Group items tagged

I was relieved -- we wouldn't have to make what felt like an impossible decision -- but then I kept reading. My father had noted that he did not want to be supported by a ventilator or hooked up to a feeding tube for any length of time. He had been connected to both for nearly two weeks.

There was grief on her face, but also curiosity. What had finally gotten to her younger son, the one who so rarely showed emotion during his father's hospitalization?

I called the hospital and approved the DNR. They told me his status was still dire. I called my dad's closest friends and started preparing them for the worst.

My father's lungs showed no signs of progress. The double pneumonia they diagnosed days before was worsening. His kidneys were failing. Dialysis was required but would put a strain on his blood pressure, which was already dangerously low. There was a special form of dialysis designed for delicate situations like this -- continuous veno-venous hemofiltration -- but it wasn't available at Lawrence

The morning after I searched for my father's health directive and drafted his obituary, I woke up and tried to turn on my laptop. It wouldn't start. When it eventually booted up, it asked if I wanted to restore an unsaved document. No, I thought, let's see what happens today.

It was the same doctor as yesterday, the one who asked about the DNR. "Look, your dad is on a ventilator. That's a form of life support. He's experiencing kidney failure and requires dialysis. His situation is still very acute. He was in good health before the Covid, but his kidney, heart, and lungs are 69 years old. It's tough for them to recover. But the numbers from today are undeniably better than yesterday. There's been an improvement at almost every level. Your dad is a tough guy."

One of my close friends, a nurse practitioner, would help me understand all the terminology and its implications. He was treating Covid patients at an ICU upstate. At the end of our calls I'd ask him how he was doing. "We ran out of gowns," he told me one day. "My ICU is out of ventilators -- we're diverting people to Albany," he said another time.

"There's a difference between good intentions and good outcomes," I explained to her. She would wave me away and pick up. Inevitably the call would bring her tears. I stewed on the porch. My brother, uncle and I would spend hours trying to ease her mind and pacify her anxiety. Any inquiry or outreach was like sticking a finger in the open wound of her anguish.

I called my friend, the nurse practitioner, and gave him the latest update. He seemed upset. "You OK, dude?" "A nurse from my hospital died," he explained.

The nurses and doctors who took care of my father -- first for four days at NewYork-Presbyterian Lawrence Hospital, then for nearly a month at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia -- were always empathetic, straightforward and willing to trust me with complicated details.

About a week after writing -- then refusing to recover -- my father's obituary, his condition was continuing to improve.

"He's only improving," I told her, "because of the life-saving care you guys have given him. The whole city is in awe of you. They should have a parade for you down the Canyon of Heroes."

Covid-19 was new and largely unstudied. Maybe one of these seemingly odd treatments would work.

"Yesterday was a stumble, but we're getting back on course," I emailed the group. "We always knew this recovery wasn't going to be a straight line. It's important to remain resilient and optimistic even when there are temporary setbacks."

"Oh Lou, I've been waiting for your call. I have such good news. They are planning to extubate him tomorrow. They are going to take your father off the ventilator!" She was practically screaming with excitement. I was speechless.

I had been withholding certain information from my family and friends during this whole ordeal. My dad had developed a blood clot two weeks into his hospitalization. Clots are extremely dangerous, of course, but it was small and in a relatively manageable location.

I called my brother and told him about the plan to get my father off the ventilator. Since there were a number of contingencies, we debated telling my mother. She was living and dying with every update.

My father's breathing was labored on the morning they were planning to extubate. They delayed the procedure a day. That next morning, April 16, a doctor called. I was in the shower and rushed out to answer my cell. He said they were doing the extubation within the hour. What do we want to do if the extubation fails?

"It went as well as we could have hoped for," the doctor said. "His vitals are stable and he's breathing well. He's resting now." She explained that my father was disoriented and it probably wasn't a great idea to speak with him that day. Whatever, I thought, I'll speak with him when he gets home. He had been on a ventilator for 28 days.

I called the doctor later in the day. She told me my dad seemed distressed. He was trying to speak, but his vocal cords were too swollen. "It's so frustrating," she told me. "I don't know what he wants to tell me."

"Each facility has their own Covid rules," she explained. "I'll send you over a list." On the list was the nursing home where my grandfather had died several years before. My father had visited him every day.

I called the step-down unit where he had been the past three days. They transferred me to his nurse. "He's doing better, love. We took him off the pressor and his blood pressure is in a good range. His heart rate is good. He's breathing fine. The doctors decided he didn't need to go back to the ICU. He's ok."

"I've repeatedly said that recovery isn't a straight line. ... Yesterday we managed the roller coaster ride as a family. My brother, uncle and I were with my mother the entire day. We never lost hope or confidence in my dad's medical care and ultimate recovery. If there's a light at the end of the tunnel, it's a blinking one. Right now, it shines again."

I drove back to my mom's house. I scanned the block for my brother's car. He had not arrived. I parked. I have to wait for him and then tell my mother, brother and uncle all at once, right? Should I call my wife first? Should I call my dad's best friend?

I called my wife. I called my dad's best friend. I called the guys he grew up with. I called his former colleagues. I began every conversation the same way, "This is that call." I listened to each of them yell and cry and ask if I was serious. Then I said I had to make another call.

I wrote about my father's career. How he got his law degree at night school and became a prosecutor at the city, state, and federal level. How he convicted mobsters, drug dealers, and those who abused power.

I wrote about my dad's volunteer work -- at the Special Olympics, at an organization he founded that helps police families with special needs, and at just about any Italian-American group that needed a lawyer. He was so proud of his Italian-American heritage. He loathed the mafioso caricatures and stereotypes found on TV -- he wrote countless op-eds attacking those -- but he revered the old-school virtues he associated with his Italian-American upbringing: loyalty, humility, hard work, dedication to family.

He was a Covid patient for 31 days. It was a painful experience, but ultimately unimportant. It doesn't matter how a man dies. It matters how he lives.

"We want to flatten the curve," Trump went on, adding: "I certainly want to get it open as soon as possible."

Facebook, for all the unprecedented connection it fosters among previously atomized people, fosters a very particular kind of connection: one that is mediated, at all times, by Facebook. And one that therefore makes very particular kinds of assumptions about how and why people connect in the first place. Facebook "connection" is defined -- semantically, at least -- by friendship. ("Facebook friends," "friending people," etc.) While it doesn't assume that every connection is an actual friend, in the narrow and maybe even old-fashioned sense of the word, Facebook's infrastructure does assume esteem among people who friend each other.

The study itself, in fact, is confirming the hypothesis that Rauch and Schanz started with: "We predict," they noted, "that due to potential chronic traits and/or their adaptation to a Facebook culture of shallow processing and agreement, frequent Facebook users are highly susceptible to persuasive messages compared to less frequent users.

This is, to say the least, troubling.

Facebook, as a result, is structured as an aggressively upbeat place.

social complicity. You can argue on Facebook, but it is not really encouraged. And the interactions Facebook fosters as it expands -- the status updates, the information sharing, the news consumption -- stem from that default-positive place. "Like," but not "Dislike." "Recommend," but not "Reject."

That's significant, because Facebook wants to expand from social connection into informational connection. The News Feed as the "personalized newspaper"; the just-introduced Home as a mobile locus of that newspaper.

Heavy users of Facebook tend to use the site because of a desire for social inclusion. In that context, the study suggests, those users are primed to agree with fellow users rather than to criticize the information those users share. And not just in terms of their public interactions, but in terms of their private beliefs. This potent combination -- "a need to connect and an ethos of shallow processing" -- provides a warm, moist breeding ground for the spread of opinions, publicly and not-so-publicly. Racist ones among them.

What will happen if information gets fully social -- according to Facebook's definition of "fully social"? What will take place when the Jack Browns of the world aren't just our friends, but our news sources?

“It used to take me an hour to memorize 20 words. Now I can learn, like, 40 new words in 20 minutes.”

“I don’t know if it makes you smarter. But when you get to each new level on the math and reading tasks, it definitely builds up your self-confidence.”

. “What you care about is not an intelligence test score, but whether your ability to do an important task has really improved. That’s a chain of evidence that would be really great to have. I haven’t seen it.”

Still,a new and growing body of scientific evidence indicates that cognitive training can be effective, including that offered by commercial services.

He looked at 340 middle-school students who spent two hours a week for a semester using LearningRx exercises in their schools’ computer labs and an equal number of students who received no such training. Those who played the online games, Dr. Hill found, not only improved significantly on measures of cognitive abilities compared to their peers, but also on Virginia’s annual Standards of Learning exam.

I’ve had some kids who not only reported that they had very big changes in the classroom, but when we bring them back in the laboratory to do neuropsychological testing, we also see great changes. They show increases that would be highly unlikely to happen just by chance.”

where crosswords and Sudoku are intended to be a diversion, the games here give that same kind of reward, only they’re designed to improve your brain, your memory, your problem-solving skills.”

More than 40 games are offered by Lumosity. One, the N-back, is based on a task developed decades ago by psychologists. Created to test working memory, the N-back challenges users to keep track of a continuously updated list and remember which item appeared “n” times ago.

Google’s latest transparency report shows a sharp rise in requests from governments and courts to take down potentially damaging material.

In Europe, where press freedoms are less sacred and the right to privacy is more ensconced, the idea has taken hold that individuals have a “right to be forgotten,” and those who want their online particulars expunged tend to have the government on their side. In Germany or Spain, Lorraine Martin might have a winning case.

The Connecticut case is just one manifestation of an anxious backlash against the invasive power of the Internet, a world of Big Data and ever more powerful search engines, in which it seems almost everything is permanently recorded and accessible to almost anyone — potential employers, landlords, dates, predators

The Times’s policy is not to censor history, because it’s history. The paper will update an arrest story if presented with evidence of an acquittal or dismissal, completing the story but not deleting the story.

Owen Tripp, a co-founder of Reputation.com, which has made a business out of helping clients manage their digital profile, advocated a “right to be forgotten” in a YouTube video. Tripp said everyone is entitled to a bit of space to grow up, to experiment, to make mistakes.

“This is not just a privacy problem,” said Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, and author of “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.” “If we are continually reminded about people’s mistakes, we are not able to judge them for who they are in the present. We need some way to put a speed-brake on the omnipresence of the past.”

would like to see search engine companies — the parties that benefit the most financially from amassing our information — offer the kind of reputation-protecting tools that are now available only to those who can afford paid services like those of Reputation.com. Google, he points out, already takes down five million items a week because of claims that they violate copyrights. Why shouldn’t we expect Google to give users an option — and a simple process — to have news stories about them down-ranked or omitted from future search results? Good question. What’s so sacred about a search algorithm, anyway?

There’s nothing wrong with an opinion on those things. The problem comes from people whose opinions are actually misconceptions

If you think vaccines cause autism you are expressing something factually wrong, not an opinion

That’s where the second question comes in; is your opinion informed and why do you believe it?

What mucks it all up is when a narrow set of information is assumed to be wider than it is. There is a difference between a belief and things you just didn’t know

eventually you are going to venture out into the world and find that what you thought was an informed opinion was actually just a tiny thought based on little data and your feelings

if I think that simply explaining the facts to the other side is going to change their mind, then I’m in for a rude awakening.

As a philosopher, I found to be somewhat more disturbing the idea that denialism isn’t even about critical thinking.

what the large variety of denialisms have in common is a very strong, overwhelming, ideological commitment that helps define the denialist identity in a core manner. This commitment can be religious, ethnical or political in nature, but in all cases it fundamentally shapes the personal identity of the people involved, thus generating a strong emotional attachment, as well as an equally strong emotional backlash against critics.

To begin with, of course, they think of themselves as “skeptics,” thus attempting to appropriate a word with a venerable philosophical pedigree and which is supposed to indicate a cautiously rational approach to a given problem. As David Hume put it, a wise person (i.e., a proper skeptic) will proportion her beliefs to the evidence. But there is nothing of the Humean attitude in people who are “skeptical” of evolution, climate change, vaccines, and so forth.

Denialists have even begun to appropriate the technical language of informal logic: when told that a majority of climate scientists agree that the planet is warming up, they are all too happy to yell “argument from authority!” When they are told that they should distrust statements coming from the oil industry and from “think tanks” in their pockets they retort “genetic fallacy!” And so on. Never mind that informal fallacies are such only against certain background information, and that it is eminently sensible and rational to trust certain authorities (at the least provisionally), as well as to be suspicious of large organizations with deep pockets and an obvious degree of self-interest.

What commonalities can we uncover across instances of denialism that may allow us to tackle the problem beyond facts and elementary logic?

the evidence from the literature is overwhelming that denialists have learned to use the vocabulary of critical thinking against their opponents.

Another important issue to understand is that denialists exploit the inherently tentative nature of scientific or historical findings to seek refuge for their doctrines.

. Scientists have been wrong before, and doubtlessly will be again in the future, many times. But the issue is rather one of where it is most rational to place your bets as a Bayesian updater: with the scientific community or with Faux News?

Science should be portrayed as a human story of failure and discovery, not as a body of barely comprehensible facts arrived at by epistemic priests.

Is there anything that can be done in this respect? I personally like the idea of teaching “science appreciation” classes in high school and college [2], as opposed to more traditional (usually rather boring, both as a student and as a teacher) science instruction

Denialists also exploit the media’s self imposed “balanced” approach to presenting facts, which leads to the false impression that there really are two approximately equal sides to every debate.

This is a rather recent phenomenon, and it is likely the result of a number of factors affecting the media industry. One, of course, is the onset of the 24-hr media cycle, with its pernicious reliance on punditry. Another is the increasing blurring of the once rather sharp line between reporting and editorializing.

The problem with the media is of course made far worse by the ongoing crisis in contemporary journalism, with newspapers, magazines and even television channels constantly facing an uncertain future of revenues,

he push back against denialism, in all its varied incarnations, is likely to be more successful if we shift the focus from persuading individual members of the public to making political and media elites accountable.

This is a major result coming out of Brendan’s research. He showed data set after data set demonstrating two fundamental things: first, large sections of the general public do not respond to the presentation of even highly compelling facts, indeed — as mentioned above — are actually more likely to entrench further into their positions.

Second, whenever one can put pressure on either politicians or the media, they do change their tune, becoming more reasonable and presenting things in a truly (as opposed to artificially) balanced way.

Third, and most crucially, there is plenty of evidence from political science studies that the public does quickly rally behind a unified political leadership. This, as much as it is hard to fathom now, has happened a number of times even in somewhat recent times

when leaders really do lead, the people follow. It’s just that of late the extreme partisan bickering in Washington has made the two major parties entirely incapable of working together on the common ground that they have demonstrably had in the past.

Another thing we can do about denialism: we should learn from the detailed study of successful cases and see what worked and how it can be applied to other instances

Yet another thing we can do: seek allies. In the case of evolution denial — for which I have the most first-hand experience — it has been increasingly obvious to me that it is utterly counterproductive for a strident atheist like Dawkins (or even a relatively good humored one like yours truly) to engage creationists directly. It is far more effective when we have clergy (Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State [6] comes to mind) and religious scientists

Make no mistake about it: denialism in its various forms is a pernicious social phenomenon, with potentially catastrophic consequences for our society. It requires a rallying call for all serious public intellectuals, academic or not, who have the expertise and the stamina to join the fray to make this an even marginally better world for us all. It’s most definitely worth the fight.

Even before the evolution of a central brain, nervous systems took advantage of a simple computing trick: competition.

It coordinates something called overt attention – aiming the satellite dishes of the eyes, ears, and nose toward anything important.

Selective enhancement therefore probably evolved sometime between hydras and arthropods—between about 700 and 600 million years ago, close to the beginning of complex, multicellular life

The next evolutionary advance was a centralized controller for attention that could coordinate among all senses. In many animals, that central controller is a brain area called the tectum

At any moment only a few neurons win that intense competition, their signals rising up above the noise and impacting the animal’s behavior. This process is called selective signal enhancement, and without it, a nervous system can do almost nothing.

All vertebrates—fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals—have a tectum. Even lampreys have one, and they appeared so early in evolution that they don’t even have a lower jaw. But as far as anyone knows, the tectum is absent from all invertebrates

According to fossil and genetic evidence, vertebrates evolved around 520 million years ago. The tectum and the central control of attention probably evolved around then, during the so-called Cambrian Explosion when vertebrates were tiny wriggling creatures competing with a vast range of invertebrates in the sea.

The tectum is a beautiful piece of engineering. To control the head and the eyes efficiently, it constructs something called an internal model, a feature well known to engineers. An internal model is a simulation that keeps track of whatever is being controlled and allows for predictions and planning.

The tectum’s internal model is a set of information encoded in the complex pattern of activity of the neurons. That information simulates the current state of the eyes, head, and other major body parts, making predictions about how these body parts will move next and about the consequences of their movement

In fish and amphibians, the tectum is the pinnacle of sophistication and the largest part of the brain. A frog has a pretty good simulation of itself.

With the evolution of reptiles around 350 to 300 million years ago, a new brain structure began to emerge – the wulst. Birds inherited a wulst from their reptile ancestors. Mammals did too, but our version is usually called the cerebral cortex and has expanded enormously

The cortex also takes in sensory signals and coordinates movement, but it has a more flexible repertoire. Depending on context, you might look toward, look away, make a sound, do a dance, or simply store the sensory event in memory in case the information is useful for the future.

The most important difference between the cortex and the tectum may be the kind of attention they control. The tectum is the master of overt attention—pointing the sensory apparatus toward anything important. The cortex ups the ante with something called covert attention. You don’t need to look directly at something to covertly attend to it. Even if you’ve turned your back on an object, your cortex can still focus its processing resources on it

The cortex needs to control that virtual movement, and therefore like any efficient controller it needs an internal model. Unlike the tectum, which models concrete objects like the eyes and the head, the cortex must model something much more abstract. According to the AST, it does so by constructing an attention schema—a constantly updated set of information that describes what covert attention is doing moment-by-moment and what its consequences are

Covert attention isn’t intangible. It has a physical basis, but that physical basis lies in the microscopic details of neurons, synapses, and signals. The brain has no need to know those details. The attention schema is therefore strategically vague. It depicts covert attention in a physically incoherent way, as a non-physical essence

this, according to the theory, is the origin of consciousness. We say we have consciousness because deep in the brain, something quite primitive is computing that semi-magical self-description.

I’m reminded of Teddy Roosevelt’s famous quote, “Do what you can with what you have where you are.” Evolution is the master of that kind of opportunism. Fins become feet. Gill arches become jaws. And self-models become models of others. In the AST, the attention schema first evolved as a model of one’s own covert attention. But once the basic mechanism was in place, according to the theory, it was further adapted to model the attentional states of others, to allow for social prediction. Not only could the brain attribute consciousness to itself, it began to attribute consciousness to others.

In the AST’s evolutionary story, social cognition begins to ramp up shortly after the reptilian wulst evolved. Crocodiles may not be the most socially complex creatures on earth, but they live in large communities, care for their young, and can make loyal if somewhat dangerous pets.

If AST is correct, 300 million years of reptilian, avian, and mammalian evolution have allowed the self-model and the social model to evolve in tandem, each influencing the other. We understand other people by projecting ourselves onto them. But we also understand ourselves by considering the way other people might see us.

t the cortical networks in the human brain that allow us to attribute consciousness to others overlap extensively with the networks that construct our own sense of consciousness.

Language is perhaps the most recent big leap in the evolution of consciousness. Nobody knows when human language first evolved. Certainly we had it by 70 thousand years ago when people began to disperse around the world, since all dispersed groups have a sophisticated language. The relationship between language and consciousness is often debated, but we can be sure of at least this much: once we developed language, we could talk about consciousness and compare notes

Maybe partly because of language and culture, humans have a hair-trigger tendency to attribute consciousness to everything around us. We attribute consciousness to characters in a story, puppets and dolls, storms, rivers, empty spaces, ghosts and gods. Justin Barrett called it the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device, or HADD

the HADD goes way beyond detecting predators. It’s a consequence of our hyper-social nature. Evolution turned up the amplitude on our tendency to model others and now we’re supremely attuned to each other’s mind states. It gives us our adaptive edge. The inevitable side effect is the detection of false positives, or ghosts.

the Internet has deepened that divide. It makes it easy for people to read only news and opinions from people they agree with. In many cases, people don’t even make that choice for themselves. Last week, Twitter said it would begin showing people tweets even from people they don’t follow if enough other people they follow favorite them.

Humans are acutely attuned to the approval of others, constantly reading cues to judge whether people agree with them, the researchers said. Active social media users get many more of these cues — like status updates, news stories people choose to share and photos of how they spend their days — and so they become less likely to speak up.

The study also found that for all the discussion of social media becoming the place where people find and discuss news, most people said they got information about the N.S.A. revelations from TV and radio, while Facebook and Twitter were the least likely to be news sources.

ThinkUp is something like Elf on the Shelf for digitally addled adults — a constant reminder that someone is watching you, and that you’re being judged.

“The goal is to make you act like less of a jerk online,” Ms. Trapani said. “The big goal is to create mindfulness and awareness, and also behavioral change.”

One of the biggest dangers is saying something off the cuff that might make sense in a particular context, but that sounds completely off the rails to the wider public. The problem, in other words, is acting without thinking — being caught up in the moment, without pausing to reflect on the long-term consequences. You’re never more than a few taps away from an embarrassment that might ruin your career, or at least your reputation, for years to come.

Because social networks often suggest a false sense of intimacy, they tend to lower people’s self-control.

Like a drug or perhaps a parasite, they worm into your devices, your daily habits and your every free moment, and they change how you think.Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

people often tweet and update without any perspective about themselves. That’s because Facebook and Twitter, as others have observed, have a way of infecting our brains.

For those of us most deeply afflicted, myself included, every mundane observation becomes grist for a 140-character quip, and every interaction a potential springboard into an all-consuming, emotionally wrenching flame battle.

getting a daily reminder from ThinkUp that there are good ways and bad ways to behave online — has a tendency to focus the mind.

More basically, though, it’s helped me pull back from social networks. Each week, ThinkUp tells me how often I’ve tweeted. Sometimes that number is terribly high — a few weeks ago it was more than 800 times — and I realize I’m probably overtaxing my followers

ThinkUp charges $5 a month for each social network you connect to it. Is it worth it? After all, there’s a better, more surefire way of avoiding any such long-term catastrophe caused by social media: Just stop using social networks.

even though “never tweet” became a popular, ironic thing to tweet this year, actually never tweeting, and never being on Facebook, is becoming nearly impossible for many people.

your online profile plays an important role in how you’re perceived by potential employers. In a recent survey commissioned by the job-hunting site CareerBuilder, almost half of companies said they perused job-seekers’ social networking profiles to look for red flags and to see what sort of image prospective employees portrayed online.

The main issue constraining growth, the founders say, is that it has been difficult to explain to people why they might need ThinkUp.

That may change as more people falter on social networks, either by posting unthinking comments that end up damaging their careers, or simply by annoying people to the point that their online presence becomes a hindrance to their real-life prospects.

Some experts displayed a top-down style of reasoning: politics as a deductive art. They started with a big-idea premise about human nature, society, or economics and applied it to the specifics of the case. They tended to reach more confident conclusions about the future. And the positions they reached were easier to classify ideologically: that is the Keynesian prediction and that is the free-market fundamentalist prediction and that is the worst-case environmentalist prediction and that is the best case technology-driven growth prediction etc. Other experts displayed a bottom-up style of reasoning: politics as a much messier inductive art. They reached less confident conclusions and they are more likely to draw on a seemingly contradictory mix of ideas in reaching those conclusions (sometimes from the left, sometimes from the right). We called the big-idea experts “hedgehogs” (they know one big thing) and the more eclectic experts “foxes” (they know many, not so big things).

The most consistent predictor of consistently more accurate forecasts was “style of reasoning”: experts with the more eclectic, self-critical, and modest cognitive styles tended to outperform the big-idea people (foxes tended to outperform hedgehogs).

Lehrer: Can non-experts do anything to encourage a more effective punditocracy?

Tetlock: Yes, non-experts can encourage more accountability in the punditocracy. Pundits are remarkably skillful at appearing to go out on a limb in their claims about the future, without actually going out on one. For instance, they often “predict” continued instability and turmoil in the Middle East (predicting the present) but they virtually never get around to telling you exactly what would have to happen to disconfirm their expectations. They are essentially impossible to pin down. If pundits felt that their public credibility hinged on participating in level playing field forecasting exercises in which they must pit their wits against an extremely difficult-to-predict world, I suspect they would be learn, quite quickly, to be more flexible and foxlike in their policy pronouncements.

tweetmeme_style = 'compact'; Digg Stumble Upon Delicious Reddit if(typeof CN!=='undefined' && CN.dart){ CN.dart.call("blogsBody",{sz: "300x250", kws : ["bottom"]}); } Disqus Login About Disqus Like Dislike and 5 others liked this. Glad you liked it. Would you like to share? Facebook Twitter Share No thanks Sharing this page … Thanks! Close Login Add New Comment Post as … Image http://mediacdn.disqus.com/1312506743/build/system/upload.html#xdm_e=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com&xdm_c=default5471&xdm_p=1&f=wiredscience&t=do_political_experts_know_what_they8217re_talking_

It also offers its experts' predictions about what the most-desired life skills (for young people, but ostensibly for everyone else, too) will be in the year 2020. Among the skills they highlighted: public problem-solving through cooperative work -- crowdsourcing and the like; the ability to search effectively for information online; the ability to distinguish the quality and veracity of online discoveries; the ability to synthesize, or combine facts and details from different sources into coherent narratives; the ability to concentrate; and the ability to distinguish between the signal and the noise as the information we're exposed to gets bigger, and broader, and more plentiful.

All these skills can be taught. The question is whether kids will learn them in school, or outside of it.

Streaming social media have an immediacy that is very different from, say, a conversation over lunch recounting the events of the previous weekend. When you see that your friends are sharing a bottle of wine without you — and at that very moment — “you can imagine how things could be different,” Professor Ariely said. It’s like a near miss in real life. “When would you be more upset?” he asked. “After missing your flight by two minutes or two hours?

“Social software is both the creator and the cure of FOMO,”

feedback, Mr. Systrom said, can be slightly addictive. People using Instagram “are rewarded when someone likes it and you keep coming back,”

“We aren’t used to seeing the world as it happens,” he said. “We as humans can only process so much data.”

as technology becomes ever more pervasive, our relationship to it becomes more intimate, granting it the power to influence decisions, moods and emotions.

While science and philosophy do at times overlap, they are fundamentally different approaches to understanding. So philosophers should not add to the conceptual confusion that subsumes all knowledge into science.

various disciplines we ordinarily treat as science are at least as — if not more —philosophical than scientific. Take for example mathematics, theoretical physics, psychology and economics. These are predominately rational conceptual disciplines. That is, they are not chiefly reliant on empirical observation. For unlike science, they may be conducted while sitting in an armchair with eyes closed.

unlike empirical observations, which may be mistaken or incomplete, philosophical findings depend primarily on rational and logical principles. As such, whereas science tends to alter and update its findings day to day through trial and error, logical deductions are timeless.

while mathematics is empirically testable at such rudimentary levels, it stops being so in its purest forms, like analysis and number theory. Proofs in these areas are conducted entirely conceptually

Logically fallacious arguments can be rather sophisticated and persuasive. But they are nevertheless invalid and always will be. Exposing such errors is part of philosophy’s stock and trade.

Wittgenstein showed that an ordinary word such as “game” is used consistently in myriad contrasting ways without possessing any essential unifying definition. Though this may seem impossible, the meaning of such terms is actually determined by their contextual usage

Ultimately as a result of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, we know that natural language is a public phenomenon that cannot logically be invented in isolation.

These are essentially conceptual clarifications. And as such, they are relatively timeless philosophical truths.

This is also why jurisprudence qualifies as an objective body of knowledge

Supreme Court justices are not so much scientific as philosophical experts on the nature of justice. And that is not to say their expertise does not count as genuine knowledge. In the best cases, it rises to the loftier level of wisdom

Though philosophy does sometimes employ thought experiments, these aren’t actually scientific, for they are conducted entirely in the imagination.

in ethics, science cannot necessarily tell us what to value

evidence of how most people happen to be does not necessarily tell us everything about how we should aspire to be. For how we should aspire to be is a conceptual question, namely, of how we ought to act, as opposed to an empirical question of how we do act.

“We have to think about social media in a new strategic way,” he said. “It is no longer something that we can ignore. It is not a place to just wish your friends happy birthday. It is a place of business. It is a place where your career will be enhanced or degraded, depending on your use of these tools and services.”

“Our consumption of content isn’t synchronous,” he said. “Things are interesting to a small group, a cluster of friends or on Reddit — then they die.” He continued: “Then they pick up and go massive. There are these little ripple effects all around the Web, little waves that converge in a pool and make big waves.”

THERE are other signs to indicate a replay aesthetic is coming to the Web. For example, the latest version of the iPhone’s mobile software will include the ability to capture video in slow motion.

The way we use technology could be reshaping our sense of time and urgency. Douglas Rushkoff, the author of “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now,” describes present shock as the stupefaction that overtakes people as they try to keep up with the never-ending onslaught of status updates, photo feeds and looping videos constantly refreshing before their eyes.

present shock keeps us suspended in a state of constant disarray, and causes us to prioritize the recent over the relevant and the new instead of the most important.

the medium of the loop — either in a GIF, a short clip posted to Vine, or Instagram photo- and video-sharing applications — has become a crucial framework for transmitting information. It mimics the way we remember — by repetition — and future tools could make use of that to understand not only how we transmit information but also how we retain it.

Perhaps the replay Web, by allowing us to constantly revisit and reconsider the recent past, can help us find new meaning in it.