“I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe,” the Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman wrote in his lovely prose poem about evolution. “The fact that we are connected through space and time,” evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis observed of the interconnectedness of the universe, “shows that life is a unitary phenomenon, no matter how we express that fact.”
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Opinion | What College Students Need Is a Taste of the Monk's Life - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ental-health-smart-phones.html
ultimate question cognitive resilience courses technology dependence purpose mission monastery distraction education learning knowledge
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When she registered last fall for the seminar known around campus as the monk class, she wasn’t sure what to expect.
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“You give up technology, and you can’t talk for a month,” Ms. Rodriguez told me. “That’s all I’d heard. I didn’t know why.” What she found was a course that challenges students to rethink the purpose of education, especially at a time when machine learning is getting way more press than the human kind.
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Each week, students would read about a different monastic tradition and adopt some of its practices. Later in the semester, they would observe a one-month vow of silence (except for discussions during Living Deliberately) and fast from technology, handing over their phones to him.
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Yes, he knew they had other classes, jobs and extracurriculars; they could make arrangements to do that work silently and without a computer.
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The class eased into the vow of silence, first restricting speech to 100 words a day. Other rules began on Day 1: no jewelry or makeup in class. Men and women sat separately and wore different “habits”: white shirts for the men, women in black. (Nonbinary and transgender students sat with the gender of their choice.)
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Dr. McDaniel discouraged them from sharing personal information; they should get to know one another only through ideas. “He gave us new names, based on our birth time and day, using a Thai birth chart,”
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“We were practicing living a monastic life. We had to wake up at 5 a.m. and journal every 30 minutes.”
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If you tried to cruise to a C, you missed the point: “I realized the only way for me to get the most out of this class was to experience it all,” she said. (She got Dr. McDaniel’s permission to break her vow of silence in order to talk to patients during her clinical rotation.)
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Dr. McDaniel also teaches a course called Existential Despair. Students meet once a week from 5 p.m. to midnight in a building with comfy couches, turn over their phones and curl up to read an assigned novel (cover to cover) in one sitting — books like James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” and José Saramago’s “Blindness.” Then they stay up late discussing it.
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The course is not about hope, overcoming things, heroic stories,” Dr. McDaniel said. Many of the books “start sad. In the middle they’re sad. They stay sad. I’m not concerned with their 20-year-old self. I’m worried about them at my age, dealing with breast cancer, their dad dying, their child being an addict, a career that never worked out — so when they’re dealing with the bigger things in life, they know they’re not alone.”
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Research suggests that underprivileged young people have far fewer opportunities to think for unbroken stretches of time, so they may need even more space in college to develop what social scientists call cognitive endurance.
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Rather than ban phones and laptops from class, some professors are brainstorming ways to embrace students’ tech addictions with class Facebook and Instagram accounts, audience response apps — and perhaps even including the friends and relatives whom students text during class as virtual participants in class discussion.
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stop worrying and love the bot by designing assignments that “help students develop their prompting skills” or “use ChatGPT to generate a first draft,” according to a tip sheet produced by the Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington University in St. Louis.
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It’s not at all clear that we want a future dominated by A.I.’s amoral, Cheez Whiz version of human thought
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It is abundantly clear that texting, tagging and chatbotting are making students miserable right now.
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One recent national survey found that 60 percent of American college students reported the symptoms of at least one mental health problem and that 15 percent said they were considering suicide
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A recent meta-analysis of 36 studies of college students’ mental health found a significant correlation between longer screen time and higher risk of anxiety and depression
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And while social media can sometimes help suffering students connect with peers, research on teenagers and college students suggests that overall, the support of a virtual community cannot compensate for the vortex of gossip, bullying and Instagram posturing that is bound to rot any normal person’s self-esteem.
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We need an intervention: maybe not a vow of silence but a bold move to put the screens, the pinging notifications and creepy humanoid A.I. chatbots in their proper place
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it does mean selectively returning to the university’s roots in the monastic schools of medieval Europe and rekindling the old-fashioned quest for meaning.
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Colleges should offer a radically low-tech first-year program for students who want to apply: a secular monastery within the modern university, with a curated set of courses that ban glowing rectangles of any kind from the classroom
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I prophesy that universities that do this will be surprised by how much demand there is. I frequently talk to students who resent the distracting laptops all around them during class. They feel the tug of the “imaginary string attaching me to my phone, where I have to constantly check it,”
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Many, if not most, students want the elusive experience of uninterrupted thought, the kind where a hash of half-baked notions slowly becomes an idea about the world.
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Even if your goal is effective use of the latest chatbot, it behooves you to read books in hard copies and read enough of them to learn what an elegant paragraph sounds like. How else will students recognize when ChatGPT churns out decent prose instead of bureaucratic drivel?
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His course offers a chance to temporarily exchange those unconscious structures for a set of deliberate, countercultural ones.
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here are the student learning outcomes universities should focus on: cognitive endurance and existential clarity.
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Contemplation and marathon reading are not ends in themselves or mere vacations from real life but are among the best ways to figure out your own answer to the question of what a human being is for
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When students finish, they can move right into their area of specialization and wire up their skulls with all the technology they want, armed with the habits and perspective to do so responsibly
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it’s worth learning from the radicals. Dr. McDaniel, the religious studies professor at Penn, has a long history with different monastic traditions. He grew up in Philadelphia, educated by Hungarian Catholic monks. After college, he volunteered in Thailand and Laos and lived as a Buddhist monk.
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e found that no amount of academic reading could help undergraduates truly understand why “people voluntarily take on celibacy, give up drinking and put themselves under authorities they don’t need to,” he told me. So for 20 years, he has helped students try it out — and question some of their assumptions about what it means to find themselves.
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“On college campuses, these students think they’re all being individuals, going out and being wild,” he said. “But they’re in a playpen. I tell them, ‘You know you’ll be protected by campus police and lawyers. You have this entire apparatus set up for you. You think you’re being an individual, but look at your four friends: They all look exactly like you and sound like you. We exist in these very strict structures we like to pretend don’t exist.’”
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Colleges could do all this in classes integrated with general education requirements: ideally, a sequence of great books seminars focused on classic texts from across different civilizations.
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“For the last 1,500 years, Benedictines have had to deal with technology,” Placid Solari, the abbot there, told me. “For us, the question is: How do you use the tool so it supports and enhances your purpose or mission and you don’t get owned by it?”
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for novices at his monastery, “part of the formation is discipline to learn how to control technology use.” After this initial time of limited phone and TV “to wean them away from overdependence on technology and its stimulation,” they get more access and mostly make their own choices.
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Evan Lutz graduated this May from Belmont Abbey with a major in theology. He stressed the special Catholic context of Belmont’s resident monks; if you experiment with monastic practices without investigating the whole worldview, it can become a shallow kind of mindfulness tourism.
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The monks at Belmont Abbey do more than model contemplation and focus. Their presence compels even non-Christians on campus to think seriously about vocation and the meaning of life. “Either what the monks are doing is valuable and based on something true, or it’s completely ridiculous,” Mr. Lutz said. “In both cases, there’s something striking there, and it asks people a question.”
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David Peña-Guzmán, who teaches philosophy at San Francisco State University, read about Dr. McDaniel’s Existential Despair course and decided he wanted to create a similar one. He called it the Reading Experiment. A small group of humanities majors gathered once every two weeks for five and a half hours in a seminar room equipped with couches and a big round table. They read authors ranging from Jean-Paul Sartre to Frantz Fanon
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“At the beginning of every class I’d ask students to turn off their phones and put them in ‘the Basket of Despair,’ which was a plastic bag,” he told me. “I had an extended chat with them about accessibility. The point is not to take away the phone for its own sake but to take away our primary sources of distraction. Students could keep the phone if they needed it. But all of them chose to part with their phones.”
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Dr. Peña-Guzmán’s students are mostly working-class, first-generation college students. He encouraged them to be honest about their anxieties by sharing his own: “I said, ‘I’m a very slow reader, and it’s likely some or most of you will get further in the text than me because I’m E.S.L. and read quite slowly in English.’
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For his students, the struggle to read long texts is “tied up with the assumption that reading can happen while multitasking and constantly interacting with technologies that are making demands on their attention, even at the level of a second,”
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“These draw you out of the flow of reading. You get back to the reading, but you have to restart the sentence or even the paragraph. Often, because of these technological interventions into the reading experience, students almost experience reading backward — as constant regress, without any sense of progress. The more time they spend, the less progress they make.”
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Dr. Peña-Guzmán dismissed the idea that a course like his is suitable only for students who don’t have to worry about holding down jobs or paying off student debt. “I’m worried by this assumption that certain experiences that are important for the development of personality, for a certain kind of humanistic and spiritual growth, should be reserved for the elite, especially when we know those experiences are also sources of cultural capital,
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Courses like the Reading Experiment are practical, too, he added. “I can’t imagine a field that wouldn’t require some version of the skill of focused attention.”
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The point is not to reject new technology but to help students retain the upper hand in their relationship with i
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Ms. Rodriguez said that before she took Living Deliberately and Existential Despair, she didn’t distinguish technology from education. “I didn’t think education ever went without technology. I think that’s really weird now. You don’t need to adapt every piece of technology to be able to learn better or more,” she said. “It can form this dependency.”
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The point of college is to help students become independent humans who can choose the gods they serve and the rules they follow rather than allow someone else to choose for them
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The first step is dethroning the small silicon idol in their pocket — and making space for the uncomfortable silence and questions that follow
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How a dose of MDMA transformed a white supremacist - BBC Future - 0 views
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February 2020, Harriet de Wit, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural science at the University of Chicago, was running an experiment on whether the drug MDMA increased the pleasantness of social touch in healthy volunteers
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The latest participant in the double-blind trial, a man named Brendan, had filled out a standard questionnaire at the end. Strangely, at the very bottom of the form, Brendan had written in bold letters: "This experience has helped me sort out a debilitating personal issue. Google my name. I now know what I need to do."
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They googled Brendan's name, and up popped a disturbing revelation: until just a couple of months before, Brendan had been the leader of the US Midwest faction of Identity Evropa, a notorious white nationalist group rebranded in 2019 as the American Identity Movement. Two months earlier, activists at Chicago Antifascist Action had exposed Brendan's identity, and he had lost his job.
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"Go ask him what he means by 'I now know what I need to do,'" she instructed Bremmer. "If it's a matter of him picking up an automatic rifle or something, we have to intervene."
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As he clarified to Bremmer, love is what he had just realised he had to do. "Love is the most important thing," he told the baffled research assistant. "Nothing matters without
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When de Wit recounted this story to me nearly two years after the fact, she still could hardly believe it. "Isn't that amazing?" she said. "It's what everyone says about this damn drug, that it makes people feel love. To think that a drug could change somebody's beliefs and thoughts without any expectations – it's mind-boggling."
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Over the past few years, I've been investigating the scientific research and medical potential of MDMA for a book called "I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World". I learnt how this once-vilified drug is now remerging as a therapeutic agent – a role it previously played in the 1970s and 1980s, prior to its criminalisation
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He attended the notorious "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville and quickly rose up the ranks of his organisation, first becoming the coordinator for Illinois and then the entire Midwest. He travelled to Europe and around the US to meet other white nationalist groups, with the ultimate goal of taking the movement mainstream
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some researchers have begun to wonder if it could be an effective tool for pushing people who are already somehow primed to reconsider their ideology toward a new way of seeing things
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While MDMA cannot fix societal-level drivers of prejudice and disconnection, on an individual basis it can make a difference. In certain cases, the drug may even be able to help people see through the fog of discrimination and fear that divides so many of us.
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What I didn't expect was how ordinary the 31-year-old who answered the door would appear to be: blue plaid button-up shirt, neatly cropped hair, and a friendly smile.
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Brendan grew up in an affluent Chicago suburb in an Irish Catholic family. He leaned liberal in high school but got sucked into white nationalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he joined a fraternity mostly composed of conservative Republican men, began reading antisemitic conspiracy books, and fell down a rabbit hole of racist, sexist content online. Brendan was further emboldened by the populist rhetoric of Donald Trump during his presidential campaign. "His speech talking about Mexicans being rapists, the fixation on the border wall and deporting everyone, the Muslim ban – I didn't really get white nationalism until Trump started running for president," Brendan said.
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If this comes to pass, MDMA – and other psychedelics-assisted therapy – could transform the field of mental health through widespread clinical use in the US and beyond, for addressing trauma and possibly other conditions as well, including substance use disorders, depression and eating disorders.
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A group of anti-fascist activists published identifying information about him and more than 100 other people in Identity Evropa. He was immediately fired from his job and ostracised by his siblings and friends outside white nationalism.
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When Brendan saw a Facebook ad in early 2020 for some sort of drug trial at the University of Chicago, he decided to apply just to have something to do and to earn a little money
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At the time, Brendan was "still in the denial stage" following his identity becoming public, he said. He was racked with regret – not over his bigoted views, which he still held, but over the missteps that had landed him in this predicament.
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About 30 minutes after taking the pill, he started to feel peculiar. "Wait a second – why am I doing this? Why am I thinking this way?" he began to wonder. "Why did I ever think it was okay to jeopardise relationships with just about everyone in my life?"
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Just then, Bremmer came to collect Brendan to start the experiment. Brendan slid into an MRI, and Bremmer started tickling his forearm with a brush and asked him to rate how pleasant it felt. "I noticed it was making me happier – the experience of the touch," Brendan recalled. "I started progressively rating it higher and higher." As he relished in the pleasurable feeling, a single, powerful word popped into his mind: connection.
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It suddenly seemed so obvious: connections with other people were all that mattered. "This is stuff you can't really put into words, but it was so profound," Brendan said. "I conceived of my relationships with other people not as distinct boundaries with distinct entities, but more as we-are-all-on
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I realised I'd been fixated on stuff that doesn't really matter, and is just so messed up, and that I'd been totally missing the point. I hadn't been soaking up the joy that life has to offer."
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Brendan hired a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant to advise him, enrolled in therapy, began meditating, and started working his way through a list of educational books. S still regularly communicates with Brendan and, for his part, thinks that Brendan is serious in his efforts to change
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"I think he is trying to better himself and work on himself, and I do think that experience with MDMA had an impact on him. It's been a touchstone for growth, and over time, I think, the reflection on that experience has had a greater impact on him than necessarily the experience itself."
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Brendan is still struggling, though, to make the connections with others that he craves. When I visited him, he'd just spent Thanksgiving alone
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He also has not completely abandoned his bigoted ideology, and is not sure that will ever be possible. "There are moments when I have racist or antisemitic thoughts, definitely," he said. "But now I can recognise that those kinds of thought patterns are harming me more than anyone else."
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it's not without precedent. In the 1980s, for example, an acquaintance of early MDMA-assisted therapy practitioner Requa Greer administered the drug to a pilot who had grown up in a racist home and had inherited those views. The pilot had always accepted his bigoted way of thinking as being a normal, accurate reflection of the way things were. MDMA, however, "gave him a clear vision that unexamined racism was both wrong and mean," Greer says
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Encouraging stories of seemingly spontaneous change appear to be exceptions to the norm, however, and from a neurological point of view, this makes sense
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Research shows that oxytocin – one of the key hormones that MDMA triggers neurons to release – drives a "tend and defend" response across the animal kingdom. The same oxytocin that causes a mother bear to nurture her newborn, for example, also fuels her rage when she perceives a threat to her cub. In people, oxytocin likewise strengthens caregiving tendencies toward liked members of a person's in-group and strangers perceived to belong to the same group, but it increases hostility toward individuals from disliked groups
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In a 2010 study published in Science, for example, men who inhaled oxytocin were three times more likely to donate money to members of their team in an economic game, as well as more likely to harshly punish competing players for not donating enough. (Read more: "The surprising downsides of empathy.")
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According to research published this week in Nature by Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist Gül Dölen, MDMA and other psychedelics – including psilocybin, LSD, ketamine and ibogaine – work therapeutically by reopening a critical period in the brain. Critical periods are finite windows of impressionability that typically occur in childhood, when our brains are more malleable and primed to learn new things
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Dölen and her colleagues' findings likewise indicate that, without the proper set and setting, MDMA and other psychedelics probably do not reopen critical periods, which means they will not have a spontaneous, revelatory effect for ridding someone of bigoted beliefs.
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In the West, plenty of members of right-wing authoritarian political movements, including neo-Nazi groups, also have track records of taking MDMA and other psychedelics
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This suggests, researchers write, that psychedelics are nonspecific, "politically pluripotent" amplifiers of whatever is going on in somebody's head, with no particular directional leaning "on the axes of conservatism-liberalism or authoritarianism-egalitarianism."
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That said, a growing body of scientific evidence indicates that the human capacity for compassion, kindness, empathy, gratitude, altruism, fairness, trust, and cooperation are core features of our natures
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As Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal wrote, "Empathy is the one weapon in the human repertoire that can rid us of the curse of xenophobia."
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Ginsberg also envisions using the drug in workshops aimed at eliminating racism, or as a means of bringing people together from opposite sides of shared cultural histories to help heal intergenerational trauma. "I think all psychedelics have a role to play, but I think MDMA has a particularly key role because you're both expanded and present, heart-open and really able to listen in a new way," Ginsberg says. "That's something really powerful."
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"If you give MDMA to hard-core haters on each side of an issue, I don't think it'll do a lot of good,"
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if you start with open-minded people on both sides, then I think it can work. You can improve communications and build empathy between groups, and help people be more capable of analysing the world from a more balanced perspective rather than from fear-based, anxiety-based distrust."
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In 2021, Ginsberg and Doblin were coauthors on a study investigating the possibility of using ayahuasca – a plant-based psychedelic – in group contexts to bridge divides between Palestinians and Israelis, with positive findings
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"I kind of have a fantasy that maybe as we get more reacquainted with psychedelics, there could be group-based experiences that build community resiliency and are intentionally oriented toward breaking down barriers between people, having people see things from other perspectives and detribalising our society,
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"But that's not going to happen on its own. It would have to be intentional, and – if it happens – it would probably take multiple generations."
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Based on his experience with extremism, Brendan agreed with expert takes that no drug, on its own, will spontaneously change the minds of white supremacists or end political conflict in the US
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he does think that, with the right framing and mindset, MDMA could be useful for people who are already at least somewhat open to reconsidering their ideologies, just as it was for him. "It helped me see things in a different way that no amount of therapy or antiracist literature ever would have done," he said. "I really think it was a breakthrough experience."
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Opinion | I Came to College Eager to Debate. I Found Self-Censorship Instead. - The New... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...pus-speech-cancel-culture.html
college debate campus cancel culture censorship university trends
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Hushed voices and anxious looks dictate so many conversations on campus here at the University of Virginia, where I’m finishing up my senior year.
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I was shaken, but also determined to not silence myself. Still, the disdain of my fellow students stuck with me. I was a welcome member of the group — and then I wasn’t.
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Instead, my college experience has been defined by strict ideological conformity. Students of all political persuasions hold back — in class discussions, in friendly conversations, on social media — from saying what we really think.
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Even as a liberal who has attended abortion rights demonstrations and written about standing up to racism, I sometimes feel afraid to fully speak my mind.
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In the classroom, backlash for unpopular opinions is so commonplace that many students have stopped voicing them, sometimes fearing lower grades if they don’t censor themselves.
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According to a 2021 survey administered by College Pulse of over 37,000 students at 159 colleges, 80 percent of students self-censor at least some of the time.
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Forty-eight percent of undergraduate students described themselves as “somewhat uncomfortable” or “very uncomfortable” with expressing their views on a controversial topic in the classroom.
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The room felt tense. I saw people shift in their seats. Someone got angry, and then everyone seemed to get angry. After the professor tried to move the discussion along, I still felt uneasy. I became a little less likely to speak up again and a little less trusting of my own thoughts.
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This anxiety affects not just conservatives. I spoke with Abby Sacks, a progressive fourth-year student. She said she experienced a “pile-on” during a class discussion about sexism in media
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Throughout that semester, I saw similar reactions in response to other students’ ideas. I heard fewer classmates speak up. Eventually, our discussions became monotonous echo chambers. Absent rich debate and rigor, we became mired in socially safe ideas.
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I went to college to learn from my professors and peers. I welcomed an environment that champions intellectual diversity and rigorous disagreement
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“Second, the dominant messages students hear from faculty, administrators and staff are progressive ones. So they feel an implicit pressure to conform to those messages in classroom and campus conversations and debates.”
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I met Stephen Wiecek at our debate club. He’s an outgoing, formidable first-year debater who often stays after meetings to help clean up. He’s also conservative.
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He told me that he has often “straight-up lied” about his beliefs to avoid conflict. Sometimes it’s at a party, sometimes it’s at an a cappella rehearsal, and sometimes it’s in the classroom. When politics comes up, “I just kind of go into survival mode,” he said. “I tense up a lot more, because I’ve got to think very carefully about how I word things. It’s very anxiety inducing.”
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“It was just a succession of people, one after each other, each vehemently disagreeing with me,” she told me.
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Ms. Sacks felt overwhelmed. “Everyone adding on to each other kind of energized the room, like everyone wanted to be part of the group with the correct opinion,” she said. The experience, she said, “made me not want to go to class again.” While Ms. Sacks did continue to attend the class, she participated less frequently. She told me that she felt as if she had become invisible.
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Other campuses also struggle with this. “Viewpoint diversity is no longer considered a sacred, core value in higher education,”
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Dr. Abrams said the environment on today’s campuses differs from his undergraduate experience. He recalled late-night debates with fellow students that sometimes left him feeling “hurt” but led to “the ecstasy of having my mind opened up to new ideas.”
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He worries that self-censorship threatens this environment and argues that college administrations in particular “enforce and create a culture of obedience and fear that has chilled speech.”
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Universities must do more than make public statements supporting free expression. We need a campus culture that prioritizes ideological diversity and strong policies that protect expression in the classroom.
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Universities should refuse to cancel controversial speakers or cave to unreasonable student demands. They should encourage professors to reward intellectual diversity and nonconformism in classroom discussions. And most urgently, they should discard restrictive speech codes and bias response teams that pathologize ideological conflict.
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We cannot experience the full benefits of a university education without having our ideas challenged, yet challenged in ways that allow us to grow.
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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
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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.
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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.
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the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.
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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”
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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The tech companies that enhanced virality from 2009 to 2012 brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare.
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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.”
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It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters; it’s the continual chipping-away of trust.
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a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions.
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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
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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fter Babel, nothing really means anything anymore––at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree.
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.
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the warped “accountability” of social media has also brought injustice—and political dysfunction—in three ways.
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First, the dart guns of social media give more power to trolls and provocateurs while silencing good citizens.
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a small subset of people on social-media platforms are highly concerned with gaining status and are willing to use aggression to do so.
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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,
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Additional research finds that women and Black people are harassed disproportionately, so the digital public square is less welcoming to their voices.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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we don’t get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.
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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
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search engines were supercharging confirmation bias, making it far easier for people to find evidence for absurd beliefs and conspiracy theorie
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The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument.
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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
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English law developed the adversarial system so that biased advocates could present both sides of a case to an impartial jury.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.”
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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
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it was so pervasive that it established new behavioral norms backed by new policies seemingly overnight
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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.
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The stupefying process plays out differently on the right and the left because their activist wings subscribe to different narratives with different sacred values.
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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.
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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.
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The traditional punishment for treason is death, hence the battle cry on January 6: “Hang Mike Pence.”
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Right-wing death threats, many delivered by anonymous accounts, are proving effective in cowing traditional conservatives
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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.
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The stupidity on the right is most visible in the many conspiracy theories spreading across right-wing media and now into Congress.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The punishment that feels right for such crimes is not execution; it is public shaming and social death.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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American factions won’t be the only ones using AI and social media to generate attack content; our adversaries will too.
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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.
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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.
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I can suggest three categories of reforms––three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era.
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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.
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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.
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Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their district.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.”
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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
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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.
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One of the first orders of business should be compelling the platforms to share their data and their algorithms with academic researchers.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Opinion | Do You Live in a 'Tight' State or a 'Loose' One? Turns Out It Matters Quite a... - 0 views
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Political biases are omnipresent, but what we don’t fully understand yet is how they come about in the first place.
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In 2014, Michele J. Gelfand, a professor of psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business formerly at the University of Maryland, and Jesse R. Harrington, then a Ph.D. candidate, conducted a study designed to rank the 50 states on a scale of “tightness” and “looseness.”
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titled “Tightness-Looseness Across the 50 United States,” the study calculated a catalog of measures for each state, including the incidence of natural disasters, disease prevalence, residents’ levels of openness and conscientiousness, drug and alcohol use, homelessness and incarceration rates.
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Gelfand and Harrington predicted that “‘tight’ states would exhibit a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater environmental vulnerability, fewer natural resources, greater incidence of disease and higher mortality rates, higher population density, and greater degrees of external threat.”
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The South dominated the tight states: Mississippi, Alabama Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and North Carolina
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states in New England and on the West Coast were the loosest: California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont.
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Cultural differences, Gelfand continued, “have a certain logic — a rationale that makes good sense,” noting that “cultures that have threats need rules to coordinate to survive (think about how incredibly coordinated Japan is in response to natural disasters).
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“Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World” in 2018, in which she described the results of a 2016 pre-election survey she and two colleagues had commissioned
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The results were telling: People who felt the country was facing greater threats desired greater tightness. This desire, in turn, correctly predicted their support for Trump. In fact, desired tightness predicted support for Trump far better than other measures. For example, a desire for tightness predicted a vote for Trump with 44 times more accuracy than other popular measures of authoritarianism.
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The 2016 election, Gelfand continued, “turned largely on primal cultural reflexes — ones that had been conditioned not only by cultural forces, but by a candidate who was able to exploit them.”
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Gelfand said:Some groups have much stronger norms than others; they’re tight. Others have much weaker norms; they’re loose. Of course, all cultures have areas in which they are tight and loose — but cultures vary in the degree to which they emphasize norms and compliance with them.
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In both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump carried all 10 of the top “tight” states; Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden carried all 10 of the top “loose” states.
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The tight-loose concept, Gelfand argued,is an important framework to understand the rise of President Donald Trump and other leaders in Poland, Hungary, Italy, and France,
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The gist is this: when people perceive threat — whether real or imagined, they want strong rules and autocratic leaders to help them survive
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My research has found that within minutes of exposing study participants to false information about terrorist incidents, overpopulation, pathogen outbreaks and natural disasters, their minds tightened. They wanted stronger rules and punishments.
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Gelfand writes that tightness encourages conscientiousness, social order and self-control on the plus side, along with close-mindedness, conventional thinking and cultural inertia on the minus side.
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Looseness, Gelfand posits, fosters tolerance, creativity and adaptability, along with such liabilities as social disorder, a lack of coordination and impulsive behavior.
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If liberalism and conservatism have historically played a complementary role, each checking the other to constrain extremism, why are the left and right so destructively hostile to each other now, and why is the contemporary political system so polarized?
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Along the same lines, if liberals and conservatives hold differing moral visions, not just about what makes a good government but about what makes a good life, what turned the relationship between left and right from competitive to mutually destructive?
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As a set, Niemi wrote, conservative binding values encompassthe values oriented around group preservation, are associated with judgments, decisions, and interpersonal orientations that sacrifice the welfare of individuals
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She cited research thatfound 47 percent of the most extreme conservatives strongly endorsed the view that “The world is becoming a more and more dangerous place,” compared to 19 percent of the most extreme liberals
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Conservatives and liberals, Niemi continued,see different things as threats — the nature of the threat and how it happens to stir one’s moral values (and their associated emotions) is a better clue to why liberals and conservatives react differently.
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Unlike liberals, conservatives strongly endorse the binding moral values aimed at protecting groups and relationships. They judge transgressions involving personal and national betrayal, disobedience to authority, and disgusting or impure acts such as sexually or spiritually unchaste behavior as morally relevant and wrong.
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Underlying these differences are competing sets of liberal and conservative moral priorities, with liberals placing more stress than conservatives on caring, kindness, fairness and rights — known among scholars as “individualizing values
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conservatives focus more on loyalty, hierarchy, deference to authority, sanctity and a higher standard of disgust, known as “binding values.”
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Niemi contended that sensitivity to various types of threat is a key factor in driving differences between the far left and far right.
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For example, binding values are associated with Machiavellianism (e.g., status-seeking and lying, getting ahead by any means, 2013); victim derogation, blame, and beliefs that victims were causal contributors for a variety of harmful acts (2016, 2020); and a tendency to excuse transgressions of ingroup members with attributions to the situation rather than the person (2023).
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Niemi cited a paper she and Liane Young, a professor of psychology at Boston College, published in 2016, “When and Why We See Victims as Responsible: The Impact of Ideology on Attitudes Toward Victims,” which tested responses of men and women to descriptions of crimes including sexual assaults and robberies.
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We measured moral values associated with unconditionally prohibiting harm (“individualizing values”) versus moral values associated with prohibiting behavior that destabilizes groups and relationships (“binding values”: loyalty, obedience to authority, and purity)
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Increased endorsement of binding values predicted increased ratings of victims as contaminated, increased blame and responsibility attributed to victims, increased perceptions of victims’ (versus perpetrators’) behaviors as contributing to the outcome, and decreased focus on perpetrators.
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A central explanation typically offered for the current situation in American politics is that partisanship and political ideology have developed into strong social identities where the mass public is increasingly sorted — along social, partisan, and ideological lines.
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What happened to people ecologically affected social-political developments, including the content of the rules people made and how they enforced them
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Just as ecological factors differing from region to region over the globe produced different cultural values, ecological factors differed throughout the U.S. historically and today, producing our regional and state-level dimensions of culture and political patterns.
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Joshua Hartshorne, who is also a professor of psychology at Boston College, took issue with the binding versus individualizing values theory as an explanation for the tendency of conservatives to blame victims:
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I would guess that the reason conservatives are more likely to blame the victim has less to do with binding values and more to do with the just-world bias (the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, therefore if a bad thing happened to you, you must be a bad person).
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Belief in a just world, Hartshorne argued, is crucial for those seeking to protect the status quo:It seems psychologically necessary for anyone who wants to advocate for keeping things the way they are that the haves should keep on having, and the have-nots have got as much as they deserve. I don’t see how you could advocate for such a position while simultaneously viewing yourself as moral (and almost everyone believes that they themselves are moral) without also believing in the just world
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Conversely, if you generally believe the world is not just, and you view yourself as a moral person, then you are likely to feel like you have an obligation to change things.
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I asked Lene Aaroe, a political scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, why the contemporary American political system is as polarized as it is now, given that the liberal-conservative schism is longstanding. What has happened to produce such intense hostility between left and right?
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There is variation across countries in hostility between left and right. The United States is a particularly polarized case which calls for a contextual explanatio
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I then asked Aaroe why surveys find that conservatives are happier than liberals. “Some research,” she replied, “suggests that experiences of inequality constitute a larger psychological burden to liberals because it is more difficult for liberals to rationalize inequality as a phenomenon with positive consequences.”
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Numerous factors potentially influence the evolution of liberalism and conservatism and other social-cultural differences, including geography, topography, catastrophic events, and subsistence styles
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Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, elaborated in an email on the link between conservatism and happiness:
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t’s a combination of factors. Conservatives are likelier to be married, patriotic, and religious, all of which make people happier
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They may be less aggrieved by the status quo, whereas liberals take on society’s problems as part of their own personal burdens. Liberals also place politics closer to their identity and striving for meaning and purpose, which is a recipe for frustration.
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Some features of the woke faction of liberalism may make people unhappier: as Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have suggested, wokeism is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in reverse, urging upon people maladaptive mental habits such as catastrophizing, feeling like a victim of forces beyond one’s control, prioritizing emotions of hurt and anger over rational analysis, and dividing the world into allies and villains.
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Why, I asked Pinker, would liberals and conservatives react differently — often very differently — to messages that highlight threat?
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It may be liberals (or at least the social-justice wing) who are more sensitive to threats, such as white supremacy, climate change, and patriarchy; who may be likelier to moralize, seeing racism and transphobia in messages that others perceive as neutral; and being likelier to surrender to emotions like “harm” and “hurt.”
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While liberals and conservatives, guided by different sets of moral values, may make agreement on specific policies difficult, that does not necessarily preclude consensus.
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there are ways to persuade conservatives to support liberal initiatives and to persuade liberals to back conservative proposals:
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While liberals tend to be more concerned with protecting vulnerable groups from harm and more concerned with equality and social justice than conservatives, conservatives tend to be more concerned with moral issues like group loyalty, respect for authority, purity and religious sanctity than liberals are. Because of these different moral commitments, we find that liberals and conservatives can be persuaded by quite different moral arguments
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For example, we find that conservatives are more persuaded by a same-sex marriage appeal articulated in terms of group loyalty and patriotism, rather than equality and social justice.
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Liberals who read the fairness argument were substantially more supportive of military spending than those who read the loyalty and authority argument.
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We find support for these claims across six studies involving diverse political issues, including same-sex marriage, universal health care, military spending, and adopting English as the nation’s official language.”
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In one test of persuadability on the right, Feinberg and Willer assigned some conservatives to read an editorial supporting universal health care as a matter of “fairness (health coverage is a basic human right)” or to read an editorial supporting health care as a matter of “purity (uninsured people means more unclean, infected, and diseased Americans).”
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Conservatives who read the purity argument were much more supportive of health care than those who read the fairness case.
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“political arguments reframed to appeal to the moral values of those holding the opposing political position are typically more effective
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In “Conservative and Liberal Attitudes Drive Polarized Neural Responses to Political Content,” Willer, Yuan Chang Leong of the University of Chicago, Janice Chen of Johns Hopkins and Jamil Zaki of Stanford address the question of how partisan biases are encoded in the brain:
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society. How do such biases arise in the brain? We measured the neural activity of participants watching videos related to immigration policy. Despite watching the same videos, conservative and liberal participants exhibited divergent neural responses. This “neural polarization” between groups occurred in a brain area associated with the interpretation of narrative content and intensified in response to language associated with risk, emotion, and morality. Furthermore, polarized neural responses predicted attitude change in response to the videos.
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The four authors argue that their “findings suggest that biased processing in the brain drives divergent interpretations of political information and subsequent attitude polarization.” These results, they continue, “shed light on the psychological and neural underpinnings of how identical information is interpreted differently by conservatives and liberals.”
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The authors used neural imaging to follow changes in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (known as DMPFC) as conservatives and liberals watched videos presenting strong positions, left and right, on immigration.
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or each video,” they write,participants with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of conservative-leaning participants became more likely to support the conservative positio
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Conversely, those with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of liberal-leaning participants became more likely to support the liberal position. These results suggest that divergent interpretations of the same information are associated with increased attitude polarizatio
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Together, our findings describe a neural basis for partisan biases in processing political information and their effects on attitude change.
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Describing their neuroimaging method, the authors point out that theysearched for evidence of “neural polarization” activity in the brain that diverges between people who hold liberal versus conservative political attitudes. Neural polarization was observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), a brain region associated with the interpretation of narrative content.
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The question is whether the political polarization that we are witnessing now proves to be a core, encoded aspect of the human mind, difficult to overcome — as Leong, Chen, Zaki and Willer sugges
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— or whether, with our increased knowledge of the neural basis of partisan and other biases, we will find more effective ways to manage these most dangerous of human predispositions.
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Peter Higgs, physicist who discovered Higgs boson, dies aged 94 | Peter Higgs | The Gua... - 0 views
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Peter Higgs, the Nobel prize-winning physicist who discovered a new particle known as the Higgs boson, has died.Higgs, 94, who was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 2013 for his work in 1964 showing how the boson helped bind the universe together by giving particles their mass
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“A giant of particle physics has left us,” Ellis told the Guardian. “Without his theory, atoms could not exist and radioactivity would be a force as strong as electricity and magnetism.
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“His prediction of the existence of the particle that bears his name was a deep insight, and its discovery at Cern in 2012 was a crowning moment that confirmed his understanding of the way the Universe works.”
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The particle that carries his name is perhaps the single most stunning example of how seemingly abstract mathematical ideas can make predictions which turn out to have huge physical consequences.”
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The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel, said at the time the standard model of physics which underpins the scientific understanding of the universe “rests on the existence of a special kind of particle: the Higgs particle. This particle originates from an invisible field that fills up all space.“Even when the universe seems empty this field is there. Without it, we would not exist, because it is from contact with the field that particles acquire mass. The theory proposed by Englert and Higgs describes this process.”
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(1) Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul - by William Deresiewicz - 0 views
www.persuasion.community/...ep-reading-will-save-your-soul
reading college education learning university trends culture humanities
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In today’s installment, William Deresiewicz—inspired by a student’s legacy—analyzes an important new trend: students and teachers abandoning traditional universities altogether and seeking a liberal arts education in self-fashioned programs.
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Higher ed is at an impasse. So much about it sucks, and nothing about it is likely to change. Colleges and universities do not seem inclined to reform themselves, and if they were, they wouldn’t know how, and if they did, they couldn’t. Between bureaucratic inertia, faculty resistance, and the conflicting agendas of a heterogenous array of stakeholders, concerted change appears to be impossible.
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Which is not to say that interesting things aren’t happening in post-secondary (and post-tertiary) education.
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These come, as far as I can tell, in two broad types, corresponding to the two fundamental complaints that people voice about their undergraduate experience
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The first complaint is that college did not prepare them for the real world: that the whole exercise—papers, busywork, pointless requirements; siloed disciplines and abstract theory—seemed remote from anything that they actually might want to do with their lives.
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Above all, they are student-centered. Participants are enabled (and expected) to direct their education by constructing bespoke curricula out of the resources the program gives them access to. In a word, these endeavors emphasize “engagement.”
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A student will identify a problem (a human need, an injustice, an instance of underrepresentation), then devise and implement a response (a physical system, a community-facing program, an art project).
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Professors were often preoccupied, with little patience for mentorship, the open-ended office-hours exploration. Classes, even in fields like philosophy, felt lifeless, impersonal, like engineering but with words instead of numbers. Worst of all were their fellow undergraduates, those climbers and careerists. “It’s hard to build your soul,” as one of my students once put it to me, “when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.”
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Not everything in the world is a problem, and to see the world as a series of problems is to limit the potential of both world and self. What problem does a song address? What problem will reading Voltaire help you solve, in any predictable way? The “problem” approach—the “engagement” approach, the save-the-world approach—leaves out, finally, what I’d call learning.
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that is the second complaint that graduates tend to express: that they finished college without the feeling that they had learned anything, in this essential sense.
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That there is a treasure out there—call it the Great Books or just great books, the wisdom of the ages or the best that has been thought and said—that its purpose is to activate the treasure inside them, that they had come to one of these splendid institutions (whose architecture speaks of culture, whose age gives earnest of depth) to be initiated into it, but that they had been denied, deprived. For unclear reasons, cheated.
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I had students like this at Columbia and Yale. There were never a lot of them, and to judge from what’s been happening to humanities enrollments, there are fewer and fewer. (From 2013 to 2022, the number of people graduating with bachelors degrees in English fell by 36%. As a share of all degrees, it fell by 42%, to less than 1 in 60.)
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They would tell me—these pilgrims, these intellectuals in embryo, these kindled souls—how hard they were finding it to get the kind of education they had come to college for.
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what bothers me about this educational approach—the “problem” approach, the “STEAM” (STEM + arts) approach—is what it leaves out. It leaves out the humanities. It leaves out books. It leaves out literature and philosophy, history and art history and the history of religion. It leaves out any mode of inquiry—reflection, speculation, conversation with the past—that cannot be turned to immediate practical ends
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The Catherine Project sees itself as being in the business of creating “communities of learning”; its principles include “conversation and hospitality, “simplicity [and] transparency.” Classes (called tutorials, in keeping with the practice at St. John’s) are free (BISR’s cost $335), are capped at four to six students (at BISR, the limit is 23), run for two hours a week for twelve weeks, and skew towards the canon: the Greeks and Romans, Pascal and Kierkegaard, Dante and Cervantes (the project also hosts a large number of reading groups, which address a wider range of texts). If BISR aspires to create a fairer market for academic labor—instructors keep the lion’s share of fees—the Catherine Project functions as a gift economy (though plans are to begin to offer tutors modest honoraria).
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As Russell Jacoby has noted, the migration of intellectuals into universities in the decades after World War II, which he documented in The Last Intellectuals, has more recently reversed itself. The rise, or re-rise, of little magazines (Dissent, Commentary, Partisan Review then; n+1, The New Inquiry, The Point, The Drift, et al. now) is part of the same story.
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a fourth factor. If there are students who despair at the condition of the humanities on campus, there are professors who do so as well. Many of her teachers, Hitz told me, have regular ladder appointments: “We draw academics—who attend our groups as well as leading them—because the life of the mind is dying or dead in conventional institutions.” Undergraduate teaching, she added, “is a particularly hard pull,” and the Catherine Project offers faculty the chance to teach people “who actually want to learn.
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I’d add, who can. Nine years ago, Stephen Greenblatt wrote: “Even the highly gifted students in my Shakespeare classes at Harvard are less likely to be touched by the subtle magic of his words than I was so many years ago or than my students were in the 1980s in Berkeley. … The problem is that their engagement with language … often seems surprisingly shallow or tepid.” By now, of course, the picture is far worse.
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The response to the announcement of our pilot programs confirmed for me the existence of a large, unmet desire for text-based exploration, touching on the deepest questions, outside the confines of higher education
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Applicants ranged from graduating college seniors to people in their 70s. They included teachers, artists, scientists, and doctoral students from across the disciplines; a submarine officer, a rabbinical student, an accountant, and a venture capitalist; retirees, parents of small children, and twentysomethings at the crossroads. Forms came in from India, Jordan, Brazil, and nine other foreign countries. The applicants were, as a group, tremendously impressive. If it had been possible, we would have taken many more than fifteen.
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When asked why they wanted to participate, a number of them spoke about the pathologies of formal education. “We have a really damaged relationship to learning,” said one. “It should be fun, not scary”—as in, you feel that you’re supposed to know the answer, which as a student, as she noted, makes no sense
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“We need opportunities for reading and exploration that lie outside the credentialing system of the modern university,” he went on, because there’s so much in the latter that cuts against “the slow way that kind of learning unfolds.”
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“How one might choose to live.” For many of our applicants—and this, of course, is what the program is about, what the humanities are about—learning has, or ought to have, an existential weight.
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I detected a desire to be free of forces and agendas: the university’s agenda of “relevance,” the professoriate’s agenda of political mobilization, the market’s agenda of productivity, the internet’s agenda of surveillance and addiction. In short, the whole capitalistic algorithmic ideological hairball of coerced homogeneity
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The desire is to not be recruited, to not be instrumentalized, to remain (or become) an individual, to resist regression toward the mean, or meme.
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That is why it’s crucial that the Matthew Strother Center has no goal—and this is true of the Catherine Project and other off-campus humanities programs, as well—beyond the pursuit of learning for its own sake.
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This is freedom. When education isn’t pointed in particular directions, its possibilities are endless
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Adam Kirsch: Art Over Biology | The New Republic - 1 views
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Nietzsche, who wrote in Human, All Too Human, under the rubric “Art dangerous for the artist,” about the particular ill-suitedness of the artist to flourishing in a modern scientific age: When art seizes an individual powerfully, it draws him back to the views of those times when art flowered most vigorously.... The artist comes more and more to revere sudden excitements, believes in gods and demons, imbues nature with a soul, hates science, becomes unchangeable in his moods like the men of antiquity, and desires the overthrow of all conditions that are not favorable to art.... Thus between him and the other men of his period who are the same age a vehement antagonism is finally generated, and a sad end
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What is modern is the sense of the superiority of the artist’s inferiority, which is only possible when the artist and the intellectual come to see the values of ordinary life—prosperity, family, worldly success, and happiness—as inherently contemptible.
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Art, according to a modern understanding that has not wholly vanished today, is meant to be a criticism of life, especially of life in a materialist, positivist civilization such as our own. If this means the artist does not share in civilization’s boons, then his suffering will be a badge of honor.
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The iron law of Darwinian evolution is that everything that exists strives with all its power to reproduce, to extend life into the future, and that every feature of every creature can be explained as an adaptation toward this end. For the artist to deny any connection with the enterprise of life, then, is to assert his freedom from this universal imperative; to reclaim negatively the autonomy that evolution seems to deny to human beings. It is only because we can freely choose our own ends that we can decide not to live for life, but for some other value that we posit. The artist’s decision to produce spiritual offspring rather than physical ones is thus allied to the monk’s celibacy and the warrior’s death for his country, as gestures that deny the empire of mere life.
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Animals produce beauty on their bodies; humans can also produce it in their artifacts. The natural inference, then, would be that art is a human form of sexual display, a way for males to impress females with spectacularly redundant creations.
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Still, Darwin recognized that the human sense of beauty was mediated by “complex ideas and trains of thought,” which make it impossible to explain in terms as straightforward as a bird’s:
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Put more positively, one might say that any given work of art can be discussed critically and historically, but not deduced from the laws of evolution.
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with the rise of evolutionary psychology, it was only a matter of time before the attempt was made to explain art in Darwinian terms. After all, if ethics and politics can be explained by game theory and reciprocal altruism, there is no reason why aesthetics should be different: in each case, what appears to be a realm of human autonomy can be reduced to the covert expression of biological imperatives
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Still, there is an unmistakable sense in discussions of Darwinian aesthetics that by linking art to fitness, we can secure it against charges of irrelevance or frivolousness—that mattering to reproduction is what makes art, or anything, really matter.
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The first popular effort in this direction was the late Denis Dutton’s much-discussed book The Art Instinct, which appeared in 2009.
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Dutton’s Darwinism was aesthetically conservative: “Darwinian aesthetics,” he wrote, “can restore the vital place of beauty, skill, and pleasure as high artistic values.” Dutton’s argument has recently been reiterated and refined by a number of new books,
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“The universality of art and artistic behaviors, their spontaneous appearance everywhere across the globe ... and the fact that in most cases they can be easily recognized as artistic across cultures suggest that they derive from a natural, innate source: a universal human psychology.”
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Again like language, art is universal in the sense that any local expression of it can be “learned” by anyone.
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Yet earlier theorists of evolution were reluctant to say that art was an evolutionary adaptation like language, for the simple reason that it does not appear to be evolutionarily adaptive.
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Stephen Jay Gould suggested that art was not an evolutionary adaptation but what he called a “spandrel”—that is, a showy but accidental by-product of other adaptations that were truly functiona
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the very words “success” and “failure,” despite themselves, bring an emotive and ethical dimension into the discussion, so impossible is it for human beings to inhabit a valueless world. In the nineteenth century, the idea that fitness for survival was a positive good motivated social Darwinism and eugenics. Proponents of these ideas thought that in some way they were serving progress by promoting the flourishing of the human race, when the basic premise of Darwinism is that there is no such thing as progress or regress, only differential rates of reproduction
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In particular, Darwin suggests that it is impossible to explain the history or the conventions of any art by the general imperatives of evolution
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Boyd begins with the premise that human beings are pattern-seeking animals: both our physical perceptions and our social interactions are determined by our brain’s innate need to find and to
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Art, then, can be defined as the calisthenics of pattern-finding. “Just as animal physical play refines performance, flexibility, and efficiency in key behaviors,” Boyd writes, “so human art refines our performance in our key perceptual and cognitive modes, in sight (the visual arts), sound (music), and social cognition (story). These three modes of art, I propose, are adaptations ... they show evidence of special design in humans, design that offers survival and especially reproductive advantages.”
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What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology - Ross Andersen - Te... - 1 views
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This question of accounting for what we call the "big bang state" -- the search for a physical explanation of it -- is probably the most important question within the philosophy of cosmology, and there are a couple different lines of thought about it.
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One that's becoming more and more prevalent in the physics community is the idea that the big bang state itself arose out of some previous condition, and that therefore there might be an explanation of it in terms of the previously existing dynamics by which it came about
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There are other ideas, for instance that maybe there might be special sorts of laws, or special sorts of explanatory principles, that would apply uniquely to the initial state of the universe.
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One common strategy for thinking about this is to suggest that what we used to call the whole universe is just a small part of everything there is, and that we live in a kind of bubble universe, a small region of something much larger
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Newton realized there had to be some force holding the moon in its orbit around the earth, to keep it from wandering off, and he knew also there was a force that was pulling the apple down to the earth. And so what suddenly struck him was that those could be one and the same thing, the same force
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That was a physical discovery, a physical discovery of momentous importance, as important as anything you could ever imagine because it knit together the terrestrial realm and the celestial realm into one common physical picture. It was also a philosophical discovery in the sense that philosophy is interested in the fundamental natures of things.
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The problem is that quantum mechanics was developed as a mathematical tool. Physicists understood how to use it as a tool for making predictions, but without an agreement or understanding about what it was telling us about the physical world. And that's very clear when you look at any of the foundational discussions. This is what Einstein was upset about; this is what Schrodinger was upset about. Quantum mechanics was merely a calculational technique that was not well understood as a physical theory. Bohr and Heisenberg tried to argue that asking for a clear physical theory was something you shouldn't do anymore. That it was something outmoded. And they were wrong, Bohr and Heisenberg were wrong about that. But the effect of it was to shut down perfectly legitimate physics questions within the physics community for about half a century. And now we're coming out of that
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The basic philosophical question, going back to Plato, is "What is x?" What is virtue? What is justice? What is matter? What is time? You can ask that about dark energy - what is it? And it's a perfectly good question.
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right now there are just way too many freely adjustable parameters in physics. Everybody agrees about that. There seem to be many things we call constants of nature that you could imagine setting at different values, and most physicists think there shouldn't be that many, that many of them are related to one another. Physicists think that at the end of the day there should be one complete equation to describe all physics, because any two physical systems interact and physics has to tell them what to do. And physicists generally like to have only a few constants, or parameters of nature. This is what Einstein meant when he famously said he wanted to understand what kind of choices God had --using his metaphor-- how free his choices were in creating the universe, which is just asking how many freely adjustable parameters there are. Physicists tend to prefer theories that reduce that number
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You have others saying that time is just an illusion, that there isn't really a direction of time, and so forth. I myself think that all of the reasons that lead people to say things like that have very little merit, and that people have just been misled, largely by mistaking the mathematics they use to describe reality for reality itself. If you think that mathematical objects are not in time, and mathematical objects don't change -- which is perfectly true -- and then you're always using mathematical objects to describe the world, you could easily fall into the idea that the world itself doesn't change, because your representations of it don't.
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physicists for almost a hundred years have been dissuaded from trying to think about fundamental questions. I think most physicists would quite rightly say "I don't have the tools to answer a question like 'what is time?' - I have the tools to solve a differential equation." The asking of fundamental physical questions is just not part of the training of a physicist anymore.
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The question remains as to how often, after life evolves, you'll have intelligent life capable of making technology. What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that's not true. Obviously it doesn't matter that much if you're a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there's a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence.
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How Stanford Took On the Giants of Economics - The New York Times - 1 views
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it is a reflection of a broader shift in the study of economics, in which the most cutting-edge work increasingly relies less on a big-brained individual scholar developing mathematical theories, and more on the ability to crunch extensive sets of data to glean insights about topics as varied as how incomes differ across society and how industries organize themselves.
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“Who wouldn’t want to be where the future of the world is being made?” said Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University (and regular contributor to The New York Times) who often blogs about trends in academic economics. Stanford’s economics department, he said, “has an excitement about it which Boston and Cambridge can’t touch.”
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In economics, Stanford has frequently been ranked just behind Harvard, M.I.T., Princeton and the University of Chicago, including in the most recent U.S. News & World Report survey
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In the last four years, Stanford has increased the number of senior faculty by 25 percent, and 11 scholars with millions in cumulative salary have either been recruited from other top programs or resisted poaching attempts by those programs.
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The specialties of the new recruits vary, but they are all examples of how the momentum in economics has shifted away from theoretical modeling and toward “empirical microeconomics,” the analysis of how things work in the real world, often arranging complex experiments or exploiting large sets of data. That kind of work requires lots of research assistants, work across disciplines including fields like sociology and computer science, and the use of advanced computational techniques unavailable a generation ago.
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the scholars who have newly signed on with Stanford described a university particularly well suited to research in that vein, with a combination of lab space, strong budgets for research support and proximity to engineering talent.
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The Chicago School, under the intellectual imprint of Milton Friedman, was a leader in neoclassical thought that emphasizes the efficiency of markets and the risks of government intervention. M.I.T.’s economics department has a long record of economic thought in the Keynesian tradition, and it produced several of the top policy makers who have guided the world economy through the tumultuous last several years.
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“There isn’t a Stanford school of thought,” said B. Douglas Bernheim, chairman of the university’s economics department. “This isn’t a doctrinaire place. Generally doctrine involves simplification, and increasingly we recognize that these social issues we’re trying to figure out are phenomenally complicated. The consensus at Stanford has focused around the idea that you have to be open to a lot of approaches and ways of thinking about things, and to be rigorous, thorough and careful in bringing the highest standard of craft to bear on your research.”
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“My sense is this is a good development for economics,” Mr. Chetty said. “I think Stanford is going to be another great department at the level of Harvard and M.I.T. doing this type of work, which is an example of economics becoming a deeper field. It’s a great thing for all the universities — I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game.”
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Coursera Plans to Announce University Partners for Online Classes - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...rtners-for-online-classes.html
university online classes courses system startups education
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John Doerr, a Kleiner investment partner, said via e-mail that he saw a clear business model: “Yes. Even with free courses. From a community of millions of learners some should ‘opt in’ for valuable, premium services. Those revenues should fund investment in tools, technology and royalties to faculty and universities.”
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Previously he said he had been involved with Stanford’s effort to put academic lectures online for viewing. But he noted that there was evidence that the newer interactive systems provided much more effective learning experiences.
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Coursera and Udacity are not alone in the rush to offer mostly free online educational alternatives. Start-up companies like Minerva and Udemy, and, separately, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have recently announced similar platforms.
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Unlike previous video lectures, which offered a “static” learning model, the Coursera system breaks lectures into segments as short as 10 minutes and offers quick online quizzes as part of each segment.
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Where essays are required, especially in the humanities and social sciences, the system relies on the students themselves to grade their fellow students’ work, in effect turning them into teaching assistants.
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The Coursera system also offers an online feature that allows students to get support from a global student community. Dr. Ng said an early test of the system found that questions were typically answered within 22 minutes.
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Dr. Koller said the educational approach was similar to that of the “flipped classroom,” pioneered by the Khan Academy, a creation of the educator Salman Khan. Students watch lectures at home and then work on problem-solving or “homework” in the classroom, either one-on-one with the teacher or in small groups.
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Ryan, Romney and the Veil of Opulence - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Nowadays, the veil of ignorance is challenged by a powerful but ancient contender: the veil of opulence. While no serious political philosopher actually defends such a device — the term is my own — the veil of opulence runs thick in our political discourse. Where the veil of ignorance offers a test for fairness from an impersonal, universal point of view — “What system would I want if I had no idea who I was going to be, or what talents and resources I was going to have?” — the veil of opulence offers a test for fairness from the first-person, partial point of view: “What system would I want if I were so-and-so?”
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Those who don the veil of opulence may imagine themselves to be fantastically wealthy movie stars or extremely successful business entrepreneurs. They vote and set policies according to this fantasy. “If I were such and such a wealthy person,” they ask, “how would I feel about giving X percentage of my income, or Y real dollars per year, to pay for services that I will never see nor use?
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the veil of opulence operates only under the guise of fairness. It is rather a distortion of fairness, by virtue of the partiality that it smuggles in. It asks not whether a policy is fair given the huge range of advantages or hardships the universe might throw at a person but rather whether it is fair that a very fortunate person should shoulder the burdens of others. That is, the veil of opulence insists that people imagine that resources and opportunities and talents are freely available to all, that such goods are widely abundant, that there is no element of randomness or chance that may negatively impact those who struggle to succeed but sadly fail through no fault of their own. It blankets off the obstacles that impede the road to success. It turns a blind eye to the adversity that some people, let’s face it, are born into. By insisting that we consider public policy from the perspective of the most-advantaged, the veil of opulence obscures the vagaries of brute luck.
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If there’s one thing about fairness, it is fundamentally an impartial notion, an idea that restricts us from privileging one group over another. When asking about fairness, we cannot ask whether X policy is fair for me, or whether Y policy is fair for someone with a yacht and two vacation homes. We must ask whether Z policy is fair, full stop. What we must ask here is whether the policy could be applied to all; whether it is the sort of system with which we could live, if we were to end up in one of the many socioeconomic groupings that make up our diverse community, whether most-advantaged or least-advantaged, fortunate or unfortunate
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This is why the veil of ignorance is a superior test for fairness over the veil of opulence. It tackles the universality of fairness without getting wrapped up in the particularities of personal interest. If you were to start this world anew, unaware of who you would turn out to be, what sort of die would you be willing to cast?
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In the interest of firming up the game, in the interest of being fair, the N.F.L. decided long ago to give the worst teams in football the best shot at improving their game.
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The question of fairness has widespread application throughout our political discourse. It affects taxation, health care, education, social safety nets and so on. The veil of opulence would have us screen for fairness by asking what the most fortunate among us are willing to bear. The veil of ignorance would have us screen for fairness by asking what any of us would be willing to bear, if it were the case that we, or the ones we love, might be born into difficult circumstances or, despite our hard work, blindsided by misfortune.
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Society is in place to correct for the injustices of the universe, to ensure that our lives can run smoothly despite the stuff that is far out of our control: not to hand us what we need, but to give us the opportunity to pursue life, liberty and happiness.
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Breathing In vs. Spacing Out - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Although pioneers like Jon Kabat-Zinn, now emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, began teaching mindfulness meditation as a means of reducing stress as far back as the 1970s, all but a dozen or so of the nearly 100 randomized clinical trials have been published since 2005.
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Michael Posner, of the University of Oregon, and Yi-Yuan Tang, of Texas Tech University, used functional M.R.I.’s before and after participants spent a combined 11 hours over two weeks practicing a form of mindfulness meditation developed by Tang. They found that it enhanced the integrity and efficiency of the brain’s white matter, the tissue that connects and protects neurons emanating from the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of particular importance for rational decision-making and effortful problem-solving.
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Perhaps that is why mindfulness has proved beneficial to prospective graduate students. In May, the journal Psychological Science published the results of a randomized trial showing that undergraduates instructed to spend a mere 10 minutes a day for two weeks practicing mindfulness made significant improvement on the verbal portion of the Graduate Record Exam — a gain of 16 percentile points. They also significantly increased their working memory capacity, the ability to maintain and manipulate multiple items of attention.
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By emphasizing a focus on the here and now, it trains the mind to stay on task and avoid distraction.
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“Your ability to recognize what your mind is engaging with, and control that, is really a core strength,” said Peter Malinowski, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Liverpool John Moores University in England. “For some people who begin mindfulness training, it’s the first time in their life where they realize that a thought or emotion is not their only reality, that they have the ability to stay focused on something else, for instance their breathing, and let that emotion or thought just pass by.”
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the higher adults scored on a measurement of mindfulness, the worse they performed on tests of implicit learning — the kind that underlies all sorts of acquired skills and habits but that occurs without conscious awareness.
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he found that having participants spend a brief period of time on an undemanding task that maximizes mind wandering improved their subsequent performance on a test of creativity. In a follow-up study, he reported that physicists and writers alike came up with their most insightful ideas while spacing out.
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one of the most surprising findings of recent mindfulness studies is that it could have unwanted side effects. Raising roadblocks to the mind’s peregrinations could, after all, prevent the very sort of mental vacations that lead to epiphanies.
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“There’s so much our brain is doing when we’re not aware of it,” said the study’s leader, Chelsea Stillman, a doctoral candidate. “We know that being mindful is really good for a lot of explicit cognitive functions. But it might not be so useful when you want to form new habits.” Learning to ride a bicycle, speak grammatically or interpret the meaning of people’s facial expressions are three examples of knowledge we acquire through implicit learning
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The Berkeley Model - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Entitled “At Berkeley” — and running some four hours long — it attempts to do nothing less than capture the breadth of activities at the University of California, Berkeley, probably the finest public university in the country
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“I hope they come away with a feeling that it is a great university, run by people of intelligence and sensitivity, and working hard to maintain standards and integrity.”
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Professors Are Prejudiced, Too - NYTimes.com - 2 views
www.nytimes.com/...essors-are-prejudiced-too.html
prejudice university professor racial gender education
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we sent emails to more than 6,500 randomly selected professors from 259 American universities. Each email was from a (fictional) prospective out-of-town student whom the professor did not know, expressing interest in the professor’s Ph.D. program and seeking guidance. These emails were identical and written in impeccable English, varying only in the name of the student sender. The messages came from students with names like Meredith Roberts, Lamar Washington, Juanita Martinez, Raj Singh and Chang Huang
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Surprisingly, several supposed advantages that some people believe women and minorities enjoy did not materialize
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Professors were more responsive to white male students than to female, black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese students in almost every discipline and across all types of universities
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We found the most severe bias in disciplines paying higher faculty salaries and at private universities
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our own discipline of business showed the most bias, with 87 percent of white males receiving a response compared with just 62 percent of all females and minorities combined.
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We computed the average response rates for each category of student (e.g., white male, Hispanic female), dividing the number of responses from the professors by the number of emails sent from students in a given race or gender category.
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Were Asians favored, given the model minority stereotype they supposedly benefit from in academic contexts? No. In fact, Chinese students were the most discriminated-against group in our sample
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Did reaching out to someone of the same gender or race — such as a black student emailing a black professor — reduce bias? No. We saw the same levels of bias in both same-race and same-gender faculty-student pairs that we saw in pairs not sharing a race or gender (the one exception was Chinese students writing to Chinese professors).
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Did it help to be in a discipline with a greater representation of women and minorities? Again, no. Faculty members in those more diverse disciplines, like criminal justice, were no less likely to discriminate than those in less diverse disciplines,
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Did it help that these were students in the pre-applicant stage, when some believe underrepresented groups enjoy advantageous access to selective opportunities? Again, no
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each of the supposed hidden advantages of being a woman or minority proved to be no more than a phantom.
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Richard Dawkins: Why the universe seems so strange | Talk Video | TED.com - 0 views
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Biologist Richard Dawkins makes a case for "thinking the improbable" by looking at how the human frame of reference limits our understanding of the universe.
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Joshua Foer: John Quijada and Ithkuil, the Language He Invented : The New Yorker - 2 views
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Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like “knight.” No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.“Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn’t mean they’re optimal,” John Quijada, a fifty-four-year-old former employee of the California State Department of Motor Vehicles, told me. In 2004, he published a monograph on the Internet that was titled “Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language.” Written like a linguistics textbook, the fourteen-page Web site ran to almost a hundred and sixty thousand words. It documented the grammar, syntax, and lexicon of a language that Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be.
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his “greater goal” was “to attempt the creation of what human beings, left to their own devices, would never create naturally, but rather only by conscious intellectual effort: an idealized language whose aim is the highest possible degree of logic, efficiency, detail, and accuracy in cognitive expression via spoken human language, while minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language.”
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Ithkuil, one Web site declared, “is a monument to human ingenuity and design.” It may be the most complete realization of a quixotic dream that has entranced philosophers for centuries: the creation of a more perfect language.
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Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.
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nventing new forms of speech is an almost cosmic urge that stems from what the linguist Marina Yaguello, the author of “Lunatic Lovers of Language,” calls “an ambivalent love-hate relationship.” Language creation is pursued by people who are so in love with what language can do that they hate what it doesn’t. “I don’t believe any other fantasy has ever been pursued with so much ardor by the human spirit, apart perhaps from the philosopher’s stone or the proof of the existence of God; or that any other utopia has caused so much ink to flow, apart perhaps from socialism,”
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What if, they wondered, you could create a universal written language that could be understood by anyone, a set of “real characters,” just as the creation of Arabic numerals had done for counting? “This writing will be a kind of general algebra and calculus of reason, so that, instead of disputing, we can say that ‘we calculate,’ ” Leibniz wrote, in 1679.
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In his “Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language,” from 1668, Wilkins laid out a sprawling taxonomic tree that was intended to represent a rational classification of every concept, thing, and action in the universe. Each branch along the tree corresponded to a letter or a syllable, so that assembling a word was simply a matter of tracing a set of forking limbs
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Solresol, the creation of a French musician named Jean-François Sudre, was among the first of these universal languages to gain popular attention. It had only seven syllables: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, and Si. Words could be sung, or performed on a violin. Or, since the language could also be translated into the seven colors of the rainbow, sentences could be woven into a textile as a stream of colors.
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“I had this realization that every individual language does at least one thing better than every other language,” he said. For example, the Australian Aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t use egocentric coördinates like “left,” “right,” “in front of,” or “behind.” Instead, speakers use only the cardinal directions. They don’t have left and right legs but north and south legs, which become east and west legs upon turning ninety degrees
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Among the Wakashan Indians of the Pacific Northwest, a grammatically correct sentence can’t be formed without providing what linguists refer to as “evidentiality,” inflecting the verb to indicate whether you are speaking from direct experience, inference, conjecture, or hearsay.
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Quijada began wondering, “What if there were one single language that combined the coolest features from all the world’s languages?”
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he started scribbling notes on an entirely new grammar that would eventually incorporate not only Wakashan evidentiality and Guugu Yimithirr coördinates but also Niger-Kordofanian aspectual systems, the nominal cases of Basque, the fourth-person referent found in several nearly extinct Native American languages, and a dozen other wild ways of forming sentences.
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he discovered “Metaphors We Live By,” a seminal book, published in 1980, by the cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, which argues that the way we think is structured by conceptual systems that are largely metaphorical in nature. Life is a journey. Time is money. Argument is war. For better or worse, these figures of speech are profoundly embedded in how we think.
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I asked him if he could come up with an entirely new concept on the spot, one for which there was no word in any existing language. He thought about it for a moment. “Well, no language, as far as I know, has a single word for that chin-stroking moment you get, often accompanied by a frown on your face, when someone expresses an idea that you’ve never thought of and you have a moment of suddenly seeing possibilities you never saw before.” He paused, as if leafing through a mental dictionary. “In Ithkuil, it’s ašţal.”
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Many conlanging projects begin with a simple premise that violates the inherited conventions of linguistics in some new way. Aeo uses only vowels. Kēlen has no verbs. Toki Pona, a language inspired by Taoist ideals, was designed to test how simple a language could be. It has just a hundred and twenty-three words and fourteen basic sound units. Brithenig is an answer to the question of what English might have sounded like as a Romance language, if vulgar Latin had taken root on the British Isles. Láadan, a feminist language developed in the early nineteen-eighties, includes words like radíidin, defined as a “non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help.”
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most conlangers come to their craft by way of fantasy and science fiction. J. R. R. Tolkien, who called conlanging his “secret vice,” maintained that he created the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy for the primary purpose of giving his invented languages, Quenya, Sindarin, and Khuzdul, a universe in which they could be spoken. And arguably the most commercially successful invented language of all time is Klingon, which has its own translation of “Hamlet” and a dictionary that has sold more than three hundred thousand copies.
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He imagined that Ithkuil might be able to do what Lakoff and Johnson said natural languages could not: force its speakers to precisely identify what they mean to say. No hemming, no hawing, no hiding true meaning behind jargon and metaphor. By requiring speakers to carefully consider the meaning of their words, he hoped that his analytical language would force many of the subterranean quirks of human cognition to the surface, and free people from the bugs that infect their thinking.
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Brown based the grammar for his ten-thousand-word language, called Loglan, on the rules of formal predicate logic used by analytical philosophers. He hoped that, by training research subjects to speak Loglan, he might turn them into more logical thinkers. If we could change how we think by changing how we speak, then the radical possibility existed of creating a new human condition.
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today the stronger versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis have “sunk into . . . disrepute among respectable linguists,” as Guy Deutscher writes, in “Through the Looking Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.” But, as Deutscher points out, there is evidence to support the less radical assertion that the particular language we speak influences how we perceive the world. For example, speakers of gendered languages, like Spanish, in which all nouns are either masculine or feminine, actually seem to think about objects differently depending on whether the language treats them as masculine or feminine
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The final version of Ithkuil, which Quijada published in 2011, has twenty-two grammatical categories for verbs, compared with the six—tense, aspect, person, number, mood, and voice—that exist in English. Eighteen hundred distinct suffixes further refine a speaker’s intent. Through a process of laborious conjugation that would befuddle even the most competent Latin grammarian, Ithkuil requires a speaker to home in on the exact idea he means to express, and attempts to remove any possibility for vagueness.
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Every language has its own phonemic inventory, or library of sounds, from which a speaker can string together words. Consonant-poor Hawaiian has just thirteen phonemes. English has around forty-two, depending on dialect. In order to pack as much meaning as possible into each word, Ithkuil has fifty-eight phonemes. The original version of the language included a repertoire of grunts, wheezes, and hacks that are borrowed from some of the world’s most obscure tongues. One particular hard-to-make clicklike sound, a voiceless uvular ejective affricate, has been found in only a few other languages, including the Caucasian language Ubykh, whose last native speaker died in 1992.
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Human interactions are governed by a set of implicit codes that can sometimes seem frustratingly opaque, and whose misreading can quickly put you on the outside looking in. Irony, metaphor, ambiguity: these are the ingenious instruments that allow us to mean more than we say. But in Ithkuil ambiguity is quashed in the interest of making all that is implicit explicit. An ironic statement is tagged with the verbal affix ’kçç. Hyperbolic statements are inflected by the letter ’m.
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“I wanted to use Ithkuil to show how you would discuss philosophy and emotional states transparently,” Quijada said. To attempt to translate a thought into Ithkuil requires investigating a spectrum of subtle variations in meaning that are not recorded in any natural language. You cannot express a thought without first considering all the neighboring thoughts that it is not. Though words in Ithkuil may sound like a hacking cough, they have an inherent and unavoidable depth. “It’s the ideal language for political and philosophical debate—any forum where people hide their intent or obfuscate behind language,” Quijada co
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In Ithkuil, the difference between glimpsing, glancing, and gawking is the mere flick of a vowel. Each of these distinctions is expressed simply as a conjugation of the root word for vision. Hunched over the dining-room table, Quijada showed me how he would translate “gawk” into Ithkuil. First, though, since words in Ithkuil are assembled from individual atoms of meaning, he had to engage in some introspection about what exactly he meant to say.For fifteen minutes, he flipped backward and forward through his thick spiral-bound manuscript, scratching his head, pondering each of the word’s aspects, as he packed the verb with all of gawking’s many connotations. As he assembled the evolving word from its constituent meanings, he scribbled its pieces on a notepad. He added the “second degree of the affix for expectation of outcome” to suggest an element of surprise that is more than mere unpreparedness but less than outright shock, and the “third degree of the affix for contextual appropriateness” to suggest an element of impropriety that is less than scandalous but more than simply eyebrow-raising. As he rapped his pen against the notepad, he paged through his manuscript in search of the third pattern of the first stem of the root for “shock” to suggest a “non-volitional physiological response,” and then, after several moments of contemplation, he decided that gawking required the use of the “resultative format” to suggest “an event which occurs in conjunction with the conflated sense but is also caused by it.” He eventually emerged with a tiny word that hardly rolled off the tongue: apq’uxasiu. He spoke the first clacking syllable aloud a couple of times before deciding that he had the pronunciation right, and then wrote it down in the script he had invented for printed Ithkuil:
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“You can make up words by the millions to describe concepts that have never existed in any language before,” he said.
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Neither Sapir nor Whorf formulated a definitive version of the hypothesis that bears their names, but in general the theory argues that the language we speak actually shapes our experience of reality. Speakers of different languages think differently. Stronger versions of the hypothesis go even further than this, to suggest that language constrains the set of possible thoughts that we can have. In 1955, a sociologist and science-fiction writer named James Cooke Brown decided he would test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis by creating a “culturally neutral” “model language” that might recondition its speakers’ brains.
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“We think that when a person learns Ithkuil his brain works faster,” Vishneva told him, in Russian. She spoke through a translator, as neither she nor Quijada was yet fluent in their shared language. “With Ithkuil, you always have to be reflecting on yourself. Using Ithkuil, we can see things that exist but don’t have names, in the same way that Mendeleyev’s periodic table showed gaps where we knew elements should be that had yet to be discovered.”
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Lakoff, who is seventy-one, bearded, and, like Quijada, broadly built, seemed to have read a fair portion of the Ithkuil manuscript and familiarized himself with the language’s nuances.“There are a whole lot of questions I have about this,” he told Quijada, and then explained how he felt Quijada had misread his work on metaphor. “Metaphors don’t just show up in language,” he said. “The metaphor isn’t in the word, it’s in the idea,” and it can’t be wished away with grammar.“For me, as a linguist looking at this, I have to say, ‘O.K., this isn’t going to be used.’ It has an assumption of efficiency that really isn’t efficient, given how the brain works. It misses the metaphor stuff. But the parts that are successful are really nontrivial. This may be an impossible language,” he said. “But if you think of it as a conceptual-art project I think it’s fascinating.”