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katherineharron

What coronavirus could teach us about the climate crisis - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...project-planet

shared by katherineharron on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • CNN's Bill Weir looks at the parallels between coronavirus and the climate crisis
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.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • 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

What this sunny, religious town in California teaches us about living longer - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Spanish for "beautiful hill," Loma Linda, California is nestled between mountain peaks in the middle of the San Bernardino Valley. The city is known as an epicenter of health and wellness, with more than 900 physicians on the campus of Loma Linda University and Medical Center.
  • Experts say that's because Loma Linda has one of the highest concentrations of Seventh-day Adventists in the world. The religion mandates a healthy lifestyle and a life of service to the church and community, which contributes to their longevity.
  • 'I never had stress'"As far as I am concerned, stress is a manufactured thing," Dr. Ellsworth Wareham told CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta in 2015 as part of a Vital Signs special on blue zones. Read MoreWareham was 100 years old at the time and still mowed his front yard.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "I could do open heart surgery right now. My hands are steady, my eyes are good," Wareham said. "My blood pressure is 117. I have noticed no deterioration in my mental ability with my age. If you gave me something to memorize, I would memorize it now just as quickly as when I was 20."
  • Wareham passed away last year, at the age of 104. Like 10% of the Adventist community, Wareham was a vegan. Another 30% are lacto-ovo vegetarians who eat dairy and eggs, while another 8% eat fish but not other meat. Vegetarianism is so prevalent that no meat can be purchased at the cafeterias at the university and medical center.
  • Other key factors to longevity: Only 1% of the Seventh-day Adventist community in the study smokes. Little to no alcohol is consumed. Daily exercise out in the fresh air of nature is the norm. The church advocates a life of service, so dedication to volunteering, humanitarian and mission work is typical, which contributes to a sense of community.
  • "The bulk of evidence suggests that changing a few simple lifestyle factors can have a profound difference in the risk of major diseases and the likelihood of living a long life," Orlich said. "The body has an amazing ability to, um, you know, heal itself to some degree.
katherineharron

Biden says Democrats have 'had enough debates' after Sanders commits to April showdown - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • oe Biden said Wednesday that Democrats have "had enough" debates, suggesting he is unwilling to have another one-on-one showdown with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
  • "If there is a debate in April, he plans to be there," Sanders communications director Mike Casca said Tuesday.
  • "I think we need a good debate as to where we go, not only just now but in the future," Sanders told Cooper. "And to my mind, if there's anything that this unexpected moment in American history should teach us, we've got to rethink the basic structures of American society, and that is guaranteed health care to all as a human right, creating an economy that provides for all people not just the wealthy."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But the pandemic has led some states to push their primaries into June, opening up the possibility that it could take more than two months for a candidate to cross the threshold needed to clinch the nomination.
g-dragon

Madhyamika - School of the Middle Way - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/chool-of-the-middle-way-450006

Truth Middle Way Reality

shared by g-dragon on 05 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Phenomena are both real and not-real; things exist, yet nothing exists. No intellectual position is ever the correct one.
  • The Wisdom Sutras are about 40 texts collected under the title Prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom) Sutra.
  • Of these, the best known in the West are the Heart Sutra (Mahaprajnaparamita-hridaya-sutra) and the Diamond (or Diamond Cutter) Sutra (Vajracchedika-sutra).
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • According to legend, however, they are the words of the Buddha that were lost to humankind for many centuries.
  • Whatever their provenance, the Wisdom Sutras focus on sunyata, “emptiness.” Nagarjuna’s principle contribution to Buddhism was his systematization of the sutras’ teachings.
  • What we think of as our self, our personality and ego, are temporary creations of the skandhas.
  • The "middle way" of Madhyamika refers to taking a middle way between affirmation and negation. Phenomena cannot be said to exist; phenomena cannot be said to not-exist.
  • Relative truth is the conventional way we perceive reality; absolute truth is sunyata. From the perspective of the relative, appearances and phenomena are real. From the perspective of the absolute, appearances and phenomena are not real. Both perspectives are true.
Javier E

He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ics-greece-rome-whiteness.html

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Padilla laid out an indictment of his field. “If one were intentionally to design a discipline whose institutional organs and gatekeeping protocols were explicitly aimed at disavowing the legitimate status of scholars of color,” he said, “one could not do better than what classics has done.”
  • Padilla believes that classics is so entangled with white supremacy as to be inseparable from it. “Far from being extrinsic to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity,” he has written, “the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of classics.”
  • Rather than kowtowing to criticism, Williams said, “maybe we should start defending our discipline.” She protested that it was imperative to stand up for the classics as the political, literary and philosophical foundation of European and American culture: “It’s Western civilization. It matters because it’s the West.” Hadn’t classics given us the concepts of liberty, equality and democracy?
  • ...46 more annotations...
  • Williams ceded the microphone, and Padilla was able to speak. “Here’s what I have to say about the vision of classics that you outlined,” he said. “I want nothing to do with it. I hope the field dies that you’ve outlined, and that it dies as swiftly as possible.”
  • “I believe in merit. I don’t look at the color of the author.” She pointed a finger in Padilla’s direction. “You may have got your job because you’re Black,” Williams said, “but I would prefer to think you got your job because of merit.”
  • What he did find was a slim blue-and-white textbook titled “How People Lived in Ancient Greece and Rome.” “Western civilization was formed from the union of early Greek wisdom and the highly organized legal minds of early Rome,” the book began. “The Greek belief in a person’s ability to use his powers of reason, coupled with Roman faith in military strength, produced a result that has come to us as a legacy, or gift from the past.” Thirty years later, Padilla can still recite those opening lines.
  • In 2017, he published a paper in the journal Classical Antiquity that compared evidence from antiquity and the Black Atlantic to draw a more coherent picture of the religious life of the Roman enslaved. “It will not do merely to adopt a pose of ‘righteous indignation’ at the distortions and gaps in the archive,” he wrote. “There are tools available for the effective recovery of the religious experiences of the enslaved, provided we work with these tools carefully and honestly.”
  • Padilla sensed that his pursuit of classics had displaced other parts of his identity, just as classics and “Western civilization” had displaced other cultures and forms of knowledge. Recovering them would be essential to dismantling the white-supremacist framework in which both he and classics had become trapped. “I had to actively engage in the decolonization of my mind,” he told me.
  • He also gravitated toward contemporary scholars like José Esteban Muñoz, Lorgia García Peña and Saidiya Hartman, who speak of race not as a physical fact but as a ghostly system o
  • In response to rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and the United States, Mary Beard, perhaps the most famous classicist alive, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the Romans “would have been puzzled by our modern problems with migration and asylum,” because the empire was founded on the “principles of incorporation and of the free movement of people.”
  • In November 2015, he wrote an essay for Eidolon, an online classics journal, clarifying that in Rome, as in the United States, paeans to multiculturalism coexisted with hatred of foreigners. Defending a client in court, Cicero argued that “denying foreigners access to our city is patently inhumane,” but ancient authors also recount the expulsions of whole “suspect” populations, including a roundup of Jews in 139 B.C., who were not considered “suitable enough to live alongside Romans.”
  • The job of classicists is not to “point out the howlers,” he said on a 2017 panel. “To simply take the position of the teacher, the qualified classicist who knows things and can point to these mistakes, is not sufficient.”
  • Dismantling structures of power that have been shored up by the classical tradition will require more than fact-checking; it will require writing an entirely new story about antiquity, and about who we are today
  • To find that story, Padilla is advocating reforms that would “explode the canon” and “overhaul the discipline from nuts to bolts,” including doing away with the label “classics” altogether.
  • . “What I want to be thinking about in the next few weeks,” he told them, “is how we can be telling the story of the early Roman Empire not just through a variety of sources but through a variety of persons.” He asked the students to consider the lives behind the identities he had assigned them, and the way those lives had been shaped by the machinery of empire, which, through military conquest, enslavement and trade, creates the conditions for the large-scale movement of human beings.
  • ultimately, he decided that leaving enslaved characters out of the role play was an act of care. “I’m not yet ready to turn to a student and say, ‘You are going to be a slave.’”
  • Privately, even some sympathetic classicists worry that Padilla’s approach will only hasten the field’s decline. “I’ve spoken to undergrad majors who say that they feel ashamed to tell their friends they’re studying classics,”
  • “I very much admire Dan-el’s work, and like him, I deplore the lack of diversity in the classical profession,” Mary Beard told me via email. But “to ‘condemn’ classical culture would be as simplistic as to offer it unconditional admiration.”
  • In a 2019 talk, Beard argued that “although classics may become politicized, it doesn’t actually have a politics,” meaning that, like the Bible, the classical tradition is a language of authority — a vocabulary that can be used for good or ill by would-be emancipators and oppressors alike.
  • Over the centuries, classical civilization has acted as a model for people of many backgrounds, who turned it into a matrix through which they formed and debated ideas about beauty, ethics, power, nature, selfhood, citizenship and, of course, race
  • Anthony Grafton, the great Renaissance scholar, put it this way in his preface to “The Classical Tradition”: “An exhaustive exposition of the ways in which the world has defined itself with regard to Greco-Roman antiquity would be nothing less than a comprehensive history of the world.”
  • Classics as we know it today is a creation of the 18th and 19th centuries. During that period, as European universities emancipated themselves from the control of the church, the study of Greece and Rome gave the Continent its new, secular origin story. Greek and Latin writings emerged as a competitor to the Bible’s moral authority, which lent them a liberatory power
  • Historians stress that such ideas cannot be separated from the discourses of nationalism, colorism and progress that were taking shape during the modern colonial period, as Europeans came into contact with other peoples and their traditions. “The whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is,” Winkelmann wrote.
  • While Renaissance scholars were fascinated by the multiplicity of cultures in the ancient world, Enlightenment thinkers created a hierarchy with Greece and Rome, coded as white, on top, and everything else below.
  • Jefferson, along with most wealthy young men of his time, studied classics at college, where students often spent half their time reading and translating Greek and Roman texts. “Next to Christianity,” writes Caroline Winterer, a historian at Stanford, “the central intellectual project in America before the late 19th century was classicism.
  • Of the 2.5 million people living in America in 1776, perhaps only 3,000 had gone to college, but that number included many of the founders
  • They saw classical civilization as uniquely educative — a “lamp of experience,” in the words of Patrick Henry, that could light the path to a more perfect union. However true it was, subsequent generations would come to believe, as Hannah Arendt wrote in “On Revolution,” that “without the classical example … none of the men of the Revolution on either side of the Atlantic would have possessed the courage for what then turned out to be unprecedented action.”
  • Comparisons between the United States and the Roman Empire became popular as the country emerged as a global power. Even after Latin and Greek were struck from college-entrance exams, the proliferation of courses on “great books” and Western civilization, in which classical texts were read in translation, helped create a coherent national story after the shocks of industrialization and global warfare.
  • even as the classics were pulled apart, laughed at and transformed, they continued to form the raw material with which many artists shaped their visions of modernity.
  • Over the centuries, thinkers as disparate as John Adams and Simone Weil have likened classical antiquity to a mirror. Generations of intellectuals, among them feminist, queer and Black scholars, have seen something of themselves in classical texts, flashes of recognition that held a kind of liberatory promise
  • The language that is used to describe the presence of classical antiquity in the world today — the classical tradition, legacy or heritage — contains within it the idea of a special, quasi-genetic relationship. In his lecture “There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilization,” Kwame Anthony Appiah (this magazine’s Ethicist columnist) mockingly describes the belief in such a kinship as the belief in a “golden nugget” of insight — a precious birthright and shimmering sign of greatness — that white Americans and Europeans imagine has been passed down to them from the ancients.
  • To see classics the way Padilla sees it means breaking the mirror; it means condemning the classical legacy as one of the most harmful stories we’ve told ourselves
  • Padilla is wary of colleagues who cite the radical uses of classics as a way to forestall change; he believes that such examples have been outmatched by the field’s long alliance with the forces of dominance and oppression.
  • Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together. Classics deserves to survive only if it can become “a site of contestation” for the communities who have been denigrated by it in the past.
  • if classics fails his test, Padilla and others are ready to give it up. “I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.”
  • One way to get rid of classics would be to dissolve its faculties and reassign their members to history, archaeology and language departments.
  • many classicists are advocating softer approaches to reforming the discipline, placing the emphasis on expanding its borders. Schools including Howard and Emory have integrated classics with Ancient Mediterranean studies, turning to look across the sea at Egypt, Anatolia, the Levant and North Africa. The change is a declaration of purpose: to leave behind the hierarchies of the Enlightenment and to move back toward the Renaissance model of the ancient world as a place of diversity and mixture.
  • Ian Morris put it more bluntly. “Classics is a Euro-American foundation myth,” Morris said to me. “Do we really want that sort of thing?”
  • There’s a more interesting story to be told about the history of what we call the West, the history of humanity, without valorizing particular cultures in it,” said Josephine Quinn, a professor of ancient history at Oxford. “It seems to me the really crucial mover in history is always the relationship between people, between cultures.”
  • “In some moods, I feel that this is just a moment of despair, and people are trying to find significance even if it only comes from self-accusation,” he told me. “I’m not sure that there is a discipline that is exempt from the fact that it is part of the history of this country. How distinctly wicked is classics? I don’t know that it is.”
  • “One of the dubious successes of my generation is that it did break the canon,” Richlin told me. “I don’t think we could believe at the time that we would be putting ourselves out of business, but we did.” She added: “If they blew up the classics departments, that would really be the end.”
  • Padilla, like Douglass, now sees the moment of absorption into the classical, literary tradition as simultaneous with his apprehension of racial difference; he can no longer find pride or comfort in having used it to bring himself out of poverty.
  • “Claiming dignity within this system of structural oppression,” Padilla has said, “requires full buy-in into its logic of valuation.” He refuses to “praise the architects of that trauma as having done right by you at the end.”
  • Last June, as racial-justice protests unfolded across the nation, Padilla turned his attention to arenas beyond classics. He and his co-authors — the astrophysicist Jenny Greene, the literary theorist Andrew Cole and the poet Tracy K. Smith — began writing their open letter to Princeton with 48 proposals for reform. “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America,” the letter began. “Indifference to the effects of racism on this campus has allowed legitimate demands for institutional support and redress in the face of microaggression and outright racist incidents to go long unmet.”
  • Padilla believes that the uproar over free speech is misguided. “I don’t see things like free speech or the exchange of ideas as ends in themselves,” he told me. “I have to be honest about that. I see them as a means to the end of human flourishing.”
  • “There is a certain kind of classicist who will look on what transpired and say, ‘Oh, that’s not us,’” Padilla said when we spoke recently. “What is of interest to me is why is it so imperative for classicists of a certain stripe to make this discursive move? ‘This is not us.’
  • Joel Christensen, the Brandeis professor, now feels that it is his “moral and ethical and intellectual responsibility” to teach classics in a way that exposes its racist history. “Otherwise we’re just participating in propaganda,”
  • Christensen, who is 42, was in graduate school before he had his “crisis of faith,” and he understands the fear that many classicists may experience at being asked to rewrite the narrative of their life’s work. But, he warned, “that future is coming, with or without Dan-el.”
  • On Jan. 6, Padilla turned on the television minutes after the windows of the Capitol were broken. In the crowd, he saw a man in a Greek helmet with TRUMP 2020 painted in white. He saw a man in a T-shirt bearing a golden eagle on a fasces — symbols of Roman law and governance — below the logo 6MWE, which stands for “Six Million Wasn’t Enough,
Javier E

Opinion | Mass testing has its problems. They're nothing compared to not testing. - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-970a-64c73a1c2392_story.html

testing mass statistics innumeracy numeracy probability probabilistic thinking

shared by Javier E on 31 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Short of a vaccine, mass testing is among the most plausible paths back to some kind of normalcy.
  • Imagine a world where you could stop at a drive-through testing center, get a result in 20 minutes or so, and then motor onward to your dinner party with a “negative” certificate in hand. Imagine outdoor kiosks at airports, with a negative test result required to get inside. Imagine offices, even restaurants or bars, with a nurse stationed in the parking lot.
  • Would this be annoying and cumbersome? Yes. Would it be a vast improvement on what we are doing now? Also yes. It even seems plausible since Abbott Labs has won emergency approval for a test that costs $5, returns an answer in 15 minutes, requires no specialized equipment and can be produced in bulk. Mass deployment of this test, or others like it, could fundamentally change how we approach covid-19.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • No test is perfectly accurate; all generate false positives and false negatives. How many varies by the test — the new Abbott Labs test, for example, has a false negative rate of about 3 percent and a false positive rate of about 1.5 percent.
  • We’d also require public understanding that test results are a risk-assessment tool rather than a definitive answer. And shifting the public’s thinking might be harder than shifting Trump.
  • Doing that would also require fundamentally changing our thinking.
  • For mass testing to work, people will need to understand that even an event where all attendees just tested negative isn’t necessarily covid-free, because some false negatives might have slipped through
  • Giving hundreds of millions of citizens this crash course in elementary statistics would be very difficult. Teaching people how to think about a positive result would be even harder — especially if mass testing does its job of reducing caseloads. Because as case numbers fall, false positives will become a bigger and bigger problem.
  • Say we’re testing 200 people, 10 of whom have covid-19. Given its rate of false negatives, the Abbott test would probably catch all 10. But with false positives, it could also tell one or two people who don’t have covid-19 that they’re infected. That’s not ideal — as good citizens, they’d have to go home and quarantine. But a more sensitive follow-up test could substantially mitigate this problem, shortening such quarantines to a day or so. It would be worth it to get those 10 true positives out of circulation.
  • Doing this, we might eventually reduce the share of the population that’s infected to, say, 0.5 percent from 5 percent. Unfortunately, the false positive rate won’t budge, so now for every one true positive uncovered, roughly three false positives would still be generated.
  • That’s inherently costly: Every false positive means skipping your flight, rehearsal or birthday party. But it would be catastrophic if people didn’t understand that a positive covid-19 test is a guideline, not a guarantee
  • People who think that they’ve had covid-19, when they haven’t, are apt to go out and engage in risky behavior, maybe a lot of it. And if mass testing ever becomes common, there could be a lot of those people.
  • So mass testing isn’t just a matter of getting a test that is cheap enough and plentiful enough; the administration and the public must be educated to use this bounty wisely. That’s a hard messaging problem. Given the alternative, though, it’s the kind of problem we’d really like to have.
Javier E

Poker and Decision Making - 2 views

magazine.wharton.upenn.edu/...ches-you-about-decision-making

decision-making probability confidence assessment research psychology brain science knowledge

shared by Javier E on 13 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • our tendency to judge decisions based on how they turn out, known in poker as “resulting.”
  • our strategy is often based on beliefs that can be biased or wrong. We are quick to form, and slow to update our beliefs. We tend towards absolutes, and indulge in “motivated reasoning,” seeking out confirmation while ignoring contradictory evidence
  • solution is to embrace uncertainty by calibrating our confidence
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Duke offers a road map for creating a group “decision pod” that can provide us with feedback. Focus on accuracy, accountability, and openness to diverse views. Set clear rules: Court dissent and differing perspectives, and take responsibility even when doing so is painful.
  • formed to improve viewpoint diversity in academia: Commit to transparency and sharing information; apply consistent standards to claims made by separating information from who is providing it; cultivate disinterestedness; seek “outcome blindness” to the hypothesis being tested; and encourage skepticism and dissent.
  • Duke explores how we can reduce conflict by shifting perspective among our past, present and futures selves via “mental time travel.” She suggests several techniques, including backcasting, premortems, and Ulysses contracts.
  • Duke also addresses how we outweigh the present over the future. When we reach for a donut instead of an apple, we’re doing so at the expense of our future self
Javier E

Covid-19 pandemic and chaos theory: Why the future is impossible to precisely predict - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...covid-19-future-pandemic-chaos

pandemic chaos theory future modeling model

shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • In Washington state, a person with the virus attended a choir practice, and more than half of the other singers subsequently got sick. In South Korea, a 29-year-old man went out to nightclubs; he was Covid-19 positive, and he has since been linked to at least 54 new cases. In China, nine people sitting in the path of an air conditioning vent in a restaurant all got sick, most likely from one person, as the duct blew viral particles across their faces.
  • Small things could have changed these outcomes. The clubber could have decided to watch TV instead of going out dancing. If the choir practice was rescheduled for the next day, maybe the person would have felt sick and stayed home. The air conditioner in the restaurant could have been turned off.
  • “Little shifts can have really disproportionately sized impacts” in a pandemic. And scientists have a name for systems that operate like this: chaos.
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  • An outbreak isn’t a double pendulum; it’s much more convoluted. Myriad chains of events, operating in overlapping networks, conspire to chart its course.
  • It’s the double pendulum, and as a physical object, it’s very simple: A pendulum (a string and a weight) is attached to the bottom of another. Its movement is explained by the laws of motion written by Isaac Newton hundreds of years ago.
  • But slight changes in the initial condition of the pendulum — say it starts its swing from a little higher up, or if the weight of the pendulum balls is a little heavier, or one of the pendulum arms is a bit longer than the other — lead to wildly different outcomes that are very hard to predict.
  • The double pendulum is chaotic because the motion of the first pendulum influences the motion of the second, which then influences the entire apparatus. There isn’t a simple scale or ratio to describe how the inputs relate to the outputs. A one-gram change to the weight of a pendulum ball can result in a very different swing pattern than a two-gram change.
  • It teaches us to understand the mechanics of a system — the science of how it works — without being able to precisely predict its future. It helps us visualize how something that seems like it should be linear and predictable just isn’t.
  • That’s why, when pressed, epidemiologists have to say they don’t know what’s going to happen.
  • Climate scientists clearly tell us adding CO2 to the air will increase global temperatures. Yet they argue about when the worst effects of climate change will be felt and how bad it will be
  • Still, they know the mechanics of outbreaks. The chaos “doesn’t necessarily mean we know nothing,” Kissler says. They understand the conditions that make an outbreak worse and the conditions that make it better.
  • There is a tough tension of the current moment that we all need to work through: The future is clouded in chaos, but we know the mechanics of this system
  • Here are the mechanics. Scientists know that if we let up on social distancing, without an alternative plan in place, the virus can infect more people. They know this virus is likely to persist for at least a few years without a vaccine. They know it’s very contagious. That it’s very deadly. They also know that its pandemic potential is hardly spent, and that most of the population of the United States and the world is still vulnerable to it.
  • Will residents keep up with mask-wearing and social distancing, even when their leaders relax regulations? Plus, there are scientific questions about the virus still not understood: Will it diminish transmission in a seasonal pattern? Do children contribute greatly to its spread? How long does immunity last after an infection? Why do some people breathe out more of the virus than others? The answers to these questions will influence the future, and we do not know the answers.
  • Scientists are still unraveling what makes the difference between a sprawling outbreak in one city and a more manageable one in another. Some of it is the result of policy, some is the result of demographics, some is about structural inequality and racism, and some comes down to individual behavior. Some of it is just luck. That’s chaos for you.
  • “I don’t see uncertainty as a lack of knowledge,” says Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, a physicist who studies the chaos of a different sort of viral dynamics. “I think it’s a fundamental part of how our world works. It’s not our fault we do not know where this all will go.”
  • Newton clearly told us what happens when an object drops from the sky. But follow his laws, and find that the path of a double pendulum is very, very difficult to predict.
  • There’s a simple mechanism that is helping me understand the many possible futures we face with the Covid-19 pandemic.
  • Epidemiologists are clearly telling us what happens when you bring masses of people together during a pandemic. But they can’t tell us the exact shape this outbreak will take.
Javier E

How to Get Things Done When You Don't Want to Do Anything - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...motivation-energy-advice.html

motivation energy success

shared by Javier E on 29 Jul 21 - No Cached
  • As you look for your motivation, it helps to think of it falling into two categories, said Stefano Di Domenico, a motivation researcher
  • First, there’s controlled motivation, when you feel you’re being ruled by outside forces like end-of-year bonuses and deadlines — or inner carrots and sticks, like guilt or people-pleasing.
  • Often when people say they’ve lost motivation, “what they really mean,” Dr. Di Domenico said, “is ‘I’m doing this because I have to, not because I want to.’”
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  • The second kind, autonomous motivation, is what we’re seeking. This is when you feel like you’re self-directed, whether you have a natural affinity for the task at hand, or you’re doing something because you understand why it’s worthwhile.
  • Ms. Winder, who teaches workshops on reconnecting to your sense of purpose, often has students free write about what makes them come alive.
  • Clinical psychologist Richard M. Ryan, one of two scientists who developed a well-known approach to understanding motivation called self-determination theory, encourages those seeking lasting motivation to take a deep dive into their values.
  • when you connect the things that are important to you to the things you need to do — even the drudgeries — you can feel more in control of your actions. What do you love about your work? What core value does it meet?
  • Looking forward to a reward isn’t the best for long-term motivation. But several studies suggest that pairing small, immediate rewards to a task improves both motivation and fun.
  • Social connections like this are critical to rekindling motivation,
  • suggested considering how your motivation is tied to the people around you, whether that’s your family or your basketball team.
  • Reaching out lifts others, too. “Letting someone know that you are thinking of them is enough to kick-start their motivation,” and reminds them that you care,
  • People also motivate each other through competition.
  • Students in competitive groups exercised much more often than those in supportive social networks,
  • New athletic adventures can be motivational gold, too. A 2020 study suggested that trying out novel activities can help you stick with exercise.
  • Treating ourselves with compassion works much more effectively than beating ourselves up,
  • “People think they’re going to shame themselves into action,” yet self-compassion helps people stay focused on their goals, reduces fear of failure and improves self-confidence, which can also improve motivation, she said.
  • Students who were encouraged to be compassionate toward themselves after the test studied longer and performed better on a follow-up test, compared to students given either simple self-esteem-boosting comments or no instruction.
  • “The key thing about self-compassion and motivation is that it allows you to learn from your failures,”
Javier E

Opinion | The Spoken Argument Is a Valuable Form of Expression - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...writing-spoken-argument.html

argument public speaking' oratory psychology language education

shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • I am ever more perplexed by why we make students learn to write the classic five-paragraph essay but have so much less interest in developing their spoken argument skills.
  • As much as I love writing, I wonder if there is something arbitrary in the idea that education must focus more on the written than the spoken word.
  • Back in the day, people would clear their throat and deliver. They weren’t winging it. They would plan their remarks, without writing them out word for word. They knew their topic and, from that, they spoke.
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  • Our sense of a spoken presentation is less formal, more personal, looser. But more formal oratory has its uses.
  • I also think, as I read a book about 19th-century England, of the way parliamentarians used to communicate. The men regularly made their points to their colleagues in speeches that could run far beyond what anyone could write out and memorize word for word
  • Black people of letters, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Maya Angelou, engaged in oratory contests when they were young, competing for prizes according to how gracefully and how convincingly they made a case for some proposition. The tradition of such contests continues in the Black community.
  • When I have given oral presentations, I reach people more directly than if I’d written everything down for them to read. When people can see your face and hear the melody of your voice, your point gets across more vividly. Language evolved, after all, for face-to-face contact, not rendered as glyphs on paper.
  • The question is why oratory of this kind is so much less central to the culture than it once was.
  • Imagine a square divided into four smaller ones. The top left square is casual speech; the top right square is formal speech. The bottom left square is casual writing; the bottom right square is formal writing. We have, as it were, an empty square in our grid.
  • what about that upper right square, formal speech?
  • When we communicate formally, we moderns think first of getting language down on a page in written form, perhaps out of a sense that this is how to deck language out in its Sunday best.
  • Perhaps it seems that to organize our thoughts properly beyond the level of “Want mustard with that?” we need to tie them down with the yoke of writing.
  • But the ancients didn’t think so. Even with a fully developed writing culture, the Greeks and Romans valued the ability to stand and pose and pace in front of an audience and make their point through speaking it — and formally, not colloquially
  • I imagine a different universe in which academics would be expected to present most of their ideas in solid PowerPoint versions, narrated in formal language, getting across the amount of information a person can actually absorb in 20 to 30 minutes.
  • I wish students had the choice of either writing essays or speaking them. We would train them in the ability to speak carefully and coherently with the same goal of making a point that we require in writing.
  • A lot of people really hate writing. It’s an unnatural activity, as humanity goes.
  • If we imagine that speech has existed for 24 hours, then according to all modern estimates, writing came along only sometime around 11:30 p.m. Writing is an artifice, and given a choice, most people would rather talk (or text).
  • For students who prefer it — and most of them likely would — the idea would be to give an oral presentation to the class, going from a memorized outline of planned remarks but expressing its points spontaneously. They would be graded on the quality of both the delivery and the content.
  • It is unclear to me that there is a reason to classify oral suasion as something lesser than the written version, as long as students are instructed that they are to maintain a basic, tempered poise, without relying on volume or colorful rhetoric to stand in for logic.
  • Some will object that students will need to be able to craft arguments in writing in their future endeavors. But to channel the modern kind of skeptical response: Will they, though?
  • An alternate universe would be one in which students who thought of themselves as likely to need such a skill in the future, such as in the law, would be the ones who choose written over oral expression.
  • When I am asked to speak about something, I do some written preparation to organize my thoughts, but I don’t craft sentences. I fashion my ideas into exactly three basic points.
  • In terms of realistic expectations of human attention span, especially in our eternally distracted era, even four points is too many, but two isn’t enough
  • Three points, each expressed with about three subpoints. I consider it my job to be able to hold this much in my memory, along with intentions of an introduction and a conclusion.
  • when it comes to individuals expressing their intelligence for assignments or teaching, I cannot see that writing is the only legitimate and effective vehicle. We are a society that values speaking engagingly but places less of a value on speaking precisely. This is a mere matter of cultural preference; I wish it would change.
Javier E

Law professor Kim Wehle's latest book is 'How To Think Like a Lawyer - and Why' : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...to-think-like-a-lawyer-and-why

critical thinking legal education learning knowledge research psychology bias civic

shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • a five-step process she calls the BICAT method - BICAT.
  • KIM WEHLE: B is to break a problem down into smaller pieces
  • I is to identify our values. A lot of people think lawyers are really about winning all the time. But the law is based on a value system. And I suggest that people be very deliberate about what matters to them with whatever decision there is
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  • C is to collect a lot of information. Thirty years ago, the challenge was finding information in a card catalog at the library. Now it's, how do we separate the good stuff from the bad stuff?
  • A is to analyze both sides. Lawyers have to turn the coin over and exhaust counterarguments or we'll lose in court.
  • So lawyers are trained to look for the gray areas, to look for the questions are not the answers. And if we kind of orient our thinking that way, I think we're less likely to shut down competing points of view.
  • My argument in the book is, we can feel good about a decision even if we don't get everything that we want. We have to make compromises.
  • I tell my students, you'll get through the bar. The key is to look for questions and not answers. If you could answer every legal question with a Wikipedia search, there would be no reason to hire lawyers.
  • Lawyers are hired because there are arguments on both sides, you know? Every Supreme Court decision that is split 6-3, 5-4, that means there were really strong arguments on both sides.
  • T is, tolerate the fact that you won't get everything you want every time
  • So we have to be very careful about the source of what you're getting, OK? Is this source neutral? Is this source really care about facts and not so much about an agenda?
  • Step 3, the collecting information piece. I think it's a new skill for all of us that we are overloaded with information into our phones. We have algorithms that somebody else developed that tailor the information that comes into our phones based on what the computer thinks we already believe
  • No. 2 - this is the beauty of social media and the internet - you can pull original sources. We can click on the indictment. Click on the new bill that has been proposed in the United States Congress.
  • then the book explains ways that you can then sort through that information for yourself. Skills are empowering.
  • Maybe as a replacement for sort of being empowered by being part of a team - a red team versus a blue team - that's been corrosive, I think, in American politics and American society. But arming ourselves with good facts, that leads to self-determination.
  • MARTINEZ: Now, you've written two other books - "How To Read The Constitution" and "What You Need To Know About Voting" - along with this one, "How To Think Like A Lawyer - And Why.
  • It kind of makes me think, Kim, that you feel that Americans might be lacking a basic level of civics education or understanding. So what is lacking when it comes to teaching civics or in civics discourse today?
  • studies have shown that around a third of Americans can't name the three branches of government. But if we don't understand our government, we don't know how to hold our government accountable
  • Democracies can't stay open if we've got elected leaders that are caring more about entrenching their own power and misinformation than actually preserving democracy by the people. I think that's No. 1.
  • No. 2 has to do with a value system. We talk about American values - reward for hard work, integrity, honesty. The same value system should apply to who we hire for government positions. And I think Americans have lost that.
  • in my own life, I'm very careful about who gets to be part of the inner circle because I have a strong value system. Bring that same sense to bear at the voting booth. Don't vote for red versus blue. Vote for people that live your value system
  • just like the Ukrainians are fighting for their children's democracy, we need to do that as well. And we do that through informing ourselves with good information, tolerating competing points of view and voting - voting, voting, voting - to hold elected leaders accountable if they cross boundaries that matter to us in our own lives.
Javier E

Politics should be taught in primary schools, Alastair Campbell says | Alastair Campbell | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...schools-alastair-campbell-says

politics primary school argumentation learning education lesson

shared by Javier E on 26 May 23 - No Cached
  • the co-host of podcast The Rest is Politics expressed dismay that most students in the UK do not take politics classes unless they choose to study it at A-level.
  • Political education needs to start in primary schools, and then become part of the “everyday debate” in children’s entire school experience, he said. “Maybe you don’t call it politics,” he said, suggesting that it could be called “arguing”, “policy” or “big issues”.
  • “Some of the most enjoyable stuff I do is going into schools and trying to teach young kids what politics is,” he added. “When they sit down and they start thinking about stuff, it’s just so fascinating and innovative.”
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  • more state school students need to be taught “how to communicate, how to argue, how to fight their corner” from a young age.
Javier E

Will ChatGPT Kill the Student Essay? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...672371

language ai writing humanities STEM technology

shared by Javier E on 09 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Essay generation is neither theoretical nor futuristic at this point. In May, a student in New Zealand confessed to using AI to write their papers, justifying it as a tool like Grammarly or spell-check: ​​“I have the knowledge, I have the lived experience, I’m a good student, I go to all the tutorials and I go to all the lectures and I read everything we have to read but I kind of felt I was being penalised because I don’t write eloquently and I didn’t feel that was right,” they told a student paper in Christchurch. They don’t feel like they’re cheating, because the student guidelines at their university state only that you’re not allowed to get somebody else to do your work for you. GPT-3 isn’t “somebody else”—it’s a program.
  • The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up
  • “You can no longer give take-home exams/homework … Even on specific questions that involve combining knowledge across domains, the OpenAI chat is frankly better than the average MBA at this point. It is frankly amazing.”
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  • In the modern tech world, the value of a humanistic education shows up in evidence of its absence. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the crypto exchange FTX who recently lost his $16 billion fortune in a few days, is a famously proud illiterate. “I would never read a book,” he once told an interviewer. “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.”
  • Elon Musk and Twitter are another excellent case in point. It’s painful and extraordinary to watch the ham-fisted way a brilliant engineering mind like Musk deals with even relatively simple literary concepts such as parody and satire. He obviously has never thought about them before.
  • The extraordinary ignorance on questions of society and history displayed by the men and women reshaping society and history has been the defining feature of the social-media era. Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg has read a great deal about Caesar Augustus, but I wish he’d read about the regulation of the pamphlet press in 17th-century Europe. It might have spared America the annihilation of social trust.
  • These failures don’t derive from mean-spiritedness or even greed, but from a willful obliviousness. The engineers do not recognize that humanistic questions—like, say, hermeneutics or the historical contingency of freedom of speech or the genealogy of morality—are real questions with real consequences
  • Everybody is entitled to their opinion about politics and culture, it’s true, but an opinion is different from a grounded understanding. The most direct path to catastrophe is to treat complex problems as if they’re obvious to everyone. You can lose billions of dollars pretty quickly that way.
  • As the technologists have ignored humanistic questions to their peril, the humanists have greeted the technological revolutions of the past 50 years by committing soft suicide.
  • As of 2017, the number of English majors had nearly halved since the 1990s. History enrollments have declined by 45 percent since 2007 alone
  • the humanities have not fundamentally changed their approach in decades, despite technology altering the entire world around them. They are still exploding meta-narratives like it’s 1979, an exercise in self-defeat.
  • Contemporary academia engages, more or less permanently, in self-critique on any and every front it can imagine.
  • the situation requires humanists to explain why they matter, not constantly undermine their own intellectual foundations.
  • The humanities promise students a journey to an irrelevant, self-consuming future; then they wonder why their enrollments are collapsing. Is it any surprise that nearly half of humanities graduates regret their choice of major?
  • Despite the clear value of a humanistic education, its decline continues. Over the past 10 years, STEM has triumphed, and the humanities have collapsed. The number of students enrolled in computer science is now nearly the same as the number of students enrolled in all of the humanities combined.
  • now there’s GPT-3. Natural-language processing presents the academic humanities with a whole series of unprecedented problems
  • Practical matters are at stake: Humanities departments judge their undergraduate students on the basis of their essays. They give Ph.D.s on the basis of a dissertation’s composition. What happens when both processes can be significantly automated?
  • despite the drastic divide of the moment, natural-language processing is going to force engineers and humanists together. They are going to need each other despite everything. Computer scientists will require basic, systematic education in general humanism: The philosophy of language, sociology, history, and ethics are not amusing questions of theoretical speculation anymore. They will be essential in determining the ethical and creative use of chatbots, to take only an obvious example.
  • The humanists will need to understand natural-language processing because it’s the future of language
  • that space for collaboration can exist, both sides will have to take the most difficult leaps for highly educated people: Understand that they need the other side, and admit their basic ignorance.
  • But that’s always been the beginning of wisdom, no matter what technological era we happen to inhabit.
Javier E

The herd mentality is all around us - 0 views

messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/...oakv2

differences diversity language behavior norms herd mentality

shared by Javier E on 20 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • “Personal space” and the idea of being left alone with one’s thoughts can almost be seen as modern add-ons to what humanity is like, and perhaps more typical of WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) societies than others
  • WEIRD-ness being the coinage of Joseph Henrich, an anthropologist at Harvard and the author of “The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.” Reviewing the book for The Times, the Tufts University philosophy professor Daniel Dennett described Henrich’s concept thusly:The world today has billions of inhabitants who have minds strikingly different from ours. Roughly, we weirdos are individualistic, think analytically, believe in free will, take personal responsibility, feel guilt when we misbehave and think nepotism is to be vigorously discouraged, if not outlawed.
  • They (the non-WEIRD majority) identify more strongly with family, tribe, clan and ethnic group, think more “holistically,” take responsibility for what their group does (and publicly punish those who besmirch the group’s honor), feel shame — not guilt — when they misbehave and think nepotism is a natural duty.
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  • There are signs that at the same time, so many other people are seeking to countenance diversity of thought, disavowing the comforts of the idea that their view is the only legitimate one and fostering an ideal under which our society frames difference of opinion as a norm rather than a threat. We can see it in aspects of linguistic behavio
  • To us WEIRD-os, by contrast, the ever-stronger purchase of individualism in our intellectual, moral and civic development seems natural. But it’s challenging, perhaps unnatural, to be an individual.
  • That realization makes less shocking to me, albeit utterly dismaying, the many dogmatic behaviors exhibited today that seem outwardly irrational or close to it. The kinds of things that make it seem as if so many of us are, so to speak, losing it are actually signs of how difficult it can be to get past what we seem to be hard-wired for. Fanatic beliefs, furious ideologies and even, potentially, a sense of duty to harm people in the name of certain beliefs reflect the eternal temptation of a sense of belonging to a group, of being part of a larger story, of having a guiding sense of purpose.
  • Casual American English, in ways we’re not always conscious of, is more overt in allowing room for disagreement than it used to be. For example, the use of “like” that so bothers purists is in reality a useful discursive hedge, along with phrases such as “sort of,” “kind of” and “you know.” In conversation, these expressions can be read as subtle indications that someone knows that there are other ways to view things, and to be too categorical is to imply a certainty that all may not share.
  • Moral Courage College, an alternative to the D.E.I. ritual, a program offering training in how to productively grapple with the wide range of views and experiences found in most workplaces, as well as colleges, universities and even K-12 schools
  • a method called Diversity Without Division. “This program doesn’t tell anybody what to think or believe,” she has said, “it teaches everybody to lower their emotional defenses so that contentious issues can be turned into constructive conversations and healthy teamwork.”
  • Courage is allowing that your own view may be but one legitimate one among many, that there are no easy answers, and that being your own self is a more gracious existence than joining a herd.
Javier E

Book Review: 'Life Is Hard,' by Kieran Setiya - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ife-is-hard-kieran-setiya.html

life phiosophy suffering book review psychology happiness success

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • “Life Is Hard” pushes back against many platitudes of contemporary American self-improvement culture. Setiya is no friend to positive thinking — at best, it requires self-deception, and at worst, such glass-half-full optimism can be cruel to those whose pain we refuse to recognize.
  • Another theory Setiya challenges is the idea that happiness should be life’s primary pursuit. Instead, he argues that we should try to live well within our limits, even if this sometimes means acknowledging difficult truths.
  • If you really consider “happiness” in its everyday sense — a feeling of contentment and pleasure — its desirability is complicated; we can certainly be made to feel good by ignoring injustice, wars, climate change or the hardships of aging. But we cannot live meaningfully that way.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • what does living well mean in practice? To Setiya, it lies in embracing one of the many possible “good-enough lives” instead of aching for a perfect one
  • Setiya’s approach blends empathy with common sense. True, a person who is blind or lacks full movement may not be able to enjoy certain pleasures — at least, in the typical way. And suffering injury can be traumatic. But none of us can fit everything worth doing into one lifetime. Our possibilities and our choices are always limited, and we can live fully within those limits.
  • he invites the reader to join him as he looks at life’s challenges — loneliness, injustice, grief — and in turning them over to examine every angle. Sometimes these twists make it difficult to grasp his ultimate point; in his discussion of the potential extinction of human beings, for instance, Setiya argues movingly that it is hard to find meaning in our actions without the promise of future societies who will enjoy the result
  • The golden thread running through “Life Is Hard” is Setiya’s belief in the value of well-directed attention. Pain, as much as we wish to avoid it, forces us to remember that we are indelibly connected to our bodies.
  • Listening carefully, whether to good friends or to strangers on a bus, can help us feel less lonely. “Close reading” other people, trying as hard as possible to see them in their full humanity, is a small step toward a more just world. By cultivating our sensitivity to ourselves and to others, we escape another destructive modern myth: that we are separate from other people, and that we can live well without caring for them.
  • Mindfulness is also Setiya’s answer to the threat of personal failure. If we can teach ourselves to notice all the splendid, varied incidents of our lives, he claims, we are much less likely to brand ourselves with a single label, winner or loser.
  • He encourages readers to abandon simple narratives about success over the course of a lifetime. I suspect this is why Setiya so often finds his conclusions in poetry, not in philosophy: The experience of suffering leads to messy, counterintuitive truths.
  • “Life Is Hard” is a humane consolation for challenging times. Reading it is like speaking with a thoughtful friend who never tells you to cheer up, but, by offering gentle companionship and a change of perspective, makes you feel better anyway.
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