Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged studying

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
15More

There's nothing wrong with grade inflation - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ing-wrong-with-grade-inflation washington post education grades inequality
shared by kushnerha on 05 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • By the early ’90s, so long as one had the good sense to major in the humanities — all bets were off in the STEM fields — it was nearly impossible to get a final grade below a B-minus at an elite college. According to a 2012 study, the average college GPA, which in the 1930s was a C-plus, had risen to a B at public universities and a B-plus at private schools. At Duke, Pomona and Harvard, D’s and F’s combine for just 2 percent of all grades. A Yale report found that 62 percent of all Yale grades are A or A-minus. According to a 2013 article in the Harvard Crimson, the median grade at Harvard was an A-minus , while the most common grade was an A.
  • The result is widespread panic about grade inflation at elite schools. (The phenomenon is not as prevalent at community colleges and less-selective universities.) Some blame students’ consumer mentality, a few see a correlation with small class sizes (departments with falling enrollments want to keep students happy), and many cite a general loss of rigor in a touchy-feely age.
  • Yet whenever elite schools have tried to fight grade inflation, it’s been a mess. Princeton instituted strict caps on the number of high grades awarded, then abandoned the plan, saying the caps dissuaded applicants and made students miserable. At Wellesley, grade-inflated humanities departments mandated that the average result in their introductory and intermediate classes not exceed a B-plus. According to one study, enrollment fell by one-fifth, and students were 30 percent less likely to major in one of these subjects.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • I liked the joy my students found when they actually earned a grade they’d been reaching for. But whereas I once thought we needed to contain grades, I now see that we may as well let them float skyward. If grade inflation is bad, fighting it is worse. Our goal should be ending the centrality of grades altogether. For years, I feared that a world of only A’s would mean the end of meaningful grades; today, I’m certain of it. But what’s so bad about that?
  • It’s easy to see why schools want to fight grade inflation. Grades should motivate certain students: those afraid of the stigma of a bad grade or those ambitious, by temperament or conditioning, to succeed in measurable ways. Periodic grading during a term, on quizzes, tests or papers, provides feedback to students, which should enable them to do better. And grades theoretically signal to others, such as potential employers or graduate schools, how well the student did. (Grade-point averages are also used for prizes and class rankings, though that doesn’t strike me as an important feature.)
  • But it’s not clear that grades work well as motivators. Although recent research on the effects of grades is limited, several studies in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s measured how students related to a task or a class when it was graded compared to when it was ungraded. Overall, graded students are less interested in the topic at hand and — and, for obvious, common-sense reasons — more inclined to pick the easiest possible task when given the chance. In the words of progressive-education theorist Alfie Kohn, author of “The Homework Myth,” “the quality of learning declines” when grades are introduced, becoming “shallower and more superficial when the point is to get a grade.”
  • Even where grades can be useful, as in describing what material a student has mastered, they are remarkably crude instruments. Yes, the student who gets a 100 on a calculus exam probably grasps the material better than the student with a 60 — but only if she retains the knowledge, which grades can’t show.
  • I still can’t say very well what separates a B from an A. What’s more, I never see the kind of incompetence or impudence that would merit a D or an F. And now, in our grade-inflated world, it’s even harder to use grades to motivate, or give feedback, or send a signal to future employers or graduate schools.
  • According to a 2012 study by the Chronicle of Higher Education, GPA was seventh out of eight factors employers considered in hiring, behind internships, extracurricular activities and previous employment. Last year, Stanford’s registrar told the Chronicle about “a clamor” from employers “for something more meaningful” than the traditional transcript. The Lumina Foundation gave a$1.27 million grant to two organizations for college administrators working to develop better student records, with grades only one part of a student’s final profile.
  • Some graduate schools, too, have basically ditched grades. “As long as you don’t bomb and flunk out, grades don’t matter very much in M.F.A. programs,” the director of one creative-writing program told the New York Times. To top humanities PhD programs, letters of reference and writing samples matter more than overall GPA (although students are surely expected to have received good grades in their intended areas of study). In fact, it’s impossible to get into good graduate or professional schools without multiple letters of reference, which have come to function as the kind of rich, descriptive comments that could go on transcripts in place of grades.
  • suggests that GPAs serve not to validate students from elite schools but to keep out those from less-prestigious schools and large public universities, where grades are less inflated. Grades at community colleges “have actually dropped” over the years, according to Stuart Rojstaczer, a co-author of the 2012 grade-inflation study. That means we have two systems: one for students at elite schools, who get jobs based on references, prestige and connections, and another for students everywhere else, who had better maintain a 3.0. Grades are a tool increasingly deployed against students without prestige.
  • The trouble is that, while it’s relatively easy for smaller colleges to go grade-free, with their low student-to-teacher ratios, it’s tough for professors at larger schools, who must evaluate more students, more quickly, with fewer resources. And adjuncts teaching five classes for poverty wages can’t write substantial term-end comments, so grades are a necessity if they want to give any feedback at all.
  • It would mean hiring more teachers and paying them better (which schools should do anyway). And if transcripts become more textured, graduate-school admission offices and employers will have to devote more resources to reading them, and to getting to know applicants through interviews and letters of reference — a salutary trend that is underway already.
  • When I think about getting rid of grades, I think of happier students, with whom I have more open, democratic relationships. I think about being forced to pay more attention to the quiet ones, since I’ll have to write something truthful about them, too. I’ve begun to wonder if a world without grades may be one of those states of affairs (like open marriages, bicycle lanes and single-payer health care) that Americans resist precisely because they seem too good, suspiciously good. Nothing worth doing is supposed to come easy.
  • Alfie Kohn, too, sees ideology at work in the grade-inflation panic. “Most of what powers the arguments against grade inflation is a very right-wing idea that excellence consists in beating everyone else around you,” he says. “Even when you have sorted them — even when they get to Harvard! — we have to sort them again.” In other words, we can trust only a system in which there are clear winners and losers.
14More

Economists tested 7 welfare programs to see if they made people lazy. They didn't. - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...welfare-cash-transfer-work research bias welfare
shared by silveiragu on 21 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • For as long as there have been government programs designed to help the poor, there have been critics insisting that helping the poor will keep them from working. But the evidence for this proposition has always been rather weak.
  • And a recent study from MIT and Harvard economists
  • found "no systematic evidence that cash transfer programs discourage work.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • he programs covered in the study have a pretty wide geographic spread. There are four in Latin America (two in Mexico, one each in Nicaragua and Honduras), two in Southeast Asia (Philippines and Indonesia), and one in Morocco
  • . The 95 percent confidence interval for how the programs affected the employment rate ranged from a 1.6 percentage point decline to a 0.9 point increase. There just isn't any change happening here
  • Some other studies find that cash encourages work
  • But it's worth being skeptical about welfare queen claims in rich countries as well.
  • There's a substantial body of evidence showing that the EITC encourages work
  • But even unrestricted cash programs aren't likely to have a major effect on work in rich countries
  • . A number of studies in the US in the 1970s examined "negative income tax" programs
  • The studies found very mild declines in work
  • A much better experiment in Canada, where an entire town got a guaranteed income by way of a negative income tax, found even milder reductions in wor
  • There's no doubt that poorly designed social programs can deter work. Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the pre–welfare reform welfare program, was found to decrease hours worked by 10 to 50 percen
  • Who would work under that condition
11More

What Architecture Is Doing to Your Brain - CityLab - 1 views

www.citylab.com/...382553 city lab research architecture brain science design meditation
shared by kushnerha on 08 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Much of the student population would likely agree that the library’s menacing figure on the quad is nothing short of soul-crushing. New research conducted by a team of architects and neuroscientists suggests that architecture may indeed affect mental states, though they choose to focus on the positive.
  • I spoke with Dr. Julio Bermudez, the lead of a new study that uses fMRI to capture the effects of architecture on the brain. His team operates with the goal of using the scientific method to transform something opaque—the qualitative “phenomenologies of our built environment”—into neuroscientific observations that architects and city planners can deliberately design for. Bermudez and his team’s research question focuses on buildings and sites designed to elicit contemplation: They theorize that the presence of “contemplative architecture” in one’s environment may over time produce the same health benefits as traditional “internally induced” meditation, except with much less effort by the individual.
  • By showing 12 architects photos of contemplative and non-contemplative buildings from facade to interior, the researchers were able to observe the brain activity that occurred as subjects "imagined they were transported to the places being shown." All of the architects were white, right-handed men with no prior meditative training, creating the necessary (if comical) uniformity for neuroscientific research—the team wanted to ensure that the brain scans would not be influenced by factors unrelated to the photos, like gender, race, or handedness. For instance, the brain scans of left- and right-handed people often look different even when subjects are performing the same task.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • In addition to posing an interesting control on the experiment, the decision to use architects was a strategic one meant to increase the researchers’ chances of achieving conclusive results. Though everyone encounters architecture, studies on the built environment struggle for funding because, as Bermudez remarked with a sigh, “it’s difficult to suggest that people are dying from it.” Architects were a natural choice for the pilot study because, the team reasoned, their critical training and experience would make them sensitive to features of the buildings that a lay person might overlook.
  • they deployed online surveys in Spanish and English to gather testimony on extraordinary architectural experiences (EAEs), or encounters with places that fundamentally alter one’s normal state of being. Critically, most of the buildings or sites mentioned in the 2,982 testimonies were designed with contemplation in mind, whether spiritual, aesthetic, religious, or symbolic, leading the researchers to conclude that “buildings may induce insightful, profound, and transformative contemplative states, [and] buildings designed to provoke contemplation seem to be succeeding”
  • Anticipating skeptics who would claim that these experiences are subjective, the researchers expanded the question to draw on the established neuroscientific subfield of meditation, with some important differences. Related studies to date have focused on internally produced states that are easily replicated in the lab, and on aesthetic evaluation, or the activity that occurs in the orbital frontal cortex as we make snap judgments about whether we find things ugly or beautiful.
  • Bermudez and his team expected that architecturally induced contemplative states would be strong, non-evaluative aesthetic experiences— eliciting more activity in areas associated with emotion and pleasure, but less activity in the orbital frontal cortex.
  • The presence of an external stimulus (the photos of the buildings) also removes the tedious self-regulation that occurs in the prefrontal cortex during traditional meditation. The interviews of the 12 subjects revealed that “peacefulness and relaxation, lessening of mind wandering, increasing of attention, and deepening of experience” were all common effects of viewing the photos—also common was a slight element of aesthetic judgment, seemingly inescapable in the crowd of critics.
  • The provisional conclusions of the study are that the brain behaves differently when exposed to contemplative and non-contemplative buildings, contemplative states elicited through “architectural aesthetics” are similar to the contemplation of traditional meditation in some ways, and different in other ways, and, finally, that “architectural design matters.”
  • reinforces a growing trend in architecture and design as researchers are beginning to study how the built environment affects the people who live in it. ANFA proclaims that “some observers have characterized what is happening in neuroscience as the most exciting frontier of human discovery since the Renaissance.”
  • gritty details: the optimal ceiling heights for different cognitive functions; the best city design for eliciting our natural exploratory tendencies and making way-finding easier; the ideal hospital layout to improve memory-related tasks in patients recovering from certain brain injuries; the influence of different types and quantities of light within a built space on mood and performance.  
12More

The Startling Link Between Sugar and Alzheimer's - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...551528 sugar dementia diet research brain science
shared by Javier E on 27 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • A longitudinal study, published Thursday in the journal Diabetologia, followed 5,189 people over 10 years and found that people with high blood sugar had a faster rate of cognitive decline than those with normal blood sugar
  • In other words, the higher the blood sugar, the faster the cognitive decline.
  • “Currently, dementia is not curable, which makes it very important to study risk factors.”
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • People who have type 2 diabetes are about twice as likely to get Alzheimer’s, and people who have diabetes and are treated with insulin are also more likely to get Alzheimer’s, suggesting elevated insulin plays a role in Alzheimer’s. In fact, many studies have found that elevated insulin, or “hyperinsulinemia,” significantly increases your risk of Alzheimer’s. On the other hand, people with type 1 diabetes, who don’t make insulin at all, are also thought to have a higher risk of Alzheimer’s. How could these both be true?
  • Schilling posits this happens because of the insulin-degrading enzyme, a product of insulin that breaks down both insulin and amyloid proteins in the brain—the same proteins that clump up and lead to Alzheimer’s disease. People who don’t have enough insulin, like those whose bodies’ ability to produce insulin has been tapped out by diabetes, aren’t going to make enough of this enzyme to break up those brain clumps. Meanwhile, in people who use insulin to treat their diabetes and end up with a surplus of insulin, most of this enzyme gets used up breaking that insulin down, leaving not enough enzyme to address those amyloid brain clumps.
  • this can happen even in people who don’t have diabetes yet—who are in a state known as “prediabetes.” It simply means your blood sugar is higher than normal, and it’s something that affects roughly 86 million Americans.
  • In a 2012 study, Roberts broke nearly 1,000 people down into four groups based on how much of their diet came from carbohydrates. The group that ate the most carbs had an 80 percent higher chance of developing mild cognitive impairment—a pit stop on the way to dementia—than those who ate the smallest amount of carbs.
  • “It’s hard to be sure at this stage, what an ‘ideal’ diet would look like,” she said. “There’s a suggestion that a Mediterranean diet, for example, may be good for brain health.”
  • there are several theories out there to explain the connection between high blood sugar and dementia. Diabetes can also weaken the blood vessels, which increases the likelihood that you’ll have ministrokes in the brain, causing various forms of dementia. A high intake of simple sugars can make cells, including those in the brain, insulin resistant, which could cause the brain cells to die. Meanwhile, eating too much in general can cause obesity. The extra fat in obese people releases cytokines, or inflammatory proteins that can also contribute to cognitive deterioration, Roberts said. In one study by Gottesman, obesity doubled a person’s risk of having elevated amyloid proteins in their brains later in life.
  • even people who don’t have any kind of diabetes should watch their sugar intake, she said.
  • as these and other researchers point out, decisions we make about food are one risk factor we can control. And it’s starting to look like decisions we make while we’re still relatively young can affect our future cognitive health.
  • “Alzheimer’s is like a slow-burning fire that you don’t see when it starts,” Schilling said. It takes time for clumps to form and for cognition to begin to deteriorate. “By the time you see the signs, it’s way too late to put out the fire.”
17More

How to avoid covid-19 hoax stories? - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ry-citizens-identify-fake-news disinformation fake news detection misinformation false
shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • How good are people at sifting out fake news?
  • we’ve been investigating whether ordinary individuals who encounter news when it first appears online — before fact-checkers like Snopes and PolitiFacts have an opportunity to issue reports about an article’s veracity — are able to identify whether articles contain true or false information.
  • Unfortunately, it seems quite difficult for people to identify false or misleading news, and the limited number of coronavirus news stories in our collection are no exception
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Over a 13-week period, our study allowed us to capture people’s assessments of fresh news articles in real time. Each day of the study, we relied on a fixed, pre-registered process to select five popular articles published within the previous 24 hours
  • The five articles were balanced between conservative, liberal and non-partisan sources, as well as from mainstream news websites and from websites known to produce fake news. In total, we sent 150 total articles to 90 survey respondents each
  • We also sent these articles separately to six independent fact checkers, and treated their most common response — true, false/misleading, or cannot determine — for each article as the “correct’’ answer for that article.
  • When shown an article that was rated “true” by the professional fact checkers, respondents correctly identified the article as true 62 percent of the time. When the source of the true news story was a mainstream news source, respondents correctly identified the article as true 73 percent of the time.
  • However, for each article the professional fact checkers rated “false/misleading,” the study participants were as likely to say it was true as they were to say it was false or misleading. And roughly one-third of the time they told us they were unable to determine the veracity of the article. In other words, people on the whole were unable to correctly classify false or misleading news.
  • four of the articles in our study that fact checkers rated as false or misleading were related to the coronavirus.
  • All four articles promoted the unfounded rumor that the virus was intentionally developed in a laboratory. Although accidental releases of pathogens from labs have previously caused significant morbidity and mortality, in the current pandemic multiple pieces of evidence suggest this virus is of natural origin. There’s little evidence that the virus was manufactured or altered.
  • Only 30 percent of participants correctly classified them as false or misleading.
  • respondents seemed to have more trouble deciding what to think about false covid-19 stories, leading to a higher proportion of “could not determine” responses than we saw for the stories on other topics our professional fact checkers rated as “false/misleading.” This finding suggests that it may be particularly difficult to identify misinformation in newly emerging topics
  • Study participants with higher levels of education did better on identifying both fake news overall and coronavirus-related fake news — but were far from being able to correctly weed out misinformation all of the time
  • In fact, no group, regardless of education level, was able to correctly identify the stories that the professional fact checkers had labeled as false or misleading more than 40 percent of the time.
  • Taken together, our findings suggest that there is widespread potential for vulnerability to misinformation when it first appears online. This is especially worrying during the current pandemic
  • In the current environment, misinformation has the potential to undermine social distancing efforts, to lead people to hoard supplies, or to promote the adoption of potentially dangerous fake cures.
  • our findings suggest that non-trivial numbers of people will believe false information to be true when they first encounter it. And it suggests that efforts to remove coronavirus-related misinformation will need to be swift — and implemented early in an article’s life-cycle — to stop the spread of something else that’s dangerous: misinformation.
20More

US cities are losing 36 million trees a year. Here's why it matters and how you can sto... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html trees climate change USA
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Trees can lower summer daytime temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a recent study.
  • A study published last year by the US Forest Service found that we lost 36 million trees annually from urban and rural communities over a five-year period. That’s a 1% drop from 2009 to 2014.
  • “cities will become warmer, more polluted and generally more unhealthy for inhabitants,”
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Trees act as water filters, taking in dirty surface water and absorbing nitrogen and phosphorus into the soil.
  • But the one reason for tree loss that humans can control is sensible development.
  • “Every time we put a road down, we put a building and we cut a tree or add a tree, it not only affects that site, it affects the region.”
  • The study placed a value on tree loss based on trees’ role in air pollution removal and energy conservation. The lost value amounted to $96 million a year.
  • Trees provide shade for homes, office buildings, parks and roadways, cooling surface temperatures.
  • Trees absorb carbon and remove pollutants from the atmosphere.
  • Trees reduce energy costs by $4 billion a year, according to Nowak’s study.
  • there are many reasons our tree canopy is declining, including hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, insects and disease.
  • Trees reduce flooding by absorbing water and reducing runoff into streams.
  • Trees can deflect sound
  • Trees absorb 96% of ultraviolet radiation, Nowak says.
  • Many studies have found connections between exposure to nature and better mental and physical health.
  • And studies have associated living near green areas with lower death rates.
  • Worldwide, forests provide for a huge diversity of animal life.
  • there’s a downside to trees too, such as pollen allergies or large falling branches in storms, “and people don’t like raking leaves.”
  • Urban forests especially need our help to replace fallen trees. Unlike rural areas, it is very difficult for trees to repopulate themselves in a city environment with so much pavement and asphalt.
  • Don’t remove old trees if it’s not necessary: Instead, try taking smaller actions like removing branches.
32More

Study Finds Brain Injury Changes Moral Judgment - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...21cnd-brain.html brain science psychology research technology education brain new york times study
shared by adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      Interesting how much our body is interconnected
  • for hurting others relies on a part of neural anatomy, one that likely evolved before the brain regions responsible for analysis and planning.
  • hypothetical;
  • ...29 more annotations...
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      Interesting how they started their study with a complete hypothetical idea of these moral decisions.
  • confirm the central role of the damaged region — the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is thought to generate social emotions, like compassion.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      We also learned about the importance of the prefrontal cortex, as it controls our social emotions and can have a great effect on our decision making.
  • The new study seals the case by demonstrating that a very specific kind of emotion-based judgment is altered when the region is offline.
  • people with the injury will even endorse suffocating an infant if that would save more lives.
  • at least two systems working when we make moral judgments,
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      TOK topic we discussed
  • There’s an emotional system that depends on this specific part of the brain
  • system that performs more utilitarian cost-benefit analyses
  • Jurors have reduced sentences based on brain-imaging results, and experts say that any evidence of damage to this ventromedial area could sway judgments of moral competency in some cases.
  • The new study focused on six patients who had suffered very specific damage to the ventromedial area from an aneurysm or a tumor
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      The study format
  • can be lucid, easygoing, talkative and intelligent, but blind to subtle social cues, making them socially awkward.
  • the ventromedial cortex
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      Interesting collection of data,
  • They strongly favored flipping the switch, just as group of people without injuries did.
  • All three groups also strongly rejected doing harm to others in situations that were not a matter of trading one certain death for another.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      They were presenting the correct moral choices
  • some of the same moral instincts
  • a large difference in the participants’ decisions emerged when there was no switch to flip
  • taking direct action to kill or harm someone (pushing him in front of the runaway boxcar, for example) and serving a greater good.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      The difference: when there was no switch to flip
  • were about twice as likely as the other participants to say they would push someone in front of the train (if that was the only option)
  • The ventromedial area is a primitive part of the cortex that appears to have evolved to help humans and other mammals navigate social interactions
  • The area has connections to deeper, unconscious regions like the brain stem,
  • The ventromedial area integrates these signals with others from the cortex, including emotional memories, to help generate familiar social reactions.
  • This tension between cost-benefit calculations and instinctive emotion in part reflects the brain’s continuing adjustment to the vast social changes that have occurred since the ventromedial area first took shape
  • transforms the way people make moral judgments in life-or-death situations, scientists are reporting today.
  • this rare injury expressed increased willingness to kill or harm another person if doing so would save others' lives.
3More

The Exaggerated Promise of So-Called Unbiased Data Mining | WIRED - 1 views

www.wired.com/...gerated-promise-of-data-mining brain science research knowledge science Technology
shared by sanderk on 20 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The Feynman trap—ransacking data for patterns without any preconceived idea of what one is looking for—is the Achilles heel of studies based on data mining. Finding something unusual or surprising after it has already occurred is neither unusual nor surprising. Patterns are sure to be found, and are likely to be misleading, absurd, or worse.
  • A standard neuroscience experiment involves showing a volunteer in an MRI machine various images and asking questions about the images. The measurements are noisy, picking up magnetic signals from the environment and from variations in the density of fatty tissue in different parts of the brain. Sometimes they miss brain activity; sometimes they suggest activity where there is none.A Dartmouth graduate student used an MRI machine to study the brain activity of a salmon as it was shown photographs and asked questions. The most interesting thing about the study was not that a salmon was studied, but that the salmon was dead. Yep, a dead salmon purchased at a local market was put into the MRI machine, and some patterns were discovered. There were inevitably patterns—and they were invariably meaningless.
  • sanderk on 20 Oct 19
     
    This article relates to our discussion in class about data mining. Scientists assume that patterns in data are true instead of making a hypothesis and trying to see if their hypothesis is true. These assumptions can lead to false conclusions. Also, this article talks about how people go through all of this data without knowing what they are looking for. When someone does this, it is called The Feynman Trap. I also found it interesting how someone studied the brain activity of a dead fish and still found patterns.
8More

Less money can mean more contentment, study says - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • People at the lower end of the income scale take more pleasure in their relationships and enjoy caring for and connecting with others, according to a study published Monday in the journal Emotion.
  • "People who are poorer are more reliant on others to get by," said Paul Piff, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine. "They really prioritize relationships because of their reduced resources, and so they are more likely to really focus on emotions that bind them to one another and find satisfaction and delight in relationships through compassion and love."
  • For the new study, "We break happiness down into all of its emotional components: all the different kinds of positive emotions we want to experience on a daily basis," he said.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • "As income increases, as you rise in the rankings of household income, your tendencies -- or daily experiences -- of pride, amusement, contentment go up, and your experience of compassion and love and awe go down," Piff said. Enthusiasm was the one emotion unaffected by wealth, with both rich and poor experiencing the same level.
  • "But of course these aren't absolute differences; it's not the case that wealthy people don't feel any compassion or any love," Piff said. "It's just that wealth sort of buffers you from experiencing as much of it as perhaps you should or as other people do."
  • "There is a very large literature showing happiness and life satisfaction is related to income," he said. One example is this study that found higher income increases access to social support, self-esteem and opportunities and so enhances happiness.
  • The holiday season gets "people to think about the larger communities that they're a part of and the important people in their lives," he noted. But sometimes we think, "If only we could have more money!" Then, we believe, we could get all the things we want and achieve all those things we think are meaningful or important, he explained.
  • "Even in the absence of wealth, you can still extract all kinds of meaning and all kinds of happiness and all kinds of joy by reminding yourself and surrounding yourself with all the people you love," Piff said.
14More

The national security adviser says there's no systemic racism in policing. Studies sugg... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 03 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • When a Trump administration official said he doesn't think systemic racism exists in policing, many were stunned -- especially after studies have shown different races are often treated differently.
  • "There is no doubt that there are some racist police," O'Brien added. "I think they're the minority. I think they're the few bad apples, and we need to root them out."
  • "Of course there is" systemic racism, St. Paul Police Chief Todd Axtell said. "It's not just in police departments across this country. My goodness, there's systemic racism within pretty much everything in this country."
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • frican-Americans are at greater risk of being killed by police, even though they are less likely to pose an objective threat to law enforcement, according to research by Northeastern University Professor Matt Miller.
  • Among those who were "unarmed and appeared to show no objective threat to police, nearly two-thirds of the victims were Hispanic or Black," the researchers found.
  • "there is profound racial disparity in the misdemeanor arrest rate for most -- but not all -- offense types,"
  • The 2017 study found that black residents were more likely to file complaints than white residents -- but "NCPD sustained complaints filed by Black residents only 31 percent of the time compared to sustaining complaints filed by White residents 50 percent of the time," the study says. "NCPD defines 'sustained' as 'the allegation is supported by sufficient evidence to justify a reasonable conclusion that the allegation is factual."
  • Latino youth are 65% more likely to be detained or committed than their white peers, according to a 2017 report from The Sentencing Project.
  • African Americans and whites use drugs at similar rates, but the imprisonment rate of African Americans for drug charges is almost 6 times that of whites, the NAACP said.
  • But they found that "blacks were 2.7 times more likely to be pulled over in an investigatory stop," NPR station KCUR reported. "Blacks were also subject to searches five times more often than white drivers."
  • But black drivers who had an infraction like a burnt out light were more often "questioned about what they were doing in a particular neighborhood, where they were heading, and whether they were carrying drugs," the report said. "Many were subject to vehicle searches."
  • "When you have the national security adviser saying he doesn't see systemic racism, well you know what? White folks also didn't see systemic racism even in the 1960s," Wise said.
  • "If white America didn't get it even when it was obvious in retrospect to everyone, what in the world would make the national security adviser believe that he or anyone else knows what they're talking about now? I think it probably stands to reason that black and brown folks know their reality better than we do."
  • "Especially after a tragedy like we saw in Minneapolis, we need to do two things -- take a hard look at our own actions and conduct, correct them where necessary, and to regain that trust by continuing to hold ourselves to the highest possible standard in a transparent way."
6More

Happiness may be healthier for some cultures than others - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Just a few months ago, the New York Times declared that "studies have shown an indisputable link between having a positive outlook and health benefits like lower blood pressure, less heart disease, better weight control and healthier blood sugar levels." Plenty of news articles present similar ideas in a stark black-and-white fashion: optimists live longer; pessimism kills.
  • But some research suggests that things aren't so simple. In 2016, for example, a study of more than 700,000 British women failed to find a link between happiness and longevity. Which raises the question: What makes this particular group of study participants any different? Could it be that culture plays a role -- that British people, overall, are just more tolerant and accepting of gloominess?
  • Even after accounting for things like a person's age, gender, socioeconomic status, and chronic health conditions, there was a significant difference between the two groups: "American adults who experience high levels of positive emotions, such as feeling 'cheerful' and 'extremely happy,' are more likely to have healthy blood-lipid profiles," explains lead study author Jiah Yoo, but the same was not true among Japanese adults.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Past research has reached similar conclusions. In a 2015 Stanford study of 690 Chinese and American participants, for example, the Americans generally sought to maximize positive feelings and minimize negative ones, while the Chinese subjects were more likely to report that they commonly felt mixed emotions. The study authors argued that the results had to do with differing ideas about the importance of the individual: The individualistic American culture places more emphasis on people doing what's best for themselves, while more collectivist East Asian cultures prioritize doing what's best for the group.
  • Yoo believes the cultural influence on the positivity-health connection may be the result of culturally specific health behaviors. "Frequent experience of positive affect in the Western context would be aligned with prescribed values and beliefs, and thus likely motivate engagement in and pursuit of healthy behaviors," she explains. "In contrast, positive affect aligns less with norms and beliefs about positive affect in the East Asian context, and thus may not be associated with healthy behaviors."
  • It's not simply that Americans are more intent on seeking happiness, then -- there's also a high bar for how intense that happiness is supposed to feel. "Westerners value high-arousal emotions more than Easterners, so they promote activities that elicit high-arousal emotions.," Lim noted. "Even children of the West learn through storybooks that high-arousal emotions are ideal, and the opposite is true for children of the East."
13More

Year-long resolutions don't work. Here's how to make 12 'micro-resolutions' instead - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • A mini- or micro-resolution is any behavior you commit to for four weeks. And even longer-term goals to, say, eat better or learn a new skill, can be broken down into more achievable goals on the way. Before you can land on Mars, focus on landing on the moon.
  • To create your micro-resolutions, you can start by thinking of 12 "bad" habits or indulgences you'd like to cut back on or give up entirely. This is what I did last year for what I called my "Year of Abstinence." My plan was to learn something about myself through self-denial, and it worked: I gave up alcohol, sweets, television and nine other things, but just for a month each. The mini-resolutions were as positive as they were eye-opening.
  • To complement March's switch-up, my plan for June was the same split: 8 hours of sleep at night and active listening with the kids. I didn't think I could pull a straight fortnight of great sleep, so my aim was for 15 nights of sleep and 15 days of not doing something else while listening.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Sleep is tied to many positive health outcomes according to a constant stream of medical research, much of which recommends more than seven hours a night. My goal was to sleep eight hours each night, and for the first two weeks of the month I tried and failed. I didn't manage it once. It started stressing me out.Wake up, people: You're fooling yourself about sleep, study says I did get more sleep than I would have otherwise because I prioritized getting to bed earlier. But between work, training for a marathon, kids' bedtimes and evening plans, my life was not conducive to that schedule. But since I'm making up the rules (and you make up yours) I gave up on sleep.
  • Research ties nature exposure to both longevity and happiness, so I made it a goal to commune with nature every day. This could include a run through a park, stopping to hug a tree (which I did at least once), or watching a convoy of ants cross a sidewalk.
  • Another super-habit for mental and physical health, I made an effort to incorporate meditation in some form -- whether it was 10 breaths, 30 minutes, guided, formal, mantra-led, what have you -- every day.
  • In order to simply increase my own, general awareness, every day in January my goal was to notice something new. I kept my eyes open, looked a bit longer, stopped to read the history markers, noticing buildings or took a different route than normal -- small ways to avoid sleepwalking through life.
  • At CNN, I sit near a constant pile of sweets. And that combined with my weakness for them equals a snacking problem. So in July, my goal was to make fresh fruit my standard snack of choice and eat at least one piece or serving a day. And more water -- at least a pint before coffee in the morning.
  • In August I attempted to not stay seated for more than 30 minutes during waking hours. Recent research has associated a number of poor health conditions with a sedentary lifestyle. And while no one can definitively say how much sitting is bad for us, moving every 30 minutes has emerged as a good guideline.
  • My commitment in September was 15 minutes of some form of creative writing each day, almost entirely in a writer's notebook that I've had since college. It's full of random dialogue, lists and story plots, and I used to write in it often but not so much in recent years.
  • Read a novel. That was it. Given that I mainly read non-fiction, this idea seemed rather novel (sorry).
  • My intention was to make a daily gesture of gratitude -- an emotional state with its own positive health outcomes -- and I quickly fell behind. I decided instead (because, again, I make up the rules) to make the goal a total of 30 thank yous, one for each day of the month, and I managed to cram them all in.
  • In another attempt to combat unhealthy snacking, my final goal for 2019 was to convert my diet into one filled with non-processed, whole foods. Carrots and peanut butter instead of donuts; almonds instead of old Halloween candy -- you get the idea. I also declared my intention to track my progress and give myself a daily score.
5More

Two New Studies Explore the Neuroscience of Negative Emotions | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...neuroscience-negative-emotions Emotions Neuroscience
shared by manhefnawi on 14 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • We've all had experiences we'd prefer not to remember. That's especially true for people who have gone through a traumatic event such as childhood abuse, combat-related PTSD, or a bad accident. But there may be positive health applications for identifying, predicting, and retrieving negative emotions in the brain, according to two new studies. 
  • Researchers identified the different networks in the brain that all work together during a participant’s negative emotional experience, which they call a “brain signature.” Then, they used machine-learning algorithms to find global patterns of brain activity that best predicted the participants’ responses. “What we’re calling a 'brain signature' is basically a configuration—a brain pattern that is predictive of a state,” Chang tells mental_floss. He compares the process to the way that Netflix predicts who is watching a certain type of show based on the watcher’s choices in programming.
  • MEMORIES CAUSED—AND LOST—BY TRAUMA
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Many psychologists believe that in order for patients to recover from trauma, they often need to be able to recall what happened to them. The second study, published in Nature Neuroscience, investigated how the brain stores negative memories, known as “state-dependent learning.” The study, conducted in mice at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, suggests that negative memories caused—and then “lost”—by traumatic experiences may be retrieved by re-creating the state of the brain in which the memory first occurred.
  • The study suggests that in response to trauma, the brain activates this extra-synaptic GABA system, which appears to encode memories of fear-inducing events and hide them away from consciousness, rather than the glutamate system, which helps to store all memories, positive and negative. This research may provide a window into how to access these traumatic memories when needed for therapeutic reasons.
49More

He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ics-greece-rome-whiteness.html
shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Padilla laid out an indictment of his field. “If one were intentionally to design a discipline whose institutional organs and gatekeeping protocols were explicitly aimed at disavowing the legitimate status of scholars of color,” he said, “one could not do better than what classics has done.”
  • Padilla believes that classics is so entangled with white supremacy as to be inseparable from it. “Far from being extrinsic to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity,” he has written, “the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of classics.”
  • Rather than kowtowing to criticism, Williams said, “maybe we should start defending our discipline.” She protested that it was imperative to stand up for the classics as the political, literary and philosophical foundation of European and American culture: “It’s Western civilization. It matters because it’s the West.” Hadn’t classics given us the concepts of liberty, equality and democracy?
  • ...46 more annotations...
  • “I believe in merit. I don’t look at the color of the author.” She pointed a finger in Padilla’s direction. “You may have got your job because you’re Black,” Williams said, “but I would prefer to think you got your job because of merit.”
  • Williams ceded the microphone, and Padilla was able to speak. “Here’s what I have to say about the vision of classics that you outlined,” he said. “I want nothing to do with it. I hope the field dies that you’ve outlined, and that it dies as swiftly as possible.”
  • What he did find was a slim blue-and-white textbook titled “How People Lived in Ancient Greece and Rome.” “Western civilization was formed from the union of early Greek wisdom and the highly organized legal minds of early Rome,” the book began. “The Greek belief in a person’s ability to use his powers of reason, coupled with Roman faith in military strength, produced a result that has come to us as a legacy, or gift from the past.” Thirty years later, Padilla can still recite those opening lines.
  • In 2017, he published a paper in the journal Classical Antiquity that compared evidence from antiquity and the Black Atlantic to draw a more coherent picture of the religious life of the Roman enslaved. “It will not do merely to adopt a pose of ‘righteous indignation’ at the distortions and gaps in the archive,” he wrote. “There are tools available for the effective recovery of the religious experiences of the enslaved, provided we work with these tools carefully and honestly.”
  • Padilla sensed that his pursuit of classics had displaced other parts of his identity, just as classics and “Western civilization” had displaced other cultures and forms of knowledge. Recovering them would be essential to dismantling the white-supremacist framework in which both he and classics had become trapped. “I had to actively engage in the decolonization of my mind,” he told me.
  • He also gravitated toward contemporary scholars like José Esteban Muñoz, Lorgia García Peña and Saidiya Hartman, who speak of race not as a physical fact but as a ghostly system o
  • In response to rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and the United States, Mary Beard, perhaps the most famous classicist alive, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the Romans “would have been puzzled by our modern problems with migration and asylum,” because the empire was founded on the “principles of incorporation and of the free movement of people.”
  • In November 2015, he wrote an essay for Eidolon, an online classics journal, clarifying that in Rome, as in the United States, paeans to multiculturalism coexisted with hatred of foreigners. Defending a client in court, Cicero argued that “denying foreigners access to our city is patently inhumane,” but ancient authors also recount the expulsions of whole “suspect” populations, including a roundup of Jews in 139 B.C., who were not considered “suitable enough to live alongside Romans.”
  • The job of classicists is not to “point out the howlers,” he said on a 2017 panel. “To simply take the position of the teacher, the qualified classicist who knows things and can point to these mistakes, is not sufficient.”
  • Dismantling structures of power that have been shored up by the classical tradition will require more than fact-checking; it will require writing an entirely new story about antiquity, and about who we are today
  • To find that story, Padilla is advocating reforms that would “explode the canon” and “overhaul the discipline from nuts to bolts,” including doing away with the label “classics” altogether.
  • . “What I want to be thinking about in the next few weeks,” he told them, “is how we can be telling the story of the early Roman Empire not just through a variety of sources but through a variety of persons.” He asked the students to consider the lives behind the identities he had assigned them, and the way those lives had been shaped by the machinery of empire, which, through military conquest, enslavement and trade, creates the conditions for the large-scale movement of human beings.
  • ultimately, he decided that leaving enslaved characters out of the role play was an act of care. “I’m not yet ready to turn to a student and say, ‘You are going to be a slave.’”
  • Privately, even some sympathetic classicists worry that Padilla’s approach will only hasten the field’s decline. “I’ve spoken to undergrad majors who say that they feel ashamed to tell their friends they’re studying classics,”
  • “I very much admire Dan-el’s work, and like him, I deplore the lack of diversity in the classical profession,” Mary Beard told me via email. But “to ‘condemn’ classical culture would be as simplistic as to offer it unconditional admiration.”
  • In a 2019 talk, Beard argued that “although classics may become politicized, it doesn’t actually have a politics,” meaning that, like the Bible, the classical tradition is a language of authority — a vocabulary that can be used for good or ill by would-be emancipators and oppressors alike.
  • Over the centuries, classical civilization has acted as a model for people of many backgrounds, who turned it into a matrix through which they formed and debated ideas about beauty, ethics, power, nature, selfhood, citizenship and, of course, race
  • Anthony Grafton, the great Renaissance scholar, put it this way in his preface to “The Classical Tradition”: “An exhaustive exposition of the ways in which the world has defined itself with regard to Greco-Roman antiquity would be nothing less than a comprehensive history of the world.”
  • Classics as we know it today is a creation of the 18th and 19th centuries. During that period, as European universities emancipated themselves from the control of the church, the study of Greece and Rome gave the Continent its new, secular origin story. Greek and Latin writings emerged as a competitor to the Bible’s moral authority, which lent them a liberatory power
  • Historians stress that such ideas cannot be separated from the discourses of nationalism, colorism and progress that were taking shape during the modern colonial period, as Europeans came into contact with other peoples and their traditions. “The whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is,” Winkelmann wrote.
  • While Renaissance scholars were fascinated by the multiplicity of cultures in the ancient world, Enlightenment thinkers created a hierarchy with Greece and Rome, coded as white, on top, and everything else below.
  • Jefferson, along with most wealthy young men of his time, studied classics at college, where students often spent half their time reading and translating Greek and Roman texts. “Next to Christianity,” writes Caroline Winterer, a historian at Stanford, “the central intellectual project in America before the late 19th century was classicism.
  • Of the 2.5 million people living in America in 1776, perhaps only 3,000 had gone to college, but that number included many of the founders
  • They saw classical civilization as uniquely educative — a “lamp of experience,” in the words of Patrick Henry, that could light the path to a more perfect union. However true it was, subsequent generations would come to believe, as Hannah Arendt wrote in “On Revolution,” that “without the classical example … none of the men of the Revolution on either side of the Atlantic would have possessed the courage for what then turned out to be unprecedented action.”
  • Comparisons between the United States and the Roman Empire became popular as the country emerged as a global power. Even after Latin and Greek were struck from college-entrance exams, the proliferation of courses on “great books” and Western civilization, in which classical texts were read in translation, helped create a coherent national story after the shocks of industrialization and global warfare.
  • even as the classics were pulled apart, laughed at and transformed, they continued to form the raw material with which many artists shaped their visions of modernity.
  • Over the centuries, thinkers as disparate as John Adams and Simone Weil have likened classical antiquity to a mirror. Generations of intellectuals, among them feminist, queer and Black scholars, have seen something of themselves in classical texts, flashes of recognition that held a kind of liberatory promise
  • The language that is used to describe the presence of classical antiquity in the world today — the classical tradition, legacy or heritage — contains within it the idea of a special, quasi-genetic relationship. In his lecture “There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilization,” Kwame Anthony Appiah (this magazine’s Ethicist columnist) mockingly describes the belief in such a kinship as the belief in a “golden nugget” of insight — a precious birthright and shimmering sign of greatness — that white Americans and Europeans imagine has been passed down to them from the ancients.
  • To see classics the way Padilla sees it means breaking the mirror; it means condemning the classical legacy as one of the most harmful stories we’ve told ourselves
  • Padilla is wary of colleagues who cite the radical uses of classics as a way to forestall change; he believes that such examples have been outmatched by the field’s long alliance with the forces of dominance and oppression.
  • Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together. Classics deserves to survive only if it can become “a site of contestation” for the communities who have been denigrated by it in the past.
  • if classics fails his test, Padilla and others are ready to give it up. “I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.”
  • One way to get rid of classics would be to dissolve its faculties and reassign their members to history, archaeology and language departments.
  • many classicists are advocating softer approaches to reforming the discipline, placing the emphasis on expanding its borders. Schools including Howard and Emory have integrated classics with Ancient Mediterranean studies, turning to look across the sea at Egypt, Anatolia, the Levant and North Africa. The change is a declaration of purpose: to leave behind the hierarchies of the Enlightenment and to move back toward the Renaissance model of the ancient world as a place of diversity and mixture.
  • Ian Morris put it more bluntly. “Classics is a Euro-American foundation myth,” Morris said to me. “Do we really want that sort of thing?”
  • There’s a more interesting story to be told about the history of what we call the West, the history of humanity, without valorizing particular cultures in it,” said Josephine Quinn, a professor of ancient history at Oxford. “It seems to me the really crucial mover in history is always the relationship between people, between cultures.”
  • “In some moods, I feel that this is just a moment of despair, and people are trying to find significance even if it only comes from self-accusation,” he told me. “I’m not sure that there is a discipline that is exempt from the fact that it is part of the history of this country. How distinctly wicked is classics? I don’t know that it is.”
  • “One of the dubious successes of my generation is that it did break the canon,” Richlin told me. “I don’t think we could believe at the time that we would be putting ourselves out of business, but we did.” She added: “If they blew up the classics departments, that would really be the end.”
  • Padilla, like Douglass, now sees the moment of absorption into the classical, literary tradition as simultaneous with his apprehension of racial difference; he can no longer find pride or comfort in having used it to bring himself out of poverty.
  • “Claiming dignity within this system of structural oppression,” Padilla has said, “requires full buy-in into its logic of valuation.” He refuses to “praise the architects of that trauma as having done right by you at the end.”
  • Last June, as racial-justice protests unfolded across the nation, Padilla turned his attention to arenas beyond classics. He and his co-authors — the astrophysicist Jenny Greene, the literary theorist Andrew Cole and the poet Tracy K. Smith — began writing their open letter to Princeton with 48 proposals for reform. “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America,” the letter began. “Indifference to the effects of racism on this campus has allowed legitimate demands for institutional support and redress in the face of microaggression and outright racist incidents to go long unmet.”
  • Padilla believes that the uproar over free speech is misguided. “I don’t see things like free speech or the exchange of ideas as ends in themselves,” he told me. “I have to be honest about that. I see them as a means to the end of human flourishing.”
  • “There is a certain kind of classicist who will look on what transpired and say, ‘Oh, that’s not us,’” Padilla said when we spoke recently. “What is of interest to me is why is it so imperative for classicists of a certain stripe to make this discursive move? ‘This is not us.’
  • Joel Christensen, the Brandeis professor, now feels that it is his “moral and ethical and intellectual responsibility” to teach classics in a way that exposes its racist history. “Otherwise we’re just participating in propaganda,”
  • Christensen, who is 42, was in graduate school before he had his “crisis of faith,” and he understands the fear that many classicists may experience at being asked to rewrite the narrative of their life’s work. But, he warned, “that future is coming, with or without Dan-el.”
  • On Jan. 6, Padilla turned on the television minutes after the windows of the Capitol were broken. In the crowd, he saw a man in a Greek helmet with TRUMP 2020 painted in white. He saw a man in a T-shirt bearing a golden eagle on a fasces — symbols of Roman law and governance — below the logo 6MWE, which stands for “Six Million Wasn’t Enough,
15More

The Real Reason You and Your Neighbor Make Different Covid-19 Risk Decisions - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-19-risk-decisions-11632063600 risk assessment rationality psychology knowledge
shared by Javier E on 20 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • Personality traits that are shaped by genetics and early life experiences strongly influence our Covid-19-related decisions, studies from the U.S. and Japan have found.
  • In a study of more than 400 U.S. adults, Dr. Byrne and her colleagues found that how people perceive risks, whether they make risky decisions, and their preference for immediate or delayed rewards were the largest predictors of whether they followed public-health guidelines when it came to wearing masks and social distancing.
  • These factors accounted for 55% of the difference in people’s behaviors—more than people’s political affiliation, level of education or age.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Dr. Byrne and her colleagues measured risky decision-making by presenting people with a gambling scenario. They could choose between two bets: One offered a guaranteed amount of money, while the other offered the possibility of a larger amount of money but also the possibility of receiving no cash. A different exercise measured people’s preference for immediate versus delayed rewards: Participants could choose a certain amount of money now, or a larger amount later.
  • Study subjects also reported Covid-19 precautions they had taken in their daily lives, including masking and social distancing.
  • with Covid-19, people don’t feel sick immediately after an exposure so the benefits of wearing a mask, social distancing or getting vaccinated aren’t immediately apparent. “You don’t see the lives you potentially save,” she says
  • “People generally are more motivated by immediate gratification or immediate benefits rather than long-term benefits, even when the long-term benefits are much greater,
  • Research has also found being extroverted or introverted affects how people make decisions about Covid-19 precautions. A recent study of more than 8,500 people in Japan published in the journal PLOS One in October 2020 found that those who scored high on a scale of extraversion were 7% less likely to wear masks in public and avoid large gatherings, among other precautions.
  • The study also found that people who scored high on a measure of conscientiousness—valuing hard work and achievement—were 31% more likely to follow Covid-19 public-health precautions.
  • Scientists believe that a person’s propensity to take risks is partly genetic and partly the result of early life experiences
  • Certain negative childhood experiences including physical, emotional or sexual abuse, parental divorce, or living with someone who was depressed or abused drugs or alcohol are linked to risky behavior in adulthood like smoking and drinking heavily, other research has found.
  • Studies of twins have generally found that about 30% of the difference in individual risk tolerance is genetic
  • And scientists have discovered that the brains of people who are more willing to take risks look different than those of people who are more cautious.
  • ambling task had differences in the structure and function of the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in detecting threats, and the prefrontal cortex, a region involved in executive
  • Even people who have the same information and a similar perception of the risks may make different decisions because of the ways they interpret the information. When public-health officials talk about breakthrough infections in vaccinated individuals being rare, for example, “rare means different things” to different people
66More

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

diigo.com/0m0g1y 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.
  • ...63 more annotations...
  • 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.
121More

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...629369 politics history social media technology psychology bias fragmentation
shared by Javier E on 26 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories.
  • Social media has weakened all three.
  • gradually, social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations. As I wrote in a 2019 Atlantic article with Tobias Rose-Stockwell, they became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will.
  • ...118 more annotations...
  • the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.
  • Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom
  • That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers.
  • “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.
  • Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction, eventually including the “share” as well.
  • Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.
  • By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous”
  • If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.
  • This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment,
  • As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, I saw this happening too. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.
  • It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution.
  • The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.”
  • The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.
  • The tech companies that enhanced virality from 2009 to 2012 brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare.
  • a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality.
  • Madison notes that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”
  • Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous.
  • It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters; it’s the continual chipping-away of trust.
  • a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions.
  • when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side
  • The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer (an international measure of citizens’ trust in government, business, media, and nongovernmental organizations) showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea scored near the bottom (albeit above Russia).
  • The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.
  • When people lose trust in institutions, they lose trust in the stories told by those institutions. That’s particularly true of the institutions entrusted with the education of children.
  • Facebook and Twitter make it possible for parents to become outraged every day over a new snippet from their children’s history lessons––and math lessons and literature selections, and any new pedagogical shifts anywhere in the country
  • The motives of teachers and administrators come into question, and overreaching laws or curricular reforms sometimes follow, dumbing down education and reducing trust in it further.
  • young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended different schools or who were educated in a different decade.
  • former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached.
  • he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. I
  • The digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass. So the public isn’t one thing; it’s highly fragmented, and it’s basically mutually hostile
  • Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.
  • I think we can date the fall of the tower to the years between 2011 (Gurri’s focal year of “nihilistic” protests) and 2015, a year marked by the “great awokening” on the left and the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the right.
  • Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments—so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.
  • fter Babel, nothing really means anything anymore––at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree.
  • Politics After Babel
  • “Politics is the art of the possible,” the German statesman Otto von Bismarck said in 1867. In a post-Babel democracy, not much may be possible.
  • The ideological distance between the two parties began increasing faster in the 1990s. Fox News and the 1994 “Republican Revolution” converted the GOP into a more combative party.
  • So cross-party relationships were already strained before 2009. But the enhanced virality of social media thereafter made it more hazardous to be seen fraternizing with the enemy or even failing to attack the enemy with sufficient vigor.
  • What changed in the 2010s? Let’s revisit that Twitter engineer’s metaphor of handing a loaded gun to a 4-year-old. A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet
  • from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.
  • “devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population.
  • the warped “accountability” of social media has also brought injustice—and political dysfunction—in three ways.
  • First, the dart guns of social media give more power to trolls and provocateurs while silencing good citizens.
  • a small subset of people on social-media platforms are highly concerned with gaining status and are willing to use aggression to do so.
  • Across eight studies, Bor and Petersen found that being online did not make most people more aggressive or hostile; rather, it allowed a small number of aggressive people to attack a much larger set of victims. Even a small number of jerks were able to dominate discussion forums,
  • Additional research finds that women and Black people are harassed disproportionately, so the digital public square is less welcoming to their voices.
  • Second, the dart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority.
  • The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors.
  • Social media has given voice to some people who had little previously, and it has made it easier to hold powerful people accountable for their misdeeds
  • The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.
  • These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society.
  • they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and political attitudes.
  • likely a result of thought-policing on social media:
  • political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team.
  • Finally, by giving everyone a dart gun, social media deputizes everyone to administer justice with no due process. Platforms like Twitter devolve into the Wild West, with no accountability for vigilantes.
  • Enhanced-virality platforms thereby facilitate massive collective punishment for small or imagined offenses, with real-world consequences, including innocent people losing their jobs and being shamed into suicide
  • we don’t get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.
  • Since the tower fell, debates of all kinds have grown more and more confused. The most pervasive obstacle to good thinking is confirmation bias, which refers to the human tendency to search only for evidence that confirms our preferred beliefs
  • search engines were supercharging confirmation bias, making it far easier for people to find evidence for absurd beliefs and conspiracy theorie
  • The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument.
  • In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch describes the historical breakthrough in which Western societies developed an “epistemic operating system”—that is, a set of institutions for generating knowledge from the interactions of biased and cognitively flawed individuals
  • English law developed the adversarial system so that biased advocates could present both sides of a case to an impartial jury.
  • Newspapers full of lies evolved into professional journalistic enterprises, with norms that required seeking out multiple sides of a story, followed by editorial review, followed by fact-checking.
  • Universities evolved from cloistered medieval institutions into research powerhouses, creating a structure in which scholars put forth evidence-backed claims with the knowledge that other scholars around the world would be motivated to gain prestige by finding contrary evidence.
  • Part of America’s greatness in the 20th century came from having developed the most capable, vibrant, and productive network of knowledge-producing institutions in all of human history
  • But this arrangement, Rauch notes, “is not self-maintaining; it relies on an array of sometimes delicate social settings and understandings, and those need to be understood, affirmed, and protected.”
  • This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted
  • it was so pervasive that it established new behavioral norms backed by new policies seemingly overnight
  • Participants in our key institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back critiques of policies and ideas—even those presented in class by their students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong.
  • The stupefying process plays out differently on the right and the left because their activist wings subscribe to different narratives with different sacred values.
  • The “Hidden Tribes” study tells us that the “devoted conservatives” score highest on beliefs related to authoritarianism. They share a narrative in which America is eternally under threat from enemies outside and subversives within; they see life as a battle between patriots and traitors.
  • they are psychologically different from the larger group of “traditional conservatives” (19 percent of the population), who emphasize order, decorum, and slow rather than radical change.
  • The traditional punishment for treason is death, hence the battle cry on January 6: “Hang Mike Pence.”
  • Right-wing death threats, many delivered by anonymous accounts, are proving effective in cowing traditional conservatives
  • The wave of threats delivered to dissenting Republican members of Congress has similarly pushed many of the remaining moderates to quit or go silent, giving us a party ever more divorced from the conservative tradition, constitutional responsibility, and reality.
  • The stupidity on the right is most visible in the many conspiracy theories spreading across right-wing media and now into Congress.
  • The Democrats have also been hit hard by structural stupidity, though in a different way. In the Democratic Party, the struggle between the progressive wing and the more moderate factions is open and ongoing, and often the moderates win.
  • The problem is that the left controls the commanding heights of the culture: universities, news organizations, Hollywood, art museums, advertising, much of Silicon Valley, and the teachers’ unions and teaching colleges that shape K–12 education. And in many of those institutions, dissent has been stifled:
  • Liberals in the late 20th century shared a belief that the sociologist Christian Smith called the “liberal progress” narrative, in which America used to be horrifically unjust and repressive, but, thanks to the struggles of activists and heroes, has made (and continues to make) progress toward realizing the noble promise of its founding.
  • It is also the view of the “traditional liberals” in the “Hidden Tribes” study (11 percent of the population), who have strong humanitarian values, are older than average, and are largely the people leading America’s cultural and intellectual institutions.
  • when the newly viralized social-media platforms gave everyone a dart gun, it was younger progressive activists who did the most shooting, and they aimed a disproportionate number of their darts at these older liberal leaders.
  • Confused and fearful, the leaders rarely challenged the activists or their nonliberal narrative in which life at every institution is an eternal battle among identity groups over a zero-sum pie, and the people on top got there by oppressing the people on the bottom. This new narrative is rigidly egalitarian––focused on equality of outcomes, not of rights or opportunities. It is unconcerned with individual rights.
  • The universal charge against people who disagree with this narrative is not “traitor”; it is “racist,” “transphobe,” “Karen,” or some related scarlet letter marking the perpetrator as one who hates or harms a marginalized group.
  • The punishment that feels right for such crimes is not execution; it is public shaming and social death.
  • anyone on Twitter had already seen dozens of examples teaching the basic lesson: Don’t question your own side’s beliefs, policies, or actions. And when traditional liberals go silent, as so many did in the summer of 2020, the progressive activists’ more radical narrative takes over as the governing narrative of an organization.
  • This is why so many epistemic institutions seemed to “go woke” in rapid succession that year and the next, beginning with a wave of controversies and resignations at The New York Times and other newspapers, and continuing on to social-justice pronouncements by groups of doctors and medical associations
  • The problem is structural. Thanks to enhanced-virality social media, dissent is punished within many of our institutions, which means that bad ideas get elevated into official policy.
  • In a 2018 interview, Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, said that the way to deal with the media is “to flood the zone with shit.” He was describing the “firehose of falsehood” tactic pioneered by Russian disinformation programs to keep Americans confused, disoriented, and angry.
  • artificial intelligence is close to enabling the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation. The AI program GPT-3 is already so good that you can give it a topic and a tone and it will spit out as many essays as you like, typically with perfect grammar and a surprising level of coherence.
  • Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, explained that spreading falsehoods—whether through text, images, or deep-fake videos—will quickly become inconceivably easy. (She co-wrote the essay with GPT-3.)
  • American factions won’t be the only ones using AI and social media to generate attack content; our adversaries will too.
  • In the 20th century, America’s shared identity as the country leading the fight to make the world safe for democracy was a strong force that helped keep the culture and the polity together.
  • In the 21st century, America’s tech companies have rewired the world and created products that now appear to be corrosive to democracy, obstacles to shared understanding, and destroyers of the modern tower.
  • What changes are needed?
  • I can suggest three categories of reforms––three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era.
  • We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.
  • Harden Democratic Institutions
  • we must reform key institutions so that they can continue to function even if levels of anger, misinformation, and violence increase far above those we have today.
  • Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their district.
  • One example of such a reform is to end closed party primaries, replacing them with a single, nonpartisan, open primary from which the top several candidates advance to a general election that also uses ranked-choice voting
  • A second way to harden democratic institutions is to reduce the power of either political party to game the system in its favor, for example by drawing its preferred electoral districts or selecting the officials who will supervise elections
  • These jobs should all be done in a nonpartisan way.
  • Reform Social Media
  • Social media’s empowerment of the far left, the far right, domestic trolls, and foreign agents is creating a system that looks less like democracy and more like rule by the most aggressive.
  • it is within our power to reduce social media’s ability to dissolve trust and foment structural stupidity. Reforms should limit the platforms’ amplification of the aggressive fringes while giving more voice to what More in Common calls “the exhausted majority.”
  • the main problem with social media is not that some people post fake or toxic stuff; it’s that fake and outrage-inducing content can now attain a level of reach and influence that was not possible before
  • Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers.
  • One of the first orders of business should be compelling the platforms to share their data and their algorithms with academic researchers.
  • Prepare the Next Generation
  • Childhood has become more tightly circumscribed in recent generations––with less opportunity for free, unstructured play; less unsupervised time outside; more time online. Whatever else the effects of these shifts, they have likely impeded the development of abilities needed for effective self-governance for many young adults
  • Depression makes people less likely to want to engage with new people, ideas, and experiences. Anxiety makes new things seem more threatening. As these conditions have risen and as the lessons on nuanced social behavior learned through free play have been delayed, tolerance for diverse viewpoints and the ability to work out disputes have diminished among many young people
  • Students did not just say that they disagreed with visiting speakers; some said that those lectures would be dangerous, emotionally devastating, a form of violence. Because rates of teen depression and anxiety have continued to rise into the 2020s, we should expect these views to continue in the generations to follow, and indeed to become more severe.
  • The most important change we can make to reduce the damaging effects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have passed through puberty.
  • The age should be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held responsible for enforcing it.
  • et them out to play. Stop starving children of the experiences they most need to become good citizens: free play in mixed-age groups of children with minimal adult supervision
  • while social media has eroded the art of association throughout society, it may be leaving its deepest and most enduring marks on adolescents. A surge in rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among American teens began suddenly in the early 2010s. (The same thing happened to Canadian and British teens, at the same time.) The cause is not known, but the timing points to social media as a substantial contributor—the surge began just as the large majority of American teens became daily users of the major platforms.
  • What would it be like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? We know. It is a time of confusion and loss. But it is also a time to reflect, listen, and build.
  • In recent years, Americans have started hundreds of groups and organizations dedicated to building trust and friendship across the political divide, including BridgeUSA, Braver Angels (on whose board I serve), and many others listed at BridgeAlliance.us. We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us. We must change ourselves and our communities.
  • when we look away from our dysfunctional federal government, disconnect from social media, and talk with our neighbors directly, things seem more hopeful. Most Americans in the More in Common report are members of the “exhausted majority,” which is tired of the fighting and is willing to listen to the other side and compromise. Most Americans now see that social media is having a negative impact on the country, and are becoming more aware of its damaging effects on children.
37More

'Follow the science': As Year 3 of the pandemic begins, a simple slogan becomes a polit... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...logan-becomes-political-weapon science pandemic slogan philosophy implications truth knowledge bias
shared by Javier E on 13 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • advocates for each side in the masking debate are once again claiming the mantle of science to justify political positions
  • pleas to “follow the science” have consistently yielded to use of the phrase as a rhetorical land mine.
  • “so much is mixed up with science — risk and values and politics. The phrase can come off as sanctimonious,” she said, “and the danger is that it says, ‘These are the facts,’ when it should say, ‘This is the situation as we understand it now and that understanding will keep changing.’
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • The pandemic’s descent from medical emergency to political flash point can be mapped as a series of surges of bickering over that one simple phrase. “Follow the science!” people on both sides insisted, as the guidance from politicians and public health officials shifted over the past two years from anti-mask to pro-mask to “keep on masking” to more refined recommendations about which masks to wear and now to a spotty lifting of mandates.
  • demands that the other side “follow the science” are often a complete rejection of another person’s cultural and political identity: “It’s not just people believing the scientific research that they agree with. It’s that in this extreme polarization we live with, we totally discredit ideas because of who holds them.
  • “I’m struggling as much as anyone else,” she said. “Our job as informed citizens in the pandemic is to be like judges and synthesize information from both sides, but with the extreme polarization, nobody really trusts each other enough to know how to judge their information.
  • Many people end up putting their trust in some subset of the celebrity scientists they see online or on TV. “Follow the science” often means “follow the scientists” — a distinction that offers insight into why there’s so much division over how to cope with the virus,
  • although a slim majority of Americans they surveyed don’t believe that “scientists adjust their findings to get the answers they want,” 31 percent do believe scientists cook the books and another 16 percent were unsure.
  • Those who mistrust scientists were vastly less likely to be worried about getting covid-19 — and more likely to be supporters of former president Donald Trump,
  • A person’s beliefs about scientists’ integrity “is the strongest and most consistent predictor of views about … the threats from covid-19,”
  • When a large minority of Americans believe scientists’ conclusions are determined by their own opinions, that demonstrates a widespread “misunderstanding of scientific methods, uncertainty, and the incremental nature of scientific inquiry,” the sociologists concluded.
  • Americans’ confidence in science has declined in recent decades, especially among Republicans, according to Gallup polls
  • The survey found last year that 64 percent of Americans said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in science, down from 70 percent who said that back in 1975
  • Confidence in science jumped among Democrats, from 67 percent in the earlier poll to 79 percent last year, while Republicans’ confidence cratered during the same period from 72 percent to 45 percent.
  • The fact that both sides want to be on the side of “science” “bespeaks tremendous confidence or admiration for a thing called ‘science,’ ”
  • Even in this time of rising mistrust, everybody wants to have the experts on their side.
  • That’s been true in American debates regarding science for many years
  • Four decades ago, when arguments about climate change were fairly new, people who rejected the idea looked at studies showing a connection between burning coal and acid rain and dubbed them “junk science.” The “real” science, those critics said, showed otherwise.
  • “Even though the motive was to reject a scientific consensus, there was still a valorization of expertise,”
  • “Even people who took a horse dewormer when they got covid-19 were quick to note that the drug was created by a Nobel laureate,” he said. “Almost no one says they’re anti-science.”
  • “There isn’t a thing called ‘the science.’ There are multiple sciences with active disagreements with each other. Science isn’t static.”
  • The problem is that the phrase has become more a political slogan than a commitment to neutral inquiry, “which bespeaks tremendous ignorance about what science is,”
  • t scientists and laypeople alike are often guilty of presenting science as a monolithic statement of fact, rather than an ever-evolving search for evidence to support theories,
  • while scientists are trained to be comfortable with uncertainty, a pandemic that has killed and sickened millions has made many people eager for definitive solutions.
  • “I just wish when people say ‘follow the science,’ it’s not the end of what they say, but the beginning, followed by ‘and here’s the evidence,’
  • As much as political leaders may pledge to “follow the science,” they answer to constituents who want answers and progress, so the temptation is to overpromise.
  • It’s never easy to follow the science, many scientists warn, because people’s behaviors are shaped as much by fear, folklore and fake science as by well-vetted studies or evidence-based government guidance.
  • “Science cannot always overcome fear,”
  • Some of the states with the lowest covid case rates and highest vaccination rates nonetheless kept many students in remote learning for the longest time, a phenomenon she attributed to “letting fear dominate our narrative.”
  • “That’s been true of the history of science for a long time,” Gandhi said. “As much as we try to be rigorous about fact, science is always subject to the political biases of the time.”
  • A study published in September indicates that people who trust in science are actually more likely to believe fake scientific findings and to want to spread those falsehoods
  • The study, reported in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, found that trusting in science did not give people the tools they need to understand that the scientific method leads not to definitive answers, but to ever-evolving theories about how the world works.
  • Rather, people need to understand how the scientific method works, so they can ask good questions about studies.
  • Trust in science alone doesn’t arm people against misinformation,
  • Overloaded with news about studies and predictions about the virus’s future, many people just tune out the information flow,
  • That winding route is what science generally looks like, Swann said, so people who are frustrated and eager for solid answers are often drawn into dangerous “wells of misinformation, and they don’t even realize it,” she said. “If you were told something every day by people you trusted, you might believe it, too.”
  • With no consensus about how and when the pandemic might end, or about which public health measures to impose and how long to keep them in force, following the science seems like an invitation to a very winding, even circular path.
46More

The new science of death: 'There's something happening in the brain that makes no sense... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...iousness-near-death-experience death science brain science research psychology
shared by Javier E on 04 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Jimo Borjigin, a professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, had been troubled by the question of what happens to us when we die. She had read about the near-death experiences of certain cardiac-arrest survivors who had undergone extraordinary psychic journeys before being resuscitated. Sometimes, these people reported travelling outside of their bodies towards overwhelming sources of light where they were greeted by dead relatives. Others spoke of coming to a new understanding of their lives, or encountering beings of profound goodness
  • Borjigin didn’t believe the content of those stories was true – she didn’t think the souls of dying people actually travelled to an afterworld – but she suspected something very real was happening in those patients’ brains. In her own laboratory, she had discovered that rats undergo a dramatic storm of many neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine, after their hearts stop and their brains lose oxygen. She wondered if humans’ near-death experiences might spring from a similar phenomenon, and if it was occurring even in people who couldn’t be revived
  • when she looked at the scientific literature, she found little enlightenment. “To die is such an essential part of life,” she told me recently. “But we knew almost nothing about the dying brain.” So she decided to go back and figure out what had happened inside the brains of people who died at the University of Michigan neurointensive care unit.
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • Since the 1960s, advances in resuscitation had helped to revive thousands of people who might otherwise have died. About 10% or 20% of those people brought with them stories of near-death experiences in which they felt their souls or selves departing from their bodies
  • According to several international surveys and studies, one in 10 people claims to have had a near-death experience involving cardiac arrest, or a similar experience in circumstances where they may have come close to death. That’s roughly 800 million souls worldwide who may have dipped a toe in the afterlife.
  • In the 1970s, a small network of cardiologists, psychiatrists, medical sociologists and social psychologists in North America and Europe began investigating whether near-death experiences proved that dying is not the end of being, and that consciousness can exist independently of the brain. The field of near-death studies was born.
  • in 1975, an American medical student named Raymond Moody published a book called Life After Life.
  • Meanwhile, new technologies and techniques were helping doctors revive more and more people who, in earlier periods of history, would have almost certainly been permanently deceased.
  • “We are now at the point where we have both the tools and the means to scientifically answer the age-old question: What happens when we die?” wrote Sam Parnia, an accomplished resuscitation specialist and one of the world’s leading experts on near-death experiences, in 2006. Parnia himself was devising an international study to test whether patients could have conscious awareness even after they were found clinically dead.
  • Borjigin, together with several colleagues, took the first close look at the record of electrical activity in the brain of Patient One after she was taken off life support. What they discovered – in results reported for the first time last year – was almost entirely unexpected, and has the potential to rewrite our understanding of death.
  • “I believe what we found is only the tip of a vast iceberg,” Borjigin told me. “What’s still beneath the surface is a full account of how dying actually takes place. Because there’s something happening in there, in the brain, that makes no sense.”
  • Over the next 30 years, researchers collected thousands of case reports of people who had had near-death experiences
  • near-death studies was already splitting into several schools of belief, whose tensions continue to this day. One influential camp was made up of spiritualists, some of them evangelical Christians, who were convinced that near-death experiences were genuine sojourns in the land of the dead and divine
  • Moody was their most important spokesman; he eventually claimed to have had multiple past lives and built a “psychomanteum” in rural Alabama where people could attempt to summon the spirits of the dead by gazing into a dimly lit mirror.
  • It is no longer unheard of for people to be revived even six hours after being declared clinically dead. In 2011, Japanese doctors reported the case of a young woman who was found in a forest one morning after an overdose stopped her heart the previous night; using advanced technology to circulate blood and oxygen through her body, the doctors were able to revive her more than six hours later, and she was able to walk out of the hospital after three weeks of care
  • The second, and largest, faction of near-death researchers were the parapsychologists, those interested in phenomena that seemed to undermine the scientific orthodoxy that the mind could not exist independently of the brain. These researchers, who were by and large trained scientists following well established research methods, tended to believe that near-death experiences offered evidence that consciousness could persist after the death of the individua
  • Their aim was to find ways to test their theories of consciousness empirically, and to turn near-death studies into a legitimate scientific endeavour.
  • Finally, there emerged the smallest contingent of near-death researchers, who could be labelled the physicalists. These were scientists, many of whom studied the brain, who were committed to a strictly biological account of near-death experiences. Like dreams, the physicalists argued, near-death experiences might reveal psychological truths, but they did so through hallucinatory fictions that emerged from the workings of the body and the brain.
  • Between 1975, when Moody published Life After Life, and 1984, only 17 articles in the PubMed database of scientific publications mentioned near-death experiences. In the following decade, there were 62. In the most recent 10-year span, there were 221.
  • Today, there is a widespread sense throughout the community of near-death researchers that we are on the verge of great discoveries
  • “We really are in a crucial moment where we have to disentangle consciousness from responsiveness, and maybe question every state that we consider unconscious,”
  • “I think in 50 or 100 years time we will have discovered the entity that is consciousness,” he told me. “It will be taken for granted that it wasn’t produced by the brain, and it doesn’t die when you die.”
  • it is in large part because of a revolution in our ability to resuscitate people who have suffered cardiac arrest
  • In a medical setting, “clinical death” is said to occur at the moment the heart stops pumping blood, and the pulse stops. This is widely known as cardiac arrest
  • Loss of oxygen to the brain and other organs generally follows within seconds or minutes, although the complete cessation of activity in the heart and brain – which is often called “flatlining” or, in the case of the latter, “brain death” – may not occur for many minutes or even hours.
  • That began to change in 1960, when the combination of mouth-to-mouth ventilation, chest compressions and external defibrillation known as cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, was formalised. Shortly thereafter, a massive campaign was launched to educate clinicians and the public on CPR’s basic techniques, and soon people were being revived in previously unthinkable, if still modest, numbers.
  • scientists learned that, even in its acute final stages, death is not a point, but a process. After cardiac arrest, blood and oxygen stop circulating through the body, cells begin to break down, and normal electrical activity in the brain gets disrupted. But the organs don’t fail irreversibly right away, and the brain doesn’t necessarily cease functioning altogether. There is often still the possibility of a return to life. In some cases, cell death can be stopped or significantly slowed, the heart can be restarted, and brain function can be restored. In other words, the process of death can be reversed.
  • In his book, Moody distilled the reports of 150 people who had had intense, life-altering experiences in the moments surrounding a cardiac arrest. Although the reports varied, he found that they often shared one or more common features or themes. The narrative arc of the most detailed of those reports – departing the body and travelling through a long tunnel, having an out-of-body experience, encountering spirits and a being of light, one’s whole life flashing before one’s eyes, and returning to the body from some outer limit – became so canonical that the art critic Robert Hughes could refer to it years later as “the familiar kitsch of near-death experience”.
  • In 2019, a British woman named Audrey Schoeman who was caught in a snowstorm spent six hours in cardiac arrest before doctors brought her back to life with no evident brain damage.
  • That is a key tenet of the parapsychologists’ arguments: if there is consciousness without brain activity, then consciousness must dwell somewhere beyond the brain
  • Some of the parapsychologists speculate that it is a “non-local” force that pervades the universe, like electromagnetism. This force is received by the brain, but is not generated by it, the way a television receives a broadcast.
  • In order for this argument to hold, something else has to be true: near-death experiences have to happen during death, after the brain shuts down
  • To prove this, parapsychologists point to a number of rare but astounding cases known as “veridical” near-death experiences, in which patients seem to report details from the operating room that they might have known only if they had conscious awareness during the time that they were clinically dead.
  • At the very least, Parnia and his colleagues have written, such phenomena are “inexplicable through current neuroscientific models”. Unfortunately for the parapsychologists, however, none of the reports of post-death awareness holds up to strict scientific scrutiny. “There are many claims of this kind, but in my long decades of research into out-of-body and near-death experiences I never met any convincing evidence that this is true,”
  • In other cases, there’s not enough evidence to prove that the experiences reported by cardiac arrest survivors happened when their brains were shut down, as opposed to in the period before or after they supposedly “flatlined”. “So far, there is no sufficiently rigorous, convincing empirical evidence that people can observe their surroundings during a near-death experience,”
  • The parapsychologists tend to push back by arguing that even if each of the cases of veridical near-death experiences leaves room for scientific doubt, surely the accumulation of dozens of these reports must count for something. But that argument can be turned on its head: if there are so many genuine instances of consciousness surviving death, then why should it have so far proven impossible to catch one empirically?
  • The spiritualists and parapsychologists are right to insist that something deeply weird is happening to people when they die, but they are wrong to assume it is happening in the next life rather than this one. At least, that is the implication of what Jimo Borjigin found when she investigated the case of Patient One.
  • In the moments after Patient One was taken off oxygen, there was a surge of activity in her dying brain. Areas that had been nearly silent while she was on life support suddenly thrummed with high-frequency electrical signals called gamma waves. In particular, the parts of the brain that scientists consider a “hot zone” for consciousness became dramatically alive. In one section, the signals remained detectable for more than six minutes. In another, they were 11 to 12 times higher than they had been before Patient One’s ventilator was removed.
  • “As she died, Patient One’s brain was functioning in a kind of hyperdrive,” Borjigin told me. For about two minutes after her oxygen was cut off, there was an intense synchronisation of her brain waves, a state associated with many cognitive functions, including heightened attention and memory. The synchronisation dampened for about 18 seconds, then intensified again for more than four minutes. It faded for a minute, then came back for a third time.
  • n those same periods of dying, different parts of Patient One’s brain were suddenly in close communication with each other. The most intense connections started immediately after her oxygen stopped, and lasted for nearly four minutes. There was another burst of connectivity more than five minutes and 20 seconds after she was taken off life support. In particular, areas of her brain associated with processing conscious experience – areas that are active when we move through the waking world, and when we have vivid dreams – were communicating with those involved in memory formation. So were parts of the brain associated with empathy. Even as she slipped irre
  • something that looked astonishingly like life was taking place over several minutes in Patient One’s brain.
  • Although a few earlier instances of brain waves had been reported in dying human brains, nothing as detailed and complex as what occurred in Patient One had ever been detected.
  • Given the levels of activity and connectivity in particular regions of her dying brain, Borjigin believes it’s likely that Patient One had a profound near-death experience with many of its major features: out-of-body sensations, visions of light, feelings of joy or serenity, and moral re-evaluations of one’s life. Of course,
  • “The brain, contrary to everybody’s belief, is actually super active during cardiac arrest,” Borjigin said. Death may be far more alive than we ever thought possible.
  • “The brain is so resilient, the heart is so resilient, that it takes years of abuse to kill them,” she pointed out. “Why then, without oxygen, can a perfectly healthy person die within 30 minutes, irreversibly?”
  • Evidence is already emerging that even total brain death may someday be reversible. In 2019, scientists at Yale University harvested the brains of pigs that had been decapitated in a commercial slaughterhouse four hours earlier. Then they perfused the brains for six hours with a special cocktail of drugs and synthetic blood. Astoundingly, some of the cells in the brains began to show metabolic activity again, and some of the synapses even began firing.
10More

History News Network | Why Historians Need Imagination - 2 views

historynewsnetwork.org/...163280 history imagination reality fantasy
shared by Javier E on 19 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • There are two types of imagination: Fantasy-directed imagination, and Reality-directed imagination.
  • Fantasy-directed imagination is aimed at depicting a scenario that goes beyond reality. An example of fantasy-directed imagination would be the creation of Mickey Mouse.
  • Reality-directed imagination, on the other hand, is aimed at depicting a scenario that reflectsreality, whether as it is known at present or as it is known to have existed in the past. An example of reality-directed imagination would be the study of Napoleon.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Reality-directed imagination, for its part, endeavours to re-create, in the intellectual realm, actions and events that have existed or have taken place, which we may have plenty or partial information about.
  • Reality-directed imagination is thus a means to retain a solid sense of reality rather than to submerge into the everlasting landscape of fantasy. We imagine what was and try to afford it life.  
  • Without reality-directed imagination, on the other hand, the study of history would be well-nigh impossible.
  • By resorting to reality-directed imagination we are able intellectually to disconnect ourselves from the present; to visualize, like a landscape gradually making its appearance as we move backwards in time, the setting in which an event occurred or the personal features of an individual we follow. We are able emotionally to connect ourselves to the prevailing conditions or to a person's thoughts.
  • In the study of history we make use of reality-directed imagination as we depict in our minds the characters of individuals or the nature of events. We even try to fill the gaps by resorting to our imagination ever vigilant not to lose sight of reality as it was. In other words, we attempt to imagine the unknown by resorting to the known.
  • Without imagination as a study-device, the learning of history becomes well-nigh impossible, for the information furnished to us is rendered unintelligible. We are unable to relate to it in any meaningful manner. We assess it in a mechanical way, devoid of image, sound and feel. Our attempt to understand it leads to a dead-end for we cannot leap forward from the stale fact before us and relate it to other facts beyond it.
  • Without imagination we cannot compare, distinguish and separate; we cannot know the difference between the particular and the general. In order to study history we need to avoid the mechanical, on the one hand, and the fantastic, on the other. In other words, we ought to eschew both lack of imagination and fantasy-directed imagination; the first does not allow us to proceed forward while the latter leads us to the realm of the unreal.
« First ‹ Previous 41 - 60 of 1309 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page