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katherineharron

Asking yourself 'What's the meaning of life?' may extend it - CNN - 0 views

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shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • "What is the meaning of life?" It's one of those enormous questions that's so important -- both philosophically and practically, in terms of how we live our lives -- and yet we rarely, if ever, stop to really think about the answer.
  • After studying 1,300 subjects from ages 21 to more than 100, the authors found that older people were more likely to have found their life's purpose, while younger people were more likely still searching. That's logical, given that wisdom is often born from experience. According to research by Stanford education professor William Damon, the author of "The Path to Purpose," only 20% of young adults have a fully realized sense of their life's meaning.And according to the new study, the presence of meaning in one's life showed a positive correlation to one's health, including improved cognitive function, while searching for it may have a slight negative effect. Mental and physical well-being was self-reported, and having a sense of purpose tended to peak around age 60, the study found.
  • According to two other studies published in 2014 -- one among 9,000 participants over age 65 and another among 6,000 people between 20 and 75 -- those who could articulate the meaning and purpose of their lives lived longer than those who saw their lives as aimless. It didn't seem to matter what meaning participants ascribed to their life, whether it was personal (like happiness), creative (like making art) or altruistic (like making the world a better place). It was having an answer to the question that mattered.
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  • Great thinkers (and celebrities) have given the question thought, so you can look to the words attributed to them for inspiration. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who lived 2,500 years ago, is believed to have written that the essence of life is "to serve others and to do good," and the Roman philosopher Cicero, born 280 years later, came to the same conclusion. As did Russian author Leo Tolstoy, who wrote, "The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity." And His Holiness the Dalai Lama added, "if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them."
  • My favorite answer, though, is the Zen-like circular reasoning attributed to writer Robert Byrne, who put it, "The purpose of life is a life of purpose."
  • Some have concluded that life's meaning is subjective. "There is not one big cosmic meaning for all," Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary. "There is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person."
  • In 1997, my answer was "the discovery, pursuit and attainment of one's bliss," inspired by myth expert Joseph Campbell. A year later, is was to make "the world a better place." In 2002, the year I got engaged, it was simply "Love." And the year we conceived our oldest daughter, it was the less-romantic "continuation of one's DNA to the next generation." But most years, my answer is some combination of love, legacy, happiness, experience and helping others.
katherineharron

Not worrying about anything is everything - CNN - 0 views

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shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • For some, anxiety and worry are so toxic and burdensome that medication and/or therapy is needed to fully function. "What worries you," John Locke wrote, "masters you."
  • Begin by writing down all the major things you're currently worried about. It's not pleasant to ruminate on them, but the fact is that your brain is constantly thinking about them anyway. Just because a worry is subconscious doesn't shield you from its negative effects.
  • I suggest two rules for making the list. First, try to make the time frame for whether they will happen just six months. That limits you to concrete and quantifiable worries. You may have general anxiety thoughts like "I think something bad is going to happen" or worries over the next year -- or four -- but for the purposes of this experiment, limit your worries to those outcomes resolved in the next 180 days.
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  • I performed this "Top 10 Worries" exercise many times over the course of five years. Of my 100 total worries, 60 didn't happen. That's a lot of needless attention, and I could have used that time in better ways.
  • Even more edifying was that of the 40 worries that did occur, most of them fell into two categories: Either they happened but didn't seem nearly as bad as I worried they would be (such as needing to dip into savings), or they happened but there was nothing I could have done to prevent them (such as whether a friend broke up with his significant other).
  • The idea that some circumstances we call "bad" can, over time, turn out favorable is a Taoist philosophy I've written about before. Sometimes, there is a big upside to what seemed bad (such as a horrible breakup that leads to finding your true love). And the wisdom of knowing the difference between the things you can and can't change is famously covered by the words of pastor Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer. Recognizing those two kinds of needless worries is just as helpful as learning that we too often worry about fiction.
katherineharron

How to stop being annoyed by life - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Beyond improvements to your general mood and happiness, taming your anger can have important benefits to your health. Constant stress and aggravation is linked to a range of issues including overeating, insomnia and depression, and angry outbursts increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
  • Anger "is like a blazing flame that burns up our self-control," the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh wrote. I aimed to teach myself how to rob it of oxygen and snuff it out.
  • At the first moment you realize you are experiencing annoyance or anger, just breathe. Ten slow, deep, even breaths do wonders. Sometimes, the annoyance will have passed in just that time.
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  • If the breaths don't make a dent, try explaining what's happening to yourself. "I'm annoyed right now because ..." is a good sentence to finish. Articulating the issue changes your response from emotion to logic.
  • Make use of this step when another person is part of the reason you are upset. Try hard to see the situation from their reality and invent a subjective theory for why they did what they did.
  • Think beyond the annoyance, or annoying person, and focus on your own behavior. By thinking of how you can be a model for grace under pressure, you help yourself to become one.
  • If you've hit No. 10, it's time to talk about the frustration with someone you trust who is not involved in the situation. Start by telling them what you did in the previous steps and why they didn't fully work.
  • How important is the matter upsetting you? How does it stack up against the things in life that you know matter? What is important (loved ones are a good example) can be the antidote to what troubles you now -- as long as you can bring them to mind in this moment.
  • Whatever the annoyance, make a joke about it, even if it's a bad one. If you can find some grain of humor in the situation, smiling, laughing and even being silly can all defuse anger and annoyance. It's not psychologically possible to experience two emotions at once.
  • If you've made it this far up the steps and you are still really peeved, here's a good (if seemingly obvious) question to ask yourself: "Is there something I can do to make it better?" Even if the answer is a small step that may not seem that effective, just taking action gets you out into the frame of acting, not reacting.
  • In the future, it is possible that you will see this particular anger-causing situation differently. Look at past problems and see how they've been a catalyst for change or even a blessing in disguise. You may even look back at a difficult situation with fondness, humor or gratefulness (for having overcome it). It's worth keeping in mind that what seems bad now won't always be so.
  • Whatever it is that is getting your goat, it is temporary and manageable. You won't always feel this way. It's just a question of how long.
  • Beyond improvements to your general mood and happiness, taming your anger can have important benefits to your health. Constant stress and aggravation is linked to a range of issues including overeating, insomnia and depression, and angry outbursts increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
katherineharron

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

www.cnn.com/...index.html

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

A Commencement Address Too Honest to Deliver in Person - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...611572

commencement advice graduation youth wisdom taste learning education college humanities classics

shared by Javier E on 15 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • Use this hiatus to do something you would never have done if this emergency hadn’t hit. When the lockdown lifts, move to another state or country. Take some job that never would have made sense if you were worrying about building a career—bartender, handyman, AmeriCorps volunteer.
  • If you use the next two years as a random hiatus, you may not wind up richer, but you’ll wind up more interesting.
  • The biggest way most colleges fail is this: They don’t plant the intellectual and moral seeds students are going to need later, when they get hit by the vicissitudes of life.
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  • If you didn’t study Jane Austen while you were here, you probably lack the capacity to think clearly about making a marriage decision. If you didn’t read George Eliot, then you missed a master class on how to judge people’s character. If you didn’t read Nietzsche, you are probably unprepared to handle the complexities of atheism—and if you didn’t read Augustine and Kierkegaard, you’re probably unprepared to handle the complexities of faith.
  • The list goes on. If you didn’t read de Tocqueville, you probably don’t understand your own country. If you didn’t study Gibbon, you probably lack the vocabulary to describe the rise and fall of cultures and nations.
  • The wisdom of the ages is your inheritance; it can make your life easier. These resources often fail to get shared because universities are too careerist, or because faculty members are more interested in their academic specialties or politics than in teaching undergraduates, or because of a host of other reasons
  • What are you putting into your mind? Our culture spends a lot less time worrying about this, and when it does, it goes about it all wrong.
  • my worry is that, especially now that you’re out of college, you won’t put enough really excellent stuff into your brain.
  • I worry that it’s possible to grow up now not even aware that those upper registers of human feeling and thought exist.
  • The theory of maximum taste says that each person’s mind is defined by its upper limit—the best that it habitually consumes and is capable of consuming.
  • After college, most of us resolve to keep doing this kind of thing, but we’re busy and our brains are tired at the end of the day. Months and years go by. We get caught up in stuff, settle for consuming Twitter and, frankly, journalism. Our maximum taste shrinks.
  • I’m worried about the future of your maximum taste. People in my and earlier generations, at least those lucky enough to get a college education, got some exposure to the classics, which lit a fire that gets rekindled every time we sit down to read something really excellent.
  • the “theory of maximum taste.” This theory is based on the idea that exposure to genius has the power to expand your consciousness. If you spend a lot of time with genius, your mind will end up bigger and broader than if you spend your time only with run-of-the-mill stuff.
  • the whole culture is eroding the skill the UCLA scholar Maryanne Wolf calls “deep literacy,” the ability to deeply engage in a dialectical way with a text or piece of philosophy, literature, or art.
  • “To the extent that you cannot perceive the world in its fullness, to the same extent you will fall back into mindless, repetitive, self-reinforcing behavior, unable to escape.”
  • I can’t say that to you, because it sounds fussy and elitist and OK Boomer. And if you were in front of me, you’d roll your eyes.
  • Javier E on 15 Jun 23
     
    Or as the neurologist Richard Cytowic put it to Adam Garfinkle, "To the extent that you cannot perceive the world in its fullness, to the same extent you will fall back into mindless, repetitive, self-reinforcing behavior, unable to escape."*
Javier E

Korean philosophy is built upon daily practice of good habits | Aeon Essays - 0 views

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korea philosophy practice habits aeon essay wisdom eastern civilization(s) cultivated learning education history

shared by Javier E on 27 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • ‘We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves,’ wrote Friedrich Nietzsche at the beginning of On the Genealogy of Morals (1887
  • This seeking after ourselves, however, is not something that is lacking in Buddhist and Confucian traditions – especially not in the case of Korean philosophy. Self-cultivation, central to the tradition, underscores that the onus is on the individual to develop oneself, without recourse to the divine or the supernatural
  • Korean philosophy is practical, while remaining agnostic to a large degree: recognising the spirit realm but highlighting that we ourselves take charge of our lives by taking charge of our minds
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  • The word for ‘philosophy’ in Korean is 철학, pronounced ch’ŏrhak. It literally means the ‘study of wisdom’ or, perhaps better, ‘how to become wise’, which reflects its more dynamic and proactive implications
  • At night, in the darkness of the cave, he drank water from a perfectly useful ‘bowl’. But when he could see properly, he found that there was no ‘bowl’ at all, only a disgusting human skull.
  • Our lives and minds are affected by others (and their actions), as others (and their minds) are affected by our actions. This is particularly true in the Korean application of Confucian and Buddhist ideas.
  • Wŏnhyo understood that how we think about things shapes their very existence – and in turn our own existence, which is constructed according to our thoughts.
  • In the Korean tradition of philosophy, human beings are social beings, therefore knowing how to interact with others is an essential part of living a good life – indeed, living well with others is our real contribution to human life
  • he realised that there isn’t a difference between the ‘bowl’ and the skull: the only difference lies with us and our perceptions. We interpret our lives through a continual stream of thoughts, and so we become what we think, or rather how we think
  • As our daily lives are shaped by our thoughts, so our experience of this reality is good or bad – depending on our thoughts – which make things ‘appear’ good or bad because, in ‘reality’, things in and of themselves are devoid of their own independent nature
  • We can take from Wŏnhyo the idea that, if you change the patterns that have become engrained in how you think, you will begin to live differently. To do this, you need to change your mental habits, which is why meditation and mindful awareness can help. And this needs to be practised every day
  • Wŏnhyo’s most important work is titled Awaken your Mind and Practice (in Korean, Palsim suhaeng-jang). It is an explicit call to younger adherents to put Buddhist ideas into practice, and an indirect warning not to get lost in contemplation or in the study of text
  • While Wŏnhyo had emphasised the mind and the need to ‘practise’ Buddhism, a later Korean monk, Chinul (1158-1210), spearheaded Sŏn, the meditational tradition in Korea that espoused the idea of ‘sudden enlightenment’ that alerts the mind, accompanied by ‘gradual cultivation’
  • we still need to practise meditation, for if not we can easily fall into our old ways even if our minds have been awakened
  • his greatest contribution to Sŏn is Secrets on Cultivating the Mind (Susim kyŏl). This text outlines in detail his teachings on sudden awakening followed by the need for gradual cultivation
  • hinul’s approach recognises the mind as the ‘essence’ of one’s Buddha nature (contained in the mind, which is inherently good), while continual practice and cultivation aids in refining its ‘function’ – this is the origin of the ‘essence-function’ concept that has since become central to Korean philosophy.
  • These ideas also influenced the reformed view of Confucianism that became linked with the mind and other metaphysical ideas, finally becoming known as Neo-Confucianism.
  • During the Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910), the longest lasting in East Asian history, Neo-Confucianism became integrated into society at all levels through rituals for marriage, funerals and ancestors
  • Neo-Confucianism recognises that we as individuals exist through plural relationships with responsibilities to others (as a child, brother/sister, lover, husband/wife, parent, teacher/student and so on), an idea nicely captured in 2000 by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy when he described our ‘being’ as ‘singular plural’
  • Corrupt interpretations of Confucianism by heteronormative men have historically championed these ideas in terms of vertical relationships rather than as a reciprocal set of benevolent social interactions, meaning that women have suffered greatly as a result.
  • Setting aside these sexist and self-serving interpretations, Confucianism emphasises that society works as an interconnected set of complementary reciprocal relationships that should be beneficial to all parties within a social system
  • Confucian relationships have the potential to offer us an example of effective citizenship, similar to that outlined by Cicero, where the good of the republic or state is at the centre of being a good citizen
  • There is a general consensus in Korean philosophy that we have an innate sociability and therefore should have a sense of duty to each other and to practise virtue.
  • The main virtue of Confucianism is the idea of ‘humanity’, coming from the Chinese character 仁, often left untranslated and written as ren and pronounced in Korean as in.
  • It is a combination of the character for a human being and the number two. In other words, it signifies what (inter)connects two people, or rather how they should interact in a humane or benevolent manner to each other. This character therefore highlights the link between people while emphasising that the most basic thing that makes us ‘human’ is our interaction with others.
  • Neo-Confucianism adopted a turn towards a more mind-centred view in the writings of the Korean scholar Yi Hwang, known by his pen name T’oegye (1501-70), who appears on the 1,000-won note. He greatly influenced Neo-Confucianism in Japan through his formidable text, Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning (Sŏnghak sipto), composed in 1568, which was one of the most-reproduced texts of the entire Chosŏn dynasty and represents the synthesis of Neo-Confucian thought in Korea
  • with commentaries that elucidate the moral principles of Confucianism, related to the cardinal relationships and education. It also embodies T’oegye’s own development of moral psychology through his focus on the mind, and illuminates the importance of teaching and the practice of self-cultivation.
  • He writes that we ourselves can transform the unrestrained mind and its desires, and achieve sagehood, if we take the arduous, gradual path of self-cultivation centred on the mind.
  • Confucians had generally accepted the Mencian idea that human nature was embodied in the unaroused state of the mind, before it was shaped by its environment. The mind in its unaroused state was taken to be theoretically good. However, this inborn tendency for goodness is always in danger of being reduced to passivity, unless you cultivate yourself as a person of ‘humanity’ (in the Confucian sense mentioned above).
  • You should constantly try to activate your humanity to allow the unhampered operation of the original mind to manifest itself through socially responsible and moral character in action
  • Humanity is the realisation of what I describe as our ‘optimum level of perfection’ that exists in an inherent stage of potentiality due our innate good nature
  • This, in a sense, is like the Buddha nature of the Buddhists, which suggests we are already enlightened and just need to recover our innate mental state. Both philosophies are hopeful: humans are born good with the potential to correct their own flaws and failures
  • this could hardly contrast any more greatly with the Christian doctrine of original sin
  • The seventh diagram in T’oegye’s text is entitled ‘The Diagram of the Explanation of Humanity’ (Insŏl-to). Here he warns how one’s good inborn nature may become impaired, hampering the operation of the original mind and negatively impacting our character in action. Humanity embodies the gradual realisation of our optimum level of perfection that already exists in our mind but that depends on how we think about things and how we relate that to others in a social context
  • For T’oegye, the key to maintaining our capacity to remain level-headed, and to control our impulses and emotions, was kyŏng. This term is often translated as ‘seriousness’, occasionally ‘mindfulness’, and it identifies the serious need for constant effort to control one’s mind in order to go about one’s life in a healthy manner
  • For T’oegye, mindfulness is as serious as meditation is for the Buddhists. In fact, the Neo-Confucians had their own meditational practice of ‘quiet-sitting’ (chŏngjwa), which focused on recovering the calm and not agitated ‘original mind’, before putting our daily plans into action
  • These diagrams reinforce this need for a daily practice of Confucian mindfulness, because practice leads to the ‘good habit’ of creating (and maintaining) routines. There is no short-cut provided, no weekend intro to this practice: it is life-long, and that is what makes it transformative, leading us to become better versions of who were in the beginning. This is consolation of Korean philosophy.
  • Seeing the world as it is can steer us away from making unnecessary mistakes, while highlighting what is good and how to maintain that good while also reducing anxiety from an agitated mind and harmful desires. This is why Korean philosophy can provide us with consolation; it recognises the bad, but prioritises the good, providing several moral pathways that are referred to in the East Asian traditions (Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism) as modes of ‘self-cultivation’
  • As social beings, we penetrate the consciousness of others, and so humans are linked externally through conduct but also internally through thought. Humanity is a unifying approach that holds the potential to solve human problems, internally and externally, as well as help people realise the perfection that is innately theirs
Javier E

Web Privacy, and How Consumers Let Down Their Guard - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mers-let-down-their-guard.html

privacy consumers web psychology research identity personal data technology

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • We are hurried and distracted and don’t pay close attention to what we are doing. Often, we turn over our data in exchange for a deal we can’t refuse.
  • his research argues that when it comes to privacy, policy makers should carefully consider how people actually behave. We don’t always act in our own best interest, his research suggests. We can be easily manipulated by how we are asked for information. Even something as simple as a playfully designed site can nudge us to reveal more of ourselves than a serious-looking one.
  • “His work has gone a long way in trying to help us figure out how irrational we are in privacy related decisions,” says Woodrow Hartzog, an assistant professor of law who studies digital privacy at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. “We have too much confidence in our ability to make decisions.”
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  • Solutions to our leaky privacy system tend to focus on transparency and control — that our best hope is knowing what our data is being used for and choosing whether to participate. But a challenge to that conventional wisdom emerges in his research. Giving users control may be an essential step, but it may also be a bit of an illusion.
  • personal data is what fuels the barons of the Internet age. Mr. Acquisti investigates the trade-offs that users make when they give up that data, and who gains and loses in those transactions. Often there are immediate rewards (cheap sandals) and sometimes intangible risks downstream (identity theft). “
  • “The technologist in me loves the amazing things the Internet is allowing us to do,” he said. “The individual who cares about freedom is concerned about the technology being hijacked, from a technology of freedom into a technology of surveillance.”
  • EARLY in his sojourn in this country, Mr. Acquisti asked himself a question that would become the guiding force of his career: Do Americans value their privacy?
  • If we have something — in this case, ownership of our purchase data — we are more likely to value it. If we don’t have it at the outset, we aren’t likely to pay extra to acquire it. Context matters.
  • “What worries me,” he said, “is that transparency and control are empty words that are used to push responsibility to the user for problems that are being created by others.”
  • We are constantly asked to make decisions about personal data amid a host of distractions, like an e-mail, a Twitter notification or a text message. If Mr. Acquisti is correct, those distractions may hinder our sense of self-protection when it comes to privacy.
  • His latest weapon against distraction is an iPad application, which lets him create a to-do list every morning and set timers for each task: 30 minutes for e-mail, 60 minutes to grade student papers, and so on.
  • it is not surprising that he is cautious in revealing himself online. He says he doesn’t feel compelled to post a picture of his meals on Instagram. He uses different browsers for different activities. He sometimes uses tools that show which ad networks are tracking him. But he knows he cannot hide entirely, which is why some people, he says, follow a policy of “rational ignorance.”
  • The online advertising industry insists that the data is scrambled to make it impossible to identify individuals.
  • Mr. Acquisti offers a sobering counterpoint. In 2011, he took snapshots with a webcam of nearly 100 students on campus. Within minutes, he had identified about one-third of them using facial recognition software. In addition, for about a fourth of the subjects whom he could identify, he found out enough about them on Facebook to guess at least a portion of their Social Security numbers.
  • The point of the experiment was to show how easy it is to identify people from the rich trail of data they scatter around the Web, including seemingly harmless pictures. Facebook can be especially valuable for identity thieves, particularly when a user’s birth date is visible to the public.
  • Does that mean Facebook users should lie about their birthdays (and break Facebook’s terms of service)? Mr. Acquisti demurred. He would say only that there are “complex trade-offs” to be made. “I reveal my date of birth and hometown on my Facebook profile and an identity thief can reconstruct my Social Security number and steal my identity,” he said, “or someone can send me ‘happy birthday’ messages on the day of my birthday, which makes me feel very good.”
Javier E

The Way to Produce a Person - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-way-to-produce-a-person.html

morality consequences role model plastic brain

shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • the brain is a malleable organ. Every time you do an activity, or have a thought, you are changing a piece of yourself into something slightly different than it was before. Every hour you spend with others, you become more like the people around you.
  • Gradually, you become a different person. If there is a large gap between your daily conduct and your core commitment, you will become more like your daily activities and less attached to your original commitment. You will become more hedge fund, less malaria.
  • I would worry about turning yourself into a means rather than an end. If you go to Wall Street mostly to make money for charity, you may turn yourself into a machine for the redistribution of wealth. You may turn yourself into a fiscal policy.
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  • a human life is not just a means to produce outcomes, it is an end in itself. When we evaluate our friends, we don’t just measure the consequences of their lives. We measure who they intrinsically are. We don’t merely want to know if they have done good. We want to know if they are good.
  • We live in a relentlessly commercial culture, so it’s natural that many people would organize their lives in utilitarian and consequentialist terms. But it’s possible to get carried away with this kind of thinking — to have logic but no wisdom
Javier E

How Facebook Warps Our Worlds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...facebook-warps-our-worlds.html

facebook social network shaming groupthink fragmentation partisan epistemic tribal conformity crisis culture psychology social media

shared by Javier E on 23 May 16 - No Cached
  • THOSE who’ve been raising alarms about Facebook are right: Almost every minute that we spend on our smartphones and tablets and laptops, thumbing through favorite websites and scrolling through personalized feeds, we’re pointed toward foregone conclusions. We’re pressured to conform
  • We’re the real culprits. When it comes to elevating one perspective above all others and herding people into culturally and ideologically inflexible tribes, nothing that Facebook does to us comes close to what we do to ourselves.
  • I’m talking about how we use social media in particular and the Internet in general — and how we let them use us. They’re not so much agents as accomplices, new tools for ancient impulses, part of “a long sequence of technological innovations that enable us to do what we want
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • “And one of the things we want is to spend more time with people who think like us and less with people who are different,” Haidt added. “The Facebook effect isn’t trivial. But it’s catalyzing or amplifying a tendency that was already there.”
  • prevalent for many users are the posts we see from friends and from other people and groups we follow on the network, and this information is utterly contingent on choices we ourselves make
  • The Internet isn’t rigged to give us right or left, conservative or liberal — at least not until we rig it that way. It’s designed to give us more of the same, whatever that same is
  • So it goes with the fiction we read, the movies we watch, the music we listen to and, scarily, the ideas we subscribe to. They’re not challenged. They’re validated and reinforced.
  • this colors our days, or rather bleeds them of color, reducing them to a single hue.
  • Facebook, along with other social media, definitely conspires in this. Haidt noted that it often discourages dissent within a cluster of friends by accelerating shaming. He pointed to the enforced political correctness among students at many colleges.
  • Carnival barkers, conspiracy theories, willful bias and nasty partisanship aren’t anything new, and they haven’t reached unprecedented heights today. But what’s remarkable and sort of heartbreaking is the way they’re fed by what should be strides in our ability to educate ourselves.
  • The proliferation of cable television networks and growth of the Internet promised to expand our worlds, not shrink them. Instead they’ve enhanced the speed and thoroughness with which we retreat into enclaves of the like-minded.
  • there’s no argument that in an era that teems with choice, brims with niche marketing and exalts individualism to the extent that ours does, we’re sorting ourselves with a chillingly ruthless efficiency. We’ve surrendered universal points of reference. We’ve lost common ground.
  • Marc Dunkelman, adding that it also makes it easier for us to avoid “face-to-face interactions with diverse ideas.” He touched on this in an incisive 2014 book, “The Vanishing Neighbor,” which belongs with Haidt’s work and with “Bowling Alone,” “Coming Apart” and “The Fractured Republic” in the literature of modern American fragmentation, a booming genre all its own.
  • We’re less committed to, and trustful of, large institutions than we were at times in the past. We question their wisdom and substitute it with the groupthink of micro-communities, many of which we’ve formed online, and their sensibilities can be more peculiar and unforgiving.
  • We construct precisely contoured echo chambers of affirmation that turn conviction into zeal, passion into fury, disagreements with the other side into the demonization of it
  • It’s not about some sorcerer’s algorithm. It’s about a tribalism that has existed for as long as humankind has and is now rooted in the fertile soil of the Internet, which is coaxing it toward a full and insidious flower
lenaurick

Why time seems to speed up as we get older - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...-speed-accelerate-age-new-year

science research psychology knowledge brain science bias

shared by lenaurick on 31 May 16 - No Cached
  • As part of a lifelong experiment on circadian rhythms, Sothern, now 69, is trying to confirm or reject a widely held belief: Many people feel that time flies by more quickly as they age.
  • So far, Sothern's results are inconclusive
  • "I'm tending now to overestimate the minute more than I used to," he tells me. But then again, he had detected a similar pattern — more overestimates — in the 1990s, only to have his estimates fall in the 2000s. "Time estimation isn't a perfect science," he says.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • There's very little scientific evidence to suggest our perception of time changes as we age. And yet, we consistently report that the past felt longer — that time is flying by faster as we age. What's going on?
  • Scientists can look at time estimation, or our ability to estimate how long a minute passes, compared with a clock. (This is what Sothern is doing.) They can also look at time awareness, or the broad feeling that time is moving quickly or slowly. Finally there's time perspective, the sense of a past, present, and future as constructed by our memories.
  • What researchers have found out is that while time estimation and time awareness don't change much as we age, time perspective does. In other words: Our memories create the illusion time is accelerating.
  • There weren't many differences between the old and the young. "[C]hronological age showed no systematic influence on the perception of these brief intervals of time up," the authors wrote. (That said, the researchers did find that males overestimate time while females underestimate it, perhaps due to having slightly different circadian clocks and therefore slightly different metabolic rates
  • Here, too, age seemed not to matter. Older people didn't seem to be aware of time passing any faster than younger people. The only question that yielded a statistically significant difference was, "How fast did the last decade pass?" Even there, the reported differences were tiny, and the effect appeared to plateau around age 50.
  • psychologists William Friedman and Steve Janssen found scant evidence that the subjective experience of time speeds up with age. They write in their 2009 paper, "We can concluded that when adults report on their general impressions of the speed of time, age differences are very small."
  • One possibility is that participants were simply biased by the (incorrect) conventional wisdom — they reported their later years as flying by more quickly because that's what everyday lore says should happen.
  • When people reflect back on their own life, they feel like their early years went by very slowly and their later years go by more quickly. This could be the source of the belief that time goes more quickly as they age.
  •  "Most people feel that time is currently passing faster for them than it did in the past," Janssen writes me in an email. "They have forgotten how they experienced the passage of time when they were younger."
  • We use significant events as signposts to gauge the passage of time. The fewer events, the faster time seems to go by.
  • Childhood is full of big, memorable moments like learning to ride a bike or making first friends. By contrast, adult life becomes ordinary and mechanized, and ambles along by.
  • Each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly notice at all, the days and weeks smooth themselves out in recollection, and the years grow hollow and collapse.
  • Each new minute represents a smaller fraction of our lives. One day as a 10 year old represents about .027 percent of the kid's life. A day for a 60 year old? .0045 percent. The kid's life is just... bigger.
  • Also, our ability to recall events declines with age. If we can't remember a time, it didn't happen.
  • "[F]inding that there is insufficient time to get things done may be reinterpreted as the feeling that time is passing quickly," they write. Deadlines always come sooner than we'd like.
  • Psychologists have long understood the phenomenon called "forward telescoping" — i.e., our tendency to underestimate how long ago very memorable events occurred. "Because we know that memories fade over time, we use the clarity of a memory as a guide to its recency," science writer Claudia Hammond writes in her book Time Warped. "So if a memory seems unclear we assumed it happened longer ago." But very clear memories are assumed to be more recent.
  • If our memories can trick us into thinking time is moving quickly, then maybe there are ways to trick our brains into thinking that time is slowing down — such as committing to breaking routines and learning new things. You're more likely to remember learning how to skydive than watching another hour of mindless television.
aliciathompson1

Science needs the freedom to constantly change its m... - 0 views

aeon.co/...-to-constantly-change-its-mind

science

shared by aliciathompson1 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • science is one of humanity’s most noble and successful endeavours, and our best way to learn how the world works.
  • Today science faces a crisis of legitimacy which is entirely centred on rampant public distrust and disavowal.
  • The capacity for self-correction is the source of science’s immense strength, but the public is unnerved by the fact that scientific wisdom isn’t immutable.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Many scientific findings run counter to common sense and challenge our deepest assumptions about reality
  • Nor are paradigm shifts confined to the distant scientific past.
  • But that’s the thing. Holding still is exactly what science won’t do.
  • aliciathompson1 on 06 Mar 16
     
    Many scientific findings run counter to common sense and challenge our deepest assumptions about reality
Javier E

What Do We Know? - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...what-do-we-know.html

knowledge information glut surplus

shared by Javier E on 02 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • one thing that happens when we acquire too much “knowledge” is that, like Othello, we sometimes fail to distinguish it from what can never be known, which may not be untrue.
  • Another is that we’re tempted to lose sight of the distinction between those realms, like science and health, where the more data we have, the better, and others, like human relations, where the opposite may be true.
  • Knowledge comes to seem an end in itself, and then we gobble it down and gobble it down without stopping to realize that it’s Iago — or that anonymous writer of the Wikipedia entry — who’s serving it up to us, and that wisdom sometimes depends on seeing how much knowledge doesn’t know and how much every day is shaped by unexpectedness.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • As a boy I was aware that knowledge was the coolest form of power around; nearly every adolescent wants to be in the know. What I couldn’t see was that it’s precisely in matters of highest importance — love, terror, is there a God, and why is Iago possessed by the Devil? — that we’re outside the domain of knowledge
anonymous

Free will debate: What does free will mean and how did it evolve? - 0 views

www.slate.com/..._how_did_it_evolve.single.html

free will human sciences natural scions

shared by anonymous on 03 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Many scientists cannot imagine how the idea of free will could be reconciled with the laws of physics and chemistry. Brain researchers say that the brain is just a bunch of nerve cells that fire as a direct result of chemical and electrical events, with no room for free will
  • Scientists take delight in (and advance their careers by) claiming to have disproved conventional wisdom, and so bashing free will is appealing. But their statements against free will can be misleading
  • Free will means freedom from causation.” Other scientists who argue against free will say that it means that a soul or other supernatural entity causes behavior, and not surprisingly they consider such explanations unscientific.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • There is a genuine psychological reality behind the idea of free will. The debate is merely about whether this reality deserves to be called free will.
  • Our actions cannot break the laws of physics, but they can be influenced by things beyond gravity, friction, and electromagnetic charges. No number of facts about a carbon atom can explain life, let alone the meaning of your life. These causes operate at different levels of organization.
  • Free will cannot violate the laws of physics or even neuroscience, but it invokes causes that go beyond them
  • Self-control furnishes the possibility of acting from rational principles rather than acting on impulse.
  • If you think of freedom as being able to do whatever you want, with no rules, you might be surprised to hear that free will is for following rules. Doing whatever you want is fully within the capability of any animal in the forest. Free will is for a far more advanced way of acting
  • That, in a nutshell, is the inner deciding process that humans have evolved. That is the reality behind the idea of free will: these processes of rational choice and self-control
  • Self-control counts as a kind of freedom because it begins with not acting on every impulse. The simple brain acts whenever something triggers a response: A hungry creature sees food and eats it
  • Our ancestors evolved the ability to act in the ways necessary for culture to succeed. Free will likely will be found right there—it’s what enables humans to control their actions in precisely the ways required to build and operate complex social systems.
  • Understanding free will in this way allows us to reconcile the popular understanding of free will as making choices with our scientific understanding of the world.
qkirkpatrick

Can You Trust the News Media? - Watchtower ONLINE LIBRARY - 1 views

wol.jw.org/...102013442

media news knowledge brain science technology

shared by qkirkpatrick on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • MANY people doubt what they read and hear in the news. In the United States, for example, a 2012 Gallup poll asked people “how much trust and confidence” they had in the accuracy, fairness, and completeness of the news reports of newspapers, TV, and radio. The answer from 6 out of 10 people was either “not very much” or “none at all.” Is such distrust justified?
  • Many journalists and the organizations they work for have expressed a commitment to producing accurate and informative reports. Yet, there is reason for concern. Consider the following factors:
  • MEDIA MOGULS. A small but very powerful number of corporations own primary media outlets.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • GOVERNMENTS. Much of what we learn in the media has to do with the people and the affairs of government.
  • ADVERTISING. In most lands, media outlets must make money in order to stay in business, and most of it comes from advertising.
  • While it is wise not to believe everything we read in the news, it does not follow that there is nothing we can trust. The key may be to have a healthy skepticism, while keeping an open mind.
  • So, can you trust the news media? Sound advice is found in the wisdom of Solomon, who wrote: “Anyone inexperienced puts faith in every word, but the shrewd one considers his steps.”
  • qkirkpatrick on 05 Jun 15
     
    Can we trust the news media?
sissij

Tesla Passes Ford in Market Value as Investors Bet on the Future - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...neral-motors-stock-market.html

new york times tesla science

shared by sissij on 04 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • But there is one exception. Tesla, the electric-vehicle upstart, continues to surge.
  • “Investors want something that is going to go up in orders of magnitude in six months to six years, and Tesla is that story,” said Karl Brauer, a senior editor at Kelley Blue Book. “Nobody thinks Ford or G.M. is going to do that.”
  • Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has shattered the conventional wisdom that automakers should be viewed as a stable, reliable investment. Instead, he promotes his California-based company as a dynamic vehicle for growth, despite the risks and challenges ahead of it.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • But neither automaker has convinced Wall Street that it has shed its boom-or-bust reputation tied to broader economic cycles, or is at the forefront of new technology being developed for self-driving vehicles and electric cars.
  • “It’s almost like Tesla is positioned in people’s minds as an energy storage company that happens to put most of its batteries on wheels,” said Andrew Stewart, chief investment officer at Exchange Capital Management, an investment firm in Ann Arbor, Mich.
  • While Tesla may enjoy the favor of investors, it still faces some daunting hurdles to reach its goals.
  • sissij on 04 Apr 17
     
    In my research on Tesla, I found it very interesting that Tesla never has advertisement spreading out like Ford, Motor or other motor companies do. Yet, it is very popular and well-known. How does Tesla manage to be known by the public if they don't have any advertisement and their target costumers are the elites? One of the reason I found online about its propaganda strategy is its skill on giving stock holder confidence. Thus their stock price is always positive and healthy. By generating new ideas, Tesla is able to stay on the headline of the newspaper. When I saw this news, my first reaction is that it's Tesla again and give me a very positive image on the future of Tesla. This new way of propaganda is directly related to the new form of economics in the society so I found it very interesting. --Sissi (4/4/2017)
Javier E

'The Death of Expertise' Explores How Ignorance Became a Virtue - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ignorance-became-a-virtue.html

knowledge democracy reason information information literacy rationality anti-intellectualism

shared by Javier E on 22 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • a larger wave of anti-rationalism that has been accelerating for years — manifested in the growing ascendance of emotion over reason in public debates, the blurring of lines among fact and opinion and lies, and denialism in the face of scientific findings about climate change and vaccination.
  • “Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue,”
  • “To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • iterating arguments explored in more depth in books like Al Gore’s “The Assault on Reason,” Susan Jacoby’s “The Age of American Unreason,” Robert Hughes’s “Culture of Complaint” and, of course, Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 classic, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.” Nichols’s source notes are one of the highlights of the volume, pointing the reader to more illuminating books and articles.
  • “resistance to intellectual authority” naturally took root in a country, dedicated to the principles of liberty and egalitarianism, and how American culture tends to fuel “romantic notions about the wisdom of the common person or the gumption of the self-educated genius.”
  • the “protective swaddling environment of the modern university infantilizes students,”
  • today’s populism has magnified disdain for elites and experts of all sorts, be they in foreign policy, economics, even science.
  • Trump won the 2016 election, Nichols writes, because “he connected with a particular kind of voter who believes that knowing about things like America’s nuclear deterrent is just so much pointy-headed claptrap.” Worse, he goes on, some of these voters “not only didn’t care that Trump is ignorant or wrong, they likely were unable to recognize his ignorance or errors,” thanks to their own lack of knowledge.
  • While the internet has allowed more people more access to more information than ever before, it has also given them the illusion of knowledge when in fact they are drowning in data and cherry-picking what they choose to read
  • it becomes easy for one to succumb to “confirmation bias” — the tendency, as Nichols puts it, “to look for information that only confirms what we believe, to accept facts that only strengthen our preferred explanations, and to dismiss data that challenge what we accept as truth.”
  • When confronted with hard evidence that they are wrong, many will simply double down on their original assertions. “This is the ‘backfire effect,’” Nichols writes, “in which people redouble their efforts to keep their own internal narrative consistent, no matter how clear the indications that they’re wrong.” As a result, extreme views are amplified online, just as fake news and propaganda easily go viral.
  • Today, all these factors have combined to create a maelstrom of unreason that’s not just killing respect for expertise, but also undermining institutions, thwarting rational debate and spreading an epidemic of misinformation. These developments, in turn, threaten to weaken the very foundations of our democracy.
  • “Laypeople complain about the rule of experts and they demand greater involvement in complicated national questions, but many of them only express their anger and make these demands after abdicating their own important role in the process: namely, to stay informed and politically literate enough to choose representatives who can act on their behalf.”
Javier E

The Evolving Teenage Brain - NYTimes.com - 0 views

parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-evolving-teenage-brain

adolescence brain science

shared by Javier E on 04 May 12 - Cached
  • Why do teenagers “behave with such vexing inconsistency: beguiling at breakfast, disgusting at dinner; masterful on Monday, sleepwalking on Saturday?” David Dobbs has compiled the available scientific answers to that question masterfully in “Teenage Brains” for the May issue of National Geographic. Teenage brains, he says, are effectively bringing a new operating system online.
  • “as we move through adolescence, the brain undergoes extensive remodeling, resembling a network and wiring upgrade.”
  • This period of development, he writes, is also adaptive: it is perfect for “the job of moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Teenagers take more risks, this new view of the research shows, because risk-taking in adolescence has historically given them an adaptive edge. “Succeeding often requires moving out of the home and into less secure situations.” They prefer the company of other teenagers because they are designed to “invest in the future rather than the past.” And they perceive a social crisis as a threat to their very existence because, on a neural level, “our brains react to peer exclusion much as they respond to threats to physical health or food supply.”
  • Studies show that when parents engage and guide their teens  with a light but steady hand, staying connected but allowing independence, their kids generally do much better in life. Adolescents want to learn primarily, but not entirely, from their friends. At some level and at some times (and it’s the parent’s job to spot when), the teen  recognizes that the parent can offer certain kernels of wisdom — knowledge valued not because it comes from parental authority, but because it comes from the parent’s own struggles to learn how the world turns.
Javier E

Philosophy Is Not a Science - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...philosophy-is-not-a-science

science philosophy knowledge experiment analysis

shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 12 - Cached
  • what objective knowledge can philosophy bring that is not already determinable by science?
  • numerous philosophers have come to believe, in concert with the prejudices of our age, that only science holds the potential to solve persistent philosophical mysteries as the nature of truth, life, mind, meaning, justice, the good and the beautiful.
  • myriad contemporary philosophers are perfectly willing to offer themselves up as intellectual servants or ushers of scientific progress. Their research largely functions as a spearhead for scientific exploration and as a balm for making those pursuits more palpable and palatable to the wider population.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • 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.
Javier E

Renaming Philosophy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...-philosophy-as-ontical-science

philosophy language knowledge

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 12 - Cached
  • I suggested in my earlier essay that philosophy so conceived is best classified as a science, because of its rigor, technicality, universality, falsifiability, connection with other sciences, and concern with the nature of objective being (among other reasons). I did not claim, however, that it is an empirical science, like physics and chemistry; rather, it is an a priori science, like the “formal science” of mathematics.
  • This is not a matter of dubious public relations for a languishing field of study; rather, it is simply the recognition of the intellectual substance of the discipline — its power and achievements
  • There is plenty of room here for ethics, philosophy of art, value theory, and even “practical wisdom.” In my terminology, we might label these parts of philosophy “axiological ontics”— that is, the study of the nature and being of value in all its forms.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • My main question was what to call this subject, in view of the confusions wrought by its current name and the ancient origin of the word.
  • The general reaction to my original essay from people not professionally involved in philosophy rather proves my point about the need for linguistic reform. There is precious little understanding of what the subject is really like, but a lot of opinion about its demerits and betrayals of its historical ideals. To be sure, we will not cure such ignorance and hostility — either from the dogmatists of empirical science or the disappointed fringe mystics — by simply relabeling the subject; but we should at least forestall some of the ire that stems from the etymology and popular meaning of the word “philosophy”
Javier E

Chris Hayes Has Arrived With 'Up' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hayes-has-arrived-with-up.html

discourse Habermas TV partisan issues conversation

shared by Javier E on 23 Jun 12 - Cached
  • In less than a year on television (and with a chirpy voice, a weakness for gesticulation and a tendency to drop honors-thesis words like “signifier” into casual conversation), Mr. Hayes has established himself as Generation Y’s wonk prince of the morning political talk-show circuit.
  • “He is never doctrinaire,” Mr. Leo said in an interview. Both punk fans and “Up” fans are “suspicious of any authority,” he said, and appreciate that Mr. Hayes “is always willing to challenge his own assumptions, and the received wisdom on both sides of the aisle.”
  • Social media, in fact, have played an unusually important role in driving traffic to the program, an MSNBC spokeswoman said. About 45 percent of the visitors to the program’s Web site, which contains complete episodes, linked through sites like Facebook and Twitter. In April, those users spent an average of 51 minutes on the site each visit.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • “Up” comes off as a rebuke to traditional cable shout-fests like CNN’s late “Crossfire.” Thanks to its early weekend time slot, the program has the freedom to unwind over two hours each Saturday and Sunday. Guests are encouraged to go deep into the issues of the week, and not try to score cheap-shot points to win the debate.
  • “The first and foremost important rule of the show: we’re not on television — no talking points, no sound bites,” he said, his hair still a bed-head tangle and his suit collar askew. “We have a lot of time for actual conversation. So actually listen, actually respond.”
  • An hour later, as the cameras rolled, Mr. Hayes and his guests waded thigh-deep into an analysis of private equity and whether it is bad for the economy. At a table of wonks, Mr. Hayes, who studied the philosophy of mathematics at Brown, came off as the wonkiest as he deconstructed the budgetary implications of tax arbitrage. Opinions were varied and passionate, but there was no sniping, no partisan grandstanding.
  • “I like t
  • he fact that it’s dialogic, small-d ‘democratic,’ ” Mr. Hayes said of his show. “We’re all sitting at t
  • Since Dec. 26, it has been No. 1 on average in its Sunday time slot on cable news channels among viewers ages 18 to 34, according to Nielsen figures provided by the network.
  • Ms. Maddow said on her program that “Up” was “the best news show on TV, including this one.” “Chris is the antidote to the anti-intellectual posing that has characterized the last decade in cable news,”
  • “No one else in cable is even trying long-form, off-the-news-cycle dives like him — let alone succeeding at them as he is. He’s giving the network Sunday shows a run for their money.”
  • As a student at Hunter College High School in Manhattan, he aspired to write. “My dream when I was 14,” he said, “was someday I could have a David Levine caricature of me in The New York Review of Books.”
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