Some behavioral interventions do seem to lead to positive changes, such as automatically enrolling children in school free lunch programs or simplifying mortgage information for aspiring homeowners. (Whether one might call such interventions “nudges,” however, is debatable.)
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shared by Javier E on 01 Dec 23
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Opinion | How Behavioral Economics Took Over America - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...human-behavior-nudge.html
behavioral economics nudge priming science research psychology ideology
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it’s not clear we need to appeal to psychology studies to make some common-sense changes, especially since the scientific rigor of these studies is shaky at best.
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Nudges are related to a larger area of research on “priming,” which tests how behavior changes in response to what we think about or even see without noticing
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Behavioral economics is at the center of the so-called replication crisis, a euphemism for the uncomfortable fact that the results of a significant percentage of social science experiments can’t be reproduced in subsequent trials
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this key result was not replicated in similar experiments, undermining confidence in a whole area of study. It’s obvious that we do associate old age and slower walking, and we probably do slow down sometimes when thinking about older people. It’s just not clear that that’s a law of the mind.
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And these attempts to “correct” human behavior are based on tenuous science. The replication crisis doesn’t have a simple solution
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Journals have instituted reforms like having scientists preregister their hypotheses to avoid the possibility of results being manipulated during the research. But that doesn’t change how many uncertain results are already out there, with a knock-on effect that ripples through huge segments of quantitative social scienc
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The Johns Hopkins science historian Ruth Leys, author of a forthcoming book on priming research, points out that cognitive science is especially prone to building future studies off disputed results. Despite the replication crisis, these fields are a “train on wheels, the track is laid and almost nothing stops them,” Dr. Leys said.
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These cases result from lax standards around data collection, which will hopefully be corrected. But they also result from strong financial incentives: the possibility of salaries, book deals and speaking and consulting fees that range into the millions. Researchers can get those prizes only if they can show “significant” findings.
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It is no coincidence that behavioral economics, from Dr. Kahneman to today, tends to be pro-business. Science should be not just reproducible, but also free of obvious ideology.
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Technology and modern data science have only further entrenched behavioral economics. Its findings have greatly influenced algorithm design.
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The collection of personal data about our movements, purchases and preferences inform interventions in our behavior from the grocery store to who is arrested by the police.
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Setting people up for safety and success and providing good default options isn’t bad in itself, but there are more sinister uses as well. After all, not everyone who wants to exploit your cognitive biases has your best interests at heart.
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Despite all its flaws, behavioral economics continues to drive public policy, market research and the design of digital interfaces.
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One might think that a kind of moratorium on applying such dubious science would be in order — except that enacting one would be practically impossible. These ideas are so embedded in our institutions and everyday life that a full-scale audit of the behavioral sciences would require bringing much of our society to a standstill.
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There is no peer review for algorithms that determine entry to a stadium or access to credit. To perform even the most banal, everyday actions, you have to put implicit trust in unverified scientific results.
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We can’t afford to defer questions about human nature, and the social and political policies that come from them, to commercialized “research” that is scientifically questionable and driven by ideology. Behavioral economics claims that humans aren’t rational.
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That’s a philosophical claim, not a scientific one, and it should be fought out in a rigorous marketplace of ideas. Instead of unearthing real, valuable knowledge of human nature, behavioral economics gives us “one weird trick” to lose weight or quit smoking.
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Humans may not be perfectly rational, but we can do better than the predictably irrational consequences that behavioral economics has left us with today.
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shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 23
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An Existential Problem in the Search for Alien Life - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...676238
life problem essence controversy n=1 definition explanation science research knowledge
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since the days of Aristotle, scientists and philosophers have struggled to draw a precise line between what is living and what is not, often returning to criteria such as self-organization, metabolism, and reproduction but never finding a definition that includes, and excludes, all the right things.
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If you say life consumes fuel to sustain itself with energy, you risk including fire; if you demand the ability to reproduce, you exclude mules. NASA hasn’t been able to do better than a working definition: “Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”
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it lacks practical application. If humans found something on another planet that seemed to be alive, how much time would we have to sit around and wait for it to evolve?
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The only life we know is life on Earth. Some scientists call this the n=1 problem, where n is the number of examples from which we can generalize.
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Cronin studies the origin of life, also a major interest of Walker’s, and it turned out that, when expressed in math, their ideas were essentially the same. They had both zeroed in on complexity as a hallmark of life. Cronin is devising a way to systematize and measure complexity, which he calls Assembly Theory.
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What we really want is more than a definition of life. We want to know what life, fundamentally, is. For that kind of understanding, scientists turn to theories. A theory is a scientific fundamental. It not only answers questions, but frames them, opening new lines of inquiry. It explains our observations and yields predictions for future experiments to test.
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Consider the difference between defining gravity as “the force that makes an apple fall to the ground” and explaining it, as Newton did, as the universal attraction between all particles in the universe, proportional to the product of their masses and so on. A definition tells us what we already know; a theory changes how we understand things.
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the potential rewards of unlocking a theory of life have captivated a clutch of researchers from a diverse set of disciplines. “There are certain things in life that seem very hard to explain,” Sara Imari Walker, a physicist at Arizona State University who has been at the vanguard of this work, told me. “If you scratch under the surface, I think there is some structure that suggests formalization and mathematical laws.”
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Walker doesn’t think about life as a biologist—or an astrobiologist—does. When she talks about signs of life, she doesn’t talk about carbon, or water, or RNA, or phosphine. She reaches for different examples: a cup, a cellphone, a chair. These objects are not alive, of course, but they’re clearly products of life. In Walker’s view, this is because of their complexity. Life brings complexity into the universe, she says, in its own being and in its products, because it has memory: in DNA, in repeating molecular reactions, in the instructions for making a chair.
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He measures the complexity of an object—say, a molecule—by calculating the number of steps necessary to put the object’s smallest building blocks together in that certain way. His lab has found, for example, when testing a wide range of molecules, that those with an “assembly number” above 15 were exclusively the products of life. Life makes some simpler molecules, too, but only life seems to make molecules that are so complex.
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I reach for the theory of gravity as a familiar parallel. Someone might ask, “Okay, so in terms of gravity, where are we in terms of our understanding of life? Like, Newton?” Further back, further back, I say. Walker compares us to pre-Copernican astronomers, reliant on epicycles, little orbits within orbits, to make sense of the motion we observe in the sky. Cleland has put it in terms of chemistry, in which case we’re alchemists, not even true chemists yet
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Walker’s whole notion is that it’s not only theoretically possible but genuinely achievable to identify something smaller—much smaller—that still nonetheless simply must be the result of life. The model would, in a sense, function like biosignatures as an indication of life that could be searched for. But it would drastically improve and expand the targets.
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Walker would use the theory to predict what life on a given planet might look like. It would require knowing a lot about the planet—information we might have about Venus, but not yet about a distant exoplanet—but, crucially, would not depend at all on how life on Earth works, what life on Earth might do with those materials.
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Without the ability to divorce the search for alien life from the example of life we know, Walker thinks, a search is almost pointless. “Any small fluctuations in simple chemistry can actually drive you down really radically different evolutionary pathways,” she told me. “I can’t imagine [life] inventing the same biochemistry on two worlds.”
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Walker’s approach is grounded in the work of, among others, the philosopher of science Carol Cleland, who wrote The Quest for a Universal Theory of Life.
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she warns that any theory of life, just like a definition, cannot be constrained by the one example of life we currently know. “It’s a mistake to start theorizing on the basis of a single example, even if you’re trying hard not to be Earth-centric. Because you’re going to be Earth-centric,” Cleland told me. In other words, until we find other examples of life, we won’t have enough data from which to devise a theory. Abstracting away from Earthliness isn’t a way to be agnostic, Cleland argues. It’s a way to be too abstract.
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Cleland calls for a more flexible search guided by what she calls “tentative criteria.” Such a search would have a sense of what we’re looking for, but also be open to anomalies that challenge our preconceptions, detections that aren’t life as we expected but aren’t familiar not-life either—neither a flower nor a rock
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it speaks to the hope that exploration and discovery might truly expand our understanding of the cosmos and our own world.
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The astrobiologist Kimberley Warren-Rhodes studies life on Earth that lives at the borders of known habitability, such as in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The point of her experiments is to better understand how life might persist—and how it might be found—on Mars. “Biology follows some rules,” she told me. The more of those rules you observe, the better sense you have of where to look on other worlds.
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In this light, the most immediate concern in our search for extraterrestrial life might be less that we only know about life on Earth, and more that we don’t even know that much about life on Earth in the first place. “I would say we understand about 5 percent,” Warren-Rhodes estimates of our cumulative knowledge. N=1 is a problem, and we might be at more like n=.05.
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who knows how strange life on another world might be? What if life as we know it is the wrong life to be looking for?
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shared by Javier E on 21 Oct 23
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'Oppenheimer,' 'The Maniac' and Our Terrifying Prometheus Moment - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...hn-von-neumann-prometheus.html
progress value-neutral science modernity AI nuclear power prometheus knowledge overreach tech research
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Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire from the gods of Olympus and gave it to human beings, setting us on a path of glory and disaster and incurring the jealous wrath of Zeus. In the modern world, especially since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, he has served as a symbol of progress and peril, an avatar of both the liberating power of knowledge and the dangers of technological overreach.
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More than 200 years after the Shelleys, Prometheus is having another moment, one closer in spirit to Mary’s terrifying ambivalence than to Percy’s fulsome gratitude. As technological optimism curdles in the face of cyber-capitalist villainy, climate disaster and what even some of its proponents warn is the existential threat of A.I., that ancient fire looks less like an ember of divine ingenuity than the start of a conflagration. Prometheus is what we call our capacity for self-destruction.
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Annie Dorsen’s theater piece “Prometheus Firebringer,” which was performed at Theater for a New Audience in September, updates the Greek myth for the age of artificial intelligence, using A.I. to weave a cautionary tale that my colleague Laura Collins-Hughes called “forcefully beneficial as an examination of our obeisance to technology.”
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Something similar might be said about “The Maniac,” Benjamín Labatut’s new novel, whose designated Prometheus is the Hungarian-born polymath John von Neumann, a pioneer of A.I. as well as an originator of game theory.
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both narratives are grounded in fact, using the lives and ideas of real people as fodder for allegory and attempting to write a new mythology of the modern world.
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Oppenheimer wasn’t a principal author of that theory. Those scientists, among them Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg, were characters in Labatut’s previous novel, “When We Cease to Understand the World.” That book provides harrowing illumination of a zone where scientific insight becomes indistinguishable from madness or, perhaps, divine inspiration. The basic truths of the new science seem to explode all common sense: A particle is also a wave; one thing can be in many places at once; “scientific method and its object could no longer be prised apart.”
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More than most intellectual bastions, the institute is a house of theory. The Promethean mad scientists of the 19th century were creatures of the laboratory, tinkering away at their infernal machines and homemade monsters. Their 20th-century counterparts were more likely to be found at the chalkboard, scratching out our future in charts, equations and lines of code.
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The consequences are real enough, of course. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed at least 100,000 people. Their successor weapons, which Oppenheimer opposed, threatened to kill everybody els
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on Neumann and Oppenheimer were close contemporaries, born a year apart to prosperous, assimilated Jewish families in Budapest and New York. Von Neumann, conversant in theoretical physics, mathematics and analytic philosophy, worked for Oppenheimer at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. He spent most of his career at the Institute for Advanced Study, where Oppenheimer served as director after the war.
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the intellectual drama of “Oppenheimer” — as distinct from the dramas of his personal life and his political fate — is about how abstraction becomes reality. The atomic bomb may be, for the soldiers and politicians, a powerful strategic tool in war and diplomacy. For the scientists, it’s something else: a proof of concept, a concrete manifestation of quantum theory.
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. Oppenheimer’s designation as Prometheus is precise. He snatched a spark of quantum insight from those divinities and handed it to Harry S. Truman and the U.S. Army Air Forces.
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Labatut’s account of von Neumann is, if anything, more unsettling than “Oppenheimer.” We had decades to get used to the specter of nuclear annihilation, and since the end of the Cold War it has been overshadowed by other terrors. A.I., on the other hand, seems newly sprung from science fiction, and especially terrifying because we can’t quite grasp what it will become.
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Von Neumann, who died in 1957, did not teach machines to play Go. But when asked “what it would take for a computer, or some other mechanical entity, to begin to think and behave like a human being,” he replied that “it would have to play, like a child.”
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MANIAC. The name was an acronym for “Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer,” which doesn’t sound like much of a threat. But von Neumann saw no limit to its potential. “If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do,” he declared, “then I can always make a machine which will do just that.” MANIAC didn’t just represent a powerful new kind of machine, but “a new type of life.”
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If Oppenheimer took hold of the sacred fire of atomic power, von Neumann’s theft was bolder and perhaps more insidious: He stole a piece of the human essence. He’s not only a modern Prometheus; he’s a second Frankenstein, creator of an all but human, potentially more than human monster.
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“Technological power as such is always an ambivalent achievement,” Labatut’s von Neumann writes toward the end of his life, “and science is neutral all through, providing only means of control applicable to any purpose, and indifferent to all. It is not the particularly perverse destructiveness of one specific invention that creates danger. The danger is intrinsic. For progress there is no cure.”
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(1) Mimetic Collapse, Our Destiny - Freddie deBoer - 0 views
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this recent piece from The New York Times Magazine, which argues that the artistic obsession with novelty and experimentation, the primary obsession of modernism and so something like the default goal of artists for more than a century, has recently run aground. This turn from the primacy of the new does not stem from a choice to reject it, but because culture is truly spent, and can produce nothing original
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the condition that Farago describes is ultimately the same condition that leads Rolling Stone to publish an anti-Infinite Jest piece in twenty goddamn twenty-three - discursive exhaustion, the inevitable dark side of meme culture, the sputtering firehose of human expression that is the internet running dry. CT Jones wrote that piece because it’s a thing people write, Rolling Stone published it because it’s a thing publications publish, and people read it because it’s a thing people are known to think. These are not ideas so much as they are the impressions of where ideas once were, like the lines you find on your face the morning after you sleep on the wrong pillow.
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The litbro, in other words, is a simulacra, a symbol that has eaten what it was meant to symbolize, a representation of something that has never existed. The idea is Jean Baudrillard’s, expressed in several texts but most famously in Simulacra & Sign, published in 1981
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In it, Baudrillard argues that there are four phases of the image - a faithful depiction of that which really is, an unfaithful depiction of that which really is, a depiction that covers up for the fact that there is nothing which is actually being depicted, and the simulacra, which exists in a human culture of such universal equivalency that no one has the grounding necessary to know what “reality” might even be outside of equivalencies, outside of depiction
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at this stage, the litbro really exists precisely within Baudrillard’s concepts - it is a representation of someone else’s representation, a second-hand depiction, an archetype that is now developed fully through reference to itself rather than to some underlying reality. Baudrillard said that the development of simulacra is “a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.”
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Another example you often hear is the 1950s diner, the joint that has the neon signs and the art deco styling and the mini jukeboxes at the tables. This classic bit of Americana is not, in fact, based on what diners were like in the 1950s; it’s someone’s idea of what 1950s diners were like, which then spread mimetically from the actual physical 1950s diners that had been built to films and television, which then acted as “proof” that the imaginary diners were real, creating a social expectation of what a diner looks like that diner owners then felt pressure to fulfill…. Eventually most people came to believe that this is what diners were like in the 1950s. The point, though, is not that this is an act of deception. The point is that the consumerist reality in which these restaurants exists obliterates any belief in a true or false depiction. (No one cares whether the classic 1950s diner actually depicts a historical truth, really
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George Orwell: The Prevention of Literature - The Atlantic - 0 views
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the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of antisocial selfishness
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the controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy over the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies.
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What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias, and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers
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The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism.
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the writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always branded as a mere egoist, He is accused, that is, either of wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current, of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privileges.
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Each of them tacitly claims that “the truth” has already been revealed, and that the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly aware of “the truth” and merely resists it out of selfish motives.
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Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and fell, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings.
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known facts are suppressed and distorted to such an extent as to make it doubtful whether a true history of our times can ever be written.
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A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened
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Then, again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revaluation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but clearly it is likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment.
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The friends of totalitarianism in England usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or, on the other hand, that modem physics has proved that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism.
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I Was Trying to Build My Son's Resilience, Not Scar Him for Life - The New York Times - 0 views
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Resilience is a popular term in modern psychology that, put simply, refers to the ability to recover and move on from adverse events, failure or change.
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“We don’t call it ‘character’ anymore,” said Jelena Kecmanovic, director of Arlington/DC Behavior Therapy Institute. “We call it the ability to tolerate distress, the ability to tolerate uncertainty.”
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Studies suggest that resilience in kids is associated with things like empathy, coping skills and problem-solving, though this research is often done on children in extreme circumstances and may not apply to everybody
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many experts are starting to see building resilience as an effective way to prevent youth anxiety and depression.
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For instance, it’s important that children have a loving and supportive foundation before they go out and take risks that build resilience
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“Challenges” are challenging only if they are hard. Child psychologists often talk about the “zone of proximal development” — the area between what a child can do without any help and what a child can’t do, even with help
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How do you find the bar? Dr. Ginsburg recommends asking your child: “What do you think you can handle? What do you think you can handle with me by your side?”
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Sometimes parents just have to lay down the law and force children to break out of their comfort zone
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“If you don’t persevere through something that’s a little bit hard, sometimes you never get the benefits,”
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don’t expect your kid to appreciate your efforts, Dr. Kecmanovic said: “They will scream ‘I hate you
Critic's Notebook: How Inequality Became a Hot Topic in Economics - The New York Times - 0 views
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shared by Javier E on 09 Nov 23
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(1) This Is Why You Don't Trust the Polls - by Jonathan V. Last - 0 views
plus.thebulwark.com/...s-why-you-dont-trust-the-polls
polls reliability JVL analysis psychology research knowledge
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The reason people have come to believe that polls are wrong is because the polls describe a reality that is utterly counter to what should be happening according to history, norms, and standard
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There is no universe in which this election should be close. When we see polls showing that it’s actually very close, we recoil from them.
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Nothing about it makes sense, or fits within existing patterns. We are in the middle of a genuine authoritarian attempt, which means that our baseline reality has shifted. None of us has been in a place like this pre-2016.
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As a result, the smell tests we used to in the Before Times have become unreliable, because what was once unthinkable is now routine.
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A Hair-Raising Hypothesis About Rodent Hair - The New York Times - 0 views
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Mice compensate with sharp senses of sight, hearing and smell. But they may have another set of tools we’ve overlooked. A paper published last week in Royal Society Open Science details striking similarities between the internal structures of certain small mammal and marsupial hairs and those of man-made optical instruments.
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Over the years, he has developed an appreciation for “how comfortable animals are in complete darkness,” he said. That led him to wonder about the extent of their sensory powers.
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Observations of predator behavior further piqued his interest. While filming and playing back his videos, he noted how cats stack their bodies behind their faces when they’re hunting. He interprets this, he said, as cats “trying to hide their heat” with their cold noses. He has also observed barn owls twisting as they swoop down, perhaps to shield their warmer parts — legs and wingpits — with cooler ones.
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Eventually, these and other musings led Dr. Baker to place mouse hairs under a microscope. As it came into view, he felt a strong sense of familiarity. The guard hair in particular — the bristliest type of mouse hair — contained evenly-spaced bands of pigment that, to Dr. Baker, closely resembled structures that allow optical sensors to tune into specific wavelengths of light.
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Thermal cameras, for instance, focus specifically on 10-micron radiation: the slice of the spectrum that most closely corresponds with heat released by living things. By measuring the stripes, Dr. Baker found they were tuned to 10 microns as well — apparently homed in on life’s most common heat signature. “That was my Eureka moment,” he said.
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shared by Javier E on 08 Jan 22
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The James Webb Telescope Finishes Deployment in Space - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...telescope-nasa-deployment.html
telescope cooperation science research technology space
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Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Observatories, who chaired a report that led to what would become the Webb telescope, said “what resonates at this moment is the extraordinary ability of our species to collaborate, to organize thousands of people to work carefully, relentlessly, unselfishly, and seemingly endlessly toward some greater human good.”
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Chanda Prescod Weinstein, an astrophysicist at the University of New Hampshire, echoed his remarks: “This is such a reminder of how successful people can be when they work together.”
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While the telescope is considered fully deployed, much remains to be completed. There are still 49 of those “single point failures,” according to Mr. Menzel. Problems with any of them could affect the mission’s individual instruments or the entire spacecraft.
Opinion | It's 2086. This Is What American History Could Look Like. - The New York Times - 0 views
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shared by Javier E on 15 Feb 22
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Digital kompromat is changing our behaviour | Comment | The Times - 0 views
www.thetimes.co.uk/...anging-our-behaviour-88g8q7l8c
privacy kompromat surveillance god punishment incentives morality
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Eyes and ears everywhere, the sort of stuff that makes civil libertarians recite prophetic lines from Nineteen Eighty-Four: “You had to live . . . in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinised.”
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Many studies have proved the rather obvious idea that we act differently when we know we are being watched. This instinct to alter our behaviour under watchful eyes is so strong that the mere presence of a picture of eyes can encourage pro-social behaviour and discourage the antisocial sort.
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Researchers found that putting a picture of human eyes on a charity donation bucket increased donations by 48 per cent. In another experiment, pictures of a stern male gaze were placed in spots around a university campus where bike theft was rife. The robberies then plummeted by 65 per cent.
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For centuries humans felt they were watched and judged by an all-seeing God who could condemn them to hell if they sinned heavily. The fear of divine punishment shaped private behaviour, applying a brake on some of our worst impulses.
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it also seems sensible to assume that in the absence of an all-seeing deity threatening fire and brimstone, the brakes on devious or selfish behaviour in private will be eased, resulting in more “what’s the harm?” behaviour, more dabbling in the grey area between right and wrong, more secretive cruelty or casual selfishness.
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Gradually, the fear of being watched by God and going to hell is being replaced by a fear of being recorded by technology and suffering the hell of public shame.
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scandals might also act as a warning that in the age of the smartphone, the space for “getting away with it” has shrunk considerably.
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shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 22
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Opinion | Beijing Olympics: Why Mikaela Shiffrin Stumbled, and Why We All Stumble - The... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...in-olympics-combined-fall.html
failure distraction recency noise disruption anxiety grief worry
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Humans are biologically hard-wired to crave a sense of control and certainty over what will happen in the future.
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But with that comes a tendency to overfixate on the details of our performance, which can get in the way of achieving our best.
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Instead of focusing on what we hope to achieve — at tomorrow’s board meeting, at that cocktail party we’re braving solo, at a major exam — our brain is preoccupied by running through scenarios to avoid. Unfortunately, this does nothing to help prepare us, and only invites an overattention to details best left outside conscious awareness — noise.
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Studies have found that simply talking on the phone while walking actually slows down and disrupts our gait
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When our brain is processing complex emotions and stressors, it hinders our ability to function at our best.
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As I tell my students, remember to play your whole movie — not just the clip of your latest stumble on repeat
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If a phone call is enough to disrupt our performance of basic tasks, we should be especially mindful of cognitive loads associated with grief, loss and general uncertainty about what is to come. All are major triggers for depression and anxiety, and profoundly affect our ability to perform even the most routine, practiced tasks.
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holding tightly on to our latest failures is a common phenomenon, thanks to the recency effect — a cognitive bias that prioritizes our most recent experiences over past ones. This natural tendency sends our brain the wrong messages, and makes us forget how skilled, credentialed or qualified we really are
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Apple News Plus Review: Good Value, But Apple Needs to Fine Tune This | Tom's Guide - 0 views
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For $9.99 a month, News+ gives you access to more than 300 magazines, along with news articles from The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times.
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if you want to find a specific magazine within the News+ tab, be prepared to give that scrolling finger a workout. There's no search field in the News+ tab for typing in a magazine title, so you've got to tap on Apple's catalog and scroll until you find what you're looking for
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You can browse by category from the home screen, which reduces the number of covers you have to sort through a little bit.
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Below the browsing menu and list of categories, you'll find the My Magazines section, which contains the publications you're currently looking at, plus issues you've downloaded.
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(The desktop version of News+ handles things better — there's a persistent search bar in the upper left corner of the app.)
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To find a specific title in News+ (without scrolling anyhow), head over to the Following tab directly to the right of the News+ in the News app. On that screen, there's a search field, and you can type in publication titles to bring up content from both News+ and the free News section
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The most frequently used section of News+ figures to be My Magazines, though to be truly useful, it's going to need a little fine tuning.
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Whatever magazine I started reading in News Plus — whether it was the latest Vanity Fair or the New Republic — would pop in My Magazines under Reading Now.
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At present, it appears the only way to make a magazine stay in My Magazines is to download it from the cloud, something you do by tapping the cloud icon next to the cover. I couldn't find any way to designate a magazine as one of my favorites from within News+, so if I want to find a new issue or revisit an old one, I'm left with Apple's clunky search feature
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Speaking of back issues, when you're within a magazine in News+, just tap the magazine's title at the top of the screen. You'll see a list of previous issues for that title, and in some cases, you'll see current headlines and articles from that publication's website
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Select a current issue of a magazine, and you'll get a title page with a tappable table of contents. In most cases, there's no description for the article, so you'll just have to hope that the headline you're tapping on gives you a good idea of what to expect
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From within the article, a Next button lets you skip ahead to the next story in an issue, while an Open button returns you to the table of contents.
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Be aware that some publications, such as New Republic, simply feature PDFs of their current issues instead of formats optimized for digital devices
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The New Yorker splits the difference, with no table of contents and PDFs of ad pages from the print magazine interspersed between scrollable articles. I
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You have the option of signifying that you love or hate stories, which will help fine-tune News+'s recommendations, and you can add many articles to your Safari reading list
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The lines between what's free and what's paid also seem a bit blurred, even with the separate News+ tab
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how frequently is new content going to surface on News+? Will all back issues get the unappealing PDF treatment
Laurie Santos on Why Her Yale Students Have so Much Anxiety - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...laurie-santos-interview.html
happiness studies lessons complacency practices beliefs intuition
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Opinion | Guns, Germs, Bitcoin and the Antisocial Right - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...isinformation-coronavirus.html
individualism alt-right right-wing anti-government ideology guns bitcoin vaccine crisis government state of nature
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What do these examples have in common? As Thomas Hobbes could have told you, human beings can only flourish, can only avoid a state of nature in which lives are “nasty, brutish and short,” if they participate in a “commonwealth” — a society in which government takes on much of the responsibility for making life secure.
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Thus, we have law enforcement precisely so individuals don’t have to go around armed to protect themselves against other people’s violence.
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Public health policy, if you think about it, reflects the same principle. Individuals can and should take responsibility for their own health, when they can; but the nature of infectious disease means that there is an essential role for collective action
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the need for regulation to maintain the reliability of essential aspects of the economy like electricity supply and the monetary system.
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Which is why I’m calling the modern American right antisocial — because its members reject any policy that relies on social cooperation, and they want us to return instead to Hobbes’s dystopian state of nature
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why Republicans have become fanatics about cryptocurrency, to the extent that one Senate candidate has defined his position as being “pro-God, pro-family, pro-Bitcoin.” The answer, I’d argue, is that Bitcoin plays into a fantasy of self-sufficient individualism, of protecting your family with your personal AR-15, treating your Covid with an anti-parasite drug or urine and managing your financial affairs with privately created money, untainted by institutions like governments or banks.
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In the end, none of this will work. Government exists for a reason. But the right’s constant attacks on essential government functions will take a toll, making all of our lives nastier, more brutish and shorter.
How 'Trustless' Is Bitcoin, Really? - The New York Times - 1 views
Opinion | Why Strangers Are Good for Us - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...trangers-talking-benefits.html
isolation social distancing stranger discourse casual community contact
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How the Internet Is Like a Dying Star - 0 views
newsletters.theatlantic.com/...al-media-reactionary-doom-loop
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