Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

“The character identification is the driving force,” says Wells, whose own research focusses on perception and the visual appeal of film. “It’s why people tend to identify with that medium always—it allows them to be put in those roles and experiment through that.”

one theme seemed to resonate: everyone could identify with Elsa. She wasn’t your typical princess. She wasn’t your typical Disney character. Born with magical powers that she couldn’t quite control, she meant well but caused harm, both on a personal scale (hurting her sister, repeatedly) and a global one (cursing her kingdom, by mistake). She was flawed—actually flawed, in a way that resulted in real mistakes and real consequences. Everyone could interpret her in a unique way and find that the arc of her story applied directly to them

what does all of this mean for “Frozen”? On the one hand, the movie shares many typical story elements with other Disney films. There are the parents dead within the first ten minutes (a must, it seems, in Disney productions), royalty galore, the quest to meet your one true love, the comic-relief character (Olaf the Snowman) to punctuate the drama. Even the strong female lead isn’t completely new

She recalls the sheer diversity of the students who joined the discussion: a mixture, split evenly between genders, of representatives of the L.G.B.T. community, artists, scientists.

the story keeps the audience engaged because it subverts expected tropes and stereotypes, over and over. “It’s the furthest thing from a typical princess movie,”

It also, unlike prior Disney films, aces the Bechdel Test: not only are both leads female, but they certainly talk about things other than men. It is the women, in fact, not the men, who save the day, repeatedly—and a selfless act of sacrifice rather than a “kiss of true love” that ends up winning.

In 2012, he and Simonton conducted a study of two hundred and twenty family films released between 1996 and 2009, to see whether successful children’s movies had certain identifying characteristics. They found that films that dealt with nuanced and complex themes did better than those that played it safe, as measured both by ratings on metacritic.com, rottentomatoes.com, and IMDb and by over-all financial performance.

“A good story, issues to think about and wrestle with,”

Simonton and Kaufman were able to explain only twenty to twenty-four per cent of variance in critical success and twenty-five in domestic gross earnings.

The other element, of course, is that intangible that Litman calls “buzz” and Simonson calls “information cascades,” the word of mouth that makes people embrace the story,

Part of the credit goes to Disney’s strategy. In their initial marketing campaign, they made an effort to point out the story’s uniqueness.

And their lawyers allowed the music to spread naturally through social media.

part of the credit goes to Jennifer Lee’s team, for the choices they consciously made to make the screenplay as complex as it was. Elsa was once evil; Elsa and Anna weren’t originally sisters; the prince wasn’t a sociopath. Their decisions to forego a true villain—something no Disney film had successfully done—and to make the story one driven by sibling love rather than romantic infatuation have made “Frozen” more than simply nuanced and relatable. They’ve made it more universally acceptable.

In contrast to other recent Disney films, like “Tangled,” “Frozen” isn’t politically fraught or controversial: you can say it’s good without fear of being accused of being a racist or an apologist or an animal-rights opponent

to echo the words of the screenwriting legend William Goldman, “Nobody knows anything.” In the end, it may just be a bit of magic.

“Soccer is a collective game, a team game, and everyone has to play the part which has been assigned to them, which means they have to understand it spatially, positionally and intelligently and make it effective.”

Then there is the structure of your network. There is by now a vast body of research on how differently people behave depending on the structure of the social networks. People with vast numbers of acquaintances have more job opportunities than people with fewer but deeper friendships

This influence happens through at least three avenues. First there is contagion. People absorb memes, ideas and behaviors from each other the way they catch a cold.

soccer is like a 90-minute anxiety dream — one of those frustrating dreams when you’re trying to get somewhere but something is always in the way. This is yet another way soccer is like life.

Let me simplify it with a classic observation: Each close friend you have brings out a version of yourself that you could not bring out on your own. When your close friend dies, you are not only losing the friend, you are losing the version of your personality that he or she elicited.

Once we acknowledge that, in life, we are playing soccer, not baseball, a few things become clear. First, awareness of the landscape of reality is the highest form of wisdom. It’s not raw computational power that matters most; it’s having a sensitive attunement to the widest environment,

Second, predictive models will be less useful. Baseball is wonderful for sabermetricians. In each at bat there is a limited range of possible outcomes. Activities like soccer are not as easily renderable statistically, because the relevant spatial structures are harder to quantify

Finally, there is the power of the extended mind. There is also a developed body of research on how much our very consciousness is shaped by the people around us.

Is life more like baseball, or is it more like soccer?

Applicant groups who won the lottery constituted our treatment group, while those who did not win an immediate tour served as our control group.

Several weeks after the students in the treatment group visited the museum, we administered surveys to all of the students. The surveys included multiple items that assessed knowledge about art, as well as measures of tolerance, historical empathy and sustained interest in visiting art museums and other cultural institutions. We also asked them to write an essay in response to a work of art that was unfamiliar to them.

Moreover, most of the benefits we observed are significantly larger for minority students, low-income students and students from rural schools — typically two to three times larger than for white, middle-class, suburban students — owing perhaps to the fact that the tour was the first time they had visited an art museum.

we can conclude that visiting an art museum exposes students to a diversity of ideas that challenge them with different perspectives on the human condition. Expanding access to art, whether through programs in schools or through visits to area museums and galleries, should be a central part of any school’s curriculum.

What’s happening in Ferguson is the result of several recent historical factors and deeply entrenched racial attitudes, as well as a breakdown in participatory democracy.

In Ferguson, the American public has awakened to images of local police, fully decked out in surplus military gear from our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who are deploying all that in accordance with a now widespread “broken windows” policy, which was established on the hypothesis that if small crimes and misdemeanors are checked in certain neighborhoods, more serious crimes will be deterred. But this policy quickly intersected with police racial profiling already in existence to result in what has recently become evident as a propensity to shoot first.

How does this “broken windows” policy relate to the tragic deaths of young black men/boys? N.Z.:People are now stopped by the police for suspicion of misdemeanor offenses and those encounters quickly escalate.

Young black men are the convenient target of choice in the tragic intersection of the broken windows policy, the domestic effects of the war on terror and police racial profiling.

Why do you think that young black men are disproportionately targeted? N.Z.: Exactly why unarmed young black men are the target of choice, as opposed to unarmed young white women, or unarmed old black women, or even unarmed middle-aged college professors, is an expression of a long American tradition of suspicion and terrorization of members of those groups who have the lowest status in our society and have suffered the most extreme forms of oppression, for centuries.

Police in the United States are mostly white and mostly male. Some confuse their work roles with their own characters. As young males, they naturally pick out other young male opponents. They have to win, because they are the law, and they have the moral charge of protecting.

So young black males, who have less status than they do, and are already more likely to be imprisoned than young white males, are natural suspects.

Besides the police, a large segment of the white American public believes they are in danger from blacks, especially young black men, who they think want to rape young white women. This is an old piece of American mythology that has been invoked to justify crimes against black men, going back to lynching. The perceived danger of blacks becomes very intense when blacks are harmed.

The term “white privilege” is misleading. A privilege is special treatment that goes beyond a right. It’s not so much that being white confers privilege but that not being white means being without rights in many cases. Not fearing that the police will kill your child for no reason isn’t a privilege. It’s a right. 

that is what “white privilege” is meant to convey, that whites don’t have many of the worries nonwhites, especially blacks, do.

Other examples of white privilege include all of the ways that whites are unlikely to end up in prison for some of the same things blacks do, not having to worry about skin-color bias, not having to worry about being pulled over by the police while driving or stopped and frisked while walking in predominantly white neighborhoods, having more family wealth because your parents and other forebears were not subject to Jim Crow and slavery.

Probably all of the ways in which whites are better off than blacks in our society are forms of white privilege.

Over half a century later, it hasn’t changed much in the United States. Black people are still imagined to have a hyper-physicality in sports, entertainment, crime, sex, politics, and on the street. Black people are not seen as people with hearts and minds and hopes and skills but as cyphers that can stand in for anything whites themselves don’t want to be or think they can’t be.

race is through and through a social construct, previously constructed by science, now by society, including its most extreme victims. But, we cannot abandon race, because people would still discriminate and there would be no nonwhite identities from which to resist. Also, many people just don’t want to abandon race and they have a fundamental right to their beliefs. So race remains with us as something that needs to be put right.

At present even those leading the charge against the surveillance state continue to treat the issue as if it were a political scandal that can be blamed on the corrupt policies of a few bad men who must be held accountable. It is widely hoped that all our societies need to do to fix our problems is to pass a few laws.

The cancer is much deeper than this. We live not only in a surveillance state, but in a surveillance society. Totalitarian surveillance is not only embodied in our governments; it is embedded in our economy, in our mundane uses of technology and in our everyday interactions.

The very concept of the Internet — a single, global, homogenous network that enmeshes the world — is the essence of a surveillance state. The Internet was built in a surveillance-friendly way because governments and serious players in the commercial Internet wanted it that way. There were alternatives at every step of the way. They were ignored.

Unlike intelligence agencies, which eavesdrop on international telecommunications lines, the commercial surveillance complex lures billions of human beings with the promise of “free services.” Their business model is the industrial destruction of privacy. And yet even the more strident critics of NSA surveillance do not appear to be calling for an end to Google and Facebook

At their core, companies like Google and Facebook are in the same business as the U.S. government’s National Security Agency. They collect a vast amount of information about people, store it, integrate it and use it to predict individual and group behavior, which they then sell to advertisers and others. This similarity made them natural partners for the NSA

there is an undeniable “tyrannical” side to the Internet. But the Internet is too complex to be unequivocally categorized as a “tyrannical” or a “democratic” phenomenon.

It is possible for more people to communicate and trade with others in more places in a single instant than it ever has been in history. The same developments that make our civilization easier to surveil make it harder to predict. They have made it easier for the larger part of humanity to educate itself, to race to consensus, and to compete with entrenched power groups.

If there is a modern analogue to Orwell’s “simple” and “democratic weapon,” which “gives claws to the weak” it is cryptography, the basis for the mathematics behind Bitcoin and the best secure communications programs. It is cheap to produce: cryptographic software can be written on a home computer. It is even cheaper to spread: software can be copied in a way that physical objects cannot. But it is also insuperable — the mathematics at the heart of modern cryptography are sound, and can withstand the might of a superpower. The same technologies that allowed the Allies to encrypt their radio communications against Axis intercepts can now be downloaded over a dial-up Internet connection and deployed with a cheap laptop.

It is too early to say whether the “democratizing” or the “tyrannical” side of the Internet will eventually win out. But acknowledging them — and perceiving them as the field of struggle — is the first step toward acting effectively

Humanity cannot now reject the Internet, but clearly we cannot surrender it either. Instead, we have to fight for it. Just as the dawn of atomic weapons inaugurated the Cold War, the manifold logic of the Internet is the key to understanding the approaching war for the intellectual center of our civilization

there’s no profit in leaving things as they are.Show me a body part, I’ll show you someone who’s making money by telling women that theirs looks wrong and they need to fix it. Tone it, work it out, tan it, bleach it, tattoo it, lipo it, remove all the hair, lose every bit of jiggle.

As a graphic designer and Photoshop teacher, I also have to note that Photoshop is used HEAVILY in these kinds of publications. Even on women with incredibly beautiful (by pop culture standards) bodies. It's quite sad because the imagery we're expected to live up to (or approximate) by cultural standards, is illustration. It's not even real. My boyfriend and I had a big laugh over a Playboy cover a few months ago where the Photoshopping was so extreme (thigh gap and butt cheek) it was anatomically impossible and looked ridiculous. I work in the industry.. I know what the Liquify filter and the Spot Healing Brush can do!

We may harp on gender inequality while pursuing stupid fetishes. Well into our middle age, we still try to forcefully wriggle into size 2 pair of jeans. We foolishly spend tonnes of money on fake ( these guys should be sued for false advertising )age -defying, anti-wrinkle creams. Why do we have to have our fuzz and bush diappear while the men have forests on their chests,abdomens,butts, arms and legs? For that we have only ourselves to blame. We just cannot get out of this mindset of being objectified. And we pass on these foolishness to our daughters and grand-daughters. They get trapped, never satisfied with what they see in the mirror. Don't expect the men to change anytime soon. They will always maintain the status quo. It is for us, women to get out of this rut. We have to 'snatch' gender-equality. It will never be handed to us. PERIOD

I spent years dieting and exercising to look good--or really to not look bad. I knew the calories (and probably still do) in thousands of foods. How I regret the time I spent on that and the boyfriends who cared about that. And how much more I had to give to the world. With unprecedented economic injustice, ecosystems collapsing, war breaking out everywhere, nations going under water, people starving in refugee camps, the keys to life, behavior, and disease being unlocked in the biological sciences . . . this is what we think women should spend their time worrying about? Talk about a poverty of ambition. No more. Won't even look at these demeaning magazines when I get my hair cut. If that's what a woman cares about, I try to tell her to stop wasting her time. If that's what a man cares about, he is a waste of my time. What a depressing way to distract women from achieving more in this world. Really wish I'd know this at 12.

we believe we're all competing against one another to procreate and participate in evolution. So women (and men) compete ferociously, and body image is a subset of all that. Then there's LeMarckian evolutionary theory and epigenetics...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckismhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EpigeneticsBottom line is that we can't stop this train any more easily than we can stop the anthropocene's Climate Change. Human beings are tempted. Sometimes we win the battle, other times we give in to vanity, hedonism, and ego. This is all a subset of much larger forces at play. Men and women make choices and act within that environment. Deal with it.

it seems as if networks think that post-racial story lines are the only acceptable ways of showcasing black characters on television.

TV is resplendent with ethnically diverse casts, from procedurals like “Law & Order: SVU” and “NCIS: Los Angeles” to hits like “Scandal” and “Elementary” to sitcoms like “New Girl” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.”  But the characters on those series don’t often deal directly with racial issues in everyday life and, by not doing so, perpetuate another kind of colorblindness, one that homogenizes characters and treats race as inconsequential, when it is anything but.

“The PC way of handling culture has been to not talk about it,” Kenya Barris, the show’s creator, said in an interview. “But we should be talking about it.”

What black viewers are left with instead, said Dayna Chatman, a media researcher at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, is a dynamic that “makes whiteness the norm.”

reality television often showcases African-Americans, but since that genre is often about over-the-top performances, she said, it isn’t “particularly representative or flattering.”

“The business explanation is always that this isn’t what the marketplace is asking for,”

The lack of texture and diversity on television is harder to ignore amid the rise of streaming and online series (say, Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black” or Issa Rae’s “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl”) as well as social media like Instagram and Vine (see King Bach’s account). They offer a welcome and much more nuanced window into black humor and culture.

there’s no middle ground: Either race is largely absent or exaggerated to the point of caricature.

He said ABC and cable networks pursued him and the “Black-ish” pilot “very aggressively.” Contrary to popular belief, networks “are looking for something that deals with diversity,” he said. “The problem has been timing and having the right package behind it.”

“This is the first time in American history where the most famous people in America are black,” he said, naming the Obama family and the musicians Kanye West and Beyoncé. “But there’s still a really obvious invisibility on television.”

Mr. Barris said he was determined to do more than create a successor to “The Cosby Show,” although “Black-ish” draws from its legacy. But while the popularity of the Huxtable family centered on its warmth and relatability, it was, Mr. Barris said, “about a family that happened to be black.” He added that he wanted his show to be much more cognizant of modern racial identity, and to reflect the class and racial dynamics of being black in America.

“We are hyperaware of how people and the media perceive us,” she said. “And who gets it and who doesn’t get it.”

In 2005, Mr. Chappelle walked away from his lucrative show on Comedy Central after expressing discomfort that the line between his social commentary and racial satire had grown too thin.

Today, there are a few other shows operating in the space left behind by Mr. Chappelle, including “Key & Peele” on Comedy Central and “Black Jesus” on Adult Swim. But those are cable outlets with smaller audiences, whereas “Black-ish” is on a mainstream network.

Western philosophy thus sprang from a dualism between the intellectual senses, crowned by sight, and the lower “animal” senses, stigmatized by touch.

opto-centrism prevailed for over 2,000 years, culminating in our contemporary culture of digital simulation and spectacle. The eye continues to rule in what Roland Barthes once called our “civilization of the image.” The world is no longer our oyster, but our screen.

our current technology is arguably exacerbating our carnal alienation. While offering us enormous freedoms of fantasy and encounter, digital eros may also be removing us further from the flesh

The move toward excarnation is apparent in what is becoming more and more a fleshless society. In medicine, “bedside manner” and hand on pulse has ceded to the anonymous technologies of imaging in diagnosis and treatment. In war, hand-to-hand combat has been replaced by “targeted killing” via remote-controlled drones.

certain cyber engineers now envisage implanting transmission codes in brains so that we will not have to move a finger — or come into contact with another human being — to get what we want.

We need to return from head to foot, from brain to fingertip, from iCloud to earth. To close the distance, so that eros is more about proximity than proxy. So that soul becomes flesh, where it belongs. Such a move, I submit, would radically alter our “sense” of sex in our digital civilization. It would enhance the role of empathy, vulnerability and sensitivity in the art of carnal love, and ideally, in all of human relations. Because to love or be loved truly is to be able to say, “I have been touched.”

the government teams in Britain and the United States that have focused on nudging have followed these guidelines scrupulously.

the private sector is another matter. In this domain, I see much more troubling behavior.

Many companies are nudging purely for their own profit and not in customers’ best interests. In a recent column in The New York Times, Robert Shiller called such behavior “phishing.” Mr. Shiller and George Akerlof, both Nobel-winning economists, have written a book on the subject, “Phishing for Phools.”

Some argue that phishing — or evil nudging — is more dangerous in government than in the private sector. The argument is that government is a monopoly with coercive power, while we have more choice in the private sector over which newspapers we read and which airlines we fly.

I think this distinction is overstated. In a democracy, if a government creates bad policies, it can be voted out of office. Competition in the private sector, however, can easily work to encourage phishing rather than stifle it.

One example is the mortgage industry in the early 2000s. Borrowers were encouraged to take out loans that they could not repay when real estate prices fell. Competition did not eliminate this practice, because it was hard for anyone to make money selling the advice “Don’t take that loan.”

it appeared that people felt dissonance only when their choices had negative consequences, but people still felt dissonance when they wrote something inconsistent with their prior beliefs and then threw it in the trash, never to be seen again

For years, it remained a mystery why people would feel dissonance even when there were no negative consequences. But recently, it was solved

Using neuroscience to track the activation of different brain regions, Professor Harmon-Jones and colleagues found that inconsistent beliefs really bother us only when they have conflicting implications for action

If I’m socially liberal and fiscally conservative, and I want to vote for a candidate with a decent shot at winning, my beliefs are contradictory. One way to reconcile them is to change my opinion on abortion or tax policies. Goodbye, dissonanc

This helps to explain why many people’s political beliefs fall on a simple left-right continuum, rather than in more complex combinations. Once, we might have held more nuanced opinions, but in pursuit of consistency, we’ve long since whitewashed the shades of gray

It also explains why we can’t stand to vote for flip-floppers. We worry that they don’t have clear principles; we think they lack integrity

t consistency is especially appealing to political conservatives, who report a stronger preference for certainty, structure, order and closure than liberals. If you favor predictability over ambiguity and stability over change, a candidate who holds fast to his ideology has a lot of curb appeal.

When historians and political scientists rate the presidents throughout history, the most effective ones turn out to be the most open-minded

This is true of both conservative and liberal presidents. Abraham Lincoln was a flip-flopper: He started out pro-slavery before abolishing it. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a flip-flopper, too: Elected on a platform of balancing the budget, he substantially increased spending with his New Deal.

we should be wary of electing anyone who fails to evolve. “Progress is impossible without change,” George Bernard Shaw observed, “and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

when it comes to facing our own contradictions, perhaps we should be more open as well. As the artist Marcel Duchamp observed, “I have forced myself to contradict myself, in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”

An alternative algorithm is known that could have let the conventional computer be more competitive, or even win, by exploiting what Neven called a “bug” in D-Wave’s design. Neven said the test his group staged is still important because that shortcut won’t be available to regular computers when they compete with future quantum annealers capable of working on larger amounts of data.

“For a specific, carefully crafted proof-of-concept problem we achieve a 100-million-fold speed-up,” said Neven.

“the world’s first commercial quantum computer.” The computer is installed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and operates on data using a superconducting chip called a quantum annealer.

Google is competing with D-Wave to make a quantum annealer that could do useful work.

Martinis is also working on quantum hardware that would not be limited to optimization problems, as annealers are.

Government and university labs, Microsoft (see “Microsoft’s Quantum Mechanics”), and IBM (see “IBM Shows Off a Quantum Computing Chip”) are also working on that technology.

“it may be several years before this research makes a difference to Google products.”

it is as if two magic coins, flipped at different corners of the cosmos, always came up heads or tails together. (The spooky action takes place only in the context of simultaneous measurement. The particles share states, but they don’t send signals.)

fashion, temperament, zeitgeist, and sheer tenacity affected the debate, along with evidence and argument.

The certainty that spooky action at a distance takes place, Musser says, challenges the very notion of “locality,” our intuitive sense that some stuff happens only here, and some stuff over there. What’s happening isn’t really spooky action at a distance; it’s spooky distance, revealed through an action.

Why, then, did Einstein’s question get excluded for so long from reputable theoretical physics? The reasons, unfolding through generations of physicists, have several notable social aspects,

What started out as a reductio ad absurdum became proof that the cosmos is in certain ways absurd. What began as a bug became a feature and is now a fact.

“If poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility, then science is tranquility recollected in emotion.” The seemingly neutral order of the natural world becomes the sounding board for every passionate feeling the physicist possesses.

Musser explains that the big issue was settled mainly by being pushed aside. Generational imperatives trumped evidentiary ones. The things that made Einstein the lovable genius of popular imagination were also the things that made him an easy object of condescension. The hot younger theorists patronized him,

There was never a decisive debate, never a hallowed crucial experiment, never even a winning argument to settle the case, with one physicist admitting, “Most physicists (including me) accept that Bohr won the debate, although like most physicists I am hard pressed to put into words just how it was done.”

Arguing about non-locality went out of fashion, in this account, almost the way “Rock Around the Clock” displaced Sinatra from the top of the charts.

The same pattern of avoidance and talking-past and taking on the temper of the times turns up in the contemporary science that has returned to the possibility of non-locality.

the revival of “non-locality” as a topic in physics may be due to our finding the metaphor of non-locality ever more palatable: “Modern communications technology may not technically be non-local but it sure feels that it is.”

Living among distant connections, where what happens in Bangalore happens in Boston, we are more receptive to the idea of such a strange order in the universe.

The “indeterminacy” of the atom was, for younger European physicists, “a lesson of modernity, an antidote to a misplaced Enlightenment trust in reason, which German intellectuals in the 1920’s widely held responsible for their country’s defeat in the First World War.” The tonal and temperamental difference between the scientists was as great as the evidence they called on.

Science isn’t a slot machine, where you drop in facts and get out truths. But it is a special kind of social activity, one where lots of different human traits—obstinacy, curiosity, resentment of authority, sheer cussedness, and a grudging readiness to submit pet notions to popular scrutiny—end by producing reliable knowledge

What was magic became mathematical and then mundane. “Magical” explanations, like spooky action, are constantly being revived and rebuffed, until, at last, they are reinterpreted and accepted. Instead of a neat line between science and magic, then, we see a jumpy, shifting boundary that keeps getting redrawn

Real-world demarcations between science and magic, Musser’s story suggests, are like Bugs’s: made on the move and as much a trap as a teaching aid.

In the past several decades, certainly, the old lines between the history of astrology and astronomy, and between alchemy and chemistry, have been blurred; historians of the scientific revolution no longer insist on a clean break between science and earlier forms of magic.

Where once logical criteria between science and non-science (or pseudo-science) were sought and taken seriously—Karl Popper’s criterion of “falsifiability” was perhaps the most famous, insisting that a sound theory could, in principle, be proved wrong by one test or another—many historians and philosophers of science have come to think that this is a naïve view of how the scientific enterprise actually works.

They see a muddle of coercion, old magical ideas, occasional experiment, hushed-up failures—all coming together in a social practice that gets results but rarely follows a definable logic.

Yet the old notion of a scientific revolution that was really a revolution is regaining some credibility.

David Wootton, in his new, encyclopedic history, “The Invention of Science” (Harper), recognizes the blurred lines between magic and science but insists that the revolution lay in the public nature of the new approach.

What killed alchemy was the insistence that experiments must be openly reported in publications which presented a clear account of what had happened, and they must then be replicated, preferably before independent witnesses.

Wootton, while making little of Popper’s criterion of falsifiability, makes it up to him by borrowing a criterion from his political philosophy. Scientific societies are open societies. One day the lunar tides are occult, the next day they are science, and what changes is the way in which we choose to talk about them.

Wootton also insists, against the grain of contemporary academia, that single observed facts, what he calls “killer facts,” really did polish off antique authorities

once we agree that the facts are facts, they can do amazing work. Traditional Ptolemaic astronomy, in place for more than a millennium, was destroyed by what Galileo discovered about the phases of Venus. That killer fact “serves as a single, solid, and strong argument to establish its revolution around the Sun, such that no room whatsoever remains for doubt,” Galileo wrote, and Wootton adds, “No one was so foolish as to dispute these claims.

everal things flow from Wootton’s view. One is that “group think” in the sciences is often true think. Science has always been made in a cloud of social networks.

There has been much talk in the pop-sci world of “memes”—ideas that somehow manage to replicate themselves in our heads. But perhaps the real memes are not ideas or tunes or artifacts but ways of making them—habits of mind rather than products of mind

science, then, a club like any other, with fetishes and fashions, with schemers, dreamers, and blackballed applicants? Is there a real demarcation to be made between science and every other kind of social activity

The claim that basic research is valuable because it leads to applied technology may be true but perhaps is not at the heart of the social use of the enterprise. The way scientists do think makes us aware of how we can think

politically motivated doubt was sown over US President Barack Obama’s nationality for many months by opponents until he revealed his birth certificate in 2011.

ignorance can often be propagated under the guise of balanced debate. For example, the common idea that there will always be two opposing views does not always result in a rational conclusion.

a false picture of the truth, hence ignorance.

For example, says Proctor, many of the studies linking carcinogens in tobacco were conducted in mice initially, and the tobacco industry responded by saying that studies into mice did not mean that people were at risk,

Even though knowledge is ‘accessible’, it does not mean it is accessed, he warns

often comes from faith or tradition, or propaganda

a scientifically illiterate society will probably be more susceptible to the tactics used by those wishing to confuse and cloud the truth.

It’s not just about the facts, it’s about what is imagined to flow from and into such facts,

Another academic studying ignorance is David Dunning, from Cornell University.

"While some smart people will profit from all the information now just a click away, many will be misled into a false sense of expertise

US presidential candidate Donald Trump's solutions that are either unworkable or unconstitutional are an example of agnotology, says Dunning

today the need for both a word and the study of human ignorance is as strong as ever

1979, a secret memo from the tobacco industry was revealed to the public.

How do people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge? Georgina Kenyon finds there is a term which defines this phenomenon.

it revealed many of the tactics employed by big tobacco to counter “anti-cigarette forces

“Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”

revelation piqued the interest of Robert Proctor, a science historian from Stanford University

led him to create a word for the study of deliberate propagation of ignorance: agnotology.

Officially, the Holocene is still running today. You have lived your entire life in the Holocene, and the Holocene has constituted the geological “present” for as long as there have been geologists.But if we now live in a new epoch, the Anthropocene, then the ICS will have to chop the Holocene somewhere. It will have to choose when the Holocene ended, and it will move some amount of time out of the purview of the Holocene working group and into that of the Anthropocene working group.

This is politically difficult. And right now, the Anthropocene working group seems intent on not carving too deep into the Holocene. In a paper published earlier this year in Earth-Science Reviews, the Anthropocene working group’s members strongly imply that they will propose starting the new epoch in the mid-20th century.

Some geologists argue that the Anthropocene started even earlier: perhaps 4,000 or 6,000 years ago, as farmers began to remake the land surface.“Most of the world’s forests that were going to be converted to cropland and agriculture were already cleared well before 1950,” says Bill Ruddiman, a geology professor at the University of Virginia and an advocate of this extremely early Anthropocene.

“Most of the world’s prairies and steppes that were going to be cleared for crops were already gone, by then. How can you argue the Anthropocene started in 1950 when all of the major things that affect Earth’s surface were already over?”Van der Pluijm agreed that the Anthropocene working group was picking 1950 for “not very good reasons.”“Agriculture was the revolution that allowed society to develop,” he said. “That was really when people started to force the land to work for them. That massive land movement—it’s like a landslide, except it’s a humanslide. And it is not, of course, as dramatic as today’s motion of land, but it starts the clock.”

This muddle had to stop. The Holocene comes up constantly in discussions of modern global warming. Geologists and climate scientists did not make their jobs any easier by slicing it in different ways and telling contradictory stories about it.

This process started almost 10 years ago. For this reason, Zalasiewicz, the chair of the Anthropocene working group, said he wasn’t blindsided by the new subdivisions at all. In fact, he voted to adopt them as a member of the Quaternary working group.“Whether the Anthropocene works with a unified Holocene or one that’s in three parts makes for very little difference,” he told me.In fact, it had made the Anthropocene group’s work easier. “It has been useful to compare the scale of the two climate events that mark the new boundaries [within the Holocene] with the kind of changes that we’re assessing in the Anthropocene. It has been quite useful to have the compare and contrast,” he said. “Our view is that some of the changes in the Anthropocene are rather bigger.”

Zalasiewicz said that he and his colleagues were going as fast as they could. When the working group group began its work in 2009, it was “really starting from scratch,” he told me.While other working groups have a large body of stratigraphic research to consider, the Anthropocene working group had nothing. “We had to spend a fair bit of time deciding whether the Anthropocene was geology at all,” he said. Then they had to decide where its signal could show up. Now, they’re looking for evidence that shows it.

This cycle of “glacials” and “interglacials” has played out about 50 times over the last several million years. When the Holocene began, it was only another interglacial—albeit the one we live in. Until recently, glaciers were still on schedule to descend in another 30,000 years or so.Yet geologists still call the Holocene an epoch, even though they do not bestow this term on any of the previous 49 interglacials. It get special treatment because we live in it.

Much of this science is now moot. Humanity’s vast emissions of greenhouse gas have now so warmed the climate that they have offset the next glaciation. They may even knock us out of the ongoing cycle of Ice Ages, sending the Earth hurtling back toward a “greenhouse” climate after the more amenable “icehouse” climate during which humans evolved.For this reason, van der Pluijm wants the Anthropocene to supplant the Holocene entirely. Humans made their first great change to the environment at the close of the last glaciation, when they seem to have hunted the world’s largest mammals—the wooly mammoth, the saber-toothed tiger—to extinction. Why not start the Anthropocene then?He would even rename the pre-1800 period “the Holocene Age” as a consolation prize:

Zalasiewicz said he would not start the Anthropocene too early in time, as it would be too work-intensive for the field to rename such a vast swath of time. “The early-Anthropocene idea would crosscut against the Holocene as it’s seen by Holocene workers,” he said. If other academics didn’t like this, they could create their own timescales and start the Anthropocene Epoch where they choose. “We have no jurisdiction over the word Anthropocene,” he said.

Ruddiman, the University of Virginia professor who first argued for a very early Anthropocene, now makes an even broader case. He’s not sure it makes sense to formally define the Anthropocene at all. In a paper published this week, he objects to designating the Anthropocene as starting in the 1950s—and then he objects to delineating the Anthropocene, or indeed any new geological epoch, by name. “Keep the use of the term informal,” he told me. “Don’t make it rigid. Keep it informal so people can say the early-agricultural Anthropocene, or the industrial-era Anthropocene.”

“This is the age of geochemical dating,” he said. Geologists have stopped looking to the ICS to place each rock sample into the rock sequence. Instead, field geologists use laboratory techniques to get a precise year or century of origin for each rock sample. “The community just doesn’t care about these definitions,” he said.

Peterson deserves a full, appropriately complex accounting of his best and worst arguments; I intend to give him one soon. For now, I can only tell you how the Peterson phenomenon manifested one night in Aspen

“For the first time in human history the spoken word has the same reach as the written word, and there are no barriers to entry. That’s a Gutenberg revolution,” he said. “That’s a big deal. This is a game changer. The podcast world is also a Gutenberg moment but it’s even more extensive. The problem with books is that you can’t do anything else while you’re reading. But if you’re listening to a podcast you can be driving a tractor or a long haul truck or doing the dishes. So podcasts free up two hours a day for people to engage in educational activity they otherwise wouldn’t be able to engage in. That’s one-eighth of people’s lives. You’re handing people a lot of time back to engage in high-level intellectual education.

that technological revolution has revealed something good that we didn’t know before: “The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are. And people have a real hunger for deep intellectual dialogue.”

I’ve known for years that the university underserved the community, because we assumed that university education is for 18- to 22-year-olds, which is a proposition that’s so absurd it is absolutely mind-boggling that anyone ever conceptualized it. Why wouldn’t you take university courses throughout your entire life? What, you stop searching for wisdom when you’re 22? I don’t think so. You don’t even start until you’re like in your mid 20s. So I knew universities were underserving the broader community a long time ago. But there wasn’t a mechanism whereby that could be rectified.

Universities are beyond forgiveness, he argued, because due to the growing ranks of administrators, there’s been a radical increase in tuition. “Unsuspecting students are given free access to student loans that will cripple them through their 30s and their 40s, and the universities are enticing them to extend their carefree adolescence for a four year period at the cost of mortgaging their future in a deal that does not allow for escape through bankruptcy,” he complained. “So it’s essentially a form of indentured servitude. There’s no excuse for that … That cripples the economy because the students become overlaid with debt that they’ll never pay off at the time when they should be at the peak of their ability to take entrepreneurial risks. That’s absolutely appalling.”

A critique I frequently hear from Peterson’s critics is that everything he says is either obvious or wrong. I think that critique fails insofar as I sometimes see some critics calling one of his statements obvious even as others insist it is obviously wrong.

a reliable difference among men and women cross-culturally is that men are more aggressive than women. Now what's the evidence for that? Here's one piece of evidence: There are 10 times as many men in prison. Now is that a sociocultural construct? It's like, no, it's not a sociocultural construct. Okay?

Here's another piece of data. Women try to commit suicide more than men by a lot, and that's because women are more prone to depression and anxiety than men are. And there are reasons for that, and that's cross-cultural as well. Now men are way more likely to actually commit suicide. Why? Because they're more aggressive so they use lethal means. So now the question is how much more aggressive are men than women? The answer is not very much. So the claim that men and women are more the same than different is actually true. This is where you have to know something about statistics to understand the way the world works, instead of just applying your a priori ideological presuppositions to things that are too complex to fit in that rubric.

So if you draw two people out of a crowd, one man and one woman, and you had to lay a bet on who was more aggressive, and you bet on the woman, you'd win 40 percent of the time. That's quite a lot. It isn't 50 percent of the time which would be no differences. But it’s a lot. There are lots of women who are more aggressive than lots of men. So the curves overlap a lot. There's way more similarity than difference. And this is along the dimension where there's the most difference. But here's the problem. You can take small differences at the average of a distribution. Then the distributions move off to the side. And then all the action is at the tail. So here's the situation. You don't care about how aggressive the average person is. It's not that relevant. What people care about is who is the most aggressive person out of 100, because that's the person you'd better watch out for.

Whenever I'm interviewed by journalists who have the scent of blood in their nose, let's say, they're very willing and able to characterize the situation I find myself in as political. But that's because they can't see the world in any other manner. The political is a tiny fraction of the world. And what I'm doing isn't political. It's psychological or theological. The political element is peripheral. And if people come to the live lectures, let's say, that's absolutely self-evident

In a New York Times article titled, “Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy,” the writer Nellie Bowles quoted her subject as follows:

Violent attacks are what happens when men do not have partners, Mr. Peterson says, and society needs to work to make sure those men are married. “He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.” Mr. Peterson does not pause when he says this. Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will all only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end.

Ever since, some Peterson critics have claimed that Peterson wants to force women to have sex with male incels, or something similarly dystopian.

...it's an anthropological truism generated primarily through scholars on the left, just so everybody is clear about it, that societies that use monogamy as a social norm, which by the way is virtually every human society that ever existed, do that in an attempt to control the aggression that goes along with polygamy. It's like ‘Oh my God, how contentious can you get.’ Well, how many of you are in monogamous relationships? A majority. How is that enforced?...

If everyone you talk to is boring it’s not them! And so if you're rejected by the opposite sex, if you’re heterosexual, then you're wrong, they're not wrong, and you've got some work to do, man. You've got some difficult work to do. And there isn't anything I've been telling young men that's clearer than that … What I've been telling people is take the responsibility for failure onto yourself. That's a hint that you've got work to do. It could also be a hint that you're young and useless and why the hell would anybody have anything to do with you because you don't have anything to offer. And that's rectifiable. Maturity helps to rectify that.

And what's the gender? Men. Because if you go two standard deviations out from the mean on two curves that overlap but are disjointed, then you derive an overwhelming preponderance of the overrepresented group. That's why men are about 10 times more likely to be in prison.  

Weiss: You are often characterized, at least in the mainstream press, as being transphobic. If you had a student come to you and say, I was born female, I now identify as male, I want you to call me by male pronouns. Would you say yes to that?

Peterson: Well, it would depend on the student and the context and why I thought they were asking me and what I believe their demand actually characterized, and all of that. Because that can be done in a way that is genuine and acceptable, and a way that is manipulative and unacceptable. And if it was genuine and acceptable then I would have no problem with it. And if it was manipulative and unacceptable then not a chance. And you might think, ‘Well, who am I to judge?’ Well, first of all, I am a clinical psychologist, I've talked to people for about 25,000 hours. And I'm responsible for judging how I am going to use my words. I'd judge the same way I judge all my interactions with people, which is to the best of my ability, and characterized by all the errors that I'm prone to. I'm not saying that my judgment would be unerring. I live with the consequences and I'm willing to accept the responsibility.

But also to be clear about this, it never happened––I never refused to call anyone by anything they had asked me to call them by, although that's been reported multiple times. It's a complete falsehood. And it had nothing to do with the transgender issue as far as I'm concerned.

type one and type two error problem

note what his avowed position is: that he has never refused to call a transgender person by their preferred pronoun, that he has done so many times, that he would always try to err on the side of believing a request to be earnest, and that he reserves the right to decline a request he believes to be in bad faith. Whether one finds that to be reasonable or needlessly difficult, it seems irresponsible to tell trans people that a prominent intellectual hates them or is deeply antagonistic to them when the only seeming conflict is utterly hypothetical and ostensibly not even directed against people that Peterson believes to be trans, but only against people whom he does not believe to be trans

In 2014, Wynn noticed a trend on YouTube that disturbed her: Videos with hyperbolic titles like “why feminism ruins everything,” “SJW cringe compilation,” and “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Every College Snowflake” were attracting millions of views and spawning long, jeering comment threads. Wynn felt she was watching the growth of a community of outrage that believes feminists, Marxists, and multiculturalists are conspiring to destroy freedom of speech, liquidate gender norms, and demolish Western civilization

Wynn created ContraPoints to offer entertaining, coherent rebuttals to these kinds of ideas. Her videos also explain left-wing talking points—like rape culture and cultural appropriation—and use philosophy to explore topics that are important to Wynn, such as the meaning of gender for trans people.

Wynn thinks it’s a mistake to assume that viewers of angry, right-wing videos are beyond redemption. “It’s quite difficult to get through to the people who are really committed to these anti-progressive beliefs,” Wynn told me recently. However, she said, she believes that many viewers find such ideas “psychologically resonant” without being hardened reactionaries. This broad, not fully committed center—comprising people whose minds can still be changed—is Wynn’s target audience.

Usually, the videos to which Wynn is responding take the stance of dogged reason cutting through the emotional excesses of so-called “political correctness.” For example, the American conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who is a target of a recent ContraPoints video, has made “facts don’t care about your feelings” his motto. Wynn’s first step in trying to win over those who find anti-progressive views appealing is to show that these ideas often rest on a flimsy foundation. To do so, she fully adopts the rational standards of argument that her rivals pride themselves on following, and demonstrates how they fail to achieve them

Wynn dissects her opponents’ positions, holding up fallacies, evasions, and other rhetorical tricks for examination, all the while providing a running commentary on good argumentative method.

The host defends her own positions according to the same principles. Wynn takes on the strongest version of her opponent’s argument, acknowledges when she thinks her opponents are right and when she has been wrong, clarifies when misunderstood, and provides plenty of evidence for her claims

Wynn is a former Ph.D. student in philosophy, and though her videos are too rich with dick jokes for official settings, her argumentative practice would pass muster in any grad seminar.

she critiques many of her leftist allies for being bad at persuasion.

Socrates persuaded by both the logic of argument and the dynamic of fandom. Wynn is beginning to grow a dedicated following of her own: Members of online discussion groups refer to her as “mother” and “the queen,” produce fan art, and post photos of themselves dressed as characters from her videos.

she shares Socrates’s view that philosophy is more an erotic art than a martial one

As she puts it, she’s not trying to destroy the people she addresses, but seduce them

for Wynn, the true key to persuasion is to engage her audience on an emotional level.

One thing she has come across repeatedly is a disdain for the left’s perceived moral superiority. Anti-progressives of all stripes, Wynn told me, show an “intense defensiveness against being told what to do” and a “repulsion in response to moralizing.”

Matching her speech to the audience’s tastes presents a prickly rhetorical challenge. In an early video, Contra complains: “The problem is this medium. These goddamn savages demand a circus, and I intend to give them one, but behind the curtain, I really just want to have a conversation.

Philosophical conversation requires empathy and good-faith engagement. But the native tongue of political YouTube is ironic antagonism. It’s Wynn’s inimitable way of combining these two ingredients that gives ContraPoints its distinctive mouthfeel.

Wynn spends weeks in the online communities of her opponents—whether they’re climate skeptics or trans-exclusionary feminists—trying to understand what they believe and why they believe it. In Socrates’s words, she’s studying the souls of her audience.

Tough conversations are usually about tribal identity

The best icebreaker. To start such a gathering, have all participants go around the room and describe how they got their names.

Scramble the chairs. If you invite disagreeable people over for a conversation, clear the meeting room, except jumble the chairs in a big pile in the middle. This will force everybody to do a cooperative physical activity, untangling the chairs, before anything else. Plus, you’ll scramble the power dynamics depending on where people choose to place their chairs.

You rigidify tribal identity every time you make a request that contains a hint of blame. You make that identity less inflamed every time you lead with weakness: “I know I’m a piece of work, but I’m trying to do better, and I hope you can help me out.” When tribal differences are intractable, the best solution is to create a third tribe that encompasses both of the warring two

The all-purpose question. “Tell me about the challenges you are facing?” Use it when there seems to be nothing else to say.

Never have a meeting around a problem. If you have a problem conversation you are looking backward and assigning blame

Instead, have a possibility conversation. Discuss how you can use the assets you have together to create something good.

Your narrative will never win

Get over it. Find a new narrative.

Never threaten autonomy

People like to feel that their options are open. If you give them an order — “Calm down” or “Be reasonable” — all that they will hear is that you’re threatening their freedom of maneuver, and they will shut down

Attune to the process. When you’re in the middle of an emotional disagreement, shift attention to the process of how you are having the conversatio

Agree on something. If you’re in the middle of an intractable disagreement, find some preliminary thing you can agree on so you can at least take a step into a world of shared reality

Gratitude. People who are good at relationships are always scanning the scene for things they can thank somebody for

Never sulk or withdraw. If somebody doesn’t understand you, not communicating with her won’t help her understand you better.

Reject either/or. The human mind has a tendency to reduce problems to either we do this or we do that

There are usually many more options neither side has imagined yet.

Presume the good. Any disagreement will go better if you assume the other person has good intentions and if you demonstrate how much you over all admire him or her.

Trying to correct misperceptions can actually reinforce them, according to a 2006 paper by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, also cited by Graves. They documented what they called a “backfire effect” by showing the persistence of the belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in 2005

“The results show that direct factual contradictions can actually strengthen ideologically grounded factual belief,” they wrote.

people remember the assertion and forget whether it’s a lie. The authors wrote: “The more often older adults were told that a given claim was false, the more likely they were to accept it as true after several days have passed.”

studies show that attempts to refute false information often backfire and lead people to hold on to their misperceptions even more strongly.

The study showed two interesting things: People are more likely to accept information if it’s presented unemotionally, in graphs;

and they’re even more accepting if the factual presentation is accompanied by “affirmation” that asks respondents to recall an experience that made them feel good about themselves.

Bottom line: Vilifying Trump voters — or, alternatively, parents who don’t want to have their children vaccinated — won’t convince them they’re wrong. Probably it will have the opposite effect.

The final point that emerged from Graves’s survey is that people will resist abandoning a false belief unless they have a compelling alternative explanation. That point was made in an article called “The Debunking Handbook,” by Australian researchers John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky. They wrote: “Unless great care is taken, any effort to debunk misinformation can inadvertently reinforce the very myths one seeks to correct.”

Trump’s campaign pushes buttons that social scientists understand. When the GOP nominee paints a dark picture of a violent, frightening America, he triggers the “fight or flight” response that’s hardwired in our brains. For the body politic, it can produce a kind of panic attack.