Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items matching "Questioning" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
caelengrubb

Will a Student Loan Debt Crisis Sink the U.S. Economy? - 1 views

knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/...student-loan-debt-crisis

shared by caelengrubb on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Student debt has more than tripled since 2004, reaching $1.52 trillion in the first quarter of 2018, according to the Federal Reserve — second only to mortgage debt in the U.S. College costs have outpaced the Consumer Price Index more than four-fold since 1985, and tuition assistance today is often harder to come by, particularly at schools without large endowments.
  • About 44 million graduates hold student debt, and today’s graduates leave school holding promissory notes worth an average of $37,000, raising concerns that the burden is creating a cascade of pressures compelling many to put off traditional life milestones
  • The storyline, as it has emerged, is that college debt delays buying a house, getting married, having children and saving for retirement, and there is some evidence that this is happening.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • But the truth is more nuanced, and, statistically at least, the question of how burdensome student debt is and the extent to which it is disrupting major life events depends on a number of factors, including when you graduated from college with debt.
  • For those who graduated with debt as the economy was crashing, it was a double-whammy, said Keys, “so you’re seeing delayed marriage, delayed child-bearing, which are at least in part a function of the ongoing damage from the Great Recession.
  • Before the Great Recession, student debt levels were below auto loans, credit card debt and home-equity lines of credit in the ranking of household debt. Since then, student loan debt has surpassed these other debts
  • A $1,000 increase in student loan debt lowers the homeownership rate by about 1.5 percentage points for public four-year college-goers during their mid 20s, equivalent to an average delay of 2.5 months in attaining homeownership,
  • Individuals who attain higher education average higher salaries, which translates into a higher tax base. With higher levels of education attainment, there is also less reliance on social welfare programs, as individuals who attain higher education are more likely to be employed, less likely to be unemployed, and less likely to be in poverty. Higher levels of education are also associated with greater civic engagement, as well as lower crime.”
  • In 2014, the largest chunk of student debt — nearly 40% — belonged to people owing between $1 and $10,000.
  • The bigger problem, Webber said, comes when students take out loans and then don’t graduate from college
  • Nationally, 60% of people who start at a four-year institution wind up graduating within the next six years
  • There are other ways in which all debt is not created equal. “Many of the people who have the largest loans and are the most likely to default are also the people who got the worst credentials and poorest quality training when they graduated or potentially didn’t even graduate
  • But although $1.5 trillion is a big number, it may not be an unreasonable amount given the value it is creating
  • In 2002, a bachelor’s degree holder could expect to make 75% more than someone with just a high school diploma, and nearly a decade later that premium had risen to 84%
  • A bachelor’s degree is worth about $2.8 million over a lifetime, the study also found.
  • Australia has a system that links the repayment of loans with the tax system. “Income-driven repayment options have been created in the U.S.,” said Perna, “but these options are more cumbersome and administratively complex than in Australia and some other nations. By linking the amount of the monthly payment to an individual’s income, income-driven repayment options can help to protect borrowers against the risk of non-repayment. But a more seamless system wouldn’t require borrowers to annually report their income to the U.S. Department of Education
  • “Promise” or “free tuition” programs cropping up in some states are also worth examining
  • “Right now there is, frankly, very little accountability that schools have; they practically have no skin in the game. If students default on their loans, there is no bad effect for the school.”
caelengrubb

Free Market - Econlib - 0 views

www.econlib.org/...FreeMarket.html

shared by caelengrubb on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Free market” is a summary term for an array of exchanges that take place in society.
  • Each exchange is undertaken as a voluntary agreement between two people or between groups of people represented by agents. These two individuals (or agents) exchange two economic goods, either tangible commodities or nontangible services
  • Both parties undertake the exchange because each expects to gain from it. Also, each will repeat the exchange next time (or refuse to) because his expectation has proved correct (or incorrect) in the recent past.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Trade, or exchange, is engaged in precisely because both parties benefit; if they did not expect to gain, they would not agree to the exchange.
  • This simple reasoning refutes the argument against free trade typical of the “mercantilist” period of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Europe and classically expounded by the famed sixteenth-century French essayist Montaigne.
  • The mercantilists argued that in any trade, one party can benefit only at the expense of the other—that in every transaction there is a winner and a loser, an “exploiter” and an “exploited.”
  • We can immediately see the fallacy in this still-popular viewpoint: the willingness and even eagerness to trade means that both parties benefit. In modern game-theory jargon, trade is a win-win situation, a “positive-sum” rather than a “zero-sum” or “negative-sum” game.
  • Each one values the two goods or services differently, and these differences set the scene for an exchange.
  • Two factors determine the terms of any agreement: how much each participant values each good in question, and each participant’s bargaining skills.
  • the market in relation to how favorably buyers evaluate these goods—in shorthand, by the interaction of their supply with the demand for them.
  • On the other hand, given the buyers’ evaluation, or demand, for a good, if the supply increases, each unit of supply—each baseball card or loaf of bread—will fall in value, and therefore the price of the good will fall. The reverse occurs if the supply of the good decreases.
  • The market, then, is not simply an array; it is a highly complex, interacting latticework of exchanges.
  • Production begins with natural resources, and then various forms of machines and capital goods, until finally, goods are sold to the consumer.
  • At each stage of production from natural resource to consumer good, money is voluntarily exchanged for capital goods, labor services, and land resources. At each step of the way, terms of exchanges, or prices, are determined by the voluntary interactions of suppliers and demanders. This market is “free” because choices, at each step, are made freely and voluntarily.
  • The free market and the free price system make goods from around the world available to consumers.
  • Saving and investment can then develop capital goods and increase the productivity and wages of workers, thereby increasing their standard of living.
  • The free competitive market also rewards and stimulates technological innovation that allows the innovator to get a head start in satisfying consumer wants in new and creative ways.
  • Government, in every society, is the only lawful system of coercion. Taxation is a coerced exchange, and the heavier the burden of taxation on production, the more likely it is that economic growth will falter and decline
  • The ultimate in government coercion is socialism.
  • Under socialist central planning the socialist planning board lacks a price system for land or capital goods.
  • Market socialism is, in fact, a contradiction in terms.
  • The fashionable discussion of market socialism often overlooks one crucial aspect of the market: When two goods are exchanged, what is really exchanged is the property titles in those goods.
  • This means that the key to the existence and flourishing of the free market is a society in which the rights and titles of private property are respected, defended, and kept secure.
  • The key to socialism, on the other hand, is government ownership of the means of production, land, and capital goods.
  • Under socialism, therefore, there can be no market in land or capital goods worthy of the name.
  • ome critics of the free market argue that property rights are in conflict with “human” rights. But the critics fail to realize that in a free-market system, every person has a property right over his own person and his own labor and can make free contracts for those services.
  • A common charge against the free-market society is that it institutes “the law of the jungle,” of “dog eat dog,” that it spurns human cooperation for competition and exalts material success as opposed to spiritual values, philosophy, or leisure activities.
  • It is the coercive countries with little or no market activity—the notable examples in the last half of the twentieth century were the communist countries—where the grind of daily existence not only impoverishes people materially but also deadens their spirit.
caelengrubb

Insider Trading - Econlib - 0 views

www.econlib.org/...InsiderTrading.html

shared by caelengrubb on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Insider trading” refers to transactions in a company’s securities, such as stocks or options, by corporate insiders or their associates based on information originating within the firm that would, once publicly disclosed, affect the prices of such securities.
  • Corporate insiders are individuals whose employment with the firm (as executives, directors, or sometimes rank-and-file employees) or whose privileged access to the firm’s internal affairs (as large shareholders, consultants, accountants, lawyers, etc.) gives them valuable information.
  • Famous examples of insider trading include transacting on the advance knowledge of a company’s discovery of a rich mineral ore (Securities and Exchange Commission v. Texas Gulf Sulphur Co.), on a forthcoming cut in dividends by the board of directors (Cady, Roberts & Co.), and on an unanticipated increase in corporate expenses (Diamond v. Oreamuno).
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Such trading on information originating outside the company is generally not covered by insider trading regulation.
  • Insider trading is quite different from market manipulation, disclosure of false or misleading information to the market, or direct expropriation of the corporation’s wealth by insiders.
  • Regulation of insider trading began in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, when judges in several states became willing to rescind corporate insiders’ transactions with uninformed shareholders.
  • One of the earliest (and unsuccessful) federal attempts to regulate insider trading occurred after the 1912–1913 congressional hearings before the Pujo Committee, which concluded that “the scandalous practices of officers and directors in speculating upon inside and advance information as to the action of their corporations may be curtailed if not stopped.”
  • The Securities Acts of 1933–1934, passed by the U.S. Congress in the aftermath of the stock market crash, though aimed primarily at prohibiting fraud and market manipulation, also targeted insider trading.
  • As of 2004, at least ninety-three countries, the vast majority of nations that possess organized securities markets, had laws regulating insider trading
  • Several factors explain the rapid emergence of such regulation, particularly during the last twenty years: namely, the growth of the securities industry worldwide, pressures to make national securities markets look more attractive in the eyes of outside investors, and the pressure the SEC exerted on foreign lawmakers and regulators to increase the effectiveness of domestic enforcement by identifying and punishing offenders and their associates operating outside the United States.
  • Many researchers argue that trading on inside information is a zero-sum game, benefiting insiders at the expense of outsiders. But most outsiders who bought from or sold to insiders would have traded anyway, and possibly at a worse price (Manne 1970). So, for example, if the insider sells stock because he expects the price to fall, the very act of selling may bring the price down to the buyer.
  • A controversial case is that of abstaining from trading on the basis of inside information (Fried 2003).
  • There is little disagreement that insider trading makes securities markets more efficient by moving the current market price closer to the future postdisclosure price. In other words, insiders’ transactions, even if they are anonymous, signal future price trends to others and make the current stock price reflect relevant information sooner.
  • Accurately priced stocks give valuable signals to investors and ensure more efficient allocation of capital.
  • The controversial question is whether insider trading is more or less effective than public disclosure.
  • Insider trading’s advantage is that it introduces individual profit motives, does not directly reveal sensitive intercorporate information, and mitigates the management’s aversion to disclosing negative information (
  • Probably the most controversial issue in the economic analysis of insider trading is whether it is an efficient way to pay managers for their entrepreneurial services to the corporation. Some researchers believe that insider trading gives managers a monetary incentive to innovate, search for, and produce valuable information, as well as to take risks that increase the firm’s value (Carlton and Fischel 1983; Manne 1966).
  • Another economic argument for insider trading is that it provides efficient compensation to holders of large blocks of stock
  • A common contention is that the presence of insider trading decreases public confidence in, and deters many potential investors from, equity markets, making them less liquid (Loss 1970).
  • Empirical research generally supports skepticism that regulation of insider trading has been effective in either the United States or internationally, as evidenced by the persistent trading profits of insiders, behavior of stock prices around corporate announcements, and relatively infrequent prosecution rates (Bhattacharya and Daouk 2002; Bris 2005).
  • Despite numerous and extensive debates, economists and legal scholars do not agree on a desirable government policy toward insider trading. On the one hand, absolute information parity is clearly infeasible, and information-based trading generally increases the pricing efficiency of financial markets. Information, after all, is a scarce economic good that is costly to produce or acquire, and its subsequent use and dissemination are difficult to control. On the other hand, insider trading, as opposed to other forms of informed trading, may produce unintended adverse consequences for the functioning of the corporate enterprise, the market-wide system of publicly mandated disclosure, or the market for information.
caelengrubb

Distribution of Income - Econlib - 0 views

www.econlib.org/...DistributionofIncome.html

shared by caelengrubb on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The distribution of income lies at the heart of an enduring issue in political economy—the extent to which government should redistribute income from those with more income to those with less.
  • The term “income distribution” is a statistical concept. No one person is distributing income. Rather, the income distribution arises from people’s decisions about work, saving, and investment as they interact through markets and are affected by the tax system.
  • In the longer view, the path of income inequality over the twentieth century is marked by two main events: a sharp fall in inequality around the outbreak of World War II and an extended rise in inequality that began in the mid-1970s and accelerated in the 1980s. Income inequality today is about as large as it was in the 1920s.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Over multiple years, family income fluctuates, and so the distribution of multiyear income is moderately more equal than the distribution of single-year income.
  • n one sense, the growth of inequality in the last part of the twentieth century comes as a surprise. In the 1950s, the bottom part of the income distribution contained large concentrations of two kinds of families: farm families whose in-kind income was not counted in Census data, and elderly families, many of whom were ineligible for the new Social Security program
  • Over subsequent decades, farm families declined as a proportion of the population while increased Social Security benefits and an expanding private pension system lifted elderly incomes. Both trends favored greater income equality but were outweighed by four main factors.
  • Family structure. Over time, the two-parent, one-earner family was increasingly replaced by low-income single-parent families and higher-income two-parent, two-earner families
  • Trade and technology increasingly shifted demand away from less-educated and less-skilled workers toward workers with higher education or particular skills. The result was a growing earnings gap between more- and less-educated/skilled workers.
  • With improved communications and transportation, people increasingly functioned in national, rather than local, markets. In these broader markets, persons with unique talents could command particularly high salaries.
  • In 2002, immigrants who had entered the country since 1980 constituted nearly 11 percent of the labor force (see immigration). A relatively high proportion of these immigrants had low levels of education and increased the number of workers competing for low-paid work.
  • A second offset to estimated inequality is economic mobility. Because most family incomes increase as people’s careers develop, long-run incomes are more equal than standard single-year statistics suggest
  • Is inequality of wages and incomes bad? The question seems ludicrous. Of course inequality is bad, isn’t it? Actually, no. What matters crucially is how the inequality came about.
  • Inequality of wages and incomes is clearly bad if it results from government privileges. Many people would find such an outcome unjust, but even more important to many economists is that such inequality sets up perverse incentives.
  • But inequality in wages and incomes in relatively free economies serves two important social functions.
anonymous

Suicide and Self-Harm: Bereaved Families Count the Costs of Lockdowns - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...uicide-self-harm-pandemic.html

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Suicide and Self-Harm: Bereaved Families Count the Costs of Lockdowns
  • The psychological toll on young people of months in isolation and great global suffering is becoming more clear after successive lockdowns.
  • Joshua Morgan was hopeful he could find a job despite the pandemic, move out of his mother’s house and begin his life.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • lockdowns in Britain dragged on and no job emerged, the young man grew cynical and self-conscious, his sister Yasmin said.
  • Mr. Morgan was “exceptionally careful” about her health.
  • But days before the end of his quarantine last month, Mr. Morgan, 25, took his own life.
  • “He just sounded so deflated,” his sister said of their last conversation, adding that he said he felt imprisoned and longed to go outside.
  • “The cost of the pandemic was my brother’s life,” she said. “It’s not just people dying in a hospital — it’s people dying inside.”
  • Editors’ Picks
  • More than 2.7 million people have died from the coronavirus — and at least 126,000 in Britain alone
  • Those numbers are a tangible count of the pandemic’s cos
  • public health officials in some areas that have seen a surge of adolescent suicides have pushed for schools to reopen, although researchers say it is too early to conclusively link restrictions to suicide rates.
  • But bereaved families of young people who have died during the pandemic are haunted by questions over whether lockdowns — which not only shut stores and restaurants but required people to stay home for months — played a role.
  • They are calling for more resources for mental health and suicide prevention.
  • “Mental health has become a buzzword during the pandemic, and we need to keep it that way,”
  • While people may have felt a sense of togetherness during the first lockdowns, that feeling began to wear thin for some as it became clear that restrictions were hitting disadvantaged groups, including many young people, harder.
  • “If you are a young person, you are looking for hope,”
  • “But the job market is going to be constrained, and opportunities to build your life are going to be slimmer.”
  • “Imagine a young person in a small room, who takes their course online and has limited social life due to restrictions,”
  • “They may be tempted to consume more drugs or drink more alcohol, and may have less physical activity, all of which can contribute to symptoms of depression, anxiety and poor sleep.”
  • “We would ask him if he was depressed, and he would say, ‘Depressed? I don’t know what depressed is, I don’t think I am. I feel bored, but I don’t feel depressed,’”
  • “With the pandemic, the things that spiced his life, that made it worth going to school, were gone,” he added.
  • After a series of lockdowns in Britain last year, one suicide hotline for young people, Papyrus, saw its calls increase by 25 percent, in line with an increase of about 20 percent each year.
  • “Lockdown put Lily in physical and emotional situations she would never have in normal times.”
  • “It’s OK for a young child to fall over and let their parents know that their knee hurts,” Ms. Arkwright said. “This same attitude needs to be extended to mental health.”
  • People should be praised for adapting and finding resilience during these difficult times, Mr. Flynn said. “Even the need to reach out to a help-line shows resilience,” he said, adding that considering the circumstances, many people were doing “really well.”
anonymous

Opinion | 'This Is Jim Crow in New Clothes' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ing-rights-resonstruction.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • ‘This Is Jim Crow in New Clothes’
  • Senator Raphael Warnock’s first speech on the Senate floor brought the past into the present.
  • “We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era,”
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • “This is Jim Crow in new clothes
  • I submit that it is the job of each citizen to stand up for the voting rights of every citizen. And it is the job of this body to do all that it can to defend the viability of our democracy.
  • The bill that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was first introduced in January 1870 by Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a Radical Republican and ardent opponent of slavery and race discrimination.
  • as well as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore pre-clearance to the Voting Rights Act, forcing covered jurisdictions to submit new voting plans for federal approval.
  • arnock is the first African-American to represent Georgia in the Senate and only the second elected from the South since Reconstruction.
  • His presence on the Senate floor is historic just on its own.
  • It represents progress — and yet it is also evocative of the past.
  • A Black lawmaker from the South, urging his mostly white colleagues to defend the voting rights of millions of Americans is, to my mind, an occasion to revisit one particular episode in the history of American democracy: the fight, in Congress, over the Civil Rights Act of 1875
  • The first Black members of the House of Representatives, some of them former slaves, were prominent in this battle
  • They saw the bill as vital in the fight against discrimination and race hierarchy.
  • Warnock argued, the Senate should pass the For the People Act, which would establish automatic voter registration nationally, provide for at least two weeks of early voting and preserve mail-in balloting,
  • “no citizen of the United States shall, by reason of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, be excepted or excluded from full and equal enjoyment” of “common schools and public institutions of learning, the same being supported by moneys derived from general taxation or authorized by law.”
  • “viewed school desegregation as a necessary component of achieving a truly colorblind nation.”
  • Their opponents saw school desegregation as collapsing a distinction between public rights and social rights that would allow the government to
  • “invade all provinces of an individual’s life.”
  • And as their fellow Republicans struggled to pass the civil rights bill, these lawmakers used the debate to devise what Francois calls a “counter narrative to white supremacy” that repudiated Black inferiority in favor of a “vision of human equality.”
  • “It is not social rights we desire,” Representative John R. Lynch of Mississippi, a former slave, said. “What we ask is protection in the enjoyment of public rights.
  • I want to say we do not come here begging for our rights. We come here clothed in the garb of American citizenship. We come demanding our rights in the name of justice.
  • The civil rights bill passed Congress in February 1875, nearly a year after Sumner’s death. It did so without the schools clause.
  • By the end of the century, Jim Crow was in place throughout most of the former Confederacy.
  • It would be over 70 years before the South would send another Black American to Washington.
  • His speech is also part and parcel of a Black tradition of calling on the government to fulfill the nation’s professed values
  • The question, as always, is whether Congress will actually act to secure democracy for all of its citizens and whether we’ll withstand the inevitable backlash if it does.
katedriscoll

How Americans Came to Distrust Science | Boston Review - 0 views

bostonreview.net/...mericans-came-distrust-science

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • But it is not just conservatives who question scientific authority in the United States. Alarm at many applications of biological research, for example, crosses party lines. This impulse usually targets genetic engineering and biotechnology, but it also fosters skepticism toward vaccination and other medical practices. Across the political spectrum, citizens tend to pick and choose among scientific theories and applications based on preexisting commitments. They are frequently suspicious of basic research procedures as well; many believe that peer review and other internal policing mechanisms fail to remove powerful biases. Conservatives often charge that peer review enforces liberal groupthink, while some progressives say it leaves conventional social norms unexamined.
  • Even as individuals, scientists face growing skepticism. Concern about scientific misconduct is widespread, and most Americans doubt that the perpetrators face serious repercussions. Significant numbers trust the experts who apply knowledge more than those who produce it.
katedriscoll

When is science credible? - OpenAIRE Blog - 0 views

www.openaire.eu/...when-is-science-credible

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The overarching goal of science is to deepen our understanding about the world we live in, and then to use this understanding, for example, to address social or medical problems. However, in order to pursue those goals effectively and efficiently, the scientific findings we base our actions on have to be credible. But how can we assess the credibility of research? Is a going through peer review enough, or being published? What if the study made it into in a “high-ranking” journal? Is that enough to deem findings credible?
  • Curate Science is committed to rewarding positive scientific behaviors, but does not punish questionable research practices or lower levels of transparency. Researchers are encouraged to adopt open and transparent practices, but to do so  at their own pace. LeBel explains, “we make it easy to get the most credit possible for conducting and reporting one's research only a little bit more transparently. That is, as transparent as you currently have time for and/or are comfortable with. For example, if you're uncomfortable publicly posting your data for an article, you could still earn credit by publicly posting your code and linking to it on Curate Science” (Only 1 transparency component is required for being added to the database).
katedriscoll

Economics and Psychology | The MIT Press - 0 views

mitpress.mit.edu/...economics-and-psychology

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Leading economics scholars consider the influence of psychology on economics, discussing topics including pro-social behavior, conditional trust, neuroeconomics, procedural utility, and happiness research.
  • Summary Leading economics scholars consider the influence of psychology on economics, discussing topics including pro-social behavior, conditional trust, neuroeconomics, procedural utility, and happiness research. The integration of economics and psychology has created a vibrant and fruitful emerging field of study. The essays in Economics and Psychology take a broad view of the interface between these two disciplines, going beyond the usual focus on "behavioral economics." As documented in this volume, the influence of psychology on economics has been responsible for a view of human behavior that calls into question the assumption of complete rationality (and raises the possibility of altruistic acts), the acceptance of experiments as a valid method of economic research, and the idea that utility or well-being can be measured.
anonymous

How Do I Dress for My Pandemic Belly? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ess-for-my-pandemic-belly.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • How Do I Dress for My Pandemic Belly?
  • Vanessa Friedman, fashion director of The New York Times, takes reader questions.
  • I have never had a waist or hips; in my 20s I always described myself as “straight up and down.”
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • It feels as if fashion is doing a better job of appreciating a woman’s “curves,” but that always means hips and bootys, never bellies. How do I dress to flatter my new shape?
  • A lot of us changed shape over the last year as we were shut indoors and the sensory joys of life
  • it’s also true that it is possible to simply live peacefully with it, prioritizing what’s important according to the individual.
  • if we become more accepting of a variety of shapes after the last year, that’s a positive development.
  • But you are correct in saying that when fashion focuses on women and weight, it tends to focus on boobs and bottoms, rather than bellies.
  • IMG decided it wanted to represent bigger girls (good)
  • the agency rejected the whole inane “plus-size” terminology
  • but then settled on calling its new division … “curve.”
  • how to move forward?
  • Both women said forget the Spanx — that’s for “red carpet,” Elizabeth said — and focus instead on comfort and what makes you feel good.
  • Both also said do not pretend your stomach does not exist by wearing muumuus.
  • eye of the beholder
  • Then the message is not about “hiding anything,” she said. “You’re just not buttoning it up.”
anonymous

The 'Old American Dream,' a Trap as the Floods Keep Coming - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-hurricane-harvey-houston.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The ‘Old American Dream,’ a Trap as the Floods Keep Coming
  • Still, she wanted so badly to keep her word.
  • In her kitchen, Juanita Hall routinely found opossums staring back at her from the cage trap she kept under the table
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • And that was all before a winter storm last month left Ms. Hall shivering over a heater and caused pipes to leak
  • Hurricane Harvey. The storm hit Houston in 2017, and for many, the trauma endured as a haunting memory.
  • But for Ms. Hall, almost four years later, the devastation remained a grinding reality.
  • “I think about it every day, all day long,”
  • she walked through the house she had lived in since childhood.
  • No matter what, the house would be there, and it would be theirs.
  • Owning a home has long been part of Houston’s promise for many working-class families, offering security and a foothold for upward mobility. But disasters — flood after flood — have kept coming.
  • A changing climate threatens more
  • Houston’s poorest neighborhoods, the houses are no longer the safety net they were intended to be.
  • A few months before Harvey, Ms. Hall ran into her mother’s bedroom and found her collapsed on the floor. Now, she cannot forget the request her mother made soon before she died: Don’t y’all lose my house.
  • “I’m tired of the unknown,
  • His house was another thread in the skein of complications that consumed his life, all of which were caused or made worse by a lack of money.
  • A storm, as it cuts its path, may not recognize race or class, but the pace of recovery very often does
  • In Houston’s poorest neighborhoods, an unfamiliar winter storm stoked a familiar anguish, one fueled by recurring floods and what residents see as a pattern of neglect.
  • Yet it also plunged them into a familiar agony: no electricity, waterlogged homes
  • certainty that they faced more of a frustration they knew all too well from wrangling with bureaucracies for help that was rarely enough, if it ever came at all.
  • “They’ve lost in a lot of ways,”
  • “These neighborhoods are just having issue after issue, and none of their original issues have been dealt with or resolved. This is layer upon layer of injury.”
  • Tired but still at it
  • “My folks used to say, if it’s easy, baby, question it,”
  • Harvey Forgotten Survivors Caucus, which helped patch up her house
  • And she also learned that hers was, in many ways, a familiar set of circumstances, living in a home that had been handed down through family and amounted to just about the entirety of their wealth.
  • The community was drained of more than just white residents. Businesses left. So too did a sense of opportunity.
  • “The property value went down,” Mr. Moses said. “The human value went down.”
  • There are the neighborhoods that bounce back. And there are the others — with lower incomes and largely nonwhite residents — where every event arrives as another setback on an interminable slog
  • “The only option is to stay where you’re at,” he said. “That’s it.”
  • “You’re more of a mother to these children than the mothers,” he told her. And when he died, he wanted her to oversee his estate.
  • “This is an assignment to me, and I want to get it done,” Ms. Hall said sitting on her front porch, washed in the light of a crisp afternoon filtering through the leaves of the magnolia tree. “If I die the day after, I’m satisfied.”
  • er father’s dream was now the one she held for Bella: No matter what, the house would be there, and it would be hers.
anonymous

Opinion | Biden Plots a Revolution for America's Children - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-child-poverty.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Biden Plots a Revolution for America’s Children
  • National pre-K and affordable day care don’t have to be a dream.
  • The most revolutionary part of President Biden’s agenda so far is his focus on a constituency that doesn’t write whiny op-ed columns, doesn’t vote, doesn’t hire lobbyists and so has been neglected for half a century: children.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Biden’s proposal to establish a national pre-K and child care system would be a huge step forward for children and for working parents alike.
  • You drop a kid off at a high-quality prekindergarten program in the morning and pick the child up on the way home from work.
  • When my wife and I lived in Japan in the late 1990s, we sent our kids to one of these nurseries, and they were a dream.
  • But the United States never developed such a system, because for half a century as other countries were investing in children, the United States was stiffing them.
  • Today one of our saddest statistics is this: American children ages 1 to 19 are 57 percent more likely to die than children in other rich countries.
  • Some of those kids die because the United States doesn’t provide universal health care to children — only to senior citizens, who vote and thus are a priority.
  • Just as Franklin Roosevelt revolutionized conditions for the elderly by instituting Social Security, Biden may be able to do the same for children.
  • But still more important for America’s future, in my view, will be the elements focused on children.
  • Making his child allowances permanent.
  • Expanding home visitation programs that help at-risk moms and dads from pregnancy through early childhood
  • Working toward universal access to high-quality pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds.
  • Ensuring high-quality affordable day care for parents
  • One model the White House is studying is the excellent day care system offered by the U.S. military,
  • For some of my middle-aged friends wrestling with homelessness, mental health crises and decades of addiction, with more of a criminal record than an educational record, it may not be possible to turn lives around. For their kids and grandkids, we have to try.
  • please, President Biden, push on. This is about America’s future. This is your chance to preside over a Rooseveltian revolution that sprinkles opportunity and averts tragedies for decades to come.
  • he question isn’t whether we can afford to invest in children and break cycles of poverty, educational failure and substance abuse. It’s whether we can afford not to.
Javier E

My Mom Believes In QAnon. I've Been Trying To Get Her Out. - 0 views

www.buzzfeednews.com/...on-parents-millennial-children

QAnon conspiracy theory language psychology

shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • An early adopter of the QAnon mass delusion, on board since 2018, she held firm to the claim that a Satan-worshipping cabal of child sex traffickers controlled the world and the only person standing in their way was Trump. She saw him not merely as a politician but a savior, and she expressed her devotion in stark terms.
  • “The prophets have said Trump is anointed,” she texted me once. “God is using him to finally end the evil doings of the cabal which has hurt humanity all these centuries… We are in a war between good & evil.”
  • By 2020, I’d pretty much given up on swaying my mom away from her preferred presidential candidate. We’d spent many hours arguing over basic facts I considered indisputable. Any information I cited to prove Trump’s cruelty, she cut down with a corresponding counterattack. My links to credible news sources disintegrated against a wall of outlets like One America News Network, Breitbart, and Before It’s News. Any cracks I could find in her positions were instantly undermined by the inconvenient fact that I was, in her words, a member of “the liberal media,” a brainwashed acolyte of the sprawling conspiracy trying to take down her heroic leader.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • The irony gnawed at me: My entire vocation as an investigative reporter was predicated on being able to reveal truths, and yet I could not even rustle up the evidence to convince my own mother that our 45th president was not, in fact, the hero she believed him to be. Or, for that matter, that John F. Kennedy Jr. was dead. Or that Tom Hanks had not been executed for drinking the blood of children.
  • The theories spun from Q’s messages seemed much easier to disprove. Oprah Winfrey couldn’t have been detained during a wave of deep state arrests because we could still see her conducting live interviews on television. Trump’s 4th of July speech at Mount Rushmore came to an end without John F. Kennedy Jr. revealing he was alive and stepping in as the president’s new running mate. The widespread blackouts that her Patriot friend’s “source from the Pentagon” had warned about failed to materialize. And I could testify firsthand that the CIA had no control over my newsroom’s editorial decisions.
  • “I believe the Holy Spirit led me to the QAnons to discover the truth which is being suppressed,” she texted me. “Otherwise, how would I be able to know the truth if the lamestream media suppresses the truth?”
  • Through the years, I’d battled against conspiracy theories my mom threw at me that were far more formidable than QAnon. I’d been stumped when she asked me to prove that Beyoncé wasn’t an Illuminati member, dumbfounded when research studies I sent her weren’t enough to reach an agreement on vaccine efficacy, and too worn down to say anything more than “that’s not true” when confronted with false allegations of murders committed by prominent politicians.
  • Eventually, I accepted the impasse. It didn’t seem healthy that every conversation we had would devolve into a circuitous debate about which one of us was on the side of the bad guys. So I tried to pick my battles.
  • But what I had dismissed as damaging inconsistencies turned out to be the core strength of the belief system: It was alive, flexible, sprouting more questions than answers, more clues to study, an investigation playing out in real time, with the fate of the world at stake.
  • With no overlap between our filters of reality, I was at a loss for any facts that would actually stick.
  • Meanwhile, she wondered where she’d gone wrong with me
  • She regretted not taking politics more seriously when I was younger. I’d grown up blinkered by American privilege, trained to ignore the dirty machinations securing my comforts. My mom had shed that luxury long ago.
  • The year my mom began falling down QAnon rabbit holes, I turned the age she was when she first arrived in the States. By then, I was no longer sure that America was worth the cost of her migration. When the real estate market collapsed under the weight of Wall Street speculation, she had to sell our house at a steep loss to avoid foreclosure and her budding career as a realtor evaporated. Her near–minimum wage jobs weren’t enough to cover her bills, so her credit card debts rose. She delayed retirement plans because she saw no path to breaking even anytime soon, though she was hopeful that a turnaround was on the horizon. Through the setbacks and detours, she drifted into the arms of the people and beliefs I held most responsible for her troubles.
  • With a fervor I knew was futile, I’d tell my mom she was missing the real conspiracy: The powerful people shaping policy to benefit their own interests, to maintain wealth and white predominance, through tax cuts and voter suppression, were commandeering her support solely by catering to her stance on the one issue she cared most about.
  • The voice my mom trusted most now was Trump’s. Our disagreements were no longer ideological to her but part of a celestial conflict.
  • “I love you but you have to be on the side of good,” she texted me. “Im sad cuz u have become part of the deep state. May God have mercy on you...I pray you will see the truth of the evil agenda and be on the side of Trump.”
  • She likened her fellow Patriots to the early Christians who spread the word of Jesus at the risk of persecution. She often sent me a meme with a caption about “ordinary people who spent countless hours researching, debating, meditating and praying” for the truth to be revealed to them. “Although they were mocked, dismissed and cast off, they knew their souls had agreed long ago to do this work.”
  • Last summer, as my mom marched in a pink MAGA hat amid maskless crowds, and armed extremists stalked racial justice protests, and a disputed election loomed like a time bomb, I entertained my darkest thoughts about the fate of our country. Was there any hope in a democracy without a shared set of basic facts? Had my elders fled one authoritarian regime only for their children to face another? Amid the gloom, I found only a single morsel of solace: My mom was as hopeful as she’d ever been.
  • I wish I could offer some evidence showing that the gulf between us might be narrowing, that my love, persistence, and collection of facts might be enough to draw her back into a reality we share, and that when our wager about the storm comes due in a few months, she’ll realize that the voices she trusts have been lying to her. But I don’t think that will happen
  • What can I do but try to limit the damage? Send my mom movie recommendations to occupy the free time she instead spends on conspiracy research. Shift our conversations to the common ground of cooking recipes and family gossip. Raise objections when her beliefs nudge her toward dangerous decisions.
  • I now understand our debates as marks of the very bond I thought was disintegrating. No matter how far she believes I’ve fallen into the deep state, how hard I fight for the forces of evil, how imminent the grand plan’s rapture, my mom will be there on the other side of the line putting in a good word for me with the angels and saints, trying to save me from damnation. And those are the two realities we live in. ●
  • understand
  • now understand our debates as marks of the very bond I thought was disintegrating. No matter how far she believes I’ve fallen into the deep state, how hard I fight for the forces of evil, how imminent the grand plan’s rapture, my mom will be there on the other side of the line putting in a good word for me with the angels and saints, trying to save me from damnation. And those are the two realities we live in. ●
Javier E

America Is Flunking Math - Persuasion - 1 views

www.persuasion.community/...ica-is-flunking-math-education

STEM math education math education anti-racism Critical Theory research Science bias

shared by Javier E on 17 May 21 - No Cached
  • One can argue that the preeminence of each civilization was, in part, due to their sophisticated understanding and use of mathematics. This is particularly clear in the case of the West, which forged ahead in the 17th century with the discovery of calculus, one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time.
  • The United States became the dominant force in the mathematical sciences in the wake of World War II, largely due to the disastrous genocidal policies of the Third Reich. The Nazis’ obsession with purging German science of what it viewed as nefarious Jewish influence led to a massive exodus of Jewish mathematicians and scientists to America
  • Indeed, academic institutions in the United States have thrived largely because of their ability to attract talented individuals from around the world.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • The quality of mathematics research in the United States today is the envy of the scientific world. This is a direct result of the openness and inclusivity of the profession.
  • Can Americans maintain this unmatched excellence in the future? There are worrisome signs that suggest not.
  • The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development compares mathematical proficiency among 15-year-olds by country worldwide. According to its 2018 report, America ranked 37th while China, America’s main competitor for world leadership, came in first.
  • This is despite the fact that the United States is the fifth-highest spender per pupil among the 37 developed OECD nations
  • This massive failure of our K-12 education system trickles through the STEM pipeline.
  • At the undergraduate level, too few American students are prepared for higher-level mathematics courses. These students are then unprepared for rigorous graduate-level work
  • According to our own experiences at the universities where we teach, an overwhelming majority of American students with strong math backgrounds are either foreign-born or first-generation students who have additional support from their education-conscious families. At all levels, STEM disciplines are more and more dependent on a constant flow of foreign talent.
  • There are many reasons for this failure, but the way that we educate and prepare teachers is particularly influential. The vast majority of K-12 math teachers are graduates of teacher-preparation programs that teach very little substantive mathematics
  • This has led to a constant stream of ill-advised and dumbed-down reforms. One of the latest fads is anti-racist mathematics. Promoted in several states, the bizarre doctrine threatens to further degrade the teaching of mathematics.
  • Another major concern is the twisted interpretation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
  • Under the banner of DEI, universities are abandoning the use of standardized tests like the SAT and GRE in admissions, and cities are considering scrapping academic tracking and various gifted programs in schools, which they deem “inequitable.”
  • such programs are particularly effective, when properly implemented, at discovering and encouraging talented children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
  • The new 2021 Mathematics Framework, currently under consideration by California’s Department of Education, does away “with all tracking, acceleration, gifted programs, or any instruction that involves clustering by individual differences, without expressing any awareness of the impact these drastic alterations would have in preparing STEM-ready candidates.”
  • These measures will not only hinder the progress of the generations of our future STEM workforce but also contribute to structural inequalities, as they are uniquely detrimental to students whose parents cannot send them to private schools or effective enrichment programs.
  • These are just a few examples of an unprecedented fervor for revolutionary change in the name of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a doctrine that views the world as a fierce battleground for the narratives of various identity groups.
  • This will only lead to a further widening of racial disparities in educational outcomes while lowering American children’s rankings in education internationally.
  • Ill-conceived DEI policies, often informed by CRT, and the declining standards of K-12 math education feed each other in a vicious circle
  • Regarding minorities, in particular, public K-12 education all too often produces students unprepared to compete, thus leading to large disparities in admissions at universities, graduate programs, and faculty positions. This disparity is then condemned as a manifestation of structural racism, resulting in administrative measures to lower the evaluation criteria. Lowering standards at all levels leads eventually to even worse outcomes and larger disparities, and so on in a downward spiral.
  • A case in point is the recent report by the American Mathematical Society that accuses the entire mathematics community, with the thinnest of specific evidence, of systemic racial discrimination. A major justification put forward for such a grave accusation is the lack of sufficient representation of Black mathematicians in the professio
  • the report, while raising awareness of several ugly facts from the long-ago past, makes little effort to address the real reasons for this, mainly the catastrophic failure of the K-12 mathematical educational system.
  • The National Science Foundation, a federal institution meant to support fundamental research, is now diverting some of its limited funding to various DEI initiatives of questionable benefit.
  • Meanwhile, other countries, especially China, are doing precisely the opposite, following the model of our past dedication to objective measures of excellence. How long before we will see a reverse exodus, away from the United States?
  • The present crisis can still be reversed by focusing on a few concrete actions:
  • Improve schools in urban areas and inner-city neighborhoods by following the most promising education programs. These programs demonstrate that inner-city children benefit if they are challenged by high standards and a nurturing environment.
  • Follow the lead of other highly successful rigorous programs such as BASIS schools and Math for America, which focus on rigorous STEM curricula, combined with 21st-century teaching methods, and recruit talented teachers to help them build on their STEM knowledge and teaching methods.
  • Increase, rather than eliminate, tailored instruction, both for accelerated and remedial math courses.
  • Reject the soft bigotry of low expectations, that Black children cannot do well in competitive mathematics programs and need dumbed-down ethnocentric versions of mathematics.
  • Uphold the objective selection process based on merit at all levels of education and research.
caelengrubb

History Is About Stories. Here's Why We Get Them Wrong | Time - 1 views

time.com/...history-neuroscience

shared by caelengrubb on 26 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Science comes hard to most of us because it can’t really take that form. Instead it’s equations, models, theories and the data that support them. But ironically, science offers an explanation of why we love stories.
  • It starts with a challenge posed in human evolution — but the more we come to understand about that subject, the more we see that our storytelling instinct can lead us astray, especially when it comes to how most of us understand history.
  • Many animals have highly developed mind-reading instinct, a sort of tracking-device technique shared with creatures that have no language, not even a language of thought.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • It’s what they use to track prey and avoid predation.
  • The theory of mind is so obvious it’s nearly invisible: it tells us that behavior is the result of the joint operation of pairs of beliefs and desires.
  • The desires are about the ways we want things to turn out in the future. The beliefs are about the way things are now.
  • The theory of mind turns what people do into a story with a plot by pairing up the content of beliefs and desires, what they are about.
  • Psycholinguistics has shown that the theory of mind is necessary for learning language and almost anything else our parents teach us.
  • Imitating others requires using the theory to figure out what they want us to do and in what order. Without it, you can’t learn much beyond what other higher primates can.
  • The theory of mind makes us construct stories obsessively, and thus encourages us to see the past as a set of them.
  • When popular historians seek to know why Hitler declared war on the U.S. (when he didn’t have to), they put the theory of mind to work: What did he believe and what was it that he wanted that made him do such a foolish thing?
  • he trouble is that the theory of mind is completely wrong about the way the mind, i.e. the brain, actually works. We can’t help but use it to guess what is going on in other people’s minds, and historians rely on it, but the evidence from neuroscience shows that in fact what’s “going on” in anyone’s mind is not decision about what to do in the light of beliefs and desire, but rather a series of neural circuitry firings.
  • The wrongness of the theory of mind is so profound it makes false all the stories we know and love, in narrative history (and in historical novels).
  • Neuroscience reveals that the brain is not organized even remotely to work the way the theory of mind says it does. The fact that narrative histories give persistently different answers to questions historians have been asking for centuries should be evidence that storytelling is not where the real answers can be found.
  • Crucially, they discovered that while different parts of the brain control different things, the neurons’ electrical signals don’t differ in “content”; they are not about different subjects. They are not about anything at all. Each neuron is just in a different part of the mid-brain, doing its job in exactly the same way all other neurons do, sending the same electrochemical oscillations.
  • There is nothing in our brains to vindicate the theory’s description of how anyone ever makes up his or her mind. And that explains a lot about how bad the theory of mind is at predicting anything much about the future, or explaining anything much about the past.
  • If we really want historical knowledge we’ll need to use the same tools scientists use — models and theories we can quantify and test. Guessing what was going through Hitler’s mind, and weaving it into a story is no substitute for empirical science.
cvanderloo

'Here Is My Proof': Local Official Shows Scars To Demonstrate His Patriotism : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...y-scars-is-this-patriot-enough

asian american patriotic race racism

shared by cvanderloo on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Ever since Lee Wong came to the U.S. after graduating from high school, he has faced questions about his patriotism.
  • Throughout his life, the discrimination continued — his application to be a police officer was immediately thrown into the trash, he says, as the officers laughed about the "Chinaman" who wants to be policeman.
  • Removing his tie and unbuttoning his shirt, the 69-year-old continued: "Here is my proof." He stood up, raising his undershirt, revealing a large dark scar across his chest. "This is sustained through my service in the U.S. military. Now is this patriot enough?"
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Several cities reported an increase in hate crimes against Asian people in 2020. One survey reported incidents of harassment and discrimination related to the coronavirus.
  • After showing his scars, Wong sat back down and buttoned up his shirt. "Prejudice is hate," he told the gathered crowd. "And that hate can be changed. We are human. We need to be kinder, gentler to one another. Because we are all the same. We are one human being on this earth."
caelengrubb

How to Read the News Without Going Insane | Vanity Fair - 0 views

www.vanityfair.com/...-the-news-without-going-insane

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • In the years since smartphones were invented, there have been smart people with advice about leaving this little black box of horrors behind, about containing the content Pandora created. But maybe this time is my chance to change, and maybe it’s yours.
  • “Right now is an extremely, extremely challenging time to have a healthy relationship with the news, and that’s regardless of your political orientation, or even if you care about politics at al
  • Recognize it’s not your fault
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Begin to build boundaries by starting with the easy stuff, whatever that means for you
  • This one is relatively simple: don’t have television news on in the background (or better, a news podcast). Clean up the passive background noise
  • Assess the situation
  • Figure out your main problem area
  • Choose what, when, where, and how
  • “What level of news is going to make me feel suitably up-to-date and responsible without driving me insane? Recognize that may be a moving target and that it’s going to be extremely difficult to stick with, but at least have some kind of goal.
  • A word on the “when” part 
  • Sometimes this means buying an alarm clock and putting your phone in a different room/closet than the one where you sleep. 
  • Ask for help
  • Who profits from my fear, my elation, my outrage? It’s a nice question to keep in the back of one’s head when you’re down the rabbit hole—especially when you’re not really getting much out of it, but just half-remembered ideas about what you’re reading and why.
caelengrubb

How to read the news like a scientist | - 0 views

ideas.ted.com/read-the-news-like-a-scientist

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • “In present times, our risk of being fooled is especially high,” she says. There are two main factors at play: “Disinformation spreads like wildfire in social media,” she adds, “and when it comes to news reporting, sometimes it is more important for journalists to be fast than accurate.”
  • Scientists labor under a burden of proof. They must conduct experiments and collect data under controlled conditions to arrive at their conclusions — and be ready to defend their findings with facts, not emotions.
  • 1. Cultivate your skepticism.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • When you learn a new piece of information through social media, think to yourself: “This may be true, but it also may be false,”
  • 2. Find out who is making the claim.
  • When you encounter a new claim, look for conflicts of interest. Ask: Do they stand to profit from what they say? Are they affiliated with an organization that could be swaying them? Two other questions to consider: What makes the writer or speaker qualified to comment on the topic? What statements have they made in the past?
  • 3. Watch out for the halo effect.
  • The halo effect, says Frans, “is a cognitive bias that makes our feeling towards someone affect how we judge their claims.
  • If we dislike someone, we are a lot more likely to disagree with them; if we like them, we are biased to agree.”
  • New scientific papers under review are read “blind,” with the authors’ names removed. That way, the experts who are deciding whether it’s worthy of publication don’t know which of their fellow scientists wrote it so they’ll be able to react free from pre-judgement or bias.
  • 4. Look at the evidence.
  • Before you act on or share a particularly surprising or enraging story, do a quick Google search — you might learn something even more interesting.
  • 5. Beware of the tendency to cherry-pick information.
  • Another human bias — confirmation bias — means we’re more likely to notice stories or facts that fit what we already believe (or want to believe).
  • When you search for information, you should not disregard the information that goes against whatever opinion you might have in advance.”
  • In your own life, look for friends and acquaintances on social media with alternative viewpoints. You don’t have to agree with them, or tolerate misinformation from them — but it’s healthy and balanced to have some variety in your information diet.
  • 6. Recognize the difference between correlation and causation.
  • However, she says, “there is no evidence supporting these claims, and it’s important to remember that just because two things increase simultaneously, this does not mean that they are causally linked to each other. Correlation does not equal causality.”
caelengrubb

Does Language Influence Culture? - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...748703467304575383131592767868

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • These questions touch on all the major controversies in the study of mind, with important implications for politics, law and religion.
  • The idea that language might shape thought was for a long time considered untestable at best and more often simply crazy and wrong. Now, a flurry of new cognitive science research is showing that in fact, language does profoundly influence how we see the world.
  • Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a universal grammar for all human languages—essentially, that languages don't really differ from one another in significant ways. And because languages didn't differ from one another, the theory went, it made no sense to ask whether linguistic differences led to differences in thinking.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The search for linguistic universals yielded interesting data on languages, but after decades of work, not a single proposed universal has withstood scrutiny. Instead, as linguists probed deeper into the world's languages (7,000 or so, only a fraction of them analyzed), innumerable unpredictable differences emerged.
  • In the past decade, cognitive scientists have begun to measure not just how people talk, but also how they think, asking whether our understanding of even such fundamental domains of experience as space, time and causality could be constructed by language.
  • About a third of the world's languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space.
  • As a result of this constant linguistic training, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.
  • People rely on their spatial knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotions.
  • And many other ways to organize time exist in the world's languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.
  • Beyond space, time and causality, patterns in language have been shown to shape many other domains of thought. Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blues in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.
  • Patterns in language offer a window on a culture's dispositions and priorities.
  • Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs
  • Simply showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn't tell us whether it's language that shapes thought or the other way around. To demonstrate the causal role of language, what's needed are studies that directly manipulate language and look for effects in cognition.
caelengrubb

The Reason We Reason | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...the-sad-reason-we-reason

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • In the early 1980s, Amos Tversky and Thomas Gilovich began sifting through years of statistics from the Philadelphia 76ers. The psychologists looked at every single shot taken by every single player, and recorded whether or not that shot had been preceded by a string of hits or misses. All told, they analyzed thousands upon thousands of field goal attempts.
  • The larger question, of course, is why confirmation bias exists.
  • After analyzing all the shots of the 76ers, the psychologists discovered that there was absolutely no evidence of "the hot hand."
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The 76ers were shocked by the evidence.
  • Why, then, do we believe in the hot hand? Confirmation bias is to blame
  • It's at this point that our faulty reasoning mechanisms kick in, as we start ignoring the misses and focusing on the makes
  • In other words, we seek out evidence that confirms our suspicions of streakiness. The end result is that a mental fiction dominates our perception of the game.
  • Why'd they do this? Tversky and Gilovich were interested in testing the "hot hand" phenomenon, which occurs when NBA players are convinced that they're hot, on a roll, in the zone.
  • This is the sort of mental mistake that seems ripe for fixing by natural selection, since it always leads to erroneous beliefs and faulty causal theorie
  • We'd be a hell of a lot smarter if we weren't only drawn to evidence that confirms what we already believe.
  • And this leads me to a fascinating and provocative new theory of reasoning put forth by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. In essence, they argue that human reason has nothing to do with finding the truth, or locating the best alternative.
  • Instead, it’s all about being able to argue with others:
  • Needless to say, this new theory paints a rather bleak portrait of human nature
  • Instead, the function of reasoning is rooted in communication, in the act of trying to persuade other people that what we believe is true. We are social animals all the way down.
« First ‹ Previous 681 - 700 of 898 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page