And all of this has, in both cases, an identifiable moral purpose.
  • The words "true" and "false" do not apply here in the sense that they are used in mathematics or science. For there is nothing universally and irrevocably true or false about these interpretations. There are no critical tests to confirm or falsify them. There are no natural laws from which they are derived. They are bound by time, by situation, and above all by the cultural prejudices of the researcher or writer.
  • Both the novelist and the social researcher construct their stories by the use of archetypes and metaphors.
  • Cervantes, for example, gave us the enduring archetype of the incurable dreamer and idealist in Don Quixote. The social historian Marx gave us the archetype of the ruthless and conspiring, though nameless, capitalist. Flaubert gave us the repressed b~urgeois romantic in Emma Bovary. And Margaret Mead gave us the carefree, guiltless Samoan adolescent. Kafka gave us the alienated urbanite driven to self-loathing. And Max Weber gave us hardworking men driven by a mythology he called the Protestant Ethic. Dostoevsky gave us the egomaniac redeemed by love and religious fervor. And B. F. Skinner gave us the automaton redeemed by a benign technology.
  • Why do such social researchers tell their stories? Essentially for didactic and moralistic purposes. These men and women tell their stories for the same reason the Buddha, Confucius, Hillel, and Jesus told their stories (and for the same reason D. H. Lawrence told his).
  • Moreover, in their quest for objectivity, scientists proceed on the assumption that the objects they study are indifferent to the fact that they are being studied.
  • If, indeed, the price of civilization is repressed sexuality, it was not Sigmund Freud who discovered it. If the consciousness of people is formed by their material circumstances, it was not Marx who discovered it. If the medium is the message, it was not McLuhan who discovered it. They have merely retold ancient stories in a modem style.
  • Unlike science, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again.
  • Only in knowing ~omething of the reasons why they advocated education can we make sense of the means they suggest. But to understand their reas.ons we must also understand the narratives that governed their view of the world. By narrative, I mean a story of human history that gives meaning to the past, explains the present, and provides guidance for the future.
  • In Technopoly, it is not Scientism 159 enough to say, it is immoral and degrading to allow people to be homeless. You cannot get anywhere by asking a judge, a politician, or a bureaucrat to r~ad Les Miserables or Nana or, indeed, the New Testament. Y 01.i must show that statistics have produced data revealing the homeless to be unhappy and to be a drain on the economy. Neither Dostoevsky nor Freud, Dickens nor Weber, Twain nor Marx, is now a dispenser of legitimate knowledge. They are interesting; they are ''.worth reading"; they are artifacts of our past. But as for "truth," we must tum to "science."
  • In Technopoly, it is not enough for social research to rediscover ancient truths or to comment on and criticize the moral behavior of people. In T echnopoly, it is an insult to call someone a "moralizer." Nor is it sufficient for social research to put forward metaphors, images, and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding and dignity.
  • Such a program lacks the aura of certain knowledge that only science can provide. It becomes necessary, then, to transform psychology, sociology, and anthropology into "sciences," in which humanity itself becomes an object, much like plants, planets, or ice cubes.
  • That is why the commonplaces that people fear death and that children who come from stable families valuing scholarship will do well in school must be announced as "discoveries" of scientific enterprise. In this way, social resear~hers can see themselves, and can be seen, as scientists, researchers without bias or values, unburdened by mere opinion. In this way, social policies can be claimed to rest on objectively determined facts.
  • given the psychological, social, and material benefits that attach to the label "scientist," it is not hard to see why social researchers should find it hard to give it up.
  • Our social "s'cientists" have from the beginning been less tender of conscience, or less rigorous in their views of science, or perhaps just more confused about the questions their procedures can answer and those they cannot. In any case, they have not been squeamish about imputing to their "discoveries" and the rigor of their procedures the power to direct us in how we ought rightly to behave.
  • It is less easy to see why the rest of us have so willingly, even eagerly, cooperated in perpetuating the same illusion.
  • When the new technologies and techniques and spirit of men like Galileo, Newton, and Bacon laid the foundations of natural science, they also discredited the authority of earlier accounts of the physical world, as found, for example, in the great tale of Genesis. By calling into question the truth of such accounts in one realm, science undermined the whole edifice of belief in sacred stories and ultimately swept away with it the source to which most humans had looked for moral authority. It is not too much to say, I think, that the desacralized world has been searching for an alternative source of moral authority ever since.
  • We welcome them gladly, and the claim explicitly made or implied, because we need so desperately to find some source outside the frail and shaky judgments of mortals like ourselves to authorize our moral decisions and behavior. And outside of the authority of brute force, which can scarcely be called moral, we seem to have little left but the authority of procedures.
  • It is not merely the misapplication of techniques such as quantification to questions where numbers have nothing to say; not merely the confusion of the material and social realms of human experience; not merely the claim of social researchers to be applying the aims and procedures of natural scien\:e to the human world.
  • This, then, is what I mean by Scientism.
  • It is the desperate hope, and wish, and ultimately the illusory belief that some standardized set of procedures called "science" can provide us with an unimpeachable source of moral authority, a suprahuman basis for answers to questions like "What is life, and when, and why?" "Why is death, and suffering?" 'What is right and wrong to do?" "What are good and evil ends?" "How ought we to think and feel and behave?
  • Science can tell us when a heart begins to beat, or movement begins, or what are the statistics on the survival of neonates of different gestational ages outside the womb. But science has no more authority than you do or I do to establish such criteria as the "true" definition of "life" or of human state or of personhood.
  • Social research can tell us how some people behave in the presence of what they believe to be legitimate authority. But it cannot tell us when authority is "legitimate" and when not, or how we must decide, or when it may be right or wrong to obey.
  • To ask of science, or expect of science, or accept unchallenged from science the answers to such questions is Scientism. And it is Technopoly's grand illusion.
  • In the institutional form it has taken in the United States, advertising is a symptom of a world-view 'that sees tradition as an obstacle to its claims. There can, of course, be no functioning sense of tradition without a measure of respect for symbols. Tradition is, in fact, nothing but the acknowledgment of the authority of symbols and the relevance of the narratives that gave birth to them. With the erosion of symbols there follows a loss of narrative, which is one of the most debilitating consequences of Technopoly' s power.
  • What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research, which meahs orienting business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable. The business of business becomes pseudo-therapy; the consumer, a patient reassl.,lred by psychodramas.
  • At the moment, 1t 1s considered necessary to introduce computers to the classroom, as it once was thought necessary to bring closed-circuit television and film to the classroom. To the question "Why should we do this?" the answer is: "To make learning more efficient and more interesting." Such an answer is considered entirely adequate, since in T ~chnopoly efficiency and interest need no justification. It is, therefore, usually not noticed that this answer does not address the question "What is learning for?"
  • What this means is that somewhere near the core of Technopoly is a vast industry with license to use all available symbols to further the interests of commerce, by devouring the psyches of consumers.
  • In the twentieth century, such metaphors and images have come largely from the pens of social historians and researchers. ·Think of John Dewey, William James, Erik Erikson, Alfred Kinsey, Thorstein Veblen, Margaret Mead, Lewis Mumford, B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Marshall McLuhan, Barbara Tuchman, Noam Chomsky, Robert Coles, even Stanley Milgram, and you must acknowledge that our ideas of what we are like and what kind of country we live in come from their stories to a far greater extent than from the stories of our most renowned novelists.
  • social idea that must be advanced through education.
  • Confucius advocated teaching "the Way" because in tradition he saw the best hope for social order. As our first systematic fascist, Plato wished education to produce philosopher kings. Cicero argued that education must free the student from the tyranny of the present. Jefferson thought the purpose of education is to teach the young how to protect their liberties. Rousseau wished education to free the young from the unnatural constraints of a wicked and arbitrary social order. And among John Dewey's aims was to help the student function without certainty in a world of constant change and puzzling· ambiguities.
  • The point is that cultures must have narratives and will find them where they will, even if they lead to catastrophe. The alternative is to live without meaning, the ultimate negation of life itself.
  • It is also to the point to say that each narrative is given its form and its emotional texture through a cluster of symbols that call for respect and allegiance, even devotion.
  • by definition, there can be no education philosophy that does not address what learning is for. Confucius, Plato, Quintilian, Cicero, Comenius, Erasmus, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Russell, Montessori, Whitehead, and Dewey--each believed that there was some transcendent political, spiritual, or
  • The importance of the American Constitution is largely in its function as a symbol of the story of our origins. It is our political equivalent of Genesis. To mock it, to• ignore it, to circwnvent it is to declare the irrelevance of the story of the United States as a moral light unto the world. In like fashion, the Statue of Liberty is the key symbol of the story of America as the natural home of the teeming masses, from anywhere, yearning to be free.
  • There are those who believe--as did the great historian Arnold Toynbee-that without a comprehensive religious narrative at its center a culture must decline. Perhaps. There are, after all, other sources-mythology, politics, philosophy, and science; for example--but it is certain that no culture can flourish without narratives of transcendent orjgin and power.
  • This does not mean that the mere existence of such a narrative ensures a culture's stability and strength. There are destructive narratives. A narrative provides meaning, not necessarily survival-as, for example, the story provided by Adolf Hitler to the German nation in t:he 1930s.
  • What story does American education wish to tell now? In a growing Technopoly, what do we believe education is for?
  • The answers are discouraging, and one of. them can be inferred from any television commercial urging the young to stay in school. The commercial will either imply or state explicitly that education will help the persevering student to get a ·good job. And that's it. Well, not quite. There is also the idea that we educate ourselves to compete with the Japanese or the Germans in an economic struggle to be number one.
  • Young men, for example, will learn how to make lay-up shots when they play basketball. To be able to make them is part of the The Great Symbol Drain 177 definition of what good players are. But they do not play basketball for that purpose. There is usually a broader, deeper, and more meaningful reason for wanting to play-to assert their manhood, to please their fathers, to be acceptable to their peers, even for the sheer aesthetic pleasure of the game itself. What you have to do to be a success must be addressed only after you have found a reason to be successful.
  • Bloom's solution is that we go back to the basics of Western thought.
  • He wants us to teach our students what Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Saint Augustine, and other luminaries have had to say on the great ethical and epistemological questions. He believes that by acquainting themselves with great books our students will acquire a moral and intellectual foundation that will give meaning and texture to their lives.
  • Hirsch's encyclopedic list is not a solution but a description of the problem of information glut. It is therefore essentially incoherent. But it also confuses a consequence of education with a purpose. Hirsch attempted to answer the question "What is an educated person?" He left unanswered the question "What is an education for?"
  • Those who reject Bloom's idea have offered several arguments against it. The first is that such a purpose for education is elitist: the mass of students would not find the great story of
  • Western civilization inspiring, are too deeply alienated from the past to find it so, and would therefore have difficulty connecting the "best that has been thought and said" to their own struggles to find q1eaning in their lives.
  • A second argument, coming from what is called a "leftist" perspective, is even more discouraging. In a sense, it offers a definition of what is meant by elitism. It asserts that the "story of Western civilization" is a partial, biased, and even oppressive one. It is not the story of blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, women, homosexuals-of any people who are not white heterosexual males of Judea-Christian heritage. This claim denies that there is or can be a national culture, a narrative of organizing power and inspiring symbols which all citizens can identify with and draw sustenance from. If this is true, it means nothing less than that our national symbols have been drained of their power to unite, and that education must become a tribal affair; that is, each subculture must find its own story and symbols, and use them as the moral basis of education.
  • nto this void comes the Technopoly story, with its emphasis on progress without limits, rights without responsibilities, and technology without cost. The T echnopoly story is without a moral center. It puts in its place efficiency, interest, and economic advance. It promises heaven on earth through the conveniences of technological progress. It casts aside all traditional narratives and symbols that· suggest stability and orderliness, and tells, instead, of a life of skills, technical expertise, and the ecstasy of consumption. Its purpose is to produce functionaries for an ongoing Technopoly.
  • It answers Bloom by saying that the story of Western civilization is irrelevant; it answers the political left by saying there is indeed a common culture whose name is T echnopoly and whose key symbol is now the computer, toward which there must be neither irreverence nor blasphemy. It even answers Hirsch by saying that there are items on his list that, if thought about too deeply and taken too seriously, will interfere with the progress of technology.
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