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Javier E

Opinion | A 'Disgusting' Yale Professor Moves On - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nicholas-christakis-yale.html

human nature kindness good cooperation love teaching psychology

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Christakis’s wife, Erika, who also taught at Yale back then, had circulated a memo in which she questioned a university edict against culturally insensitive Halloween costumes, suggesting that students could police themselves and should have both the freedom to err and the strength to cope with offense. She wrote that her husband concurred.
  • when, in that courtyard, Christakis apologized for any pain that the memo had caused but refused to disavow its content, he was pilloried.
  • “Blueprint,” it’s no lament for the mess that we humans make of things. It’s an argument that we’re transcendently and inherently good — that we’re genetically wired for it, thanks to a process of natural selection that has favored people prone to constructive friendships, to cooperation, to teaching, to love.
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  • “For too long,” he writes in the preface, “the scientific community has been overly focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for tribalism, violence, selfishness and cruelty. The bright side has been denied the attention it deserves.”
  • He told me that few people realize that he listened to those students for more than two hours, and that they hadn’t intercepted and surprised him: He went out to meet them, knowing how angry they were. “I felt that I had to model the principles that I believed — which is that I am committed to free and open expression,” he said. “I hardly could cower in my house.”
  • The book is a hefty, dazzlingly erudite synthesis of history, philosophy, anthropology, genetics, sociology, economics, epidemiology, statistics and more. It uses everything from shipwrecks to the primatologist Jane Goodall to make its pro-kindnes
  • Although he stayed calm — which he attributes to years of training in karate and its premium on self-control — he was rattled, deeply, by the encounter. He soon took his first sabbatical ever. He read books about equanimity in the face of injustice. “I did not want to become a different person,” he said. “I certainly did not want to become embittered.”
  • He rues America’s intense polarization, which perhaps makes this “an odd time for me to advance the view that there is more that unites us than divides us.”
  • His reasoning, oversimplified, is this: Complex societies are possible and durable only when people are emotionally invested in, and help, one another; we’d be living in smaller units and more solitary fashions if we weren’t equipped for such collaboration; and human thriving within these societies guarantees future generations suited to them.
  • Yes, there are hideous wars and horrid leaders. But if that were the sum of us, how to explain all the peace and progress? Christakis urges a wide angle and the long view
  • “To accept this belief that human beings are evil or violent or selfish or overly tribal is a kind of moral and intellectual laziness,” he told me. It also excuses that destructiveness. “The way to repair our torn social fabric is to say: Wait a minute, that’s not quite right.
  • “Blueprint,” he said, is sociodicy: It tries “to vindicate society despites its failures.”
krystalxu

Why Study Philosophy? 'To Challenge Your Own Point of View' - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...283954

psychology brain science language

shared by krystalxu on 21 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Goldstein’s forthcoming book, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, offers insight into the significant—and often invisible—progress that philosophy has made. I spoke with Goldstein about her take on the science vs. philosophy debates, how we can measure philosophy’s advances, and why an understanding of philosophy is critical to our lives today.
  • One of the things about philosophy is that you don’t have to give up on any other field. Whatever field there is, there’s a corresponding field of philosophy. Philosophy of language, philosophy of politics, philosophy of math. All the things I wanted to know about I could still study within a philosophical framework.
  • There’s a peer pressure that sets in at a certain age. They so much want to be like everybody else. But what I’ve found is that if you instill this joy of thinking, the sheer intellectual fun, it will survive even the adolescent years and come back in fighting form. It’s empowering.
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  • One thing that’s changed tremendously is the presence of women and the change in focus because of that. There’s a lot of interest in literature and philosophy, and using literature as a philosophical examination. It makes me so happy! Because I was seen as a hard-core analytic philosopher, and when I first began to write novels people thought, Oh, and we thought she was serious! But that’s changed entirely. People take literature seriously, especially in moral philosophy, as thought experiments. A lot of the most developed and effective thought experiments come from novels. Also, novels contribute to making moral progress, changing people’s emotions.
  • The other thing that’s changed is that there’s more applied philosophy. Let’s apply philosophical theory to real-life problems, like medical ethics, environmental ethics, gender issues. This is a real change from when I was in school and it was only theory.
  • here’s a lot of philosophical progress, it’s just a progress that’s very hard to see. It’s very hard to see because we see with it. We incorporate philosophical progress into our own way of viewing the world.
  • Plato would be constantly surprised by what we know. And not only what we know scientifically, or by our technology, but what we know ethically. We take a lot for granted. It’s obvious to us, for example, that individual’s ethical truths are equally important.
  • it’s usually philosophical arguments that first introduce the very outlandish idea that we need to extend rights. And it takes more, it takes a movement, and activism, and emotions, to affect real social change. It starts with an argument, but then it becomes obvious. The tracks of philosophy’s work are erased because it becomes intuitively obvious
  • The arguments against slavery, against cruel and unusual punishment, against unjust wars, against treating children cruelly—these all took arguments.
  • About 30 years ago, the philosopher Peter Singer started to argue about the way animals are treated in our factory farms. Everybody thought he was nuts. But I’ve watched this movement grow; I’ve watched it become emotional. It has to become emotional. You have to draw empathy into it. But here it is, right in our time—a philosopher making the argument, everyone dismissing it, but then people start discussing it. Even criticizing it, or saying it’s not valid, is taking it seriously
  • This is what we have to teach our children. Even things that go against their intuition they need to take seriously. What was intuition two generations ago is no longer intuition; and it’s arguments that change i
  • We are very inertial creatures. We do not like to change our thinking, especially if it’s inconvenient for us. And certainly the people in power never want to wonder whether they should hold power.
  • I’m really trying to draw the students out, make them think for themselves. The more they challenge me, the more successful I feel as a teacher. It has to be very active
  • Plato used the metaphor that in teaching philosophy, there needs to be a fire in the teacher, and the sheer heat will help the fire grow in the student. It’s something that’s kindled because of the proximity to the heat.
  • how can you make the case that they should study philosophy?
  • ches your inner life. You have lots of frameworks to apply to problems, and so many ways to interpret things. It makes life so much more interesting. It’s us at our most human. And it helps us increase our humanity. No matter what you do, that’s an asset.
  • What do you think are the biggest philosophical issues of our time? The growth in scientific knowledge presents new philosophical issues.
  • The idea of the multiverse. Where are we in the universe? Physics is blowing our minds about this.
  • The question of whether some of these scientific theories are really even scientific. Can we get predictions out of them?
  • And with the growth in cognitive science and neuroscience. We’re going into the brain and getting these images of the brain. Are we discovering what we really are? Are we solving the problem of free will? Are we learning that there isn’t any free will? How much do the advances in neuroscience tell us about the deep philosophical issues?
  • With the decline of religion is there a sense of the meaninglessness of life and the easy consumerist answer that’s filling the space religion used to occupy? This is something that philosophers ought to be addressing.
Javier E

Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | New Republic - 1 views

www.thenewrepublic.com/...rated-send-your-kids-elsewhere

inequality ivy league admissions university education elite success leadership class

shared by Javier E on 22 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • a blizzard of admissions jargon that I had to pick up on the fly. “Good rig”: the transcript exhibits a good degree of academic rigor. “Ed level 1”: parents have an educational level no higher than high school, indicating a genuine hardship case. “MUSD”: a musician in the highest category of promise. Kids who had five or six items on their list of extracurriculars—the “brag”—were already in trouble, because that wasn’t nearly enough.
  • With so many accomplished applicants to choose from, we were looking for kids with something special, “PQs”—personal qualities—that were often revealed by the letters or essays. Kids who only had the numbers and the résumé were usually rejected: “no spark,” “not a team-builder,” “this is pretty much in the middle of the fairway for us.” One young person, who had piled up a truly insane quantity of extracurriculars and who submitted nine letters of recommendation, was felt to be “too intense.”
  • On the other hand, the numbers and the résumé were clearly indispensable. I’d been told that successful applicants could either be “well-rounded” or “pointy”—outstanding in one particular way—but if they were pointy, they had to be really pointy: a musician whose audition tape had impressed the music department, a scientist who had won a national award.
  • ...52 more annotations...
  • When I speak of elite education, I mean prestigious institutions like Harvard or Stanford or Williams as well as the larger universe of second-tier selective schools, but I also mean everything that leads up to and away from them—the private and affluent public high schools; the ever-growing industry of tutors and consultants and test-prep courses; the admissions process itself, squatting like a dragon at the entrance to adulthood; the brand-name graduate schools and employment opportunities that come after the B.A.; and the parents and communities, largely upper-middle class, who push their children into the maw of this machine.
  • Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.
  • “Super People,” the writer James Atlas has called them—the stereotypical ultra-high-achieving elite college students of today. A double major, a sport, a musical instrument, a couple of foreign languages, service work in distant corners of the globe, a few hobbies thrown in for good measure: They have mastered them all, and with a serene self-assurance
  • Like so many kids today, I went off to college like a sleepwalker. You chose the most prestigious place that let you in; up ahead were vaguely understood objectives: status, wealth—“success.” What it meant to actually get an education and why you might want one—all this was off the table.
  • It was only after 24 years in the Ivy League—college and a Ph.D. at Columbia, ten years on the faculty at Yale—that I started to think about what this system does to kids and how they can escape from it, what it does to our society and how we can dismantle it.
  • I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy League—bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice.
  • Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history.
  • So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk.
  • There are exceptions, kids who insist, against all odds, on trying to get a real education. But their experience tends to make them feel like freaks. One student told me that a friend of hers had left Yale because she found the school “stifling to the parts of yourself that you’d call a soul.”
  • What no one seems to ask is what the “return” is supposed to be. Is it just about earning more money? Is the only purpose of an education to enable you to get a job? What, in short, is college for?
  • The first thing that college is for is to teach you to think.
  • College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance.
  • it is only through the act of establishing communication between the mind and the heart, the mind and experience, that you become an individual, a unique being—a soul. The job of college is to assist you to begin to do that. Books, ideas, works of art and thought, the pressure of the minds around you that are looking for their own answers in their own ways.
  • College is not the only chance to learn to think, but it is the best. One thing is certain: If you haven’t started by the time you finish your B.A., there’s little likelihood you’ll do it later. That is why an undergraduate experience devoted exclusively to career preparation is four years largely wasted.
  • Elite schools like to boast that they teach their students how to think, but all they mean is that they train them in the analytic and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions.
  • Everything is technocratic—the development of expertise—and everything is ultimately justified in technocratic terms.
  • Religious colleges—even obscure, regional schools that no one has ever heard of on the coasts—often do a much better job in that respect.
  • At least the classes at elite schools are academically rigorous, demanding on their own terms, no? Not necessarily. In the sciences, usually; in other disciplines, not so much
  • professors and students have largely entered into what one observer called a “nonaggression pact.”
  • higher marks for shoddier work.
  • today’s young people appear to be more socially engaged than kids have been for several decades and that they are more apt to harbor creative or entrepreneurial impulses
  • they tend to be played out within the same narrow conception of what constitutes a valid life: affluence, credentials, prestige.
  • Experience itself has been reduced to instrumental function, via the college essay. From learning to commodify your experiences for the application, the next step has been to seek out experiences in order to have them to commodify
  • there is now a thriving sector devoted to producing essay-ready summers
  • To be a high-achieving student is to constantly be urged to think of yourself as a future leader of society.
  • what these institutions mean by leadership is nothing more than getting to the top. Making partner at a major law firm or becoming a chief executive, climbing the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy you decide to attach yourself to. I don’t think it occurs to the people in charge of elite colleges that the concept of leadership ought to have a higher meaning, or, really, any meaning.
  • The irony is that elite students are told that they can be whatever they want, but most of them end up choosing to be one of a few very similar things
  • As of 2010, about a third of graduates went into financing or consulting at a number of top schools, including Harvard, Princeton, and Cornell.
  • Whole fields have disappeared from view: the clergy, the military, electoral politics, even academia itself, for the most part, including basic science
  • It’s considered glamorous to drop out of a selective college if you want to become the next Mark Zuckerberg, but ludicrous to stay in to become a social worker. “What Wall Street figured out,” as Ezra Klein has put it, “is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic and no idea what to do next.”
  • t almost feels ridiculous to have to insist that colleges like Harvard are bastions of privilege, where the rich send their children to learn to walk, talk, and think like the rich. Don’t we already know this? They aren’t called elite colleges for nothing. But apparently we like pretending otherwise. We live in a meritocracy, after all.
  • Visit any elite campus across our great nation, and you can thrill to the heart-warming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals
  • That doesn’t mean there aren’t a few exceptions, but that is all they are. In fact, the group that is most disadvantaged by our current admissions policies are working-class and rural whites, who are hardly present
  • The college admissions game is not primarily about the lower and middle classes seeking to rise, or even about the upper-middle class attempting to maintain its position. It is about determining the exact hierarchy of status within the upper-middle class itself.
  • This system is exacerbating inequality, retarding social mobility, perpetuating privilege, and creating an elite that is isolated from the society that it’s supposed to lead. The numbers are undeniable. In 1985, 46 percent of incoming freshmen at the 250 most selective colleges came from the top quarter of the income distribution. By 2000, it was 55 percent
  • The major reason for the trend is clear. Not increasing tuition, though that is a factor, but the ever-growing cost of manufacturing children who are fit to compete in the college admissions game
  • Wealthy families start buying their children’s way into elite colleges almost from the moment they are born: music lessons, sports equipment, foreign travel (“enrichment” programs, to use the all-too-perfect term)—most important, of course, private-school tuition or the costs of living in a place with top-tier public schools.
  • s there anything that I can do, a lot of young people have written to ask me, to avoid becoming an out-of-touch, entitled little shit? I don’t have a satisfying answer, short of telling them to transfer to a public university. You cannot cogitate your way to sympathy with people of different backgrounds, still less to knowledge of them. You need to interact with them directly, and it has to be on an equal footing
  • Elite private colleges will never allow their students’ economic profile to mirror that of society as a whole. They can’t afford to—they need a critical mass of full payers and they need to tend to their donor base—and it’s not even clear that they’d want to.
  • Elite colleges are not just powerless to reverse the movement toward a more unequal society; their policies actively promote it.
  • The SAT is supposed to measure aptitude, but what it actually measures is parental income, which it tracks quite closely
  • U.S. News and World Report supplies the percentage of freshmen at each college who finished in the highest 10 percent of their high school class. Among the top 20 universities, the number is usually above 90 percent. I’d be wary of attending schools like that. Students determine the level of classroom discussion; they shape your values and expectations, for good and ill. It’s partly because of the students that I’d warn kids away from the Ivies and their ilk. Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, and far less entitled and competitive.
  • The best option of all may be the second-tier—not second-rate—colleges, like Reed, Kenyon, Wesleyan, Sewanee, Mount Holyoke, and others. Instead of trying to compete with Harvard and Yale, these schools have retained their allegiance to real educational values.
  • Not being an entitled little shit is an admirable goal. But in the end, the deeper issue is the situation that makes it so hard to be anything else. The time has come, not simply to reform that system top to bottom, but to plot our exit to another kind of society altogether.
  • The education system has to act to mitigate the class system, not reproduce it. Affirmative action should be based on class instead of race, a change that many have been advocating for years. Preferences for legacies and athletes ought to be discarded. SAT scores should be weighted to account for socioeconomic factors. Colleges should put an end to résumé-stuffing by imposing a limit on the number of extracurriculars that kids can list on their applications. They ought to place more value on the kind of service jobs that lower-income students often take in high school and that high achievers almost never do. They should refuse to be impressed by any opportunity that was enabled by parental wealth
  • More broadly, they need to rethink their conception of merit. If schools are going to train a better class of leaders than the ones we have today, they’re going to have to ask themselves what kinds of qualities they need to promote. Selecting students by GPA or the number of extracurriculars more often benefits the faithful drudge than the original mind.
  • reforming the admissions process. That might address the problem of mediocrity, but it won’t address the greater one of inequality
  • The problem is the Ivy League itself. We have contracted the training of our leadership class to a set of private institutions. However much they claim to act for the common good, they will always place their interests first.
  • I’ve come to see that what we really need is to create one where you don’t have to go to the Ivy League, or any private college, to get a first-rate education.
  • High-quality public education, financed with public money, for the benefit of all
  • Everybody gets an equal chance to go as far as their hard work and talent will take them—you know, the American dream. Everyone who wants it gets to have the kind of mind-expanding, soul-enriching experience that a liberal arts education provides.
  • We recognize that free, quality K–12 education is a right of citizenship. We also need to recognize—as we once did and as many countries still do—that the same is true of higher education. We have tried aristocracy. We have tried meritocracy. Now it’s time to try democracy.
Javier E

New Guidelines Call for Changes in Science Education - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...nges-in-science-education.html

science education US policy

shared by Javier E on 10 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Educators unveiled new guidelines on Tuesday that call for sweeping changes in the way science is taught in the United States
  • The guidelines, known as the Next Generation Science Standards, are the first broad national recommendations for science instruction since 1996. They were developed by a consortium of 26 state governments and several groups representing scientists and teachers.
  • The focus would be helping students become more intelligent science consumers by learning how scientific work is done: how ideas are developed and tested, what counts as strong or weak evidence, and how insights from many disciplines fit together into a coherent picture of the world.
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  • Leaders of the effort said that teachers may well wind up covering fewer subjects, but digging more deeply into the ones they do cover. In some cases, traditional classes like biology and chemistry may disappear entirely from high schools, replaced by courses that use a case-study method to teach science in a more holistic way.
  • the standards are meant to do for science what a separate set of guidelines known as the Common Core is supposed to do for English and mathematics: impose and raise standards, with a focus on critical thinking and primary investigation.
  • “This is a huge deal,” said David L. Evans, the executive director of the National Science Teachers Association. “We depend on science in so many aspects of our lives. There’s a strong feeling that we need to help people understand the nature of science itself, as an intellectual pursuit.”
  • a group called Citizens for Objective Public Education, which lists officers in Florida and Kansas, distributed a nine-page letter attacking them. It warned that the standards ignored evidence against evolution, promoted “secular humanism,” and threatened to “take away the right of parents to direct the religious education of their children.”
  • In many states, extensive scientific instruction does not begin until high school. The guidelines call for injecting far more science into the middle grades, with climate change being one among many topics. In high school, students would learn in more detail about the human role in generating emissions that are altering the planetary climate.
  • While thousands of schools in the United States already teach climate change to some degree, they are usually doing it voluntarily, and often in environmental studies classes. In many more schools, the subject does not come up because students are not offered those specialized courses, and state guidelines typically do not require that the issue be raised in traditional biology or chemistry classes.
  • Outlining how the standards might change science classrooms, educators said they foresaw more use of real-world examples, like taking students to a farm or fish hatchery — perhaps repeatedly, over the course of years — to help them learn principles from biology, chemistry and physics.
Javier E

History News Network | Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About Donald Trump's America - 1 views

historynewsnetwork.org/...162131

politics psychology brain science stupid evolution bias context institutions

shared by Javier E on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  •  Just How Stupid Are We?  Facing the Truth About the American Voter.  The book is filled with statistics like these:● A majority of Americans don’t know which party is in control of Congress.  ● A majority can’t name the chief justice of the Supreme Court.  ● A majority don’t know we have three branches of government.
  • suddenly mainstream media pundits have discovered how ignorant millions of voters are.  See this and this and this and this.  More importantly, the concern with low-information voters has become widespread.  Many are now wondering what country they’re living in. 
  • The answer science gives us (the title of my last book and this essay notwithstanding) is not that people fall for slick charlatans like Trump because they’re stupid.
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  •  The problem is that we humans didn’t evolve to live in the world in which we find ourselves.  As the social scientists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby put it, the human mind was “designed to solve the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. These stone age priorities produced a brain far better at solving some problems than others.” 
  • there are four failings common to human beings as a result of our Stone-Age brain that hinder us in politics.
  • why are we this way?  Science suggests that one reason is that we evolved to win in social settings and in such situations the truth doesn't matter as much as sheer doggedness
  • Second, we find it hard to size up politicians correctly.  The reason for this is that we rely on instant impressions. 
  • This stops voters from worrying that they need to bolster their impressions by consulting experts and reading news stories from a broad array of ideological viewpoints.  Why study when you can rely on your gut instinct?
  • Third, we aren’t inclined to reward politicians who tell us hard truths.
  • First, most people find it easy to ignore politics because it usually involves people they don’t know.  As human beings we evolved to care about people in our immediate vicinity.  Our nervous system kicks into action usually only when we meet people face-to-face
  •  This has left millions of voters on their own.  Lacking information, millions do what you would expect.  They go with their gut
  • We don't want the truth to prevail, as Harvard's Steven Pinker informs us, we want our version of the truth to prevail, for in the end what we're really concerned with is maintaining our status or enhancing it.
  • Fourth, we frequently fail to show empathy in circumstances that clearly cry out for it.
  • We evolved to show empathy for people we know.  It takes special effort to empathize with people who don’t dress like us or look like us.
  • long-term we need to teach voters not to trust their instincts in politics because our instincts often don’t work.
  • Doing politics in a modern mass democracy, in other words, is an unnatural act.
  • Teaching this lesson doesn’t sound like a job for historians, but in one way it is.  Studying history is all about putting events into context. And as it turns out, voters need to learn the importance of context.
  • Given the mismatch between our Stone-Age brain and the problems we face in the 21st century, we should only trust our political instincts when those instincts are serviceable in a modern context.  If they aren’t (and most of the time they aren't), then higher order cognitive thinking is required.
  • Just why mass ignorance seems to be afflicting our politics at this moment is a complicated question.  But here again history can be helpful.  The answer seems to be that the institutions voters formerly could turn to for help have withered.
  • most of the time we return to a state of well-being by simply ignoring the evidence we find discomforting.  This is known as Disconfirmation Bias and it afflicts all of us
  • ut cultural norms can be established that help us overcome our natural inclinations.
  • don’t have much confidence that people in general will be willing on their own to undertake the effort.
sissij

It Turns Out Cosmic Dust Is Everywhere | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...-out-cosmic-dust-is-everywhere

science research education

shared by sissij on 15 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Who among us doesn’t thrill to catch a glimpse of a meteorite streaking across the night sky? Except for a few colorful cases — a living room in Connecticut, an explosion in the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia — these beauties disappear into our atmosphere.
  • Now a new picture book, In Search of Stardust: Amazing Micro-Meteorites and Their Terrestrial Imposters, reveals that, really, it’s everywhere. 
  • The cosmic stuff is so ubiquitous that we probably eat it in our salads all the time.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Instead of trying to identify bits from space, he would instead teach himself to recognize the terrestrial source of all the samples he collected.
  • something that anybody can do. It could and should become part of teachings in schools, an aspect of citizen science.
  • The key is knowing what to look for.
  • sissij on 15 Mar 17
     
    I have listened to a radio show. There was a guest speaker one time that he talks about meteorite. He said that cosmic dust is the smallest and most common meteorite. I think it is really amazing to think about because those mysterious meteorites that are sold high in the auction are actually al around us. There is one quote that I really like from this article: "The key is knowing what to look for". I think this is pretty true in our daily life. For example, when I was doing my IA chemistry lab, once I understand the mechanics behind the lab procedure, the whole process becomes more meaningful for me. It feels like that I switch to a different perspective after understanding the lab. --Sissi (3/14/2017)
sissij

Teachers:What kind of students do you remember(if any) and how long for? | Yahoo Answers - 1 views

uk.answers.yahoo.com/...index

brain science psychology

shared by sissij on 21 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • I remember the troublemakers, of course. Those are hard to forget. I also remember the exceptionally good ones. I teach English, so I also remember those who had something very interesting to say, regardless of how well-said, either in class or in their papers.
  • To be honest, it's the mediocre ones that I might not remember. The ones who did well, but were very quiet and had sort of normal or typical ideas.
  • I remember that most troublesome students the most because they challenged me to reflect and learn from my teaching. I always remember them everytime I run into others of the same nature in the classroom. :)
  • sissij on 21 Nov 16
     
    I found this very interesting because it has a connection with the our memory. Our memory has a predilection and what we tend to remember the most is the extremes. I feel so unfair because the worst people get remember the most, and the ones who is hardworking but quiet just get forgot and lost in the history. For example, although Trump's election is very random, out of bounds, and ridiculous in a way, he still gets remembered and recorded in the history. I feel so sorry for those quiet contributors in this country that just get lost in the history. --Sissi (11/21/2016)
cvanderloo

Lockdown, violence and understanding women's anger - 1 views

theconversation.com/erstanding-womens-anger-157180

women violence anger sexism stereotypes

shared by cvanderloo on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In early March, reports of a white, middle-class missing woman, Sarah Everard, had hit the news. A few days later, a white serving Metropolitan Police officer, Wayne Couzens, was charged with her kidnap and murder.
  • Countless stories have been shared online of women being frightened to walk alone, of holding their keys as a weapon, and of feeling a sense of constant threat and anxiety. At a time when lockdown has curtailed freedom of movement, it felt especially cruel that women felt safe nowhere – in their homes, in the street or online.
  • If there is an image that has come to represent what transpired on the night of the vigil, it is the photo of a young woman, who we now know to be Patsy Stevenson, clad in a face mask and pinned to the ground by a group of male police officers, her head held up, as she stares into the camera.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Much of the searing power of this viral image comes from how it captures what appears to be the aggressive demeanour of the police officers, while also showing the outrage and defiance of Stevenson. Serious questions are now being raised about the Met’s handling of the situation.
  • As a research team, we are not surprised by women’s outrage. But we are surprised at the government’s response of proposing that increased infrastructure alone, like better lighting or CCTV cameras, will make women’s lives any safer.
  • Rather than teaching women how to protect themselves, our research dating back over a decade shows there is a need for education that tackles the gendered and sexual inequities that normalise violent, predatory forms of masculinit
  • Young people struggle to know how to deal with this kind of online sexual harassment and abuse. The numbers of young people who reported their experiences were staggeringly low with only 6% reporting it to the social media platform, 3% telling parents and a mere 1% reporting it to their school.
  • As recent petitions show, there is a demand from young people for better education, regardless of their gender, on issues such as consent, healthy relationships and sexual violence. And in an increasingly digital world, this education must account for everyday online practices, like pestering girls for nudes or sending unwanted dick pics, in addition to offline forms of sexual violence.
  • Education is not just needed for young people, but also for teachers, school leaders and parents.
  • Although our evaluation of these resources is ongoing, our preliminary findings show that schools adopting our training and policies have led to dramatic reductions in online sexual harassment, increased teacher confidence in handling these issues and improved student mental health.
anonymous

Talking to Children About Anti-Asian Bias - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-children-anti-Asian-bias.html

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • I’m Helping My Korean-American Daughter Embrace Her Identity to Counter Racism
  • “I’m not sure Asian-American families can avoid ‘the talk’ any longer,” one expert said.
  • My daughter was the only kid who didn’t have a separate Korean name when we signed her up for Korean classes three years ago. The blank space on the registration form looked at me, as if to say we’d forgotten something as parents.
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  • my spouse and I, who are both Asian-American, never thought to give her a name like Seohyun or Haeun. Though Korean was the language I spoke growing up in New York with my immigrant parents, I’ve forgotten many of the words I used to know. Yet hearing it spoken still conjures the sense of home.
  • I had no ambition to teach my daughter Korean, but when she turned 5, she insisted she wanted to learn so she could talk to her halmoni — her grandmother. So I conceded.
  • On Seollal, the Korean New Year, she and the other girls in her class sported traditional silk outfits. The floor-length skirts flapped to show their patterned leggings underneath, in a church basement that smelled of steamed rice and sesame oil.
  • Still, I kept asking my daughter when she would try soccer, which seemed to me the “American thing” to do on a Saturday morning. It was held at the same time as Korean School. I kept thinking about the parents on the sidelines and wondered what we were missing
  • A classmate had written that coronavirus was a problem and that keeping Chinese people out of the country was the solution.
  • In the summer of 2020, the Stop A.A.P.I. Hate Youth Campaign interviewed 990 Asian-American young adults across the United States about their experiences during the pandemic, and found that one in four had reported experiencing racism in some way
  • Kids said that they had been bullied, physically harassed and had racial slurs shouted at them
  • a child who hears a racist remark hears this: “You don’t belong. You’re other. You’re different.”
  • We are one of only a handful of Asian-American families in our school, which prides itself on teaching about inclusion. Earlier in the year, our daughter came home talking about Malala Yousafzai and Ruby Bridges, asking where we would have been sitting on the bus in times of segregation.
  • But when a girl in our neighborhood pointed to my daughter and said they could not play together because of the “China virus,” I wept.
  • During lockdown, we devoured books with Asian-American heroines by authors like Grace Lin and Min Jin Lee
  • I struggled to find the words to explain to my daughter why Chinese-Americans were forced to live in these barracks; why they were separated from their families.
  • She doesn’t yet know about the 84-year old man who died two days after being shoved to the sidewalk in Chinatown in San Francisco last month, or about the six Asian-American women killed by a shooter in Atlanta this week.
  • While attacks on Asian people aren’t always charged as hate crimes, many Asians feel an increasing sense of vulnerability.
  • Kids begin to develop a sense of racial identity by age 3 or 4, Dr. Yip said.
  • Once they enter grade school, they hear about race and racism from peers and the media they consume.
  • “By not talking about race” and what they’re hearing, Dr. Yip said, “you run the risk of intensifying stereotypes” which can then lead to racism.
  • “We think we’re protecting our kids, by not talking about racist incidents” Dr. Chen added. “But actually not talking about it is not helping.” Building their racial identity is what helps them feel safe.
  • When a racist incident happens to your child, Dr. Chen said, don’t jump into solving the problem. First ask how they feel and listen. Tell them you don’t know all the answers, but you can find solutions together.
  • Make sure that the children who were targeted know it wasn’t their fault, Dr. Chen added. Role play what you will do if it happens again and tell them, Mom or Dad or your caregivers will keep you safe.
  • “I’m not sure Asian-American families can avoid ‘the talk’ any longer.” It’s a talk that must include listening to, and coming to understand, all groups who face racial bias.
  • In hindsight, I now see that Korean School has done more for my family than soccer ever could. It’s a place where my daughter sees she isn’t alone. There are families who look like ours and wrestle with the same questions, about what we will forget, and what we will keep from our immigrant families’ pasts.
  • My daughter has gone from sewing masks for her bears, to carrying Black Lives Matter posters and voting with me in a presidential election.
anonymous

Opinion | The Social Justice Purge at Idaho Colleges - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...free-speech-idaho.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The Social Justice Purge at Idaho Colleges
  • Republican lawmakers try to cancel diversity programs.
  • I wrote that right-wing legislatures trying to ban critical race theory from public schools and institutions were a far more direct threat to free speech than what’s often called cancel culture.
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  • Some opponents of critical race theory responded that these bans aren’t meant to prohibit teaching about critical race theory; that they are, rather, meant to protect individuals, especially children, from coerced speech and indoctrination.
  • “They also take issue with the way this theory is being imposed on schoolchildren, many of whom have been forced to denounce immutable parts of themselves, such as their skin color and sex, in C.R.T. struggle sessions.”
  • I don’t like struggle sessions; I think critical race theory as it developed in the academy is intellectually rich, but some of the ways it’s been adapted by workplace diversity trainers and education consultants seem risible.
  • Rosen referred to a Nevada lawsuit by a Black woman who accused a charter school of making life miserable for her mixed-race son because he rejected certain ideas about privilege and oppression; if the details in it are true, he was seriously mistreated.
  • right-wing caricature of progressive public schools as pampered re-education camps
  • This week, they were reinstated, but online only and “asynchronously,” without any live discussions.
  • The budget bill also banned state colleges and universities from using any appropriated funds to “support social justice ideology student activities, clubs, events and organizations on campus,”
  • The Idaho Statesman quoted one lawmaker saying of schools, “They’re going to get the message.”
  • “a series of concerns, culminating in allegations that a student or students have been humiliated and degraded in class on our campus for their beliefs and values.”
  • But it’s hard to see how whatever happened implicated 52 different classes, and the political pressure the university is under is undeniable.
  • this month called for millions of dollars in cuts to education funding targeting “social justice programming and critical race theory.”
  • “Many legislators, frustrated with B.S.U., want to defund the social justice agenda by reducing higher education spending.”
  • “We’ve seen a spate of these bills across the country, and some of them are more concerning than others,”
  • “It’s comparable, I think, to what happened in Hungary, where the government there cracked down on, or banished essentially, the teaching of gender studies.”
  • “Integral to almost all the attacks is the implication that gender studies itself is not an academic discipline, but something larger and more mendacious,”
  • Relatively powerless academics were demonized as dangerous subversives.
  • The right likes to pretend that social justice-inflected academic disciplines are full of ideological commissars browbeating conservative students.
  • in conservative places like Idaho, it’s the professors, many of them untenured, who feel intimidated.
  • “With the climate as it is, I wouldn’t doubt that folks are starting to look over their shoulder,”
  • When it comes to the campaign against critical race theory, the fear is part of the point.
Javier E

Who Decides What's Racist? - Persuasion - 1 views

www.persuasion.community/...who-decides-whats-racist

persuasion racism Critical Theory race Culture Politics epistemology perspective bias

shared by Javier E on 14 May 21 - No Cached
  • The implication of Hannah-Jones’s tweet and candidate Biden’s quip seems to be that you can have African ancestry, dark skin, textured hair, and perhaps even some “culturally black” traits regarding tastes in food, music, and ways of moving through the world. But unless you hold the “correct” political beliefs and values, you are not authentically black.
  • In a now-deleted tweet from May 22, 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, opined, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.”
  • Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”
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  • This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks
  • black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.
  • we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices
  • This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.
  • When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”
  • Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.
  • Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.
  • This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.
  • The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools
  • one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.
  • To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.
  • It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:
  • Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”
  • In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”
  • The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.
  • Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California
  • Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”
  • A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”
  • Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.
  • Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?
  • Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.
  • So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.
  • Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease
  • Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”
  • We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation
  • We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.
caelengrubb

Copernicus, Galileo, and the Church: Science in a Religious World - Inquiries Journal - 0 views

www.inquiriesjournal.com/...h-science-in-a-religious-world

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • During most of the 16th and 17th centuries, fear of heretics spreading teachings and opinions that contradicted the Bible dominated the Catholic Church
  • A type of war between science and religion was in play but there would be more casualties on the side of science.
  • Nicholas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei were two scientists who printed books that later became banned
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  • Copernicus faced no persecution when he was alive because he died shortly after publishing his book. Galileo, on the other hand, was tried by the Inquisition after his book was published
  • As the contents of the Bible were taken literally, the publishing of these books proved, to the Church, that Copernicus and Galileo were sinners; they preached, through their writing, that the Bible was wrong.
  • By writing in this fashion, Copernicus would have been able to deny that he himself believed in heliocentrism because he phrased it as nothing more than a hypothesis and as a result, would be able to slip past the Church's dislike of heliocentrism
  • fter his death, the Church was heavily involved in the Council of Trent during the years 1545 to 1563 and other matters10.) . Thus, Revolutions escaped prohibition for many years and eventually influenced Galileo Galilei, who read it and wrote on the subject himself
  • In 1616, Galileo was issued an injunction not to “hold, defend, or teach” heliocentrism
  • The Master of the Sacred Palace ordered Galileo to have someone the Master chose review the manuscript to ensure it was fit for publishing.
  • Also, the title with the sea in it might have made the Church feel threatened that Galileo was supporting heliocentrism, which would have resulted in Galileo being charged with heresy.
  • With that decision, it was determined that Galileo would be tried by the Inquisition. The Inquisition did not need to decide if Galileo was innocent or guilty, they already knew he was guilty. The Inquisition wanted to determine what Galileo's intentions were. Galileo tried to delay going to Rome for the trial, most likely due to the Inquisition's infamous methods.
Javier E

Why Study History? (1985) | AHA - 0 views

www.historians.org/...why-study-history-(1985)

history study historiography learning teaching education

shared by Javier E on 17 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Isn't there quite enough to learn about the world today? Why add to the burden by looking at the past
  • Historical knowledge is no more and no less than carefully and critically constructed collective memory. As such it can both make us wiser in our public choices and more richly human in our private lives.
  • Without individual memory, a person literally loses his or her identity, and would not know how to act in encounters with others. Imagine waking up one morning unable to tell total strangers from family and friends!
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  • Collective memory is similar, though its loss does not immediately paralyze everyday private activity. But ignorance of history-that is, absent or defective collective memory-does deprive us of the best available guide for public action, especially in encounters with outsider
  • Often it is enough for experts to know about outsiders, if their advice is listened to. But democratic citizenship and effective participation in the determination of public policy require citizens to share a collective memory, organized into historical knowledge and belief
  • This value of historical knowledge obviously justifies teaching and learning about what happened in recent times, for the way things are descends from the way they were yesterday and the day before that
  • in fact, institutions that govern a great deal of our everyday behavior took shape hundreds or even thousands of years ago
  • Only an acquaintance with the entire human adventure on earth allows us to understand these dimensions of contemporary reality.
  • it follows that study of history is essential for every young person.
  • Collective memory is quite the same. Historians are always at work reinterpreting the past, asking new questions, searching new sources and finding new meanings in old documents in order to bring the perspective of new knowledge and experience to bear on the task of understanding the past.
  • what we know and believe about history is always changing. In other words, our collective, codified memory alters with time just as personal memories do, and for the same reasons.
  • skeptics are likely to conclude that history has no right to take student time from other subjects. If what is taught today is not really true, how can it claim space in a crowded school curriculum?
  • what if the world is more complicated and diverse than words can ever tell? What if human minds are incapable of finding' neat pigeon holes into which everything that happens will fit?
  • What if we have to learn to live with uncertainty and probabilities, and act on the basis of the best guesswork we are capable of?
  • Then, surely, the changing perspectives of historical understanding are the very best introduction we can have to the practical problems of real life. Then, surely, a serious effort to understand the interplay of change and continuity in human affairs is the only adequate introduction human beings can have to the confusing flow of events that constitutes the actual, adult world.
  • Memory is not something fixed and forever. As time passes, remembered personal experiences take on new meanings.
  • Early in this century, teachers and academic administrators pretty well agreed that two sorts of history courses were needed: a survey of the national history of the United States and a survey of European history.
  • Memory, indeed, makes us human. History, our collective memory, carefully codified and critically revised, makes us social, sharing ideas and ideals with others so as to form all sorts of different human groups
  • The varieties of history are enormous; facts and probabilities about the past are far too numerous for anyone to comprehend them all. Every sort of human group has its own histor
  • Where to start? How bring some sort of order to the enormous variety of things known and believed about the past?
  • Systematic sciences are not enough. They discount time, and therefore oversimplify reality, especially human reality.
  • This second course was often broadened into a survey of Western civilization in the 1930s and 1940s
  • But by the 1960s and 1970s these courses were becoming outdated, left behind by the rise of new kinds social and quantitative history, especially the history of women, of Blacks, and of other formerly overlooked groups within the borders of the United States, and of peoples emerging from colonial status in the world beyond our borders.
  • much harder to combine old with new to make an inclusive, judiciously balanced (and far less novel) introductory course for high school or college students.
  • But abandoning the effort to present a meaningful portrait of the entire national and civilizational past destroyed the original justification for requiring students to study history
  • Competing subjects abounded, and no one could or would decide what mattered most and should take precedence. As this happened, studying history became only one among many possible ways of spending time in school.
  • The costs of this change are now becoming apparent, and many concerned persons agree that returning to a more structured curriculum, in which history ought to play a prominent part, is imperative.
  • three levels of generality seem likely to have the greatest importance for ordinary people.
  • First is family, local, neighborhood history
  • Second is national history, because that is where political power is concentrated in our time.
  • Last is global history, because intensified communications make encounters with all the other peoples of the earth increasingly important.
  • Other pasts are certainly worth attention, but are better studied in the context of a prior acquaintance with personal-local, national, and global history. That is because these three levels are the ones that affect most powerfully what all other groups and segments of society actually do.
  • National history that leaves out Blacks and women and other minorities is no longer acceptable; but American history that leaves out the Founding Fathers and the Constitution is not acceptable either. What is needed is a vision of the whole, warts and all.
  • the study of history does not lead to exact prediction of future events. Though it fosters practical wisdom, knowledge of the past does not permit anyone to know exactly what is going to happen
  • Consequently, the lessons of history, though supremely valuable when wisely formulated, become grossly misleading when oversimplifiers try to transfer them mechanically from one age to another, or from one place to another.
  • Predictable fixity is simply not the human way of behaving. Probabilities and possibilities-together with a few complete surprises-are what we live with and must learn to expect.
  • Second, as acquaintance with the past expands, delight in knowing more and more can and often does become an end in itself.
  • On the other hand, studying alien religious beliefs, strange customs, diverse family patterns and vanished social structures shows how differently various human groups have tried to cop
  • Broadening our humanity and extending our sensibilities by recognizing sameness and difference throughout the recorded past is therefore an important reason for studying history, and especially the history of peoples far away and long ago
  • For we can only know ourselves by knowing how we resemble and how we differ from others. Acquaintance with the human past is the only way to such self knowledge.
Javier E

How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart? - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...societal-collapse.html

collapse civilization decline history crisis politics economics culture complexity

shared by Javier E on 21 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Tainter seemed calm. He walked me through the arguments of the book that made his reputation, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which has for years been the seminal text in the study of societal collapse, an academic subdiscipline that arguably was born with its publication in 1988
  • It is only a mild overstatement to suggest that before Tainter, collapse was simply not a thing.
  • His own research has moved on; these days, he focuses on “sustainability.”
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  • He writes with disarming composure about the factors that have led to the disintegration of empires and the abandonment of cities and about the mechanism that, in his view, makes it nearly certain that all states that rise will one day fall
  • societal collapse and its associated terms — “fragility” and “resilience,” “risk” and “sustainability” — have become the objects of extensive scholarly inquiry and infrastructure.
  • Princeton has a research program in Global Systemic Risk, Cambridge a Center for the Study of Existential Risk
  • even Tainter, for all his caution and reserve, was willing to allow that contemporary society has built-in vulnerabilities that could allow things to go very badly indeed — probably not right now, maybe not for a few decades still, but possibly sooner. In fact, he worried, it could begin before the year was over.
  • Plato, in “The Republic,” compared cities to animals and plants, subject to growth and senescence like any living thing. The metaphor would hold: In the early 20th century, the German historian Oswald Spengler proposed that all cultures have souls, vital essences that begin falling into decay the moment they adopt the trappings of civilization.
  • that theory, which became the heart of “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” Tainter’s argument rests on two proposals. The first is that human societies develop complexity, i.e. specialized roles and the institutional structures that coordinate them, in order to solve problems
  • All history since then has been “characterized by a seemingly inexorable trend toward higher levels of complexity, specialization and sociopolitical control.”
  • Eventually, societies we would recognize as similar to our own would emerge, “large, heterogeneous, internally differentiated, class structured, controlled societies in which the resources that sustain life are not equally available to all.”
  • Something more than the threat of violence would be necessary to hold them together, a delicate balance of symbolic and material benefits that Tainter calls “legitimacy,” the maintenance of which would itself require ever more complex structures, which would become ever less flexible, and more vulnerable, the more they piled up.
  • Social complexity, he argues, is inevitably subject to diminishing marginal returns. It costs more and more, in other words, while producing smaller and smaller profits.
  • Take Rome, which, in Tainter's telling, was able to win significant wealth by sacking its neighbors but was thereafter required to maintain an ever larger and more expensive military just to keep the imperial machine from stalling — until it couldn’t anymore.
  • This is how it goes. As the benefits of ever-increasing complexity — the loot shipped home by the Roman armies or the gentler agricultural symbiosis of the San Juan Basin — begin to dwindle, Tainter writes, societies “become vulnerable to collapse.”
  • haven’t countless societies weathered military defeats, invasions, even occupations and lengthy civil wars, or rebuilt themselves after earthquakes, floods and famines?
  • Only complexity, Tainter argues, provides an explanation that applies in every instance of collapse.
  • Complexity builds and builds, usually incrementally, without anyone noticing how brittle it has all become. Then some little push arrives, and the society begins to fracture.
  • A disaster — even a severe one like a deadly pandemic, mass social unrest or a rapidly changing climate — can, in Tainter’s view, never be enough by itself to cause collapse
  • The only precedent Tainter could think of, in which pandemic coincided with mass social unrest, was the Black Death of the 14th century. That crisis reduced the population of Europe by as much as 60 percent.
  • Whether any existing society is close to collapsing depends on where it falls on the curve of diminishing returns.
  • The United States hardly feels like a confident empire on the rise these days. But how far along are we?
  • Scholars of collapse tend to fall into two loose camps. The first, dominated by Tainter, looks for grand narratives and one-size-fits-all explanations
  • The second is more interested in the particulars of the societies they study
  • Patricia McAnany, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has questioned the usefulness of the very concept of collapse — she was an editor of a 2010 volume titled “Questioning Collapse” — but admits to being “very, very worried” about the lack, in the United States, of the “nimbleness” that crises require of governments.
  • We’re too vested and tied to places.” Without the possibility of dispersal, or of real structural change to more equitably distribute resources, “at some point the whole thing blows. It has to.”
  • In Turchin’s case the key is the loss of “social resilience,” a society’s ability to cooperate and act collectively for common goals. By that measure, Turchin judges that the United States was collapsing well before Covid-19 hit. For the last 40 years, he argues, the population has been growing poorer and more unhealthy as elites accumulate more and more wealth and institutional legitimacy founders. “The United States is basically eating itself from the inside out,
  • Inequality and “popular immiseration” have left the country extremely vulnerable to external shocks like the pandemic, and to internal triggers like the killings of George Floyd
  • Societies evolve complexity, he argues, precisely to meet such challenges.
  • Eric H. Cline, who teaches at the George Washington University, argued in “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed” that Late Bronze Age societies across Europe and western Asia crumbled under a concatenation of stresses, including natural disasters — earthquakes and drought — famine, political strife, mass migration and the closure of trade routes. On their own, none of those factors would have been capable of causing such widespread disintegration, but together they formed a “perfect storm” capable of toppling multiple societies all at once.
  • Collapse “really is a matter of when,” he told me, “and I’m concerned that this may be the time.”
  • In “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Tainter makes a point that echoes the concern that Patricia McAnany raised. “The world today is full,” Tainter writes. Complex societies occupy every inhabitable region of the planet. There is no escaping. This also means, he writes, that collapse, “if and when it comes again, will this time be global.” Our fates are interlinked. “No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”
  • If it happens, he says, it would be “the worst catastrophe in history.”
  • The quest for efficiency, he wrote recently, has brought on unprecedented levels of complexity: “an elaborate global system of production, shipping, manufacturing and retailing” in which goods are manufactured in one part of the world to meet immediate demands in another, and delivered only when they’re needed. The system’s speed is dizzying, but so are its vulnerabilities.
  • A more comprehensive failure of fragile supply chains could mean that fuel, food and other essentials would no longer flow to cities. “There would be billions of deaths within a very short period,” Tainter says.
  • If we sink “into a severe recession or a depression,” Tainter says, “then it will probably cascade. It will simply reinforce itself.”
  • Tainter tells me, he has seen “a definite uptick” in calls from journalists: The study of societal collapse suddenly no longer seems like a purely academic pursuit
  • Turchin is keenly aware of the essential instability of even the sturdiest-seeming systems. “Very severe events, while not terribly likely, are quite possible,” he says. When he emigrated from the U.S.S.R. in 1977, he adds, no one imagined the country would splinter into its constituent parts. “But it did.”
  • He writes of visions of “bloated bureaucracies” becoming the basis of “entire political careers.” Arms races, he observes, presented a “classic example” of spiraling complexity that provides “no tangible benefit for much of the population” and “usually no competitive advantage” either.
  • It is hard not to read the book through the lens of the last 40 years of American history, as a prediction of how the country might deteriorate if resources continued to be slashed from nearly every sector but the military, prisons and police.
  • The more a population is squeezed, Tainter warns, the larger the share that “must be allocated to legitimization or coercion.
  • And so it was: As U.S. military spending skyrocketed — to, by some estimates, a total of more than $1 trillion today from $138 billion in 1980 — the government would try both tactics, ingratiating itself with the wealthy by cutting taxes while dismantling public-assistance programs and incarcerating the poor in ever-greater numbers.
  • “As resources committed to benefits decline,” Tainter wrote in 1988, “resources committed to control must increase.”
  • The overall picture drawn by Tainter’s work is a tragic one. It is our very creativity, our extraordinary ability as a species to organize ourselves to solve problems collectively, that leads us into a trap from which there is no escaping
  • Complexity is “insidious,” in Tainter’s words. “It grows by small steps, each of which seems reasonable at the time.” And then the world starts to fall apart, and you wonder how you got there.
  • Perhaps collapse is not, actually, a thing. Perhaps, as an idea, it was a product of its time, a Cold War hangover that has outlived its usefulness, or an academic ripple effect of climate-change anxiety, or a feedback loop produced by some combination of the two
  • if you pay attention to people’s lived experience, and not just to the abstractions imposed by a highly fragmented archaeological record, a different kind of picture emerges.
  • Tainter’s understanding of societies as problem-solving entities can obscure as much as it reveals
  • Plantation slavery arose in order to solve a problem faced by the white landowning class: The production of agricultural commodities like sugar and cotton requires a great deal of backbreaking labor. That problem, however, has nothing to do with the problems of the people they enslaved. Which of them counts as “society”?
  • Since the beginning of the pandemic, the total net worth of America’s billionaires, all 686 of them, has jumped by close to a trillion dollars.
  • If societies are not in fact unitary, problem-solving entities but heaving contradictions and sites of constant struggle, then their existence is not an all-or-nothing game.
  • Collapse appears not as an ending, but a reality that some have already suffered — in the hold of a slave ship, say, or on a long, forced march from their ancestral lands to reservations faraway — and survived.
  • The current pandemic has already given many of us a taste of what happens when a society fails to meet the challenges that face it, when the factions that rule over it tend solely to their own problems
  • the real danger comes from imagining that we can keep living the way we always have, and that the past is any more stable than the present.
  • If you close your eyes and open them again, the periodic disintegrations that punctuate our history — all those crumbling ruins — begin to fade, and something else comes into focus: wiliness, stubbornness and, perhaps the strongest and most essential human trait, adaptability.
  • When one system fails, we build another. We struggle to do things differently, and we push on. As always, we have no other choice.
Javier E

YOU ARE NOT A RACIST TO CRITICIZE CRITICAL RACE THEORY. - It Bears Mentioning - 0 views

johnmcwhorter.substack.com/...-are-not-a-racist-to-criticize

race theory critical CRT bias education

shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The early writings by people like Regina Austin, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw are simply hard-leftist legal analysis, proposing a revised conception of justice that takes oppression into account, including a collective sense of subordinate group identity. These are hardly calls to turn schools into Maoist re-education camps fostering star chambers and struggle sessions.However, this, indeed, is what is happening to educational institutions across the country.
  • 1. Young children should not be taught if white to be guilty and if black to feel a) oppressed and b) wary of white kids around them (and if South Asian to be very, very confused …).
  • "What we are interested in here might be termed “critical pedagogy.” “Critical pedagogy” names — without exhaustively defining — the host of concepts, terms, practices, and theories that have lately taken hold in many public and private schools. This term alludes to a connection to CRT — it might be thought of as critical race theory as applied to schooling — but also to “critical studies” and “critical theory,” a broader set of contemporary philosophical ideas that have been particularly influential in certain circles of the modern Left."
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • In a dialogue premised on good faith, we can assume that when politicos and parents decry “Critical Race Theory,” what they refer to is the idea of oppression and white perfidy treated as the main meal of an entire school’s curriculum.
  • what most of us (as opposed to the Establishment in schools of education) think, and are correct about, is this:
  • it is no tort to call it "CRT" in shorthand when:1) these developments are descended from its teachings and2) their architects openly bill themselves as following the tenets of CRT.
  • 2. Young children should not be taught that the American story is mainly (note I write mainly rather than only, but mainly is just as awful here) one of oppression and racism. Not because it’s unpleasant and because sinister characters want to “hide” it, but because it’s dumb.
  • 3. While there is room for the above ideas to be presented to children as some among many – maybe; I’m bending over backwards here – this kind of thought should certainly not be the fulcrum of a school’s entire curriculum, as has been reported at schools like Dalton and others in New York.
  • 1) Criticizing Critical Race Theory as it operates in 2021 does not require perusing the oeuvre of Kimberlé Crenshaw, and the critique is not invalidated by the differences between what articles like that contained and what’s happening in our schools now.
  • 2) Criticizing Critical Race Theory does not mean teaching students that America has been nothing but great.
Javier E

The Case for Teaching Ignorance - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...se-for-teaching-ignorance.html

TOK knowledge ignorance Kuhn ambiguity psychology science anomalies curiosity

shared by Javier E on 24 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Far too often, she believed, teachers fail to emphasize how much about a given topic is unknown.
  • She wanted her students to recognize the limits of knowledge and to appreciate that questions often deserve as much attention as answers
  • in recent years scholars have made a convincing case that focusing on uncertainty can foster latent curiosity, while emphasizing clarity can convey a warped understanding of knowledge.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Presenting ignorance as less extensive than it is, knowledge as more solid and more stable, and discovery as neater also leads students to misunderstand the interplay between answers and questions.
  • Discovery is not the neat and linear process many students imagine, but usually involves, in Dr. Firestein’s phrasing, “feeling around in dark rooms, bumping into unidentifiable things, looking for barely perceptible phantoms.”
  • As he argued in his 2012 book “Ignorance: How It Drives Science,” many scientific facts simply aren’t solid and immutable, but are instead destined to be vigorously challenged and revised by successive generations.
  • People tend to think of not knowing as something to be wiped out or overcome, as if ignorance were simply the absence of knowledge. But answers don’t merely resolve questions; they provoke new ones.
  • The larger the island of knowledge grows, the longer the shoreline — where knowledge meets ignorance — extends. The more we know, the more we can ask.
  • Questions don’t give way to answers so much as the two proliferate together. Answers breed questions. Curiosity isn’t merely a static disposition but rather a passion of the mind that is ceaselessly earned and nurtured.
  • Mapping the coast of the island of knowledge, to continue the metaphor, requires a grasp of the psychology of ambiguity. The ever-expanding shoreline, where questions are born of answers, is terrain characterized by vague and conflicting information. The resulting state of uncertainty, psychologists have shown, intensifies our emotions: not only exhilaration and surprise, but also confusion and frustration.
  • The borderland between known and unknown is also where we strive against our preconceptions to acknowledge and investigate anomalous data, a struggle Thomas S. Kuhn described in his 1962 classic, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”
  • giving due emphasis to unknowns, highlighting case studies that illustrate the fertile interplay between questions and answers, and exploring the psychology of ambiguity are essential.
  • The time has come to “view ignorance as ‘regular’ rather than deviant,” the sociologists Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey have boldly argued. Our students will be more curious — and more intelligently so — if, in addition to facts, they were equipped with theories of ignorance as well as theories of knowledge.
  • This article makes an excellent case for "ignorance studies" but, ironically, treats "agnotology" as a cutting edge concept when in fact it is an old notion with a long history and a better name: "nescience." Nescience can refer to the Socratic idea of learned ignorance, but the concept was also developed in the eighteenth century, chiefly by Scottish commonsense philosopher Thomas Reid
  • "nescience" has considerable advantages over "agnotology". Linguistically, nescience is the precise opposite of "science" (scio: "I know"; nescio: "I don't know"). So why not stick with the Latin root word--and avoid any of the unfortunate connotations "ignorance" has in contemporary parlance? Historically, the word reminds us of the concept's provenance in Socratic philosophy and the Scottish enlightenment. Finally, unearthing the history of "nescience" might yield an unexpected insight into American intellectual history, since many of our founders read Thomas Reid's philosophy in college.
anonymous

Opinion | 2020 Taught Us How to Fix This - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cial-change-bias-training.html

shared by anonymous on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • So many of our hopes are based on the idea that the key to change is education.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      This whole articles lets us question the very education that we learn how to think about thoughts from too.
  • Second, some researchers argue that the training activates stereotypes in people’s minds rather than eliminates them.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      An interesting idea!
  • Fourth, the mandatory training makes many white participants feel left out, angry and resentful, actually decreasing their support for workplace diversity.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Fifth, people don’t like to be told what to think, and may rebel if they feel that they’re being pressured to think a certain way.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      We've talked about all this!
  • our training model of “teaching people to be good” is based on the illusion that you can change people’s minds and behaviors by presenting them with new information and new thoughts.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      I wonder what our class would say about this
  • If this were generally so, moral philosophers would behave better than the rest of us
  • People change when they are put in new environments, in permanent relationship with diverse groups of people. Their embodied minds adapt to the environments in a million different ways we will never understand or be able to plan
  • doing life together with people of other groups can reduce prejudice and change minds.
  • This points to a more fundamental vision of social change, but it is a hard-won lesson from a bitterly divisive year.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      Very true.
  • impervious to evidence, willing to believe the most outlandish things if it suited their biases
  • this was the year that called into question the very processes by which our society supposedly makes progress.
  • It turns out that if you tell someone their facts are wrong, you don’t usually win them over; you just entrench false belief.
  • this was the year that showed that our models for how we change minds or change behavior are deeply flawed.
  • The courses teach people about bias, they combat stereotypes and they encourage people to assume the perspectives of others in disadvantaged groups.
  • One of the most studied examples of this flawed model is racial diversity training
  • Our current model of social change isn’t working.
  • but the bulk of the evidence, though not all of it, suggests they don’t reduce discrimination.
  • One meta-analysis of 985 studies of anti-bias interventions found little evidence that these programs reduced bias. Other studies sometimes do find a short-term change in attitudes, but very few find a widespread change in actual behavior.
  • First, “short-term educational interventions in general do not change people.”
  • Third, training can make people complacent, thinking that because they went through the program they’ve solved the problem
huffem4

The Power of Positive Thinking: Too Much and Never Enough - The Bulwark - 1 views

thebulwark.com/king-too-much-and-never-enough

psychological COVID-19 current events

shared by huffem4 on 27 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Peale was exceptional for cutting the flock some spiritual slack, encouraging them to look for the sunny side and conquer their inferiority complexes. In his world, you can have the economic gains minus the guilt, which seems perfectly suited to the American sensibility.
  • The book sold millions of copies and was eventually translated into more than 40 languages, and Peale, from his pulpit at Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, became central to the spiritual life of the family of Fred Trump Sr., his wife, Mary, and the four Trump children, including the future president.
  • it was also well suited to justifying and exacerbating the pathologies of the Trump family and businesses
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Mary Trump (the president’s niece who also happens to have a Ph.D. in psychology) paints a portrait of Fred Trump Sr. as a sociopath, utterly uninterested in entering into the moral, emotional, and psychological world of his family or its members. In keeping with Peale’s teaching, he would no more hear about his wife’s or children’s problems than he would accept a failed business deal
  • Fred would just say, “Everything’s great, right Toots?” refusing to acknowledge, much less accommodate, her illness. 
  • Fred Jr. was then further abused, repeatedly denied authority, second-guessed at every turn, and blamed for every problem, setback, and failure in a perverse tag-team between Fred Sr. and Donald. The abuse fed his alcoholism, which, in the family’s Peale-informed understanding, was not a disease requiring treatment but the result of Fred Jr.’s negative thinking
  • Peale wanted people to be hopeful, kind, and optimistic, and to become “people persons.” The Trump family heard the positive thinking, personal empowerment parts, which integrated easily with its win-at-all-cost ideology, but they, or at least Donald, missed the bits about seeking counsel from others and living a life of dependence upon God.
  • Fred Jr.’s deepening alcoholism only elicited increasing abuse from his father and brother seemingly under the theory that if they were hard enough on him he would turn around. Even in his final crisis, afflicted by fatal, alcohol-induced cardiac problems, no member of the family went with him to the hospital (Donald Trump went to a movie instead). Dying, it appears, is the result of late-stage negative thought.
  • The consistent element in each of these has been to deny negative realities and keep moving. The casinos, the airline, the football league, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump University . . . all bear the same markings of hyper optimism and overpromise/underdeliver salesmanship
  • Trump’s just doing what he’s always done: conquering the challenge by blinding himself to it, just the way Reverend Peale taught him and his father insisted upon. 
  • My AEI colleague, Brad Wilcox, documented that men who identified as “evangelical” but infrequently attend church were more likely to engage in domestic violence than evangelicals who regularly attended church, mainline Protestants and those who never attend church. Wilcox believes this results from a kind of doctrinal cherry-picking—big on authority, sovereignty, and power but closed to other-directed teachings like altruism and self-sacrifice. Weak attachment to religious faith tends to put some of the worst behaviors on steroids.  
  • These are the problem-solving strategies that Donald Trump brought to his marriages, six corporate bankruptcies, presidential campaign, and now, what increasingly appears to be a failed presidency.
  • “prosperity gospel” (a belief popularized by televangelists that God intends Christians to be healthy and wealthy)
  • The purpose of these psychological and spiritual practices is to free individuals from self-doubt and feelings of inferiority and help them to become the people God truly intends them to be: happy, wealthy, popular, and professionally successful.
  • Now we have Trump COVID-19 and it’s following the same pattern. The virus is “very well under control” and “going to fade away.”
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