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Javier E

Justice Goes Global - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...15friedman.html

philosophy moral reasoning ethics Sandel

shared by Javier E on 18 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Sandel’s popularity in Asia reflects the intersection of three trends. One is the growth of online education, where students anywhere now can gain access to the best professors from everywhere. Another is the craving in Asia for a more creative, discussion-based style of teaching in order to produce more creative, innovative students. And the last is the hunger of young people to engage in moral reasoning and debates, rather than having their education confined to the dry technical aspects of economics, business or engineering.
  • Sandel is touching something deep in both Boston and Beijing. “Students everywhere are hungry for discussion of the big ethical questions we confront in our everyday lives,” Sandel argues. “In recent years, seemingly technical economic questions have crowded out questions of justice and the common good.  I think there is a growing sense, in many societies, that G.D.P. and market values do not by themselves produce happiness, or a good society.
Adam Clark

Four Theories of Emotion - Good Summary - 0 views

webspace.ship.edu/...emotion.htm

emotion

shared by Adam Clark on 05 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Adam Clark on 05 Nov 14
     
    "There are many theories of emotion but four of them are perhaps the most commonly discussed. They are called the James-Lange theory, Cannon-Bard theory, Schachter-Singer theory, and Opponent Process theory of emotion. The following is a brief explanation of the four theories."
Javier E

History News Network | How the NCSS Sold Out Social Studies and History - 0 views

historynewsnetwork.org/...157845

history social studies Common Core teaching methods citizenship democracy education

shared by Javier E on 22 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • As a historian, I was influenced by E. H. Carr’s thinking about the past and present as part of a continuum that stretches into the future. In What is History? (1961), Carr argued that concern with the future is what really motivates the study of the past. As a teacher and political activist, I also strongly believe that schools should promote active citizenship as essential for maintaining a democratic society.
  • in an effort to survive, the NCSS has largely abandoned its commitment to these ideas, twisting itself into a pretzel to adapt to national Common Core standards and to satisfy influential conservative organizations that they are not radical, or even liberal. I suspect, but cannot document, that the organization’s membership has precipitously declined during the past two decades and it has increasingly depended financial support for its conferences and publications from deep-pocketed traditional and rightwing groups who advertise and have display booths.
  • No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Since the introduction of NCLB, there has been a steady reduction in the amount of time spent in the teaching of social studies, with the most profound decline noticed in the elementary grades.”
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • In an effort to counter the Common Core push for detextualized skill-based instruction and assessment that has further marginalized social studies education, the NCSS is promoting what it calls “College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework,”
  • through its choice of partners, its rigid adherence to Common Core lesson guidelines, and the sample material it is promoting, the NCSS has virtually abandoned not just meaningful social studies education, but education for democracy and citizenship as well.
  • My biggest problem with the C3 Framework as presented in this new document on instruction is its attempt to adopt a fundamentally flawed Common Core approach to social studies and history based on the close reading of text without exploring historical context
  • how Common Core as it is being implemented will mean the end of history.
  • In the C3 Framework inquiry approach, students start in Dimension 1 by “developing questions and planning inquiries,” however the inquiry is really already “planned” because material they use is pre-selected. It is also not clear what their questions will be based on since they do not necessarily have any background on the subject. In Dimension 3 students evaluate sources using evidence, but again, devoid of historical context. Dimension 4 is supposed to be C3’s chief addition to Common Core. In Dimension 4 students are supposed to plan activities and become involved in civic life, although of course their options have again already been pre-prescribed.
  • In Dimension 2, as they read the text, which sixth graders and many eighth graders will find difficult, students discuss “How was citizenship revolutionary in 1776?” The question requires them to assume that colonists had already formulated a concept of citizenship, which I do not believe they had, a concept of nation, which they definitely did not, and an understanding that somehow what they were doing was “revolutionary,” which was still being debated.
  • Some of the organizations involved in writing the C3 Frameworks have positions so politically skewed to the right that NCSS should be embarrassed about including them in the project. In this category I include Gilder Lehrman, The Bill of Rights Institute, and The Center for Economic Education and Entrepreneurship (CEEE).
  • Conspicuously missing from the group of contributors is the Zinn Education Project which would have provided a radically different point of view.
  • What we have in the C3 Framework is standard teaching at best but a lot of poor teaching and propaganda as well.
  • Instead of challenging Common Core, the NCSS begs to be included. Instead of presenting multiple perspectives, it sells advertising in the form of lessons to its corporate and foundation sponsors. But worst in their own terms, in a time of mass protest against police brutality by high school and college students across the United States, active citizenship in a democratic society is stripped of meaning and becomes little more than idle discussion and telling student to vote when they are eighteen.
dpittenger

How Many Things Are There? - 1 views

www.youtube.com/watch

science knowledge things

shared by dpittenger on 14 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • dpittenger on 14 Jan 15
     
    This is a youtube video that discusses how many "things" there are. He defines the definition of things and then he eventually calculates how many things there are. This is related to TOK because it shows how "things" can be relative to a person, and it also shows that everything could possible be limited.
jongardner04

Your Scientific Reasoning Is More Flawed Than You Think - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...ing-more-flawed-than-you-think

reasoning scientific method

shared by jongardner04 on 16 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • And in a world where many high-stakes issues fundamentally boil down to science, this is clearly a problem. 
  • Naturally, the solution to the problem lies in good schooling — emptying minds of their youthful hunches and intuitions about how the world works, and repopulating them with sound scientific principles that have been repeatedly tested and verified. Wipe out the old operating system, and install the new
  • Although science as a field discards theories that are wrong or lacking, Shtulman and Valcarcel’s work suggests that individuals —even scientifically literate ones — tend to hang on to their early, unschooled, and often wrong theories about the natural world.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Taken together, these findings suggest that we may be innately predisposed to have certain theories about the natural world that are resilient to being drastically replaced or restructured.
  • hile some theories of learning consider the unschooled mind to be a ‘bundle of misconceptions’ in need of replacement, perhaps replacement is an unattainable goal. Or, if it is attainable, we may need to rethink how science is taught.
  • jongardner04 on 16 Jan 15
     
    Discusses scientific reasoning, which relates with the things we are learning about with scientific method. 
jongardner04

Is Texting Killing the English Language? | TIME.com - 0 views

ideas.time.com/...g-killing-the-english-language

language

shared by jongardner04 on 16 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Texting properly isn’t writing at all — it’s actually more akin to spoken language. And it’s a “spoken” language that is getting richer and more complex by the year.
  • Over time, writers took advantage of this and started crafting tapeworm sentences such as this one, from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “The whole engagement lasted above 12 hours, till the gradual retreat of the Persians was changed into a disorderly flight, of which the shameful example was given by the principal leaders and the Surenas himself.”
  • Texting is developing its own kind of grammar. Take LOL. It doesn’t actually mean “laughing out loud” in a literal sense anymore. LOL has evolved into something much subtler and sophisticated and is used even when nothing is remotely amusing. Jocelyn texts
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “Where have you been?” and Annabelle texts back “LOL at the library studying for two hours.” LOL signals basic empathy between texters, easing tension and creating a sense of equality. Instead of having a literal meaning, it does something — conveying an attitude — just like the -ed ending conveys past tense rather than “meaning” anything. LOL, of all things, is grammar.
  • All indications are that America’s youth are doing it quite well. Texting, far from being a scourge, is a work in progress.
  • jongardner04 on 16 Jan 15
     
    Discusses the idea of language and how texting is changing the english language especially with youth
carolinewren

Mess: Emotion can be good; science can be bad | Pork Network - 0 views

www.porknetwork.com/...can-be-good-science-can-be-bad

emotion science

shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • While facts and science are the backbone of what we do as agriculturalists, numbers and statistics tend to be dry and not very convincing when presented by someone who doesn’t first connect to the audience they are speaking
  • While the first two examples may stick in someone’s mind for a while, the third example, which brings emotions into the conversation, is the one that will get the most people riled up.
  • For some, it seems emotion is fine when we want people to understand us, but should be frowned upon when brought to us by our customers.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • there has been an uptick in the online discussion on what roll emotion plays in the art and science of raising animals.
  • The old saying that “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care” applies to agvocacy just as much as anything else. Animal rights activists gained ground because, rather than lead with the facts and figures, they tell stories that tug at the heartstrings of those who don’t know better.
  • Dropping science from the discussion saves time. Think of all the time it takes to spout off some numbers and paste a link to a study. We can use that time to truly listen to our customers and answer them with our own personal stories.
  • sticking with just the science of what we do is simply not effective. When it comes to talking about how we care for our land and animals, cutting corners straight to the facts and playing it safe hasn’t been working for us. We must show the softer side of farming.
Javier E

'Economicism,' n.: The Intrusion of Economics Into Everything Else - Megan Garber - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...373722

economics language utilitarian bias

shared by Javier E on 01 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • The stultifying language of economic theory is becoming more and more prevalent outside the worlds of business and policy. We use terms like "human resources" to discuss ... our coworkers. We run cost-benefit analyses when deciding between the pizza and the pasta. We use language that suggests a world that can be scrutinized and organized according to neat inputs and outputs—according, in other words, to systems.
  • American language, in the discussion of non-economic realms, has been infiltrated by economic metaphors and economic terms."
  • Economicism, on the other hand, is allowing the language and the frameworks of economics to permeate other fields. The "ism" version of "economics" is, Wieseltier said, "raising economics as a source of wisdom in realms that have nothing to do with economics." 
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • you get things like the Freakonomics franchise. And defenses of the humanities that are based, somewhat awkwardly, on economic logic. ("So basically," Wieseltier says, "you're providing utilitarian arguments for the resistance or indifference to utilitarianism.") And then, of course, you get cringetastic terms like "synergies" and "efficiencies" and "human capital."
  • this deprives us, Wieseltier argues, of a more nuanced and humanistic—you might even say spiritual—understanding of the world and our place within it. "There isn't the cultural answer to an economic problem," he said, "and there isn't an economic answer to a cultural problem."
  • "The categories and the vocabulary of the market are being used in realms where they do not belong," Wieseltier said. "And one of the things we have to learn how to do is to distinguish between the realms."
jongardner04

Ex-CIA Directors: Interrogations Saved Lives - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...gations-saved-lives-1418142644

Torture

shared by jongardner04 on 15 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • jongardner04 on 15 Jan 15
     
    Goes along with the CIA interrogation discussion we had.
jongardner04

Scientists able to 'reverse' emotions associated with memories | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

america.aljazeera.com/...otion-memory-braincircuit.html

emotions memories

shared by jongardner04 on 15 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Erasing the anguish associated with a breakup or a traumatic event may soon no longer be confined to the realm of science fiction, or the central idea of the film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” following an apparent breakthrough by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  • "Recalling a memory is not like playing a tape recorder," said Susumu Tonegawa, an MIT neuroscientist and a lead author of the study. "It's a creative process."
  • Neuroscientists at MIT have honed in on the pathway of brain cells that appear to control the way our memories become linked to emotions — and have been able to “reverse” the emotion in mice linked to a specific memory, turning bad memories into good and vice versa
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In the future, one may be able to develop methods that help people to remember positive memories more strongly than negative ones," said Tonegawa.
  • jongardner04 on 15 Jan 15
     
    Relates to our unit about emotions and also relates to our memory unit. Discusses how maybe in the future we may be able to develop a way to remember more positive memories rather than negative
jongardner04

Looks Can Deceive: Why Perception and Reality Don't Always Match Up - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...looks-can-deceive

perception reality

shared by jongardner04 on 15 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • ALL OF US, even postmodern philosophers, are naive realists at heart. We assume that the external world maps perfectly onto our internal view of it—an expectation that is reinforced by daily experience.
  • That there should be a match between perception and reality is not surprising, because evolution ruthlessly eliminates the unfit.
  • As psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered over the past several decades, our consciousness provides a stable interface to a dizzyingly rich sensory world. Underneath this interface lurk two visio
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • systems that work in parallel.
  • jongardner04 on 15 Jan 15
     
    Discusses sense perception and how it shapes our society.
Javier E

Han Solo Shot First - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...385551

wikipedia fiction tense language

shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • When I teach writing, I stress the immediacy of art to my students. Fiction, I tell them, plays out in the perpetual present, a story making itself anew each time we read or tell it. When we write about a work in the present tense, we focus on what it does, on the ways that it whispers and shouts as we listen to it. With the present tense, we acknowledge that the work is a thing in itself, a subject in the grammatical sense: It is one that acts, albeit one impelled to action by its encounter with the reader. In the process, we maintain the conceit that art has a degree of independent and objective reality, and that, therefore, it can be examined, argued about, and discussed.
  • By contrast, the past tense suggests a certain naiveté. Put simply, where the present tense lets us discuss art in its own terms, the past tense leaves us unwittingly talking about ourselves. With it, we implicitly tell a story about our experience of the work instead of the work itself, narrating the events it describes as if they had happened to us. The independent work of art dissolves here,
  • In a seminal 2008 New York Review of Books article, Nicholson Baker points out that Wikipedia has always been a subjective phenomenon, despite its protestations to the contrary. Intellectually ravenous, Baker writes that “it just feels good to find something there—even, or especially, when the article you find is a little clumsily written.” Tellingly, Baker himself often employs the past tense as he explains the site, implicitly describing his experience of it rather than the thing in itself. In the process, he suggests that Wikipedia, the defining monument of knowledge today, has as much to do with the ways we were—with the things we’ve felt, sensed, and done—as with the things we know.
anonymous

Why are Simpler Explanations Usually Better? - 0 views

www.toktalk.net/...er-explanations-usually-better

TOK Complexity Science

shared by anonymous on 28 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 28 Oct 14
     
    This article discusses why scientists attempt to simplify things. It suggests that things may only appear complex because it is the first time we are hearing something, and that we are more comfortable when we are more familiar with an idea. 
Javier E

Among the Disrupted - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...among-the-disrupted.html

postmodernism media tech disruption culture

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind.
  • Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability.
  • the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms:
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything. It is enabled by the idolatry of data, which has itself been enabled by the almost unimaginable data-generating capabilities of the new technology
  • The distinction between knowledge and information is a thing of the past, and there is no greater disgrace than to be a thing of the past.
  • even as technologism, which is not the same as technology, asserts itself over more and more precincts of human life, so too does scientism, which is not the same as science.
  • The notion that the nonmaterial dimensions of life must be explained in terms of the material dimensions, and that nonscientific understandings must be translated into scientific understandings if they are to qualify as knowledge, is increasingly popular inside and outside the university
  • The contrary insistence that the glories of art and thought are not evolutionary adaptations, or that the mind is not the brain, or that love is not just biology’s bait for sex, now amounts to a kind of heresy.
  • So, too, does the view that the strongest defense of the humanities lies not in the appeal to their utility — that literature majors may find good jobs, that theaters may economically revitalize neighborhoods — but rather in the appeal to their defiantly nonutilitarian character, so that individuals can know more than how things work, and develop their powers of discernment and judgment, their competence in matters of truth and goodness and beauty, to equip themselves adequately for the choices and the crucibles of private and public life.
  • are we becoming posthumanists?
  • In American culture right now, as I say, the worldview that is ascendant may be described as posthumanism.
  • The posthumanism of the 1970s and 1980s was more insular, an academic affair of “theory,” an insurgency of professors; our posthumanism is a way of life, a social fate.
  • In “The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973,” the gifted essayist Mark Greif, who reveals himself to be also a skillful historian of ideas, charts the history of the 20th-century reckonings with the definition of “man.”
katrinaskibicki

Can You Get Smarter? - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...can-you-get-smarter.html

shared by katrinaskibicki on 25 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • katrinaskibicki on 25 Oct 15
     
    This article discusses cognitive developments and declines, relating to our focus during Unit 1 on the neocortex and evolution of the human brain.
Javier E

Data Firm Tied to Trump Campaign Talked Business With Russians - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ambridge-analytica-russia.html

data mining trump campaign russia psychology manipulation social media

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • When the Russia question came up during a hearing at the British Parliament last month, Alexander Nix did not hesitate.“We’ve never worked in Russia,” said Mr. Nix, head of a data consulting firm that advised the Trump campaign on targeting voters.
  • “As far as I’m aware, we’ve never worked for a Russian company,” Mr. Nix added. “We’ve never worked with a Russian organization in Russia or any other country, and we don’t have any relationship with Russia or Russian individuals.”
  • But Mr. Nix’s business did have some dealings with Russian interests, according to company documents and interviews.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • . The firms’ employees, who often overlap, had contact in 2014 and 2015 with executives from Lukoil, the Russian oil giant.
  • Lukoil was interested in how data was used to target American voters, according to two former company insiders who said there were at least three meetings with Lukoil executives in London and Turkey.
  • Cambridge Analytica also included extensive questions about Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, in surveys it was carrying out in American focus groups in 2014. It is not clear what — or which client — prompted the line of questioning, which asked for views on topics ranging from Mr. Putin’s popularity to Russian expansionism.
  • On two promotional documents obtained by The New York Times, SCL said it did business in Russia. In both documents, the country is highlighted on world maps that specify the location of SCL clients, with one of the maps noting that the clients were for the firm’s elections division. In a statement, SCL said an employee had done “commercial work” about 25 years ago “for a private company in Russia.”
  • Asked about the Russian oil company, a spokesman for SCL said that in 2014 the firm’s commercial division “discussed helping Lukoil Turkey better engage with its loyalty-card customers at gas stations.” The spokesman said SCL was not ultimately hired.
  • But Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge Analytica and develop the company’s voter-profiling technology, said Lukoil showed interest in how the company used data to tailor messaging to American voters.
  • “I remember being super confused,” said Mr. Wylie, who took part in one of the Lukoil meetings.“I kept asking Alexander, ‘Can you explain to me what they want?’” he said, referring to Mr. Nix. “I don’t understand why Lukoil wants to know about political targeting in America.”
  • “We’re sending them stuff about political targeting — they then come and ask more about political targeting,” Mr. Wylie said, adding that Lukoil “just didn’t seem to be interested” in how the techniques could be used commercially.
  • A second person familiar with the discussions backed up Mr. Wylie’s account, but spoke on the condition of anonymity because of a confidentiality agreement.
  • Though Lukoil is not state-owned, it depends on Kremlin support, and its chief executive, Vagit Alekperov, has met with Mr. Putin on a number of occasions. Reuters reported last year that Lukoil and other companies received instructions from the state energy ministry on providing news stories favorable to Russian leadership.
Javier E

Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...liu-cixins-war-of-the-worlds

china science fiction realpolitik psychology science

shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • he briskly dismissed the idea that fiction could serve as commentary on history or on current affairs. “The whole point is to escape the real world!” he said.
  • Chinese tech entrepreneurs discuss the Hobbesian vision of the trilogy as a metaphor for cutthroat competition in the corporate world; other fans include Barack Obama, who met Liu in Beijing two years ago, and Mark Zuckerberg. Liu’s international career has become a source of national pride. In 2015, China’s then Vice-President, Li Yuanchao, invited Liu to Zhongnanhai—an off-limits complex of government accommodation sometimes compared to the Kremlin—to discuss the books and showed Liu his own copies, which were dense with highlights and annotations.
  • In China, one of his stories has been a set text in the gao kao—the notoriously competitive college-entrance exams that determine the fate of ten million pupils annually; another has appeared in the national seventh-grade-curriculum textbook. When a reporter recently challenged Liu to answer the middle-school questions about the “meaning” and the “central themes” of his story, he didn’t get a single one right. “I’m a writer,” he told me, with a shrug.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Liu’s tomes—they tend to be tomes—have been translated into more than twenty languages, and the trilogy has sold some eight million copies worldwide. He has won China’s highest honor for science-fiction writing, the Galaxy Award, nine times, and in 2015 he became the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award, the most prestigious international science-fiction prize
  • “The Three-Body Problem” takes its title from an analytical problem in orbital mechanics which has to do with the unpredictable motion of three bodies under mutual gravitational pull. Reading an article about the problem, Liu thought, What if the three bodies were three suns? How would intelligent life on a planet in such a solar system develop? From there, a structure gradually took shape that almost resembles a planetary system, with characters orbiting the central conceit like moons. For better or worse, the characters exist to support the framework of the story rather than to live as individuals on the page.
  • Concepts that seemed abstract to others took on, for him, concrete forms; they were like things he could touch, inducing a “druglike euphoria.” Compared with ordinary literature, he came to feel, “the stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional
  • Pragmatic choices like this one, or like the decision his grandparents made when their sons were conscripted, recur in his fiction—situations that present equally unconscionable choices on either side of a moral fulcrum
  • The great flourishing of science fiction in the West at the end of the nineteenth century occurred alongside unprecedented technological progress and the proliferation of the popular press—transformations that were fundamental to the development of the genre
  • Joel Martinsen, the translator of the second volume of Liu’s trilogy, sees the series as a continuation of this tradition. “It’s not hard to read parallels between the Trisolarans and imperialist designs on China, driven by hunger for resources and fear of being wiped out,” he told me. Even Liu, unwilling as he is to endorse comparisons between the plot and China’s current face-off with the U.S., did at one point let slip that “the relationship between politics and science fiction cannot be underestimated.”
  • Speculative fiction is the art of imagining alternative worlds, and the same political establishment that permits it to be used as propaganda for the existing regime is also likely to recognize its capacity to interrogate the legitimacy of the status quo.
  • Liu has been criticized for peopling his books with characters who seem like cardboard cutouts installed in magnificent dioramas. Liu readily admits to the charge. “I did not begin writing for love of literature,” he told me. “I did so for love of science.”
  • Liu believes that this trend signals a deeper shift in the Chinese mind-set—that technological advances have spurred a new excitement about the possibilities of cosmic exploration.
  • Liu’s imagination is dauntingly capacious, his narratives conceived on a scale that feels, at times, almost hallucinogenic. The time line of the trilogy spans 18,906,450 years, encompassing ancient Egypt, the Qin dynasty, the Byzantine Empire, the Cultural Revolution, the present, and a time eighteen million years in the future
  • The first book is set on Earth, though some of its scenes take place in virtual reality; by the end of the third book, the scope of the action is interstellar and annihilation unfolds across several dimensions. The London Review of Books has called the trilogy “one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written.”
  • Although physics furnishes the novels’ premises, it is politics that drives the plots. At every turn, the characters are forced to make brutal calculations in which moral absolutism is pitted against the greater good
  • In Liu’s fictional universe, idealism is fatal and kindness an exorbitant luxury. As one general says in the trilogy, “In a time of war, we can’t afford to be too scrupulous.” Indeed, it is usually when people do not play by the rules of Realpolitik that the most lives are lost.
  • “I know what you are thinking,” he told me with weary clarity. “What about individual liberty and freedom of governance?” He sighed, as if exhausted by a debate going on in his head. “But that’s not what Chinese people care about. For ordinary folks, it’s the cost of health care, real-estate prices, their children’s education. Not democracy.”
  • Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.”
  • Liu explained to me, the existing regime made the most sense for today’s China, because to change it would be to invite chaos. “If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth,”
  • It was an opinion entirely consistent with his systems-level view of human societies, just as mine reflected a belief in democracy and individualism as principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes
  • “I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.
  • Chinese people of his generation were lucky, he said. The changes they had seen were so huge that they now inhabited a world entirely different from that of their childhood. “China is a futuristic country,” he said. “I realized that the world around me became more and more like science fiction, and this process is speeding up.”
  • “We have statues of a few martyrs, but we never—We don’t memorialize those, the individuals.” He took off his glasses and blinked, peering into the wide expanse of green and concrete. “This is how we Chinese have always been,” he said. “When something happens, it passes, and time buries the stories.”
dicindioha

Americans have lost faith in institutions. That's not because of Trump or 'fake news.' - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-because-of-trump-or-fake-news

shared by dicindioha on 05 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • we live in a “Matrix”-infused “conspiracy culture,” according to social scientists, where one is thought to be impossibly simple to not understand that the world is ruled by collusion and machination.
  • journalists have allowed too much of their personalities to creep into their work.
  • “less analysis and more reporting, less personality and more facts.”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Trust in American institutions, however, has been in decline for some time. Trump is merely feeding on that sentiment.
  • olitical scientist Ron Inglehart proposed in the 1970s that as societies grow wealthier and less concerned about basic survival, we should expect a shift from communal to individual values: People express themselves more and trust authorities less.
    • dicindioha
      dicindioha on 05 Mar 17
       
      This quote sums up what we have been talking about with regard to economics
  • The Watergate scandal caused Americans to lose faith in their government. Conversely, after the country was attacked on 9/11, trust in government soared and people went back to church. After the impact of scandal and threat faded, however, the long-term trends returned.
  • As far back as the 1600s, travelers confronted by new cultures and novel deities began to question their own societies’ rules and institutions
  • In 1964, 3 out of 4 Americans trusted their government to do the right thing most of the time. By 1976, that number had dropped to 33 percent.
  • And technology offers everyone the chance to be one’s own reporter, broadcaster and commentator.
  • In some Los Angeles schools, so many parents opt out of the vaccination regime that inoculation rates are on a par with South Sudan’s as people make their own scientific judgments.
  • Political scientists tell us that democracies require a little faith. To engage with others, you have to believe that if you lose a contest or a debate, the winner will treat you equitably; that if the other side wins, it will act within the law and not send its opponents off to jail. You have to assume that institutions will be fair and that leaders will act in the country’s best interest.
    • dicindioha
      dicindioha on 05 Mar 17
       
      interesting
  • dicindioha on 05 Mar 17
     
    This article talks about how people have lost trust in different American institutions, like the media, and how some newspapers are trying to gain it back. It's interesting that it talks about how people are letting emotions come through their writing, which as we have learned, is hard not to do. This article also uses graphical data, probably because people trust graphs and scientific looking data more than they would simple claims in an article. It's interesting it said that trust comes when we have to deal with something bad like 9/11, for people come together after an event like that. It also brings up how societies develop, people become more self interested, as we have discussed.
sissij

Unsealed Documents Raise Questions on Monsanto Weed Killer - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...to-roundup-safety-lawsuit.html

new york times science research bias

shared by sissij on 15 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • The court documents included Monsanto’s internal emails and email traffic between the company and federal regulators. The records suggested that Monsanto had ghostwritten research that was later attributed to academics and indicated that a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency had worked to quash a review of Roundup’s main ingredient, glyphosate, that was to have been conducted by the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
  • Monsanto also rebutted suggestions that the disclosures highlighted concerns that the academic research it underwrites is compromised.
  • In a statement, Monsanto said, “Glyphosate is not a carcinogen.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The safety of glyphosate is not settled science.
  • they could ghostwrite research on glyphosate by hiring academics to put their names on papers that were actually written by Monsanto.
  • The issue of glyphosate’s safety is not a trivial one for Americans. Over the last two decades, Monsanto has genetically re-engineered corn, soybeans and cotton so it is much easier to spray them with the weed killer, and some 220 million pounds of glyphosate were used in 2015 in the United States.
  • sissij on 15 Mar 17
     
    This news shows that there are a lot of cases that companies use science as a shield to convince people that their product is safe and good. Honesty is scientific papers has always been an important issue when we talk about the reliability of those papers. As we discussed in TOK, science is more like a social project that involves a lot of people and all human works are more or less biased and subjective. Now, science is intertwined with benefit and economics so the issue become much more complicated. I think we should identify the sources of the paper before citing any word from the paper because who write the paper is a big factor of which side the paper is standing. --Sissi (3/14/2017)
sissij

Manterruption is a Thing, and Now There is an App to Detect it in Daily Conversation | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...ing-and-there-is-an-app-for-it

psychology bias research

shared by sissij on 14 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Introducing our word of the day – “manterruption”. It’s a pretty self-explanatory term, describing a behavior when men interrupt women unnecessarily, which leads to a pretty serious imbalance in the amount of female vs. male contributions in a conversation.
  • A 2004 study on gender issues at Harvard Law School found that men were 50% more likely than women to volunteer at least one comment during class and 144% more likely to volunteer three or more comments. 
  • which as a consequence leaves decision-making mostly to men.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Meaning, women’s voices bring a different and valuable perspective in a conversation and should be heard more.
  • Here's the thing, though: while fighting for the cause of hearing the female perspective equally in all matters of business, government, and life is definitely worthwhile, blaming it all on interrupting men doesn’t seem fair. Because it is not just men who interrupt women, women do it too. As a matter of fact, a study done in a tech company showed that 87% of the time that women interrupt, they are interrupting other women.
  • There are also other dynamics at play, for example, seniority. It is still more likely that men will hold a more senior position in a professional environment and, generally, people with a higher rank tend to interrupt more and be interrupted less.
  • Hearing the voices and perspectives of both genders equally is incredibly important, but we should make sure we are addressing the right root causes and are not antagonizing those who need to be on the same side for progress to be made. 
  • sissij on 14 Mar 17
     
    I think this app is very interesting. There are obviously gender inequality in the society that men are often more used to take the leadership than women. I think by counting how many times a woman is interrupted by a man is a very interesting aspect to show how the society is still dominated by men. I also really like that the author discusses about other possible factors of why women are more likely to be interrupted by men. Only arguing about one side wouldn't make a strong argument. Gender inequality is a big and heavy label that we should give it more thinking before we apply it to any phenomenon. --Sissi (3/14/2017)
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