At one end of the scale, men continue to dominate.
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The Increasing Significance of the Decline of Men - The New York Times - 0 views
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But at the other end of the scale, men of all races and ethnicities are dropping out of the work force, abusing opioids and falling behind women in both college attendance and graduation rates.
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From 1979 to 2007, seven percent of men and 16 percent of women with middle-skill jobs lost their positions, according to the Dallas Fed study. Four percent of these men moved to low-skill work, and 3 percent moved to high-skill jobs. Almost all the women, 15 percent, moved into high-skill jobs, with only 1 percent moving to low-skill work.
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For boys and girls raised in two-parent households, there were only modest differences between the sexes in terms of success at school, and boys tended to earn more than their sisters in early adulthood.
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At the same time, the divorce rate for college graduates has declined from 34.8 percent among those born between 1950 and 1955 to 29.9 percent among those born between 1957 and 1964. In contrast, the divorce rate for those without college degrees increased over the same period from 44.3 percent to 50.6 percent.
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First, there are irreversible changes in the workplace, particularly the rise of jobs requiring social skills (even STEM jobs) that will continue to make it hard for men who lack those skills.
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Men are really going to have to change their act or have big problems. I think of big guys from the cave days, guys who were good at lifting stuff and hunting and the things we got genetically selected out for. During the industrial revolution that wasn’t so bad, but it’s not going to be there anymore.
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This vulnerability, in turn, makes boys more susceptible toattention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and conduct disorders as well as the epigenetic mechanisms that can account for the recent widespread increase of these disorders in U.S. culture.
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Schore argues that a major factor in rising dysfunction among boys and men in this country is the failure of the United States to provide longer periods of paid parental leave, with the result that many infants are placed in day care when they are six weeks old.
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Females consistently score higher on tests of emotional and social intelligence. Sex differences in sociability and social perceptiveness have been shown to have biological origins, with differences appearing in infancy and higher levels of fetal testosterone associated with lower scores on tests of social intelligence.
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Second, male children suffer more from restricted or nonexistent parental leave policies and contemporary child care arrangements, as well as from growing up in single-parent households. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
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It has been a longstanding objective of right-wing regimes to push women back into traditional gender roles. Is that what’s going on here? Or could it be something less pernicious and more important?
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I think this research is very interesting. It takes a different perspective when discussing gender issues. It notices that there are actually a decline of men in the society. Although there are still wage inequality and other gender problems that women are usually in disadvantages, men are having more and more disadvantages now as the the society shift from physical work to mental work. As the society evolved, the social structure also evolves. Gender equality means we should put equal attention to all genders (there are more than two). --Sissi (3/16/2017)
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After Britain Attack, Trump Unleashes a Twitter Storm - The New York Times - 0 views
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“We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people,” he wrote on Twitter. “If we don’t get smart it will only get worse.”
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“Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now?” he wrote on Sunday morning. “That’s because they used knives and a truck!” Advertisement Continue reading the main story On Saturday night, he wrote: “We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!”
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“You have to be kidding me?!: Terror attacks are part of living in big city, says London Mayor Sadiq Khan,” the younger Mr. Trump wrote at the time.Mr. Trump’s post left the impression that Mr. Khan was minimizing the importance of terrorist attacks. But in fact, he was saying that terrorism was a reality that a big city needed to be prepared to prevent and respond to vigorously.
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Asked later during a television interview about the president’s son, Mr. Khan dismissed the post. “I’m not going to respond to a tweet from Donald Trump Jr.,” he said on CNN. “I’ve been doing far more important things over the last 24 hours.”
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using Twitter is Trump's way of communicating; interesting for a president. it seems it portrays him as a less serious president, unfortunately. social media can be useful, but Trump uses it in ways that are not always appropriate. sometimes it is very difficult to correctly interpret the tone of a statement over the internet when there is no real human voice behind it.
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An Algorithm Isn't Always the Answer - The New York Times - 1 views
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Here are my search criteria: I’m looking for men in my area (no farther than three miles away, because traveling is such a hassle and I take too many cabs as it is) who are anywhere from two years younger than me up to 10 years older (going on the assumption that women mature more quickly than men). And for goodness’ sake, my friends would tell me, find a man who isn’t a writer — they’re way too emotionally unstable. Certainly if I could check most of those items off the checklist, I’d find love or some good enough approximation of it. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
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How did it go? I was absolutely miserable dating appropriate-age marketing associates who lived near me. I always wanted to be at home reading instead
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Then one night I held a reading with some authors I admire at a bookstore, and I threw an after-party at my favorite dive bar. In walked a friend of a friend who I sort of knew from the internet but who I’d never met in real life. He is six years younger than I am (way too young for me) and he lived in Harlem (that’s a $40 cab fare from my home in Brooklyn) and he’s a writer/comedian (warning flags coming at me from every direction). But we talked and he charmed me. He was online dating, too, but I never would’ve found him on an app. He wasn’t on my metaphorical vision board, but he fit into my real life in ways I never could’ve imagined. He’s my husband now. (He likes David Foster Wallace.)
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The internet is supposed to make it easier for us to find people and places and perfect gifts, and more profitable for companies that offer those services. And yet here I am, with my too-old dog and my too-young husband and my ever-growing book collection, happier than I could have predicted.
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It’s risky not to have data, to be without numbers you can plug in when you’re looking for something or someone to love. We think we know exactly what we want. But I hope that our guts remain true to our hearts, and in this world measured by clicks and stars and highest customer reviews, we remember that some rules are made to be broken in the most delightful of ways.
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The Happiness Course: Here What's Some Learned - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Yale happiness class, formally known as Psyc 157: Psychology and the Good Life, is one of the most popular classes to be offered in the university’s 320-year history
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“Everyone knows what they need to do to protect their physical health: wash your hands, and social distance, and wear a mask,” she added. “People were struggling with what to do to protect their mental health.”
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The Coursera curriculum, adapted from the one Dr. Santos taught at Yale, asks students to, among other things, track their sleep patterns, keep a gratitude journal, perform random acts of kindness, and take note of whether, over time, these behaviors correlate with a positive change in their general mood.
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“It’s hard to set those boundaries with yourself sometimes and say, ‘I know this book is really exciting, but it can wait till tomorrow, sleep is more important,’”
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“That’s discipline, right? But I had never done it in that way, where it’s like, ‘It’s going to make you happier. It’s not just good for you; it’s going to actually legitimately make you happier.’”
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“I found myself looking inward. It helped me become more introspective,” she said. “Honestly, it was the best thing I ever did.”
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“There’s no reason I shouldn’t be happy,” she said. “I have a wonderful marriage. I have two kids. I have a nice job and a nice house. And I just could never find happiness.
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Since taking the course, Ms. Morgan, 52, has made a commitment to do three things every day: practice yoga for one hour, take a walk outside in nature no matter how cold it may be in Alberta, and write three to five entries in her gratitude journal before bed
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“When you start writing down those things at the end of the day, you only think about it at the end of the day, but once you make it a routine, you start to think about it all throughout the day,”
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some studies show that finding reasons to be grateful can increase your general sense of well-being.
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“Somewhere along the second or third year, you do feel a bit burned out, and you need strategies for dealing with it,”
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Matt Nadel, 21, a Yale senior, was among the 1,200 students taking the class on campus in 2018. He said the rigors of Yale were a big adjustment when he started at the university in the fall of 2017.
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While the class wasn’t life-changing for him, Mr. Nadel said that he is more expressive now when he feels gratitude.
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“I think I was struggling to reconcile, and to intellectually interrogate, my religion,” he said. “Also acknowledging that I just really like to hang out with this kind of community that I think made me who I am.”
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negative visualization. This entails thinking of a good thing in your life (like your gorgeous, reasonably affordable apartment) and then imagining the worst-case scenario (suddenly finding yourself homeless and without a safety net).
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If gratitude is something that doesn’t come naturally, negative visualization can help you to get there.
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“That’s something that I really keep in mind, especially when I feel like my mind is so trapped in thinking about future hurdles,
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“I should be so grateful for everything that I have. Because you’re not built to notice these things.”
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Living With Aphantasia, the Inability to Make Mental Images - The New York Times - 0 views
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Many educators believe visualization is key to reading comprehension since it allows readers to organize information in their minds, make inferences, and remember content more effectively.
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Aphantasia is not a monolithic condition. People who believe they have aphantasia, known as aphants, debate in online groups about whether it should be deemed a disability. Some who are just finding out about their condition in their 50s or 60s say they never felt hindered, while others believe they failed courses in school because of it.
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Not being able to visualize means never picturing the faces of family or close friends and remembering images as abstract information.
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It might be while reminiscing about the past and realizing they’re having a different experience with memory than their friends or family.
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Ultimately, aphantasia is just one of the many ways that people’s brains and learning styles are different.
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When I close my eyes, all I see is faint blue dots and darkness, and for 19 years, I assumed that’s what everyone else saw too.
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The Neuroscience of Illusion - Scientific American - 0 views
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Although our sensations feel accurate and truthful, they do not necessarily reproduce the physical reality of the outside world
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One of the most important tools used by neuroscientists to understand how the brain creates its sense of reality is the visual illusion.
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Long before scientists were studying the properties of neurons, artists had devised a series of techniques to deceive the brain into thinking that a flat canvas was three-dimensional or that a series of brushstrokes was indeed a still life.
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Visual illusions are defined by the dissociation between the physical reality and the subjective perception of an object or event.
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Brightness, color, shading, eye movement and other factors can have powerful effects on what we “see.”
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Taking On Adam Smith (and Karl Marx) - The New York Times - 0 views
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“This sort of vaccinated me for life against lazy, anticapitalist rhetoric, because when you see these empty shops, you see these people queuing for nothing in the street,” he said, “it became clear to me that we need private property and market institutions, not just for economic efficiency but for personal freedom.”
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But his disenchantment with communism doesn’t mean that Mr. Piketty has turned his back on the intellectual heritage of Karl Marx, who sought to explain the “iron laws” of capitalism. Like Marx, he is fiercely critical of the economic and social inequalities that untrammeled capitalism produces — and, he concludes, will continue to worsen. “I belong to a generation that never had any temptation with the Communist Party; I was too young for that,” Mr. Piketty said, in
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In his new book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (Harvard University Press), Mr. Piketty, 42, has written a blockbuster, at least in the world of economics. His book punctures earlier assumptions about the benevolence of advanced capitalism and forecasts sharply increasing inequality of wealth in industrialized countries, with deep and deleterious impact on democratic values of justice and fairness.
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Branko Milanovic, a former economist at the World Bank, called it “one of the watershed books in economic thinking.
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“Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” with its title echoing Marx’s “Das Kapital,” is meant to be a return to the kind of economic history, of political economy, written by predecessors like Marx and Adam Smith. It is nothing less than a broad effort to understand Western societies and the economic rules that underpin them.
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he said, are his generation’s “founding experiences”: the collapse of Communism, the economic degradation of Eastern Europe and the first Gulf War, in 1991.
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Those events motivated him to try to understand a world where economic ideas had such bad consequences. As for the Gulf War, it showed him that “governments can do a lot in terms of redistribution of wealth when they want.” The rapid intervention to fo
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The reason that postwar economies looked different — that inequality fell — was historical catastrophe. World War I, the Depression and World War II destroyed huge accumulations of private capital, especially in Europe. What the French call “les
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In 2012 the top 1 percent of American households collected 22.5 percent of the nation’s income, the highest total since 1928. The richest 10 percent of Americans now take a larger slice of the pie than in 1913, at the close of the Gilded Age, owning more than 70 percent of the nation’s wealth. And half of that is owned by the top 1 percent. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Mr. Piketty, father of three daughters — 11, 13 and 16 — is no revolutionary. He is a member of no political party, and says he never served as an economic adviser to any politician. He calls himself a pragmatist, who simply follows the data.
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Net wealth is a better indicator of ability to pay than income alone, he said. “All I’m proposing is to reduce the property tax on half or three-quarters of the population who have very little wealth,” he said. Write A Comment Published a year ago in French, the book is not without critics, especially of Mr. Piketty’s policy prescriptions, which have been called politically naïve. Others point out that some of the increase in capital is because of aging populations and postwar pension plans, which are not necessarily inherited.More criticism is sure to come, and Mr. Piketty says he welcomes it. “I’m certainly looking forward to the debate.”
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Why Listening Is So Much More Than Hearing - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...so-much-more-than-hearing.html
sense perception hearing listening attention brain science psychology
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Studies have shown that conscious thought takes place at about the same rate as visual recognition, requiring a significant fraction of a second per event. But hearing is a quantitatively faster sense.
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hearing has evolved as our alarm system — it operates out of line of sight and works even while you are asleep. And because there is no place in the universe that is totally silent, your auditory system has evolved a complex and automatic “volume control,” fine-tuned by development and experience, to keep most sounds off your cognitive radar unless they might be of use as a signal
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Hearing, in short, is easy. You and every other vertebrate that hasn’t suffered some genetic, developmental or environmental accident have been doing it for hundreds of millions of years. It’s your life line, your alarm system, your way to escape danger and pass on your genes
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This simplest form of attention requires almost no brains at all and has been observed in every studied vertebrate.
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But listening, really listening, is hard when potential distractions are leaping into your ears every fifty-thousandth of a second — and pathways in your brain are just waiting to interrupt your focus to warn you of any potential dangers.
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Listening is a skill that we’re in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction and information overload.
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we can train our listening just as with any other skill. Listen to new music when jogging rather than familiar tunes. Listen to your dog’s whines and barks: he is trying to tell you something isn’t right. Listen to your significant other’s voice — not only to the words, which after a few years may repeat, but to the sounds under them, the emotions carried in the harmonics.
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“You never listen” is not just the complaint of a problematic relationship, it has also become an epidemic in a world that is exchanging convenience for content, speed for meaning. The richness of life doesn’t lie in the loudness and the beat, but in the timbres and the variations that you can discern if you simply pay attention.
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Illustrating With Words Alone « The Dish - 1 views
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Sam Sacks details the turn against illustrated stories and novels among early 20th century writers, including Henry James and Virginia Woolf, who were suspicious of what visuals did to the integrity of their art:
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So writers somewhat defensively cleaved to this division: pictures were about superficial titillation; prose was about essences. And over time the opinion hardened that the old custom of accompanying illustration was a form of aesthetic corruption.
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Writers who stick to this dichotomy are missing out, especially in the age of e-readers that “allow you to read text, look at pictures, and watch videos on the same device.”
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Seeing Things? Hearing Things? Many of Us Do - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Having hallucinations is a fearful secret for many people — millions of people — never to be mentioned, hardly to be acknowledged to oneself, and yet far from uncommon. The vast majority are benign — and, indeed, in many circumstances, perfectly normal. Most of us have experienced them from time to time, during a fever or with the sensory monotony of a desert or empty road, or sometimes, seemingly, out of the blue.
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hallucinations are often a result of too many medications and interactions between them, compounded by illness, anxiety and unfamiliar surroundings.
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But hallucinations can have a positive and comforting role, too — this is especially true with bereavement hallucinations, seeing the face or hearing the voice of one’s deceased spouse, siblings, parents or child — and may play an important part in the mourning process.
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I explained to her that if the visual parts of the brain are deprived of actual input, they are hungry for stimulation and may concoct images of their own. Rosalie was greatly relieved by this, and delighted to know that there was even a name for her condition: Charles Bonnet syndrome.
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Professor Rosenhan demonstrated convincingly that auditory hallucinations and schizophrenia were synonymous in the medical mind.
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Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong - Yarden Katz - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...261637
chomsky ai language brain science computer research methods science history
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If you take a look at the progress of science, the sciences are kind of a continuum, but they're broken up into fields. The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say physics -- greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.
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If a molecule is too big, you give it to the chemists. The chemists, for them, if the molecule is too big or the system gets too big, you give it to the biologists. And if it gets too big for them, they give it to the psychologists, and finally it ends up in the hands of the literary critic, and so on.
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neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track. There's a fairly recent book by a very good cognitive neuroscientist, Randy Gallistel and King, arguing -- in my view, plausibly -- that neuroscience developed kind of enthralled to associationism and related views of the way humans and animals work. And as a result they've been looking for things that have the properties of associationist psychology.
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in general what he argues is that if you take a look at animal cognition, human too, it's computational systems. Therefore, you want to look the units of computation. Think about a Turing machine, say, which is the simplest form of computation, you have to find units that have properties like "read", "write" and "address." That's the minimal computational unit, so you got to look in the brain for those. You're never going to find them if you look for strengthening of synaptic connections or field properties, and so on. You've got to start by looking for what's there and what's working and you see that from Marr's highest level.
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it's basically in the spirit of Marr's analysis. So when you're studying vision, he argues, you first ask what kind of computational tasks is the visual system carrying out. And then you look for an algorithm that might carry out those computations and finally you search for mechanisms of the kind that would make the algorithm work. Otherwise, you may never find anything.
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AI and robotics got to the point where you could actually do things that were useful, so it turned to the practical applications and somewhat, maybe not abandoned, but put to the side, the more fundamental scientific questions, just caught up in the success of the technology and achieving specific goals.
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"Good Old Fashioned AI," as it's labeled now, made strong use of formalisms in the tradition of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, mathematical logic for example, or derivatives of it, like nonmonotonic reasoning and so on. It's interesting from a history of science perspective that even very recently, these approaches have been almost wiped out from the mainstream and have been largely replaced -- in the field that calls itself AI now -- by probabilistic and statistical models. My question is, what do you think explains that shift and is it a step in the right direction?
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The approximating unanalyzed data kind is sort of a new approach, not totally, there's things like it in the past. It's basically a new approach that has been accelerated by the existence of massive memories, very rapid processing, which enables you to do things like this that you couldn't have done by hand. But I think, myself, that it is leading subjects like computational cognitive science into a direction of maybe some practical applicability... ..in engineering? Chomsky: ...But away from understanding.
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I was very skeptical about the original work. I thought it was first of all way too optimistic, it was assuming you could achieve things that required real understanding of systems that were barely understood, and you just can't get to that understanding by throwing a complicated machine at it.
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if success is defined as getting a fair approximation to a mass of chaotic unanalyzed data, then it's way better to do it this way than to do it the way the physicists do, you know, no thought experiments about frictionless planes and so on and so forth. But you won't get the kind of understanding that the sciences have always been aimed at -- what you'll get at is an approximation to what's happening.
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Suppose you want to predict tomorrow's weather. One way to do it is okay I'll get my statistical priors, if you like, there's a high probability that tomorrow's weather here will be the same as it was yesterday in Cleveland, so I'll stick that in, and where the sun is will have some effect, so I'll stick that in, and you get a bunch of assumptions like that, you run the experiment, you look at it over and over again, you correct it by Bayesian methods, you get better priors. You get a pretty good approximation of what tomorrow's weather is going to be. That's not what meteorologists do -- they want to understand how it's working. And these are just two different concepts of what success means, of what achievement is.
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take a concrete example of a new field in neuroscience, called Connectomics, where the goal is to find the wiring diagram of very complex organisms, find the connectivity of all the neurons in say human cerebral cortex, or mouse cortex. This approach was criticized by Sidney Brenner, who in many ways is [historically] one of the originators of the approach. Advocates of this field don't stop to ask if the wiring diagram is the right level of abstraction -- maybe it's no
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the right approach, is to try to see if you can understand what the fundamental principles are that deal with the core properties, and recognize that in the actual usage, there's going to be a thousand other variables intervening -- kind of like what's happening outside the window, and you'll sort of tack those on later on if you want better approximations, that's a different approach.
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if you get more and more data, and better and better statistics, you can get a better and better approximation to some immense corpus of text, like everything in The Wall Street Journal archives -- but you learn nothing about the language.
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if you went to MIT in the 1960s, or now, it's completely different. No matter what engineering field you're in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it. But that's a very different approach. And it resulted maybe from the fact that really for the first time in history, the basic sciences, like physics, had something really to tell engineers. And besides, technologies began to change very fast, so not very much point in learning the technologies of today if it's going to be different 10 years from now. So you have to learn the fundamental science that's going to be applicable to whatever comes along next. And the same thing pretty much happened in medicine.
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that's the kind of transition from something like an art, that you learn how to practice -- an analog would be trying to match some data that you don't understand, in some fashion, maybe building something that will work -- to science, what happened in the modern period, roughly Galilean science.
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it turns out that there actually are neural circuits which are reacting to particular kinds of rhythm, which happen to show up in language, like syllable length and so on. And there's some evidence that that's one of the first things that the infant brain is seeking -- rhythmic structures. And going back to Gallistel and Marr, its got some computational system inside which is saying "okay, here's what I do with these things" and say, by nine months, the typical infant has rejected -- eliminated from its repertoire -- the phonetic distinctions that aren't used in its own language.
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people like Shimon Ullman discovered some pretty remarkable things like the rigidity principle. You're not going to find that by statistical analysis of data. But he did find it by carefully designed experiments. Then you look for the neurophysiology, and see if you can find something there that carries out these computations. I think it's the same in language, the same in studying our arithmetical capacity, planning, almost anything you look at. Just trying to deal with the unanalyzed chaotic data is unlikely to get you anywhere, just like as it wouldn't have gotten Galileo anywhere.
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You can invent a world -- I don't think it's our world -- but you can invent a world in which nothing happens except random changes in objects and selection on the basis of external forces. I don't think that's the way our world works, I don't think it's the way any biologist thinks it is. There are all kind of ways in which natural law imposes channels within which selection can take place, and some things can happen and other things don't happen. Plenty of things that go on in the biology in organisms aren't like this. So take the first step, meiosis. Why do cells split into spheres and not cubes? It's not random mutation and natural selection; it's a law of physics. There's no reason to think that laws of physics stop there, they work all the way through. Well, they constrain the biology, sure. Chomsky: Okay, well then it's not just random mutation and selection. It's random mutation, selection, and everything that matters, like laws of physics.
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What I think is valuable is the history of science. I think we learn a lot of things from the history of science that can be very valuable to the emerging sciences. Particularly when we realize that in say, the emerging cognitive sciences, we really are in a kind of pre-Galilean stage. We don't know wh
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The Limits of Human Reason, in One Dramatic Video | Psychology Today - 1 views
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Hello to the real world of human perception, the product of a system of physical and psychological processes which blend facts and feelings, intellect and instinct, and, when the two conflict, a system which gives the upper hand not to conscious evidence-based reason but to instinctive and subconscious gut reaction.
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Just like balance, our risk perception system employs several distinct components; one is purposeful conscious reasoning about the facts (think of that as the vision of visitors to Demon Hill), and one is a set of psychological processes and instincts and emotions that help us make quick subconscious judgments about how those facts feel
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Just as visual and vestibular information conflicts in visitors to Demon Hill, in risk perception, when reason and evidence clashes with emotion and instinct, no matter how clear and compelling the evidence, we are ‘cognitively impenetrable’ to just the facts, and our brain literally denies that evidence if it conflicts with how our instincts – the subconscious part of the risk perception system that is beyond our control - make that evidence feel
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Perception, informed not just by the facts but our instinctive interpretations of how those facts feel, IS reality…a potentially dangerous reality
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History News Network | Why Historians Need Imagination - 2 views
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Fantasy-directed imagination is aimed at depicting a scenario that goes beyond reality. An example of fantasy-directed imagination would be the creation of Mickey Mouse.
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Reality-directed imagination, on the other hand, is aimed at depicting a scenario that reflectsreality, whether as it is known at present or as it is known to have existed in the past. An example of reality-directed imagination would be the study of Napoleon.
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Reality-directed imagination, for its part, endeavours to re-create, in the intellectual realm, actions and events that have existed or have taken place, which we may have plenty or partial information about.
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Reality-directed imagination is thus a means to retain a solid sense of reality rather than to submerge into the everlasting landscape of fantasy. We imagine what was and try to afford it life.
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Without reality-directed imagination, on the other hand, the study of history would be well-nigh impossible.
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By resorting to reality-directed imagination we are able intellectually to disconnect ourselves from the present; to visualize, like a landscape gradually making its appearance as we move backwards in time, the setting in which an event occurred or the personal features of an individual we follow. We are able emotionally to connect ourselves to the prevailing conditions or to a person's thoughts.
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In the study of history we make use of reality-directed imagination as we depict in our minds the characters of individuals or the nature of events. We even try to fill the gaps by resorting to our imagination ever vigilant not to lose sight of reality as it was. In other words, we attempt to imagine the unknown by resorting to the known.
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Without imagination as a study-device, the learning of history becomes well-nigh impossible, for the information furnished to us is rendered unintelligible. We are unable to relate to it in any meaningful manner. We assess it in a mechanical way, devoid of image, sound and feel. Our attempt to understand it leads to a dead-end for we cannot leap forward from the stale fact before us and relate it to other facts beyond it.
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Without imagination we cannot compare, distinguish and separate; we cannot know the difference between the particular and the general. In order to study history we need to avoid the mechanical, on the one hand, and the fantastic, on the other. In other words, we ought to eschew both lack of imagination and fantasy-directed imagination; the first does not allow us to proceed forward while the latter leads us to the realm of the unreal.
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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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Why Are Some People So Smart? The Answer Could Spawn a Generation of Superbabies | WIRED - 0 views
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use those machines to examine the genetic underpinnings of genius like his own. He wants nothing less than to crack the code for intelligence by studying the genomes of thousands of prodigies, not just from China but around the world.
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fully expect they will succeed in identifying a genetic basis for IQ. They also expect that within a decade their research will be used to screen embryos during in vitro fertilization, boosting the IQ of unborn children by up to 20 points. In theory, that’s the difference between a kid who struggles through high school and one who sails into college.
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studies make it clear that IQ is strongly correlated with the ability to solve all sorts of abstract problems, whether they involve language, math, or visual patterns. The frightening upshot is that IQ remains by far the most powerful predictor of the life outcomes that people care most about in the modern world. Tell me your IQ and I can make a decently accurate prediction of your occupational attainment, how many kids you’ll have, your chances of being arrested for a crime, even how long you’ll live.
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Dozens of popular books by nonexperts have filled the void, many claiming that IQ—which after more than a century remains the dominant metric for intelligence—predicts nothing important or that intelligence is simply too complex and subtle to be measured.
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evidence points toward a strong genetic component in IQ. Based on studies of twins, siblings, and adoption, contemporary estimates put the heritability of IQ at 50 to 80 percent
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“Do you know any Perl?” Li asked him. Perl is a programming language often used to analyze genomic data. Zhao admitted he did not; in fact, he had no programming skills at all. Li handed him a massive textbook, Programming Perl. There were only two weeks left in the camp, so this would get rid of the kid for good. A few days later, Zhao returned. “I finished it,” he said. “The problems are kind of boring. Do you have anything harder?” Perl is a famously complicated language that takes university students a full year to learn.
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So Li gave him a large DNA data set and a complicated statistical problem. That should do it. But Zhao returned later that day. “Finished.” Not only was it finished—and correct—but Zhao had even built a slick interface on top of the data.
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driven by a fascination with kids who are born smart; he wants to know what makes them—and by extension, himself—the way they are.
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How language transformed humanity [video] | GrrlScientist | Global | The Guardian - 0 views
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Language is very probably the one characteristic that separates us from the chimpanzees, our closest relatives. All other major differences between us likely stem from language.
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[Language] allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else's mind and they can attempt to do the same to you without either of you performing surgery
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language is a "social technology" that allows for cooperation between unrelated individuals and groups. According to the archaeological record, it was this cooperation and sharing of ideas that preceded human migration around the planet and the ensuing human population explosion.
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Humans use discrete pulses of sound -- their language -- to alter the internal settings inside someone else's brain to suit an individual's interests. Because language is not a solitary pursuit, language is a form of social learning.
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Can humans afford to have all these different languages, asks Professor Pagel. In a world where we want to promote cooperation, in a world that is more dependent than ever on cooperation to maintain and enhance humanity's levels of prosperity, multiple languages may not be practical.
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languages reflect the myriad ways that the human mind perceives and responds to the world, and to lose any of them is to (slightly) diminish and limit the variety and expressive depth of human intellectual, creative and experiential capacity.
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Racing Age: Angela Jimenez Book - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Angela Jimenez’s new book, Racing Age, explores a level of athleticism that many may not know was possible: competitive masters track & field for those athletes aged sixty and over.
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. "Because they defy visual stereotypes, these athletes surprise us," she said. "They are not weak, or vulnerable, or just cute: they are fierce and competitive. It is inspiring and brave,