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katedriscoll

Confirmation bias in the utilization of others' opinion strength | Nature Neuroscience - 0 views

www.nature.com/...s41593-019-0549-2

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Humans tend to discount information that undermines past choices and judgments. This
  • confirmation bias has significant impact on domains ranging from politics to science and education. Little is known about the mechanisms underlying this fundamental characteristic of belief formation. Here we report a mechanism underlying the confirmation bias. Specifically, we provide evidence for a failure to use the strength of others’ disconfirming opinions to alter confidence in judgments, but adequate use when opinions are confirmatory. This bias is related to reduced neural sensitivity to the strength of others’ opinions in the posterior medial prefrontal cortex when opinions are disconfirming. Our results demonstrate that existing judgments alter the neural representation of information strength, leaving the individual less likely to alter opinions in the face of disagreement.
katedriscoll

Confirmation Bias | Simply Psychology - 0 views

www.simplypsychology.org/confirmation-bias.html

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Confirmation Bias is the tendency to look for information that supports, rather than rejects, one’s preconceptions, typically by interpreting evidence to confirm existing beliefs while rejecting or ignoring any conflicting data (American Psychological Association).
  • experiment by Peter Watson (1960) in which the subjects were to find the experimenter’s rule for sequencing numbers.Its results showed that the subjects chose responses that supported their hypotheses while rejecting contradictory evidence, and even though their hypotheses were not correct, they became confident in them quickly (Gray, 2010, p. 356).Though such evidence of the confirmation bias has appeared in psychological literature throughout history, the term ‘confirmation bias’ was first used in a 1977 paper detailing an experimental study on the topic (Mynatt, Doherty, & Tweney, 1977).
  • This type of confirmation bias explains people’s search for evidence in a one-sided way to support their hypotheses or theories.Experiments have shown that people provide tests/questions that are designed to yield “yes” if their favored hypothesis was true, and ignore alternative hypotheses that are likely to give the same result.This is also known as congruence heuristic (Baron, 2000, p.162-64). Though the preference for affirmative questions itself may not be bias, there are experiments that have shown that congruence bias does exist.
ilanaprincilus06

Want To Mix 2 Different COVID-19 Vaccines? Canada Is Fine With That : Coronavirus Updates : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...cines-canada-is-fine-with-that

Canada Covid-19 vaccine

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 05 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Canada's public health agency says people can mix COVID-19 vaccines if they want to, citing cases where local supply shortages or health concerns might otherwise prevent some from completing their two-dose vaccination regimen.
  • Public confidence is also an issue: Health officials cite a study from late April that found more than 90% of participants said they were comfortable with either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, but only 52% of participants said they were comfortable with the AstraZeneca vaccine.
  • "we are recommending that someone who received a first dose of the AstraZeneca ... vaccine may receive an mRNA vaccine for their second dose,"
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  • The agency cites the results of a study in Germany and clinical trials in the U.K. and Spain as supporting the safety of vaccine interchangeability.
  • As of late May, 50.6% of Canada's population had received at least one vaccination shot — but only 4.6% of the population was fully vaccinated.
  • "Different vaccine products have been used to complete a vaccine series for influenza, hepatitis A, and others to complete a vaccine series for influenza, hepatitis A, and others."
  • "Basically, all vaccines work by showing people's immune systems something that looks like an invading virus but really isn't. If the real virus ever comes along, their immune systems will recognize it and be prepared to fight it off.
  • "Using two different vaccines is a bit like giving the immune system two pictures of the virus, maybe one face-on and one in profile."
  • "Individuals who have received one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccine should receive a second dose of the same vaccine to complete the vaccination series," the spokesperson added.
Javier E

Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in | World news | The Guardian - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...redicted-the-future-we-live-in

philosophy fringe acceleration psychology technology

shared by Javier E on 11 May 17 - No Cached
  • Roger Zelazny, published his third novel. In many ways, Lord of Light was of its time, shaggy with imported Hindu mythology and cosmic dialogue. Yet there were also glints of something more forward-looking and political.
  • accelerationism has gradually solidified from a fictional device into an actual intellectual movement: a new way of thinking about the contemporary world and its potential.
  • Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified – either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative.
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  • Accelerationists favour automation. They favour the further merging of the digital and the human. They often favour the deregulation of business, and drastically scaled-back government. They believe that people should stop deluding themselves that economic and technological progress can be controlled.
  • Accelerationism, therefore, goes against conservatism, traditional socialism, social democracy, environmentalism, protectionism, populism, nationalism, localism and all the other ideologies that have sought to moderate or reverse the already hugely disruptive, seemingly runaway pace of change in the modern world
  • Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian in their introduction to #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, a sometimes baffling, sometimes exhilarating book, published in 2014, which remains the only proper guide to the movement in existence.
  • “We all live in an operating system set up by the accelerating triad of war, capitalism and emergent AI,” says Steve Goodman, a British accelerationist
  • A century ago, the writers and artists of the Italian futurist movement fell in love with the machines of the industrial era and their apparent ability to invigorate society. Many futurists followed this fascination into war-mongering and fascism.
  • One of the central figures of accelerationism is the British philosopher Nick Land, who taught at Warwick University in the 1990s
  • Land has published prolifically on the internet, not always under his own name, about the supposed obsolescence of western democracy; he has also written approvingly about “human biodiversity” and “capitalistic human sorting” – the pseudoscientific idea, currently popular on the far right, that different races “naturally” fare differently in the modern world; and about the supposedly inevitable “disintegration of the human species” when artificial intelligence improves sufficiently.
  • In our politically febrile times, the impatient, intemperate, possibly revolutionary ideas of accelerationism feel relevant, or at least intriguing, as never before. Noys says: “Accelerationists always seem to have an answer. If capitalism is going fast, they say it needs to go faster. If capitalism hits a bump in the road, and slows down” – as it has since the 2008 financial crisis – “they say it needs to be kickstarted.”
  • On alt-right blogs, Land in particular has become a name to conjure with. Commenters have excitedly noted the connections between some of his ideas and the thinking of both the libertarian Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and Trump’s iconoclastic strategist Steve Bannon.
  • “In Silicon Valley,” says Fred Turner, a leading historian of America’s digital industries, “accelerationism is part of a whole movement which is saying, we don’t need [conventional] politics any more, we can get rid of ‘left’ and ‘right’, if we just get technology right. Accelerationism also fits with how electronic devices are marketed – the promise that, finally, they will help us leave the material world, all the mess of the physical, far behind.”
  • In 1972, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari published Anti-Oedipus. It was a restless, sprawling, appealingly ambiguous book, which suggested that, rather than simply oppose capitalism, the left should acknowledge its ability to liberate as well as oppress people, and should seek to strengthen these anarchic tendencies, “to go still further … in the movement of the market … to ‘accelerate the process’”.
  • By the early 90s Land had distilled his reading, which included Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard, into a set of ideas and a writing style that, to his students at least, were visionary and thrillingly dangerous. Land wrote in 1992 that capitalism had never been properly unleashed, but instead had always been held back by politics, “the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind”. He dismissed Europe as a sclerotic, increasingly marginal place, “the racial trash-can of Asia”. And he saw civilisation everywhere accelerating towards an apocalypse: “Disorder must increase... Any [human] organisation is ... a mere ... detour in the inexorable death-flow.”
  • With the internet becoming part of everyday life for the first time, and capitalism seemingly triumphant after the collapse of communism in 1989, a belief that the future would be almost entirely shaped by computers and globalisation – the accelerated “movement of the market” that Deleuze and Guattari had called for two decades earlier – spread across British and American academia and politics during the 90s. The Warwick accelerationists were in the vanguard.
  • In the US, confident, rainbow-coloured magazines such as Wired promoted what became known as “the Californian ideology”: the optimistic claim that human potential would be unlocked everywhere by digital technology. In Britain, this optimism influenced New Labour
  • At Warwick, however, the prophecies were darker. “One of our motives,” says Plant, “was precisely to undermine the cheery utopianism of the 90s, much of which seemed very conservative” – an old-fashioned male desire for salvation through gadgets, in her view.
  • The CCRU gang formed reading groups and set up conferences and journals. They squeezed into the narrow CCRU room in the philosophy department and gave each other impromptu seminars.
  • The main result of the CCRU’s frantic, promiscuous research was a conveyor belt of cryptic articles, crammed with invented terms, sometimes speculative to the point of being fiction.
  • The Warwick accelerationists saw themselves as participants, not traditional academic observers
  • K-punk was written by Mark Fisher, formerly of the CCRU. The blog retained some Warwick traits, such as quoting reverently from Deleuze and Guattari, but it gradually shed the CCRU’s aggressive rhetoric and pro-capitalist politics for a more forgiving, more left-leaning take on modernity. Fisher increasingly felt that capitalism was a disappointment to accelerationists, with its cautious, entrenched corporations and endless cycles of essentially the same products. But he was also impatient with the left, which he thought was ignoring new technology
  • lex Williams, co-wrote a Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics. “Capitalism has begun to constrain the productive forces of technology,” they wrote. “[Our version of] accelerationism is the basic belief that these capacities can and should be let loose … repurposed towards common ends … towards an alternative modernity.”
  • What that “alternative modernity” might be was barely, but seductively, sketched out, with fleeting references to reduced working hours, to technology being used to reduce social conflict rather than exacerbate it, and to humanity moving “beyond the limitations of the earth and our own immediate bodily forms”. On politics and philosophy blogs from Britain to the US and Italy, the notion spread that Srnicek and Williams had founded a new political philosophy: “left accelerationism”.
  • Two years later, in 2015, they expanded the manifesto into a slightly more concrete book, Inventing the Future. It argued for an economy based as far as possible on automation, with the jobs, working hours and wages lost replaced by a universal basic income. The book attracted more attention than a speculative leftwing work had for years, with interest and praise from intellectually curious leftists
  • Even the thinking of the arch-accelerationist Nick Land, who is 55 now, may be slowing down. Since 2013, he has become a guru for the US-based far-right movement neoreaction, or NRx as it often calls itself. Neoreactionaries believe in the replacement of modern nation-states, democracy and government bureaucracies by authoritarian city states, which on neoreaction blogs sound as much like idealised medieval kingdoms as they do modern enclaves such as Singapore.
  • Land argues now that neoreaction, like Trump and Brexit, is something that accelerationists should support, in order to hasten the end of the status quo.
  • In 1970, the American writer Alvin Toffler, an exponent of accelerationism’s more playful intellectual cousin, futurology, published Future Shock, a book about the possibilities and dangers of new technology. Toffler predicted the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence, cryonics, cloning and robots working behind airline check-in desks
  • Land left Britain. He moved to Taiwan “early in the new millennium”, he told me, then to Shanghai “a couple of years later”. He still lives there now.
  • In a 2004 article for the Shanghai Star, an English-language paper, he described the modern Chinese fusion of Marxism and capitalism as “the greatest political engine of social and economic development the world has ever known”
  • Once he lived there, Land told me, he realised that “to a massive degree” China was already an accelerationist society: fixated by the future and changing at speed. Presented with the sweeping projects of the Chinese state, his previous, libertarian contempt for the capabilities of governments fell away
  • Without a dynamic capitalism to feed off, as Deleuze and Guattari had in the early 70s, and the Warwick philosophers had in the 90s, it may be that accelerationism just races up blind alleys. In his 2014 book about the movement, Malign Velocities, Benjamin Noys accuses it of offering “false” solutions to current technological and economic dilemmas. With accelerationism, he writes, a breakthrough to a better future is “always promised and always just out of reach”.
  • “The pace of change accelerates,” concluded a documentary version of the book, with a slightly hammy voiceover by Orson Welles. “We are living through one of the greatest revolutions in history – the birth of a new civilisation.”
  • Shortly afterwards, the 1973 oil crisis struck. World capitalism did not accelerate again for almost a decade. For much of the “new civilisation” Toffler promised, we are still waiting
caelengrubb

Social Media Effects on Teens | Impact of Social Media on Self-Esteem - 0 views

childmind.org/...social-media-affects-teenagers

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • In fact, experts worry that the social media and text messages that have become so integral to teenage life are promoting anxiety and lowering self-esteem.
  • A survey conducted by the Royal Society for Public Health asked 14-24 year olds in the UK how social media platforms impacted their health and wellbeing. The survey results found that Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all led to increased feelings of depression, anxiety, poor body image and loneliness.
  • For one thing, modern teens are learning to do most of their communication while looking at a screen, not another person.
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  • Learning how to make friends is a major part of growing up, and friendship requires a certain amount of risk-taking. This is true for making a new friend, but it’s also true for maintaining friendships. When there are problems that need to be faced—big ones or small ones—it takes courage to be honest about your feelings and then hear what the other person has to say
  • But when friendship is conducted online and through texts, kids are doing this in a context stripped of many of the most personal—and sometimes intimidating—aspects of communication
  • The other big danger that comes from kids communicating more indirectly is that it has gotten easier to be cruel. “Kids text all sorts of things that you would never in a million years contemplate saying to anyone’s face,”
  • “Girls are socialized more to compare themselves to other people, girls in particular, to develop their identities, so it makes them more vulnerable to the downside of all this.” She warns that a lack of solid self-esteem is often to blame. “We forget that relational aggression comes from insecurity and feeling awful about yourself, and wanting to put other people down so you feel better.”
  • . Teenage girls sort through hundreds of photos, agonizing over which ones to post online. Boys compete for attention by trying to out-gross one other, pushing the envelope as much as they can in the already disinhibited atmosphere online.
  • Another big change that has come with new technology and especially smart phones is that we are never really alone. Kids update their status, share what they’re watching, listening to, and reading, and have apps that let their friends know their specific location on a map at all times.
  • Offline, the gold standard advice for helping kids build healthy self-esteem is to get them involved in something that they’re interested in
Javier E

The View from Nowhere: Questions and Answers » Pressthink - 2 views

pressthink.org/...-nowhere-questions-and-answers

journalism objectivity bias US impartiality

shared by Javier E on 14 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • In pro journalism, American style, the View from Nowhere is a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position “impartial.” Second, it’s a means of defense against a style of criticism that is fully anticipated: charges of bias originating in partisan politics and the two-party system. Third: it’s an attempt to secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view. American journalists have almost a lust for the View from Nowhere because they think it has more authority than any other possible stance.
  • Who gets credit for the phrase, “view from nowhere?” # A. The philosopher Thomas Nagel, who wrote a very important book with that title.
  • Q. What does it say? # A. It says that human beings are, in fact, capable of stepping back from their position to gain an enlarged understanding, which includes the more limited view they had before the step back. Think of the cinema: when the camera pulls back to reveal where a character had been standing and shows us a fuller tableau. To Nagel, objectivity is that kind of motion. We try to “transcend our particular viewpoint and develop an expanded consciousness that takes in the world more fully.” #
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  • But there are limits to this motion. We can’t transcend all our starting points. No matter how far it pulls back the camera is still occupying a position. We can’t actually take the “view from nowhere,” but this doesn’t mean that objectivity is a lie or an illusion. Our ability to step back and the fact that there are limits to it– both are real. And realism demands that we acknowledge both.
  • Q. So is objectivity a myth… or not? # A. One of the many interesting things Nagel says in that book is that “objectivity is both underrated and overrated, sometimes by the same persons.” It’s underrated by those who scoff at it as a myth. It is overrated by people who think it can replace the view from somewhere or transcend the human subject. It can’t.
  • When MSNBC suspends Keith Olbermann for donating without company permission to candidates he supports– that’s dumb. When NPR forbids its “news analysts” from expressing a view on matters they are empowered to analyze– that’s dumb. When reporters have to “launder” their views by putting them in the mouths of think tank experts: dumb. When editors at the Washington Post decline even to investigate whether the size of rallies on the Mall can be reliably estimated because they want to avoid charges of “leaning one way or the other,” as one of them recently put it, that is dumb. When CNN thinks that, because it’s not MSNBC and it’s not Fox, it’s the only the “real news network” on cable, CNN is being dumb about itself.
  • Let some in the press continue on with the mask of impartiality, which has advantages for cultivating sources and soothing advertisers. Let others experiment with transparency as the basis for trust. When you click on their by-line it takes you to a disclosure page where there is a bio, a kind of mission statement, and a creative attempt to say: here’s where I’m coming from (one example) along with campaign contributions, any affiliations or memberships, and–I’m just speculating now–a list of heroes and villains, or major influences, along with an archive of the work, plus anything else that might assist the user in placing this person on the user’s mattering map.
  • if objectivity means trying to ground truth claims in verifiable facts, I am definitely for that. If it means there’s a “hard” reality out there that exists beyond any of our descriptions of it, sign me up. If objectivity is the requirement to acknowledge what is, regardless of whether we want it to be that way, then I want journalists who can be objective in that sense.
  • If it means trying to see things in that fuller perspective Thomas Nagel talked about–pulling the camera back, revealing our previous position as only one of many–I second the motion. If it means the struggle to get beyond the limited perspective that our experience and upbringing afford us… yeah, we need more of that, not less. I think there is value in acts of description that do not attempt to say whether the thing described is good or bad
  • I think we are in the midst of shift in the system by which trust is sustained in professional journalism. David Weinberger tried to capture it with his phrase: transparency is the new objectivity. My version of that: it’s easier to trust in “here’s where I’m coming from” than the View from Nowhere. These are two different ways of bidding for the confidence of the users.
  • In the newer way, the logic is different. “Look, I’m not going to pretend that I have no view. Instead, I am going to level with you about where I’m coming from on this. So factor that in when you evaluate my report. Because I’ve done the work and this is what I’ve concluded…”
  • it has unearned authority in the American press. If in doing the serious work of journalism–digging, reporting, verification, mastering a beat–you develop a view, expressing that view does not diminish your authority. It may even add to it. The View from Nowhere doesn’t know from this. It also encourages journalists to develop bad habits. Like: criticism from both sides is a sign that you’re doing something right, when you could be doing everything wrong.
  • Who gets credit for the phrase, “view from nowhere?” # A. The philosopher Thomas Nagel, who wrote a very important book with that title.
  • It says that human beings are, in fact, capable of stepping back from their position to gain an enlarged understanding, which includes the more limited view they had before the step back. Think of the cinema: when the camera pulls back to reveal where a character had been standing and shows us a fuller tableau. To Nagel, objectivity is that kind of motion. We try to “transcend our particular viewpoint and develop an expanded consciousness that takes in the world more fully.”
Javier E

Coronavirus - Mindfulness is useless in a pandemic | 1843 magazine | The Economist - 1 views

www.economist.com/...lness-is-useless-in-a-pandemic

mindfulness pandemic anticipation future present

shared by Javier E on 03 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • hese days there are mindful guides to everything from anger to recruitment. There are even mindfulness advent calendars (who needs chocolate when you can feed your soul?). Like selling sand to the Sahara, these all pitch to us the ability to live in the “now”
  • Planning is key to our physical survival. It’s also central to our emotional wellbeing.
  • Expectation is integral to survival and is seen in even the most underwhelming creatures.
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  • In a small way babies are learning to predict and anticipate the future.
  • You can see similar responses throughout the animal kingdom. Give a chimp a raisin and its reward neurons fire. Teach a chimp that pressing a button will bring a raisin, and the chimp’s brain starts to react to the button as if that were the reward. “The process of getting the reward itself becomes rewarding,”
  • It may be profitable but it flies in the face of thousands of years of evolution. Animals are hardwired to react to the future
  • Daydreaming, or mind-wandering, as the wonks call it, is part of universal human experience. In 2008 one Harvard study found that people spent nearly half of their waking hours mind-wandering – often about good things.
  • Imagining a positive outcome is a popular technique to build resilience and confidence in everything from sport to job interviews. Teachers may tell pupils off for daydreaming in lessons but studies show a link between daydreaming and creative thought.
  • . That’s not the point. It’s our dreams that feed us. We are hardwired to anticipate the future and, with all due respect to the philosophers, to thrill to it.
  • . The pandemic has reminded us that the joy we take in planning is as valid as the event itself.
  • When the present is crushing – when lives and economies are being ruined – our imagination offers us a welcome escape. The mind, as Milton put it, is its own place: it can make a hell of heaven, or a heaven of hell. Perhaps we should let it
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
  • 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.”
  • 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
  • Societies evolve complexity, he argues, precisely to meet such challenges.
  • 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.
caelengrubb

The Linguistic Evolution of 'Like' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...507614

shared by caelengrubb on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In our mouths or in print, in villages or in cities, in buildings or in caves, a language doesn’t sit still. It can’t. Language change has preceded apace even in places known for preserving a language in amber
  • It’s under this view of language—as something becoming rather than being, a film rather than a photo, in motion rather than at rest—that we should consider the way young people use (drum roll, please) like
  • First, let’s take like in just its traditional, accepted forms. Even in its dictionary definition, like is the product of stark changes in meaning that no one would ever guess.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • To an Old English speaker, the word that later became like was the word for, of all things, “body.”
  • The word was lic, and lic was part of a word, gelic, that meant “with the body,” as in “with the body of,” which was a way of saying “similar to”—as in like
  • It was just that, step by step, the syllable lic, which to an Old English speaker meant “body,” came to mean, when uttered by people centuries later, “similar to”—and life went on.
  • Like has become a piece of grammar: It is the source of the suffix -ly.
  • Like has become a part of compounds. Likewise began as like plus a word, wise, which was different from the one meaning “smart when either a child or getting old.”
  • Dictionaries tell us it’s pronounced “like-MINE-did,” but I, for one, say “LIKE- minded” and have heard many others do so
  • Therefore, like is ever so much more than some isolated thing clinically described in a dictionary with a definition like “(preposition) ‘having the same characteristics or qualities as; similar to.’”
  • What we are seeing in like’s transformations today are just the latest chapters in a story that began with an ancient word that was supposed to mean “body.”
  • Because we think of like as meaning “akin to” or “similar to,” kids decorating every sentence or two with it seems like overuse. After all, how often should a coherently minded person need to note that something is similar to something rather than just being that something?
  • The new like, then, is associated with hesitation.
  • So today’s like did not spring mysteriously from a crowd on the margins of unusual mind-set and then somehow jump the rails from them into the general population.
  • The problem with the hesitation analysis is that this was a thoroughly confident speaker.
  • It’s real-life usage of this kind—to linguists it is data, just like climate patterns are to meteorologists—that suggests that the idea of like as the linguistic equivalent to slumped shoulders is off.
  • Understandably so, of course—the meaning of like suggests that people are claiming that everything is “like” itself rather than itself.
  • The new like acknowledges unspoken objection while underlining one’s own point (the factuality). Like grandparents translates here as “There were, despite what you might think, actually grandparents.”
  • Then there is a second new like, which is closer to what people tend to think of all its new uses: it is indeed a hedge.
  • Then, the two likes I have mentioned must be distinguished from yet a third usage, the quotative like—as in “And she was like, ‘I didn’t even invite him.’
  • This is yet another way that like has become grammar. The meaning “similar to” is as natural a source here as it was for -ly: mimicking people’s utterances is talking similarly to, as in “like,” them.
  • Thus the modern American English speaker has mastered not just two, but actually three different new usages of like.
jmfinizio

Opinion: UK decision to delay second Covid-19 vaccine dose is dubious - CNN - 0 views

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

opinion science research covid19 cnn

shared by jmfinizio on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The second dose of both vaccines can now be given up to 12 weeks after the first dose
  • Similar proposals about delaying the second dose have been discussed in the US,
  • the FDA does not support changing the vaccine administration protocol initially set forth
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • how can the public trust the right decisions were made
  • how can the public trust the right decisions were made
  • How can knowledgeable independent healthcare professionals endorse those decisions when they are not privy to the process?
  • Pfizer vaccine to have a 90% short term efficacy, and a single dose of the Oxford vaccine to have a 70% short term efficacy.
  • Would confidence in the vaccine be reduced by multiple reports of vaccine failures among at-risk individuals
  • Perhaps the UK could consider instead other ways to conserve vaccine supplies that may be safer than the delayed second dose option.
  • Also, for people who have recovered from Covid-19 a single vaccine dose may indeed be sufficient to boost their antibodies to high levels
cvanderloo

Britain, dubbed 'plague island', wants tourists to return | CNN Travel - 0 views

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

UK brexit Britain covid travel

shared by cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Boris Johnson plunged the country into harsh new restrictions, blaming a new variant of the disease that had been spreading in London and the southeast of England since September.
  • Country after country closed their borders to flights from the UK, in a bid to keep the new variant confined to "plague island,"
  • UK travelers are still banned from much of the world -- including EU countries -- because of the homegrown variant.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • In the end, 2020 saw a 76% decline in visitors and an 80% drop.
  • "A lot of our multi-country trips including England used to fly round-trip to London, and now we're looking to see if from a traveler's perspective that will be the most convenient."
  • DaSilva said that potential Brexit complications were on the radar of travelers' concerns last year, but, with a no-deal averted and the pandemic taking center stage, it's no longer an issue for her guests. In fact, three of the top five most searched trips on their website involve Great Britain.
  • "Early on in the pandemic, people were searching for places that had more open green spaces, like New Zealand and Ireland," she says. "But as news of the vaccine came out and people became more confident about trips for this year, England popped back up to the top."
  • And there's one big bonus for those traveling to the UK this year --- the tanking pound.
  • The UK made a great play that it was an international and welcoming destination over the 2012 Olympics, but that message was withdrawn with Brexit. The posturing of the government -- especially the threat to put gunboats in the Channel -- didn't play well with a lot of origin markets," he says.
  • "There may be differences with the import of goods and transmission of services that means London isn't as prosperous as it was."
  • "Suddenly, using the UK as gateway to Europe becomes enormously less attractive. Travelers will have to think about whether it's sensible to come to the UK as part of a European destination. They may wish to look at the UK as a single destination, but that isn't nearly as attractive as the UK being part of a European vacation."
  • "The UK won't be ignored, but it's unlikely to recover as strongly as Europe.
  • About 20% of the Intercontinental's staff left the UK before Brexit, says Ouseph; but while in normal times that would be a crisis, he thinks that Covid-induced job losses will mean hotels can fill these positions for now -- at least, the customer-facing ones. Instead, it's the less visible, but crucial roles, where they'll struggle.
  • Not everyone thinks Brexit will make a big difference to the inbound UK travel industry.
  • Maine -- who hasn't run tours since October -- says that he thinks the vaccine "will get us out of it -- it's a matter of when, not if." And he predicts that "when" could be as early as Easter.
  • "Rolling out the vaccine is the acid test of being a coherent holiday destination, and the UK looks like it's doing a reasonably good job in comparison to everyone else."
ardenganse

William urges public to follow queen's example and get jab - ABC News - 0 views

abcnews.go.com/...lic-follow-queens-jab-75300165

shared by ardenganse on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • LONDON -- Prince William is encouraging everyone in Britain to follow the example of Queen Elizabeth II, his grandmother, in being inoculated against COVID-19 as authorities battle unsubstantiated fears about vaccine safety.
    • ardenganse
      ardenganse on 17 Jan 21
       
      Relates to the logical fallacy of argument from authority. In this case, an authority figure is being used to convince people to do something, which they are hesitant to do.
  • The medics told William some members of the public are reluctant to get any of the coronavirus vaccines authorized by regulators.
  • The disclosure was meant to end speculation about the matter and to boost confidence in the shots
cvanderloo

Uganda Election: President Yoweri Museveni Declared Winner As Bobi Wine Alleges Fraud : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...-winner-as-bobi-wine-alleges-f

Uganda Fruaud Museveni Wine

shared by cvanderloo on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni has won a sixth term in office, fighting off a challenge by former singer Bobi Wine
  • Wine's run drew many young Ugandans to pay attention to politics.
  • Museveni received 58% of the vote to 34% for Wine
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Wine is alleging that votes were rigged
  • Ahead of the vote, Museveni's government shut down social media outlets in Uganda
  • Wine said that security forces were not allowing anyone in or out of his home, and he urged Ugandans to reject the results.
  • called Uganda's electoral process "fundamentally flawed," citing "authorities' denial of accreditation to election observers, violence and harassment of opposition figures" and the arrest of civil service organization workers.
  • The election has been closely watched because of Wine's appeal to younger voters — a crucial strength in a country with one of the youngest populations in the world, where more than two-thirds of the population is under age 30.
  • Wine sought to replace one of Africa's longest-tenured leaders with one of its youngest, hoping to make a generational shift that would be felt across the continent.
  • "Uganda has never witnessed a peaceful transfer of power since gaining its independence in 1962."
  • Wine himself was arrested in November, sparking large protests during which dozens of people died.
  • A recent Gallup poll found that only around a third of respondents in Uganda said they're confident in the honesty of their country's elections.
  • This week, Wine said the military had killed his driver and that his home was raided.
  • But Wine is alleging that the vote was rigged, as election officials face questions over how results were tallied amid an Internet blackout, according to the AP.
  • In an interview with NPR, Wine said security forces were not allowing anyone in or out of his home, and he urged Ugandans to reject the results.
  • Wine became a pop star with music that blends Afrobeat with sounds borrowed from reggae and dancehall.
  • He then turned toward politics, winning a seat in parliament.
  • Museveni recently told NPR that he views pro-Wine demonstrators as "agents of foreign schemes."
  • This week, as ballots were being counted and the outcome of the 2021 vote hung in the balance, there were worries about what a transition of leaders might look like in the former British colony.
margogramiak

Low-income preschoolers exposed to nurturing care have with higher IQ scores later on -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...201218152721.htm

shared by margogramiak on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Preschoolers living in impoverished communities who have access to a nurturing home environment have significantly higher intelligence quotient (IQ) scores in adolescence compared to those raised without nurturing care.
  • Preschoolers living in impoverished communities who have access to a nurturing home environment have significantly higher intelligence quotient (IQ) scores in adolescence compared to those raised without nurturing care.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      In class, we've talked about the effects of economic and emotional states growing up.
  • hey found that prenatal and early life adversities matter throughout life.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Of course they do! How could they not? In Spanish, we learned about the "circle of poverty," which definitely applies here.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • They also found that being raised in a nurturing environment could significantly counteract the detrimental effect of early adversities on IQ and help children achieve their full intellectual potential.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I think "feeling loved" and "feeling like you are enough" is a hug contributor to success. If you are told you can do something, you are much more confident than if you are told you can't, obviously.
  • A nurturing environment also led to better growth and fewer psycho-social difficulties in adolescence, but it did not mitigate the effects of early adversities on growth and psycho-social difficulties."
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Interesting.
  • one in five children are raised in poverty and 15 percent do not complete high school, with higher rates for children in Black and Hispanic families.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      These are very impactful stats.
  • Parents want to provide nurturing environments and we need to help them." She said this includes interacting with young children in a positive way such as reading children's books from the library, singing songs together, and playing games with numbers and letters. Children who engage in age-appropriate chores with adult supervision like picking up toys and clearing the table gain skills and feel good about helping.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      This is up to the parents though, isn't it? How can the community solve the issue of lack of nurture in a household?
  • "This research highlights the importance of nurturing caregivers, both at home and at school to help children lead more productive lives as adults."
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      It seems obvious nurturing has positive effects. I find it hard to believe that anyone who doesn't nurture their children who read this article and change the way they parent. I wish there was a way provided that allowed the community to help out, but I don't think this is a possibility.
anonymous

Pandemic-Proof Your Habits - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...emic-habits-routine-brain.html

shared by anonymous on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The good news is that much of what we miss about our routines and customs, and what makes them beneficial to us as a species, has more to do with their comforting regularity than the actual behaviors
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      Our brains have that much power over our emotions, and can change how we feel about the world when they experience a change in routine.
  • The key to coping during this, or any, time of upheaval is to quickly establish new routines so that, even if the world is uncertain, there are still things you can count on.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      I haven't really thought of this, since I'm so set on getting back to old routines.
  • Human beings are prediction machines.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • Our brains are statistical organs that are built simply to predict what will happen next
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      I don't know if we've talked about this specifically, more that we like and tend to make up patterns to "predict" the future and reassure ourselves. However, it's not real.
  • This makes sense because, in prehistoric times, faulty predictions could lead to some very unpleasant surprises — like a tiger eating you or sinking in quicksand.
  • So-called prediction errors (like finding salmon instead of turkey on your plate on Thanksgiving) send us into a tizzy because our brains interpret them as a potential threat.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      We have talked about this- the survival aspect of this reaction to change.
  • Keep doing what you’ve been doing, because you did it before, and you didn’t die.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      A good way of putting it.
  • all essentially subconscious efforts to make your world more predictable, orderly and safe.
  • Routines and rituals also conserve precious brainpower
  • It turns out our brains are incredibly greedy when it comes to energy consumption, sucking up 20 percent of calories while accounting for only 2 percent of overall body weight.
  • Our brains are literally overburdened with all the uncertainty caused by the pandemic.
  • Not only is there the seeming capriciousness of the virus, but we no longer have the routines that served as the familiar scaffolding of our lives
  • “It’s counterintuitive because we think of meaning in life as coming from these grandiose experiences
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      I've definitely felt this way.
  • grandiose
  • grandiose
  • Of course, you can always take routines and rituals too far, such as the extremely controlled and repetitive behaviors indicative of addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder and various eating disorders.
  • it’s mundane routines that give us structure to help us pare things down and better navigate the world, which helps us make sense of things and feel that life has meaning.”
  • In the coronavirus era, people may resort to obsessive cleaning, hoarding toilet paper, stockpiling food or neurotically wearing masks when driving alone in their cars. On the other end of the spectrum are those who stubbornly adhere to their old routines because stopping feels more threatening than the virus.
  • You’re much better off establishing a new routine within the limited environment that we find ourselves in
  • Luckily, there is a vast repertoire of habits you can adopt and routines you can establish to structure your days no matter what crises are unfolding around you
  • The point is to find what works for you. It just needs to be regular and help you achieve your goals, whether intellectually, emotionally, socially or professionally. The best habits not only provide structure and order but also give you a sense of pleasure, accomplishment or confidence upon completion.
  • It could be as simple as making your bed as soon as you get up in the morning or committing to working the same hours in the same spot.
  • Pandemic-proof routines might include weekly phone or video calls with friends, Taco Tuesdays with the family, hiking with your spouse on weekends, regularly filling a bird feeder, set times for prayer or meditation, front yard happy hours with the neighbors or listening to an audiobook every night before bed.
  • The truth is that you cannot control what happens in life. But you can create a routine that gives your life a predictable rhythm and secure mooring.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      It's all about changing your thoughts and not tricking exactly but helping your brain.
  • This frees your brain to develop perspective so you’re better able to take life’s surprises in stride.
  • I attended a Thanksgiving dinner several years ago where the hostess, without warning family and friends, broke with tradition and served salmon instead of turkey, roasted potatoes instead of mashed, raspberry coulis instead of cranberry sauce and … you get the idea.
  • Too many people are still longing for their old routines. Get some new ones instead.
  • It wasn’t that the meal itself was bad. In fact, the meal was outstanding. The problem was that it wasn’t the meal everyone was expecting.
  • When there are discrepancies between expectations and reality, all kinds of distress signals go off in the brain.
  • It doesn’t matter if it’s a holiday ritual or more mundane habit like how you tie your shoes; if you can’t do it the way you normally do it, you’re biologically engineered to get upset.
  • This in part explains people’s grief and longing for the routines that were the background melodies of their lives before the pandemic
Javier E

The Lasting Lessons of John Conway's Game of Life - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...math-conway-game-of-life.html

emergent life game lessons programming software simulation chaos

shared by Javier E on 29 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • “Because of its analogies with the rise, fall and alterations of a society of living organisms, it belongs to a growing class of what are called ‘simulation games,’” Mr. Gardner wrote when he introduced Life to the world 50 years ago with his October 1970 column.
  • The Game of Life motivated the use of cellular automata in the rich field of complexity science, with simulations modeling everything from ants to traffic, clouds to galaxies. More trivially, the game attracted a cult of “Lifenthusiasts,” programmers who spent a lot of time hacking Life — that is, constructing patterns in hopes of spotting new Life-forms.
  • The tree of Life also includes oscillators, such as the blinker, and spaceships of various sizes (the glider being the smallest).
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Patterns that didn’t change one generation to the next, Dr. Conway called still lifes — such as the four-celled block, the six-celled beehive or the eight-celled pond. Patterns that took a long time to stabilize, he called methuselahs.
  • The second thing Life shows us is something that Darwin hit upon when he was looking at Life, the organic version. Complexity arises from simplicity!
  • I first encountered Life at the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 1978. I was hooked immediately by the thing that has always hooked me — watching complexity arise out of simplicity.
  • Life shows you two things. The first is sensitivity to initial conditions. A tiny change in the rules can produce a huge difference in the output, ranging from complete destruction (no dots) through stasis (a frozen pattern) to patterns that keep changing as they unfold.
  • Life shows us complex virtual “organisms” arising out of the interaction of a few simple rules — so goodbye “Intelligent Design.”
  • I’ve wondered for decades what one could learn from all that Life hacking. I recently realized it’s a great place to try to develop “meta-engineering” — to see if there are general principles that govern the advance of engineering and help us predict the overall future trajectory of technology.
  • Melanie Mitchell— Professor of complexity, Santa Fe Institute
  • Given that Conway’s proof that the Game of Life can be made to simulate a Universal Computer — that is, it could be “programmed” to carry out any computation that a traditional computer can do — the extremely simple rules can give rise to the most complex and most unpredictable behavior possible. This means that there are certain properties of the Game of Life that can never be predicted, even in principle!
  • I use the Game of Life to make vivid for my students the ideas of determinism, higher-order patterns and information. One of its great features is that nothing is hidden; there are no black boxes in Life, so you know from the outset that anything that you can get to happen in the Life world is completely unmysterious and explicable in terms of a very large number of simple steps by small items.
  • In Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Gravity’s Rainbow,” a character says, “But you had taken on a greater and more harmful illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen.”This is compelling but wrong, and Life is a great way of showing this.
  • In Life, we might say, things only happen at the pixel level; nothing controls anything, nothing does anything. But that doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as action, as control; it means that these are higher-level phenomena composed (entirely, with no magic) from things that only happen.
  • Stephen Wolfram— Scientist and C.E.O., Wolfram Research
  • Brian Eno— Musician, London
  • Bert Chan— Artificial-life researcher and creator of the continuous cellular automaton “Lenia,” Hong Kong
  • it did have a big impact on beginner programmers, like me in the 90s, giving them a sense of wonder and a kind of confidence that some easy-to-code math models can produce complex and beautiful results. It’s like a starter kit for future software engineers and hackers, together with Mandelbrot Set, Lorenz Attractor, et cetera.
  • if we think about our everyday life, about corporations and governments, the cultural and technical infrastructures humans built for thousands of years, they are not unlike the incredible machines that are engineered in Life.
  • In normal times, they are stable and we can keep building stuff one component upon another, but in harder times like this pandemic or a new Cold War, we need something that is more resilient and can prepare for the unpreparable. That would need changes in our “rules of life,” which we take for granted.
  • Rudy Rucker— Mathematician and author of “Ware Tetralogy,” Los Gatos, Calif.
  • That’s what chaos is about. The Game of Life, or a kinky dynamical system like a pair of pendulums, or a candle flame, or an ocean wave, or the growth of a plant — they aren’t readily predictable. But they are not random. They do obey laws, and there are certain kinds of patterns — chaotic attractors — that they tend to produce. But again, unpredictable is not random. An important and subtle distinction which changed my whole view of the world.
  • William Poundstone— Author of “The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge,” Los Angeles, Calif.
  • The Game of Life’s pulsing, pyrotechnic constellations are classic examples of emergent phenomena, introduced decades before that adjective became a buzzword.
  • Fifty years later, the misfortunes of 2020 are the stuff of memes. The biggest challenges facing us today are emergent: viruses leaping from species to species; the abrupt onset of wildfires and tropical storms as a consequence of a small rise in temperature; economies in which billions of free transactions lead to staggering concentrations of wealth; an internet that becomes more fraught with hazard each year
  • Looming behind it all is our collective vision of an artificial intelligence-fueled future that is certain to come with surprises, not all of them pleasant.
  • The name Conway chose — the Game of Life — frames his invention as a metaphor. But I’m not sure that even he anticipated how relevant Life would become, and that in 50 years we’d all be playing an emergent game of life and death.
huffem4

Infographic: 11 Cognitive Biases That Influence Political Outcomes - 1 views

www.visualcapitalist.com/tive-biases-influence-politics

social media coverage bias bias

shared by huffem4 on 23 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • when searching for facts, our own cognitive biases often get in the way.
  • The media, for example, can exploit our tendency to assign stereotypes to others by only providing catchy, surface-level information.
  • People exhibit confirmation bias when they seek information that only affirms their pre-existing beliefs. This can cause them to become overly rigid in their political opinions, even when presented with conflicting ideas or evidence.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In one experiment, participants chose to either support or oppose a given sociopolitical issue. They were then presented with evidence that was conflicting, affirming, or a combination of both. In all scenarios, participants were most likely to stick with their initial decisions. Of those presented with conflicting evidence, just one in five changed their stance. Furthermore, participants who maintained their initial positions became even more confident in the superiority of their decision—a testament to how influential confirmation bias can be.
  • Coverage bias, in the context of politics, is a form of media bias where certain politicians or topics are disproportionately covered.
pier-paolo

A Parent's Intuition - The New York Times - 0 views

parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/...a-parents-intuition

shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • As a kid, I grew up confident that the best decisions were based on pure intellectual reasoning. If you couldn’t figure out what to do next, make two columns — pros and cons
  • I’d arrive somewhere after an act of violence and, from a wash of stunned or unfriendly faces, have to decide who to approach. Following my gut, I’d find myself inexplicably drawn to the one with an amazing story held right behind his compressed lips, and a willingness to talk
  • Without conscious thought, I’d hit reverse, choose another street and find out later the switch had kept me safe.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • But as a parent, I’ve experienced another level of perception that seems to kick in with no clear outside cues
  • “The only really valuable thing is intuition,” Albert Einstein said
  • We are connected to our offspring on a level so deep that it sometimes defies reason. What are the possibilities of parental premonition? Is intuition underused and even unfairly maligned?
  • But I’ve been reminded again in recent weeks that yet tempering that common sense with some trust in gut might be the most useful advice we can get.
  • we might do well to heed our intuition, give it its due, and even discuss it among ourselves as parents. It could be one more tool — and perhaps an extremely powerful one — in our parental toolbox.
Javier E

Do You Know the Difference Between Being Rich and Being Wealthy? - WSJ - 1 views

www.wsj.com/...-and-being-wealthy-11596808802

wealth income money finance investment success analysis psychology

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Mr. Housel, 36 years old, is a blogger and venture capitalist who writes beautifully and wisely about a central truth: Money isn’t primarily a store of value. Money is a conduit of emotion and ego, carrying hopes and fears, dreams and heartbreak, confidence and surprise, envy and regret.
  • Investing isn’t an IQ test; it’s a test of character. Unlike the man who chucked coins into the sea, Mr. Read could defer gratification and had no need to spend big so other people wouldn’t think he was small. From such old-fashioned virtues great fortunes can be built.
  • Investors think of such volatility as a kind of “fine” for having made a mistake, says Mr. Housel. Instead, they should regard it as a “fee,” the unavoidable cost of participation. You never know how big the fee will be or when you will incur it, but patience can make it bearable.
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  • Most investors regard Warren Buffett as someone who has parlayed brilliant analysis, hard work and extensive connections into one of the best track records in financial history. Mr. Housel, however, notices that Mr. Buffett accrued at least 95% of his wealth after age 65.
  • Had Mr. Buffett earned his world-beating returns for only 30 years rather than much longer, he would be worth 99.9% less, notes Mr. Housel. “The real key to his success is that he’s been a phenomenal investor for three quarters of a century,” he writes of Mr. Buffett. “His skill is investing, but his secret is time.”
  • So Mr. Buffett—traditionally viewed as the greatest living example of investing skill—is also proof of the power of luck and longevity.
  • In a similar vein, “The Psychology of Money” argues the biggest determinant of long-term returns often happens to be when you were born. Adjusted for inflation, people born in 1950 earned essentially nothing in the stock market between the ages of 13 and 30, Mr. Housel shows. Those born in 1970 earned roughly nine times as much on stocks in their formative years. Those born in 2000? They may have to save a lot more than their parents did.
  • Bubbles form when catchy stories and the human need for imitation and conformity turn investing into a social imperative.
  • Mr. Housel urges investors to think about what money and wealth are for. He draws a critical distinction between being rich (having a high current income) and being wealthy (having the freedom to choose not to spend money).
  • Many rich people aren’t wealthy, Mr. Housel argues, because they feel the need to spend a lot of money to show others how rich they are
  • He defines the optimal savings level as “the gap between your ego and your income.” Wealth consists in caring less about what others think about you and more about using your money to control how you spend your time.
  • He writes: “The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who[m] you want, for as long as you want to, pays the highest dividend that exists in finance.”
pier-paolo

The Election Is Almost Over. That Doesn't Mean Democrats Are Relaxed. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-democrats.html

shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • “I’m assuming in my mind that Trump wins, because I can’t deal with being let down like that again,”
  • “Secretly, in a little corner in the back of my mind, I’m wishing and hoping that Biden wins. But most of my brain is saying, ‘OK, Trump wins and New York is not getting a fiscal bailout and we’re going to lose more ground on the environment, we’re going to lose on Roe v. Wade, we’re going to lose on health care.’”
  • It’s hard to overstate the degree of anxiety in America right now, as the country confronts a Hydra of troubles: the pandemic, the economy, the fires, the protests, the violent plots against public officials, the assault on voting rights, the state-sponsored disinformation, the sense that democracy itself is on the ballot.
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  • 68 percent of American adults said that the 2020 election was a “significant source of stress” in their lives. (Among Democrats, the figure was 76 percent; it was 67 percent for Republicans and 64 percent for Independents.) Across the board, 77 percent of Americans said they were stressed about the future of the country.
  • It’s very bumpy and you’re riding along the highway and you have pothole after pothole. The news cycle is probably under 30 minutes right now.”
  • “What we’re seeing among Democrats is the sense that ‘we were in this position four years ago, so we’re not getting our hopes up,’” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “Republicans are consistently more confident that the election is going to go the way they want.”
  • “Polls give people a false sense of security, and they think they don’t have to turn out to vote,” he said. “Is there going to be a peaceful transfer of power? That’s a big question. The big worry is that he won’t accept the results, or he’s going to incite violence.”
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