Skip to main content

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

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

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

Spotify Wants Listeners to Break Down Music Barriers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...genres-dont-really-matter.html

spotify music knowledge genre categorization barriers social media radio exposure

shared by demetriar on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Their cultural acumen is entirely the product of technology — in particular, being introduced to new artists through Spotify, the world’s largest subscription music-streaming service. According to executives at Spotify, my children offer a peek at the future of music consumption.
  • On average, the company said, the service exposes each of these listeners to one new artist every day. That is making listeners less beholden to music of certain styles and eras. Instead, many of us will try anything, just because we can easily sample it online.
  • Spotify is betting that fixed musical genres will fade away. In its new version rolling out to iPhone users, the company has expanded its effort to program for moods and activities rather than merely certain kinds of musical tastes.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • If Spotify is right about our increasing willingness to try new stuff — and critics who follow the pop charts said it may be — the trend could upend how we think about music.
  • Until recently, because of the narrowcasting ethos of terrestrial radio, music was fiercely segregated by genre. In an era less bound by those niches and instead dominated by an online free-for-all, we may discover new artists more quickly than in the past — though, on the other side of the coin, we may also develop less fierce attachments to certain artists, flitting, as my children do, between anything and everything. For better or worse, streaming services may turn us into cultural nomads.
  • By suggesting tracks based on my activities and parts of the day, I found the service exposed me to music out of my comfort zone.
  • Programmers for radio stations also look at these services to decide what to add to their rotations.
  • “These were all songs that were different from what radio was playing, and radio tends to be a homogeneous medium,” Mr. Molanphy said.
  • demetriar on 05 Jun 15
     
    How online music streaming sorts music into categories other than by typical music genres, allowing people to be exposed to more types of music. Why do we categorize music by genres? How has online music streaming effected our knowledge of music?
manhefnawi

Study Finds Experts Overestimate Their Knowledge | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...s-overestimate-their-knowledge

Knowledge Claims

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • You’re in the middle of a conversation about politics or music or art, and someone asks, “Have you heard of…?” And despite your complete lack of knowledge of that band or law or artist, you say, “Sure!”
  • As it turns out, the more you know about a subject, the more likely you are to fib when your knowledge falls short, claiming that some factoid rings a bell when, in fact, there are no bells to be rung
  • Self-professed experts were more likely to claim they were very knowledgeable about concepts and places that didn’t exist
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “Our results suggest that people do not simply consult a ‘mental index’ that catalogues their knowledge but instead draw on preexisting self-perceptions of knowledge to make inferences about what they should or probably do know
Javier E

How Does Science Really Work? | The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...how-does-science-really-work

science scientific method history research knowledge culture progress discovery

shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • I wanted to be a scientist. So why did I find the actual work of science so boring? In college science courses, I had occasional bursts of mind-expanding insight. For the most part, though, I was tortured by drudgery.
  • I’d found that science was two-faced: simultaneously thrilling and tedious, all-encompassing and narrow. And yet this was clearly an asset, not a flaw. Something about that combination had changed the world completely.
  • “Science is an alien thought form,” he writes; that’s why so many civilizations rose and fell before it was invented. In his view, we downplay its weirdness, perhaps because its success is so fundamental to our continued existence.
  • ...50 more annotations...
  • In school, one learns about “the scientific method”—usually a straightforward set of steps, along the lines of “ask a question, propose a hypothesis, perform an experiment, analyze the results.”
  • That method works in the classroom, where students are basically told what questions to pursue. But real scientists must come up with their own questions, finding new routes through a much vaster landscape.
  • Since science began, there has been disagreement about how those routes are charted. Two twentieth-century philosophers of science, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, are widely held to have offered the best accounts of this process.
  • For Popper, Strevens writes, “scientific inquiry is essentially a process of disproof, and scientists are the disprovers, the debunkers, the destroyers.” Kuhn’s scientists, by contrast, are faddish true believers who promulgate received wisdom until they are forced to attempt a “paradigm shift”—a painful rethinking of their basic assumptions.
  • Working scientists tend to prefer Popper to Kuhn. But Strevens thinks that both theorists failed to capture what makes science historically distinctive and singularly effective.
  • Sometimes they seek to falsify theories, sometimes to prove them; sometimes they’re informed by preëxisting or contextual views, and at other times they try to rule narrowly, based on t
  • Why do scientists agree to this scheme? Why do some of the world’s most intelligent people sign on for a lifetime of pipetting?
  • Strevens thinks that they do it because they have no choice. They are constrained by a central regulation that governs science, which he calls the “iron rule of explanation.” The rule is simple: it tells scientists that, “if they are to participate in the scientific enterprise, they must uncover or generate new evidence to argue with”; from there, they must “conduct all disputes with reference to empirical evidence alone.”
  • , it is “the key to science’s success,” because it “channels hope, anger, envy, ambition, resentment—all the fires fuming in the human heart—to one end: the production of empirical evidence.”
  • Strevens arrives at the idea of the iron rule in a Popperian way: by disproving the other theories about how scientific knowledge is created.
  • The problem isn’t that Popper and Kuhn are completely wrong. It’s that scientists, as a group, don’t pursue any single intellectual strategy consistently.
  • Exploring a number of case studies—including the controversies over continental drift, spontaneous generation, and the theory of relativity—Strevens shows scientists exerting themselves intellectually in a variety of ways, as smart, ambitious people usually do.
  • “Science is boring,” Strevens writes. “Readers of popular science see the 1 percent: the intriguing phenomena, the provocative theories, the dramatic experimental refutations or verifications.” But, he says,behind these achievements . . . are long hours, days, months of tedious laboratory labor. The single greatest obstacle to successful science is the difficulty of persuading brilliant minds to give up the intellectual pleasures of continual speculation and debate, theorizing and arguing, and to turn instead to a life consisting almost entirely of the production of experimental data.
  • Ultimately, in fact, it was good that the geologists had a “splendid variety” of somewhat arbitrary opinions: progress in science requires partisans, because only they have “the motivation to perform years or even decades of necessary experimental work.” It’s just that these partisans must channel their energies into empirical observation. The iron rule, Strevens writes, “has a valuable by-product, and that by-product is data.”
  • Science is often described as “self-correcting”: it’s said that bad data and wrong conclusions are rooted out by other scientists, who present contrary findings. But Strevens thinks that the iron rule is often more important than overt correction.
  • Eddington was never really refuted. Other astronomers, driven by the iron rule, were already planning their own studies, and “the great preponderance of the resulting measurements fit Einsteinian physics better than Newtonian physics.” It’s partly by generating data on such a vast scale, Strevens argues, that the iron rule can power science’s knowledge machine: “Opinions converge not because bad data is corrected but because it is swamped.”
  • Why did the iron rule emerge when it did? Strevens takes us back to the Thirty Years’ War, which concluded with the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648. The war weakened religious loyalties and strengthened national ones.
  • Two regimes arose: in the spiritual realm, the will of God held sway, while in the civic one the decrees of the state were paramount. As Isaac Newton wrote, “The laws of God & the laws of man are to be kept distinct.” These new, “nonoverlapping spheres of obligation,” Strevens argues, were what made it possible to imagine the iron rule. The rule simply proposed the creation of a third sphere: in addition to God and state, there would now be science.
  • Strevens imagines how, to someone in Descartes’s time, the iron rule would have seemed “unreasonably closed-minded.” Since ancient Greece, it had been obvious that the best thinking was cross-disciplinary, capable of knitting together “poetry, music, drama, philosophy, democracy, mathematics,” and other elevating human disciplines.
  • We’re still accustomed to the idea that a truly flourishing intellect is a well-rounded one. And, by this standard, Strevens says, the iron rule looks like “an irrational way to inquire into the underlying structure of things”; it seems to demand the upsetting “suppression of human nature.”
  • Descartes, in short, would have had good reasons for resisting a law that narrowed the grounds of disputation, or that encouraged what Strevens describes as “doing rather than thinking.”
  • In fact, the iron rule offered scientists a more supple vision of progress. Before its arrival, intellectual life was conducted in grand gestures.
  • Descartes’s book was meant to be a complete overhaul of what had preceded it; its fate, had science not arisen, would have been replacement by some equally expansive system. The iron rule broke that pattern.
  • Strevens sees its earliest expression in Francis Bacon’s “The New Organon,” a foundational text of the Scientific Revolution, published in 1620. Bacon argued that thinkers must set aside their “idols,” relying, instead, only on evidence they could verify. This dictum gave scientists a new way of responding to one another’s work: gathering data.
  • it also changed what counted as progress. In the past, a theory about the world was deemed valid when it was complete—when God, light, muscles, plants, and the planets cohered. The iron rule allowed scientists to step away from the quest for completeness.
  • The consequences of this shift would become apparent only with time
  • In 1713, Isaac Newton appended a postscript to the second edition of his “Principia,” the treatise in which he first laid out the three laws of motion and the theory of universal gravitation. “I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses,” he wrote. “It is enough that gravity really exists and acts according to the laws that we have set forth.”
  • What mattered, to Newton and his contemporaries, was his theory’s empirical, predictive power—that it was “sufficient to explain all the motions of the heavenly bodies and of our sea.”
  • Descartes would have found this attitude ridiculous. He had been playing a deep game—trying to explain, at a fundamental level, how the universe fit together. Newton, by those lights, had failed to explain anything: he himself admitted that he had no sense of how gravity did its work
  • by authorizing what Strevens calls “shallow explanation,” the iron rule offered an empirical bridge across a conceptual chasm. Work could continue, and understanding could be acquired on the other side. In this way, shallowness was actually more powerful than depth.
  • Quantum theory—which tells us that subatomic particles can be “entangled” across vast distances, and in multiple places at the same time—makes intuitive sense to pretty much nobody.
  • Without the iron rule, Strevens writes, physicists confronted with such a theory would have found themselves at an impasse. They would have argued endlessly about quantum metaphysics.
  • ollowing the iron rule, they can make progress empirically even though they are uncertain conceptually. Individual researchers still passionately disagree about what quantum theory means. But that hasn’t stopped them from using it for practical purposes—computer chips, MRI machines, G.P.S. networks, and other technologies rely on quantum physics.
  • One group of theorists, the rationalists, has argued that science is a new way of thinking, and that the scientist is a new kind of thinker—dispassionate to an uncommon degree.
  • As evidence against this view, another group, the subjectivists, points out that scientists are as hopelessly biased as the rest of us. To this group, the aloofness of science is a smoke screen behind which the inevitable emotions and ideologies hide.
  • At least in science, Strevens tells us, “the appearance of objectivity” has turned out to be “as important as the real thing.”
  • The subjectivists are right, he admits, inasmuch as scientists are regular people with a “need to win” and a “determination to come out on top.”
  • But they are wrong to think that subjectivity compromises the scientific enterprise. On the contrary, once subjectivity is channelled by the iron rule, it becomes a vital component of the knowledge machine. It’s this redirected subjectivity—to come out on top, you must follow the iron rule!—that solves science’s “problem of motivation,” giving scientists no choice but “to pursue a single experiment relentlessly, to the last measurable digit, when that digit might be quite meaningless.”
  • If it really was a speech code that instigated “the extraordinary attention to process and detail that makes science the supreme discriminator and destroyer of false ideas,” then the peculiar rigidity of scientific writing—Strevens describes it as “sterilized”—isn’t a symptom of the scientific mind-set but its cause.
  • The iron rule—“a kind of speech code”—simply created a new way of communicating, and it’s this new way of communicating that created science.
  • Other theorists have explained science by charting a sweeping revolution in the human mind; inevitably, they’ve become mired in a long-running debate about how objective scientists really are
  • In “The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science” (Liveright), Michael Strevens, a philosopher at New York University, aims to identify that special something. Strevens is a philosopher of science
  • Compared with the theories proposed by Popper and Kuhn, Strevens’s rule can feel obvious and underpowered. That’s because it isn’t intellectual but procedural. “The iron rule is focused not on what scientists think,” he writes, “but on what arguments they can make in their official communications.”
  • Like everybody else, scientists view questions through the lenses of taste, personality, affiliation, and experience
  • geologists had a professional obligation to take sides. Europeans, Strevens reports, tended to back Wegener, who was German, while scholars in the United States often preferred Simpson, who was American. Outsiders to the field were often more receptive to the concept of continental drift than established scientists, who considered its incompleteness a fatal flaw.
  • Strevens’s point isn’t that these scientists were doing anything wrong. If they had biases and perspectives, he writes, “that’s how human thinking works.”
  • Eddington’s observations were expected to either confirm or falsify Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which predicted that the sun’s gravity would bend the path of light, subtly shifting the stellar pattern. For reasons having to do with weather and equipment, the evidence collected by Eddington—and by his colleague Frank Dyson, who had taken similar photographs in Sobral, Brazil—was inconclusive; some of their images were blurry, and so failed to resolve the matter definitively.
  • it was only natural for intelligent people who were free of the rule’s strictures to attempt a kind of holistic, systematic inquiry that was, in many ways, more demanding. It never occurred to them to ask if they might illuminate more collectively by thinking about less individually.
  • In the single-sphered, pre-scientific world, thinkers tended to inquire into everything at once. Often, they arrived at conclusions about nature that were fascinating, visionary, and wrong.
  • How Does Science Really Work?Science is objective. Scientists are not. Can an “iron rule” explain how they’ve changed the world anyway?By Joshua RothmanSeptember 28, 2020
Emily Horwitz

The Country That Stopped Reading - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ntry-that-stopped-reading.html

knowledge reading illiteracy

shared by Emily Horwitz on 06 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • EARLIER this week, I spotted, among the job listings in the newspaper Reforma, an ad from a restaurant in Mexico City looking to hire dishwashers. The requirement: a secondary school diploma.
  • Years ago, school was not for everyone. Classrooms were places for discipline, study. Teachers were respected figures. Parents actually gave them permission to punish their children by slapping them or tugging their ears. But at least in those days, schools aimed to offer a more dignified life.
  • During a strike in 2008 in Oaxaca, I remember walking through the temporary campground in search of a teacher reading a book. Among tens of thousands, I found not one. I did find people listening to disco-decibel music, watching television, playing cards or dominoes, vegetating. I saw some gossip magazines, too.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Despite recent gains in industrial development and increasing numbers of engineering graduates, Mexico is floundering socially, politically and economically because so many of its citizens do not read. Upon taking office in December, our new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, immediately announced a program to improve education. This is typical. All presidents do this upon taking office.
  • Put the leader of the teachers’ union, Elba Esther Gordillo, in jail — which he did last week. Ms. Gordillo, who has led the 1.5 million-member union for 23 years, is suspected of embezzling about $200 million.
  • Nobody in Mexico organizes as many strikes as the teachers’ union. And, sadly, many teachers, who often buy or inherit their jobs, are lacking in education themselves.
  • they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago
  • I picked out five of the ignorant majority and asked them to tell me why they didn’t like reading. The result was predictable: they stuttered, grumbled, grew impatient. None was able to articulate a sentence, express an idea.
  • In 2002, President Vicente Fox began a national reading plan; he chose as a spokesman Jorge Campos, a popular soccer player, ordered millions of books printed and built an immense library. Unfortunately, teachers were not properly trained and children were not given time for reading in school. The plan focused on the book instead of the reader. I have seen warehouses filled with hundreds of thousands of forgotten books, intended for schools and libraries, simply waiting for the dust and humidity to render them garbage.
  • When my daughter was 15, her literature teacher banished all fiction from her classroom. “We’re going to read history and biology textbooks,” she said, “because that way you’ll read and learn at the same time.” In our schools, children are being taught what is easy to teach rather than what they need to learn. It is for this reason that in Mexico — and many other countries — the humanities have been pushed aside.
  • it is natural that in secondary school we are training chauffeurs, waiters and dishwashers.
  • he educational machine does not need fine-tuning; it needs a complete change of direction. It needs to make students read, read and read.
  • But perhaps the Mexican government is not ready for its people to be truly educated. We know that books give people ambitions, expectations, a sense of dignity. If tomorrow we were to wake up as educated as the Finnish people, the streets would be filled with indignant citizens and our frightened government would be asking itself where these people got more than a dishwasher’s training.
  • Emily Horwitz on 06 Mar 13
     
    This article claimed that the more we read (not just textbooks, but fiction), the greater capacity we have to know. It also said that many of the students in Mexico do not learn much because their teachers are ill-educated. This made me think of the knowledge question: how much can we know if we rely on inaccurate knowledge by authority?
Javier E

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

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

inequality ivy league admissions university education elite success leadership class

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates defines a new race beat - Columbia Journalism Review - 0 views

www.cjr.org/...ehisi_coates_defines_a_new.php

history culture race racism American idea exceptionalism journalism slavery freedom empathy white privilege

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • “The Case for Reparations,” Coates’ 16,000-word cover story for The Atlantic, where he is a national correspondent. Published online in May, it was a close look at housing discrimination, such as redlining, that was really about the need for America to take a brutally honest look in the mirror and acknowledge its deep racial divisions.
  • The story broke a single-day traffic record for a magazine story on The Atlantic’s website, and in its wake, Politico named him to its list of 50 thinkers changing American politics
  • Coates believes that if there is an answer to contemporary racism, it lies in confronting the pas
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • For Coates, true equality means “black people in this country have the right to be as mediocre as white people,” he says. “Not that individual black people will be as excellent, or more excellent, than other white people.”
  • he came to see black respectability—the idea that, to succeed, African-Americans must stoically prevail against the odds and be “twice as good” as white people to get the same rights—as deeply immoral.
  • He is no soothsayer, telling people what to think from on high, but rather is refreshingly open about what he doesn’t know, inviting readers to learn with him. Coates is not merely an ivory-tower pontificator or a shiny Web 2.0 brand. He is a public intellectual for the digital age.
  • he cites research that in 1860 slaves were the largest asset in the US economy. “It is almost impossible to think of democracy, as it was formed in America, without the enslavement of African-Americans,” he says. “Not that these things were bumps in the road along the way, but that they were the road.”
  • Another term for that road is “white supremacy.” This refers not so much to hate groups, but, as Coates defines it, a system of policies and beliefs that aims to keep African-Americans as “a peon class.”
  • To be “white” in this sense does not refer merely to skin color but to the degree that someone qualifies as “normal,” and thus worthy of the same rights as all Americans
  • The pool where all these ideas eventually arrive is a question: “How big-hearted can democracy be?” he says. “How many people can it actually include and sustain itself? That is the question I’m asking over and over again.”
  • it is a question of empathy. Are humans capable of forming a society where everyone can flourish?
  • there was the coverage of Michael Brown (or Jordan Davis, or Renisha McBride, or Eric Garner): unarmed African-Americans killed by police or others under controversial circumstances. In each case, the storyline was that these horrific encounters were caused either by genuine provocation, or by race-fueled fear or hatred. Either way, they were stories of personal failings.
  • When an event becomes news, there is often an implication that it is an exception—that the world is mostly working as it should and this event is newsworthy because it’s an aberration. If the race-related stories we see most often in the media are about personal bigotry, then our conception of racism is limited to the bigoted remarks or actions—racism becomes little more than uttering the n-word.
  • we miss the real question of why there is a systemic, historical difference in the way police treat blacks versus whites.
  • a lack of historical perspective in the media’s approach to race. “Journalism privileges what’s happening now over the long reasons for things happening,” he says. “And for African-Americans, that has a particular effect.”
  • Even the very existence of racism is questioned: A recent study published by the Association of Psychological Science has shown that whites think they are discriminated against due to race as much if not more than blacks.
  • “So when you’re talking about something like institutional racism and prejudice, how do you talk about that as an objective reality?”
  • Coates’ strength is in connecting contemporary problems to historical scholarship. “I think if I bring anything to the table it’s the ability to synthesize all of that into something that people find emotionally moving,” he says. The irony of the reparations piece, as unoriginal as it may have been to scholars, is that it was news to many people.
  • Reporting on race requires simultaneously understanding multiple, contradictory worlds, with contradictory narratives. Widespread black poverty exists; so do a black middle class and a black president
  • Progress is key to the myth of American Exceptionalism, and the notion that America is built on slavery and on freedom are discordant ideas that threaten any simple storyline. Coates, together with others who join him, is trying to claim the frontier of a new narrative.
  • reading Coates is like building a worldview, piece by piece, on an area of contemporary life that’s otherwise difficult to grasp.
  • “To come and tell someone may not be as effective in convincing them as allowing them to learn on their own. If you believe you come to a conclusion on your own, you’re more likely to agree.”
  • It’s brave to bare yourself intellectually on the Web, and to acknowledge mistakes, especially when the capital that public intellectuals appear to have is their ability to be “right.”
  • Coates is equally demanding of his followers. Online he is blunt, and willing to call people out. He cares enough to be rigorous
  • despite being a master of online engagement, Coates insists he does not write for others, an idea he explained in a recent post: “I have long believed that the best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself. The best thing I can say about the reparations piece is that I now understand.”
  • To him, it’s an open question whether or not America will ever be capable of fostering true equality. “How big-hearted can democracy be? It points to a very ugly answer: maybe not that big-hearted at all. That in fact America is not exceptional. That it’s just like every other country. That it passes its democracy and it passes all these allegedly big-hearted programs [the New Deal, the G.I. Bill] but still excludes other people,
  • In a 2010 post about antebellum America, Coates mentioned feminist and abolitionist Angelina Grimke. “Suffice to say that much like Abe Lincoln, and Ulysses Grant, Angelina Grimke was a Walker,” he wrote. “What was the Walker reference?” Rosemartian asked in the comments section. “Just someone who spends their life evolving, or, walking,” Coates replied. “Grant and Lincoln fit in there for me. Malcolm X was another Walker. Walkers tend to be sometimes—even often—wrong. But they are rarely bigots, in the sense of nakedly clinging to ignorance.”
pier-paolo

THE CLOSE READER; Powers of Perception - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ader-powers-of-perception.html

shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Keller's writing jars the contemporary reader in three ways. First, she composes in the grandiose manner favored by the late-19th-century genteel essayist, with lots of quotations and inverted sentences. Second, she gushes with a girlish gratefulness that registers, in our more cynical time, as more ingratiating than genuine
  • Keller violates a cardinal rule of autobiography, which is to distinguish what you have been told from what you know from experience. She narrates, as if she knew them firsthand, events from very early childhood and the first stages of her education -- neither of which she could possibly remember herself, at least not in such detail.
  • When Keller's book came out in 1903, she was criticized by one reviewer for her constant, un-self-conscious allusions to color and music. ''All her knowledge is hearsay knowledge,'' this critic wrote in The Nation, ''her very sensations are for the most part vicarious, and yet she writes of things beyond her powers of perception with the assurance of one who has verified every word.'
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Maybe Shattuck is right and we are all like this -- creatures of language, rather than its masters. Much of what we think we know firsthand we probably picked up from books or newspapers or friends or lovers and never checked against the world at all.
  • Her ability to experience what others felt and heard, she said, illustrated the power of imagination, particularly one that had been developed and extended, as hers was, by books.
  • What she knew of her own observation is exactly what we want to know from her. We want to know what it felt like to be Helen Keller. We want to locate the boundaries between what was real to her and what she was forced to imagine. At least in this book, she seems not to have known where that boundary might lie.
  • He tries to remember what he looks like and discovers that he cannot. He asks: ''To what extent is loss of the image of the face connected with loss of the image of the self? Is this one of the reasons why I often feel that I am mere spirit, a ghost, a memory?''
  • Keller, in short, matured, both as a person and a writer. She mastered a lesson that relatively few with all their senses have ever mastered, which is to write about what you know.
Javier E

Eric Kandel's Visions - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...131095

art aesthetics brain science research consciousness psychology

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 12 - Cached
  • Judith, "barely clothed and fresh from the seduction and slaying of Holofernes, glows in her voluptuousness. Her hair is a dark sky between the golden branches of Assyrian trees, fertility symbols that represent her eroticism. This young, ecstatic, extravagantly made-up woman confronts the viewer through half-closed eyes in what appears to be a reverie of orgasmic rapture," writes Eric Kandel in his new book, The Age of Insight. Wait a minute. Writes who? Eric Kandel, the Nobel-winning neuroscientist who's spent most of his career fixated on the generously sized neurons of sea snails
  • Kandel goes on to speculate, in a bravura paragraph a few hundred pages later, on the exact neurochemical cognitive circuitry of the painting's viewer:
  • "At a base level, the aesthetics of the image's luminous gold surface, the soft rendering of the body, and the overall harmonious combination of colors could activate the pleasure circuits, triggering the release of dopamine. If Judith's smooth skin and exposed breast trigger the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and vasopressin, one might feel sexual excitement. The latent violence of Holofernes's decapitated head, as well as Judith's own sadistic gaze and upturned lip, could cause the release of norepinephrine, resulting in increased heart rate and blood pressure and triggering the fight-or-flight response. In contrast, the soft brushwork and repetitive, almost meditative, patterning may stimulate the release of serotonin. As the beholder takes in the image and its multifaceted emotional content, the release of acetylcholine to the hippocampus contributes to the storing of the image in the viewer's memory. What ultimately makes an image like Klimt's 'Judith' so irresistible and dynamic is its complexity, the way it activates a number of distinct and often conflicting emotional signals in the brain and combines them to produce a staggeringly complex and fascinating swirl of emotions."
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • His key findings on the snail, for which he shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, showed that learning and memory change not the neuron's basic structure but rather the nature, strength, and number of its synaptic connections. Further, through focus on the molecular biology involved in a learned reflex like Aplysia's gill retraction, Kandel demonstrated that experience alters nerve cells' synapses by changing their pattern of gene expression. In other words, learning doesn't change what neurons are, but rather what they do.
  • In Search of Memory (Norton), Kandel offered what sounded at the time like a vague research agenda for future generations in the budding field of neuroaesthetics, saying that the science of memory storage lay "at the foothills of a great mountain range." Experts grasp the "cellular and molecular mechanisms," he wrote, but need to move to the level of neural circuits to answer the question, "How are internal representations of a face, a scene, a melody, or an experience encoded in the brain?
  • Since giving a talk on the matter in 2001, he has been piecing together his own thoughts in relation to his favorite European artists
  • The field of neuroaesthetics, says one of its founders, Semir Zeki, of University College London, is just 10 to 15 years old. Through brain imaging and other studies, scholars like Zeki have explored the cognitive responses to, say, color contrasts or ambiguities of line or perspective in works by Titian, Michelangelo, Cubists, and Abstract Expressionists. Researchers have also examined the brain's pleasure centers in response to appealing landscapes.
  • it is fundamental to an understanding of human cognition and motivation. Art isn't, as Kandel paraphrases a concept from the late philosopher of art Denis Dutton, "a byproduct of evolution, but rather an evolutionary adaptation—an instinctual trait—that helps us survive because it is crucial to our well-being." The arts encode information, stories, and perspectives that allow us to appraise courses of action and the feelings and motives of others in a palatable, low-risk way.
  • "as far as activity in the brain is concerned, there is a faculty of beauty that is not dependent on the modality through which it is conveyed but which can be activated by at least two sources—musical and visual—and probably by other sources as well." Specifically, in this "brain-based theory of beauty," the paper says, that faculty is associated with activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex.
  • It also enables Kandel—building on the work of Gombrich and the psychoanalyst and art historian Ernst Kris, among others—to compare the painters' rendering of emotion, the unconscious, and the libido with contemporaneous psychological insights from Freud about latent aggression, pleasure and death instincts, and other primal drives.
  • although Kandel considers The Age of Insight to be more a work of intellectual history than of science, the book summarizes centuries of research on perception. And so you'll find, in those hundreds of pages between Kandel's introduction to Klimt's "Judith" and the neurochemical cadenza about the viewer's response to it, dossiers on vision as information processing; the brain's three-dimensional-space mapping and its interpretations of two-dimensional renderings; face recognition; the mirror neurons that enable us to empathize and physically reflect the affect and intentions we see in others; and many related topics. Kandel elsewhere describes the scientific evidence that creativity is nurtured by spells of relaxation, which foster a connection between conscious and unconscious cognition.
  • The author of a classic textbook on neuroscience, he seems here to have written a layman's cognition textbook wrapped within a work of art history.
  • "our initial response to the most salient features of the paintings of the Austrian Modernists, like our response to a dangerous animal, is automatic. ... The answer to James's question of how an object simply perceived turns into an object emotionally felt, then, is that the portraits are never objects simply perceived. They are more like the dangerous animal at a distance—both perceived and felt."
  • If imaging is key to gauging therapeutic practices, it will be key to neuroaesthetics as well, Kandel predicts—a broad, intense array of "imaging experiments to see what happens with exaggeration, distorted faces, in the human brain and the monkey brain," viewers' responses to "mixed eroticism and aggression," and the like.
  • while the visual-perception literature might be richer at the moment, there's no reason that neuroaesthetics should restrict its emphasis to the purely visual arts at the expense of music, dance, film, and theater.
  • Kandel views the Expressionists' art through the powerful multiple lenses of turn-of-the-century Vienna's cultural mores and psychological insights. But then he refracts them further, through later discoveries in cognitive science. He seeks to reassure those who fear that the empirical and chemical will diminish the paintings' poetic power. "In art, as in science," he writes, "reductionism does not trivialize our perception—of color, light, and perspective—but allows us to see each of these components in a new way. Indeed, artists, particularly modern artists, have intentionally limited the scope and vocabulary of their expression to convey, as Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt do, the most essential, even spiritual ideas of their art."
  • Zeki's message to art historians, aesthetic philosophers, and others who chafe at that idea is twofold. The more diplomatic pitch is that neuroaesthetics is different, complementary, and not oppositional to other forms of arts scholarship. But "the stick," as he puts it, is that if arts scholars "want to be taken seriously" by neurobiologists, they need to take advantage of the discoveries of the past half-century. If they don't, he says, "it's a bit like the guys who said to Galileo that we'd rather not look through your telescope."
  • Matthews, a co-author of The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind Through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of Brain Imaging (Dana Press, 2003), seems open to the elucidations that science and the humanities can cast on each other. The neural pathways of our aesthetic responses are "good explanations," he says. But "does one [type of] explanation supersede all the others? I would argue that they don't, because there's a fundamental disconnection still between ... explanations of neural correlates of conscious experience and conscious experience" itself.
  • There are, Matthews says, "certain kinds of problems that are fundamentally interesting to us as a species: What is love? What motivates us to anger?" Writers put their observations on such matters into idiosyncratic stories, psychologists conceive their observations in a more formalized framework, and neuroscientists like Zeki monitor them at the level of functional changes in the brain. All of those approaches to human experience "intersect," Matthews says, "but no one of them is the explanation."
  • "Conscious experience," he says, "is something we cannot even interrogate in ourselves adequately. What we're always trying to do in effect is capture the conscious experience of the last moment. ... As we think about it, we have no way of capturing more than one part of it."
  • Kandel sees art and art history as "parent disciplines" and psychology and brain science as "antidisciplines," to be drawn together in an E.O. Wilson-like synthesis toward "consilience as an attempt to open a discussion between restricted areas of knowledge." Kandel approvingly cites Stephen Jay Gould's wish for "the sciences and humanities to become the greatest of pals ... but to keep their ineluctably different aims and logics separate as they ply their joint projects and learn from each other."
Ryan Beneck

Will We Ever Run Out of New Music? - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

technology music arts knowledge

shared by Ryan Beneck on 14 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Ryan Beneck on 14 Jan 14
     
    Are there a finite amount of songs that can exist? This is an interesting video that looks at the arts in a mathematical way.
Javier E

George Packer: Is Amazon Bad for Books? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...140217fa_fact_packer

book industry Amazon

shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Amazon is a global superstore, like Walmart. It’s also a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, and a utility, like Con Edison, and a video distributor, like Netflix, and a book publisher, like Random House, and a production studio, like Paramount, and a literary magazine, like The Paris Review, and a grocery deliverer, like FreshDirect, and someday it might be a package service, like U.P.S. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns a major newspaper, the Washington Post. All these streams and tributaries make Amazon something radically new in the history of American business
  • Amazon is not just the “Everything Store,” to quote the title of Brad Stone’s rich chronicle of Bezos and his company; it’s more like the Everything. What remains constant is ambition, and the search for new things to be ambitious about.
  • It wasn’t a love of books that led him to start an online bookstore. “It was totally based on the property of books as a product,” Shel Kaphan, Bezos’s former deputy, says. Books are easy to ship and hard to break, and there was a major distribution warehouse in Oregon. Crucially, there are far too many books, in and out of print, to sell even a fraction of them at a physical store. The vast selection made possible by the Internet gave Amazon its initial advantage, and a wedge into selling everything else.
  • ...38 more annotations...
  • it’s impossible to know for sure, but, according to one publisher’s estimate, book sales in the U.S. now make up no more than seven per cent of the company’s roughly seventy-five billion dollars in annual revenue.
  • A monopoly is dangerous because it concentrates so much economic power, but in the book business the prospect of a single owner of both the means of production and the modes of distribution is especially worrisome: it would give Amazon more control over the exchange of ideas than any company in U.S. history.
  • “The key to understanding Amazon is the hiring process,” one former employee said. “You’re not hired to do a particular job—you’re hired to be an Amazonian. Lots of managers had to take the Myers-Briggs personality tests. Eighty per cent of them came in two or three similar categories, and Bezos is the same: introverted, detail-oriented, engineer-type personality. Not musicians, designers, salesmen. The vast majority fall within the same personality type—people who graduate at the top of their class at M.I.T. and have no idea what to say to a woman in a bar.”
  • According to Marcus, Amazon executives considered publishing people “antediluvian losers with rotary phones and inventory systems designed in 1968 and warehouses full of crap.” Publishers kept no data on customers, making their bets on books a matter of instinct rather than metrics. They were full of inefficiences, starting with overpriced Manhattan offices.
  • For a smaller house, Amazon’s total discount can go as high as sixty per cent, which cuts deeply into already slim profit margins. Because Amazon manages its inventory so well, it often buys books from small publishers with the understanding that it can’t return them, for an even deeper discount
  • According to one insider, around 2008—when the company was selling far more than books, and was making twenty billion dollars a year in revenue, more than the combined sales of all other American bookstores—Amazon began thinking of content as central to its business. Authors started to be considered among the company’s most important customers. By then, Amazon had lost much of the market in selling music and videos to Apple and Netflix, and its relations with publishers were deteriorating
  • In its drive for profitability, Amazon did not raise retail prices; it simply squeezed its suppliers harder, much as Walmart had done with manufacturers. Amazon demanded ever-larger co-op fees and better shipping terms; publishers knew that they would stop being favored by the site’s recommendation algorithms if they didn’t comply. Eventually, they all did.
  • Brad Stone describes one campaign to pressure the most vulnerable publishers for better terms: internally, it was known as the Gazelle Project, after Bezos suggested “that Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.”
  • ithout dropping co-op fees entirely, Amazon simplified its system: publishers were asked to hand over a percentage of their previous year’s sales on the site, as “marketing development funds.”
  • The figure keeps rising, though less for the giant pachyderms than for the sickly gazelles. According to the marketing executive, the larger houses, which used to pay two or three per cent of their net sales through Amazon, now relinquish five to seven per cent of gross sales, pushing Amazon’s percentage discount on books into the mid-fifties. Random House currently gives Amazon an effective discount of around fifty-three per cent.
  • In December, 1999, at the height of the dot-com mania, Time named Bezos its Person of the Year. “Amazon isn’t about technology or even commerce,” the breathless cover article announced. “Amazon is, like every other site on the Web, a content play.” Yet this was the moment, Marcus said, when “content” people were “on the way out.”
  • In 2004, he set up a lab in Silicon Valley that would build Amazon’s first piece of consumer hardware: a device for reading digital books. According to Stone’s book, Bezos told the executive running the project, “Proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.”
  • By 2010, Amazon controlled ninety per cent of the market in digital books—a dominance that almost no company, in any industry, could claim. Its prohibitively low prices warded off competition
  • Lately, digital titles have levelled off at about thirty per cent of book sales.
  • The literary agent Andrew Wylie (whose firm represents me) says, “What Bezos wants is to drag the retail price down as low as he can get it—a dollar-ninety-nine, even ninety-nine cents. That’s the Apple play—‘What we want is traffic through our device, and we’ll do anything to get there.’ ” If customers grew used to paying just a few dollars for an e-book, how long before publishers would have to slash the cover price of all their titles?
  • As Apple and the publishers see it, the ruling ignored the context of the case: when the key events occurred, Amazon effectively had a monopoly in digital books and was selling them so cheaply that it resembled predatory pricing—a barrier to entry for potential competitors. Since then, Amazon’s share of the e-book market has dropped, levelling off at about sixty-five per cent, with the rest going largely to Apple and to Barnes & Noble, which sells the Nook e-reader. In other words, before the feds stepped in, the agency model introduced competition to the market
  • But the court’s decision reflected a trend in legal thinking among liberals and conservatives alike, going back to the seventies, that looks at antitrust cases from the perspective of consumers, not producers: what matters is lowering prices, even if that goal comes at the expense of competition. Barry Lynn, a market-policy expert at the New America Foundation, said, “It’s one of the main factors that’s led to massive consolidation.”
  • The combination of ceaseless innovation and low-wage drudgery makes Amazon the epitome of a successful New Economy company. It’s hiring as fast as it can—nearly thirty thousand employees last year.
  • brick-and-mortar retailers employ forty-seven people for every ten million dollars in revenue earned; Amazon employs fourteen.
  • Since the arrival of the Kindle, the tension between Amazon and the publishers has become an open battle. The conflict reflects not only business antagonism amid technological change but a division between the two coasts, with different cultural styles and a philosophical disagreement about what techies call “disruption.”
  • Bezos told Charlie Rose, “Amazon is not happening to bookselling. The future is happening to bookselling.”
  • n Grandinetti’s view, the Kindle “has helped the book business make a more orderly transition to a mixed print and digital world than perhaps any other medium.” Compared with people who work in music, movies, and newspapers, he said, authors are well positioned to thrive. The old print world of scarcity—with a limited number of publishers and editors selecting which manuscripts to publish, and a limited number of bookstores selecting which titles to carry—is yielding to a world of digital abundance. Grandinetti told me that, in these new circumstances, a publisher’s job “is to build a megaphone.”
  • it offers an extremely popular self-publishing platform. Authors become Amazon partners, earning up to seventy per cent in royalties, as opposed to the fifteen per cent that authors typically make on hardcovers. Bezos touts the biggest successes, such as Theresa Ragan, whose self-published thrillers and romances have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. But one survey found that half of all self-published authors make less than five hundred dollars a year.
  • The business term for all this clear-cutting is “disintermediation”: the elimination of the “gatekeepers,” as Bezos calls the professionals who get in the customer’s way. There’s a populist inflection to Amazon’s propaganda, an argument against élitist institutions and for “the democratization of the means of production”—a common line of thought in the West Coast tech world
  • “Book publishing is a very human business, and Amazon is driven by algorithms and scale,” Sargent told me. When a house gets behind a new book, “well over two hundred people are pushing your book all over the place, handing it to people, talking about it. A mass of humans, all in one place, generating tremendous energy—that’s the magic potion of publishing. . . . That’s pretty hard to replicate in Amazon’s publishing world, where they have hundreds of thousands of titles.”
  • By producing its own original work, Amazon can sell more devices and sign up more Prime members—a major source of revenue. While the company was building the
  • Like the publishing venture, Amazon Studios set out to make the old “gatekeepers”—in this case, Hollywood agents and executives—obsolete. “We let the data drive what to put in front of customers,” Carr told the Wall Street Journal. “We don’t have tastemakers deciding what our customers should read, listen to, and watch.”
  • book publishers have been consolidating for several decades, under the ownership of media conglomerates like News Corporation, which squeeze them for profits, or holding companies such as Rivergroup, which strip them to service debt. The effect of all this corporatization, as with the replacement of independent booksellers by superstores, has been to privilege the blockbuster.
  • Publishers sometimes pass on this cost to authors, by redefining royalties as a percentage of the publisher’s receipts, not of the book’s list price. Recently, publishers say, Amazon began demanding an additional payment, amounting to approximately one per cent of net sales
  • the long-term outlook is discouraging. This is partly because Americans don’t read as many books as they used to—they are too busy doing other things with their devices—but also because of the relentless downward pressure on prices that Amazon enforces.
  • he digital market is awash with millions of barely edited titles, most of it dreck, while r
  • Amazon believes that its approach encourages ever more people to tell their stories to ever more people, and turns writers into entrepreneurs; the price per unit might be cheap, but the higher number of units sold, and the accompanying royalties, will make authors wealthier
  • In Friedman’s view, selling digital books at low prices will democratize reading: “What do you want as an author—to sell books to as few people as possible for as much as possible, or for as little as possible to as many readers as possible?”
  • The real talent, the people who are writers because they happen to be really good at writing—they aren’t going to be able to afford to do it.”
  • Seven-figure bidding wars still break out over potential blockbusters, even though these battles often turn out to be follies. The quest for publishing profits in an economy of scarcity drives the money toward a few big books. So does the gradual disappearance of book reviewers and knowledgeable booksellers, whose enthusiasm might have rescued a book from drowning in obscurity. When consumers are overwhelmed with choices, some experts argue, they all tend to buy the same well-known thing.
  • These trends point toward what the literary agent called “the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer.” A few brand names at the top, a mass of unwashed titles down below, the middle hollowed out: the book business in the age of Amazon mirrors the widening inequality of the broader economy.
  • “If they did, in my opinion they would save the industry. They’d lose thirty per cent of their sales, but they would have an additional thirty per cent for every copy they sold, because they’d be selling directly to consumers. The industry thinks of itself as Procter & Gamble*. What gave publishers the idea that this was some big goddam business? It’s not—it’s a tiny little business, selling to a bunch of odd people who read.”
  • Bezos is right: gatekeepers are inherently élitist, and some of them have been weakened, in no small part, because of their complacency and short-term thinking. But gatekeepers are also barriers against the complete commercialization of ideas, allowing new talent the time to develop and learn to tell difficult truths. When the last gatekeeper but one is gone, will Amazon care whether a book is any good? ♦
grayton downing

Measuring Consciousness | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/35140/title/Measuring-Consciousness/

measuring consciousness science research knowledge brain science

shared by grayton downing on 24 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • General anesthesia has transformed surgery from a ghastly ordeal to a procedure in which the patient feels no pain.
  • “integrated-information theory,” which holds that consciousness relies on communication between different brain areas, and fades as that communication breaks down.
  • neural markers of consciousness—or more precisely, the loss of consciousness—a group led by Patrick Purdon
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The purpose of the surgery was to remove electrodes that had previously been implanted in the patients’ brains to monitor seizures. But before they were taken out, the electrodes enabled the researchers to study the activity of individual neurons in the cortex, in addition to large-scale brain activity from EEG recordings.
  • importance of communication between discrete groups of neurons, both within the cortex and across brain regions, is analogous to a band playing music, said George Mashour, a neuroscientist and anesthesiologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “You need musical information to come together either in time or space to really make sense,”
  • “Consciousness and cognitive activity may be similar. If different areas of the brain aren’t in synch or if a critical area that normally integrates cognitive activity isn’t functioning, you could be rendered unconscious.”
  • , Purdon and colleagues were able to discern a more detailed neural signature of loss of unconsciousness, this time by using EEG alone. Monitoring brain activity in healthy patients for 2 hours as they underwent propofol-induced anesthesia, they observed that as responsiveness fades, high-frequency brain waves (12–35 hertz) rippling across the cortex and the thalamus were replaced by two different brain waves superimposed on top on one another: a low-frequency (<1 hertz) wave and an alpha frequency (8–12 hertz) wave. “These two waves pretty much come at loss of consciousness,”
  • “We’ve started to teach our anesthesiologists how to read this signature on the EEG”
  • Anesthesia is not the only state in which consciousness is lost, of course
  • o measure the gradual breakdown of connectivity between neural networks during natural REM sleep and anesthesia, as well as in brain-injured, unresponsive patients. Using an electromagnetic coil to activate neurons in a small patch of the human cortex, then recording EEG output to track the propagation of those signals to other neuronal groups, the researchers can measure the connectivity between collections of neurons in the cortex and other brain regions.
  • minimally conscious patients, the magnetically stimulated signals propagated fairly far and wide, occasionally reaching distant cortical areas, much like activations seen in locked-in but conscious patients. In patients in a persistent vegetative state, on the other hand, propagation was severely limited—a breakdown of connectivity similar to that observed in previous tests of anesthetized patients. What’s more, in three vegetative patients that later recovered consciousness, the test picked up signs of increased connectivity before clinical signs of improvement became evident.
  • “I think understanding consciousness itself is going to help us find successful [measurement] approaches that are universally applicable,” said Pearce.
Javier E

The Singular Mind of Terry Tao - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ingular-mind-of-terry-tao.html

math creativity proof

shared by Javier E on 26 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • reflecting on his career so far, Tao told me that his view of mathematics has utterly changed since childhood. ‘‘When I was growing up, I knew I wanted to be a mathematician, but I had no idea what that entailed,’’ he said in a lilting Australian accent. ‘‘I sort of imagined a committee would hand me problems to solve or something.’’
  • But it turned out that the work of real mathematicians bears little resemblance to the manipulations and memorization of the math student. Even those who experience great success through their college years may turn out not to have what it takes. The ancient art of mathematics, Tao has discovered, does not reward speed so much as patience, cunning and, perhaps most surprising of all, the sort of gift for collaboration and improvisation that characterizes the best jazz musicians
  • Tao now believes that his younger self, the prodigy who wowed the math world, wasn’t truly doing math at all. ‘‘It’s as if your only experience with music were practicing scales or learning music theory,’’ he said, looking into light pouring from his window. ‘‘I didn’t learn the deeper meaning of the subject until much later.’’
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The true work of the mathematician is not experienced until the later parts of graduate school, when the student is challenged to create knowledge in the form of a novel proof. It is common to fill page after page with an attempt, the seasons turning, only to arrive precisely where you began, empty-handed — or to realize that a subtle flaw of logic doomed the whole enterprise from its outset. The steady state of mathematical research is to be completely stuck. It is a process that Charles Fefferman of Princeton, himself a onetime math prodigy turned Fields medalist, likens to ‘‘playing chess with the devil.’’ The rules of the devil’s game are special, though: The devil is vastly superior at chess, but, Fefferman explained, you may take back as many moves as you like, and the devil may not. You play a first game, and, of course, ‘‘he crushes you.’’ So you take back moves and try something different, and he crushes you again, ‘‘in much the same way.’’ If you are sufficiently wily, you will eventually discover a move that forces the devil to shift strategy; you still lose, but — aha! — you have your first clue.
  • Tao has emerged as one of the field’s great bridge-­builders. At the time of his Fields Medal, he had already made discoveries with more than 30 different collaborators. Since then, he has also become a prolific math blogger with a decidedly non-­Gaussian ebullience: He celebrates the work of others, shares favorite tricks, documents his progress and delights at any corrections that follow in the comments. He has organized cooperative online efforts to work on problems. ‘‘Terry is what a great 21st-­century mathematician looks like,’’ Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has collaborated with Tao, told me. He is ‘‘part of a network, always communicating, always connecting what he is doing with what other people are doing.’’
  • As a group, the people drawn to mathematics tend to value certainty and logic and a neatness of outcome, so this game becomes a special kind of torture. And yet this is what any ­would-be mathematician must summon the courage to face down: weeks, months, years on a problem that may or may not even be possible to unlock. You find yourself sitting in a room without doors or windows, and you can shout and carry on all you want, but no one is listening.
  • For their work, Tao and Green salvaged a crucial bit from an earlier proof done by others, which had been discarded as incorrect, and aimed at a different goal. Other maneuvers came from masterful proofs by Timothy Gowers of England and Endre Szemeredi of Hungary. Their work, in turn, relied on contributions from Erdos, Klaus Roth and Frank Ramsey, an Englishman who died at age 26 in 1930, and on and on, into history. Ask mathematicians about their experience of the craft, and most will talk about an intense feeling of intellectual camaraderie. ‘‘A very central part of any mathematician’s life is this sense of connection to other minds, alive today and going back to Pythagoras,’’ said Steven Strogatz, a professor of mathematics at Cornell University. ‘‘We are having this conversation with each other going over the millennia.’’
  • Most mathematicians tend to specialize, but Tao ranges widely, learning from others and then working with them to make discoveries. Markus Keel, a longtime collaborator and close friend, reaches to science fiction to explain Tao’s ability to rapidly digest and employ mathematical ideas: Seeing Tao in action, Keel told me, reminds him of the scene in ‘‘The Matrix’’ when Neo has martial arts downloaded into his brain and then, opening his eyes, declares, ‘‘I know kung fu.’’ The citation for Tao’s Fields Medal, awarded in 2006, is a litany of boundary hopping and notes particularly ‘‘beautiful work’’ on Horn’s conjecture, which Tao completed with a friend he had played foosball with in graduate school. It was a new area of mathematics for Tao, at a great remove from his known stamping grounds. ‘‘This is akin,’’ the citation read, ‘‘to a leading English-­language novelist suddenly producing the definitive Russian novel.’’
  • An effort to prove that 1 equals 0 is not likely to yield much fruit, it’s true, but the hacker’s mind-set can be extremely useful when doing math. Long ago, mathematicians invented a number that when multiplied by itself equals negative 1, an idea that seemed to break the basic rules of multiplication. It was so far outside what mathematicians were doing at the time that they called it ‘‘imaginary.’’ Yet imaginary numbers proved a powerful invention, and modern physics and engineering could not function without them.
  • Early encounters with math can be misleading. The subject seems to be about learning rules — how and when to apply ancient tricks to arrive at an answer. Four cookies remain in the cookie jar; the ball moves at 12.5 feet per second. Really, though, to be a mathematician is to experiment. Mathematical research is a fundamentally creative act. Lore has it that when David Hilbert, arguably the most influential mathematician of fin de siècle Europe, heard that a colleague had left to pursue fiction, he quipped: ‘‘He did not have enough imagination for mathematics.’’
  • Many people think that substantial progress on Navier-­Stokes may be impossible, and years ago, Tao told me, he wrote a blog post concurring with this view. Now he has some small bit of hope. The twin-prime conjecture had the same feel, a sense of breaking through the wall of intimidation that has scared off many aspirants. Outside the world of mathematics, both Navier-­Stokes and the twin-prime conjecture are described as problems. But for Tao and others in the field, they are more like opponents. Tao’s opponent has been known to taunt him, convincing him that he is overlooking the obvious, or to fight back, making quick escapes when none should be possible. Now the opponent appears to have revealed a weakness. But Tao said he has been here before, thinking he has found a way through the defenses, when in fact he was being led into an ambush. ‘‘You learn to get suspicious,’’ Tao said. ‘‘You learn to be on the lookout.’’
Javier E

The Psychopath Makeover - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...135160

psychopathy psychology brain science reading historical development

shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • The eminent criminal psychologist and creator of the widely used Psychopathy Checklist paused before answering. "I think, in general, yes, society is becoming more psychopathic," he said. "I mean, there's stuff going on nowadays that we wouldn't have seen 20, even 10 years ago. Kids are becoming anesthetized to normal sexual behavior by early exposure to pornography on the Internet. Rent-a-friend sites are getting more popular on the Web, because folks are either too busy or too techy to make real ones. ... The recent hike in female criminality is particularly revealing. And don't even get me started on Wall Street."
  • in a survey that has so far tested 14,000 volunteers, Sara Konrath and her team at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research has found that college students' self-reported empathy levels (as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a standardized questionnaire containing such items as "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me" and "I try to look at everybody's side of a disagreement before I make a decision") have been in steady decline over the past three decades—since the inauguration of the scale, in fact, back in 1979. A particularly pronounced slump has been observed over the past 10 years. "College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago," Konrath reports.
  • Imagining, it would seem, really does make it so. Whenever we read a story, our level of engagement is such that we "mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative," according to one of the researchers, Nicole Speer. Our brains then interweave these newly encountered situations with knowledge and experience gleaned from our own lives to create an organic mosaic of dynamic mental syntheses.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • during this same period, students' self-reported narcissism levels have shot through the roof. "Many people see the current group of college students, sometimes called 'Generation Me,' " Konrath continues, "as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident, and individualistic in recent history."
  • Reading a book carves brand-new neural pathways into the ancient cortical bedrock of our brains. It transforms the way we see the world—makes us, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his recent essay, "The Dreams of Readers," "more alert to the inner lives of others." We become vampires without being bitten—in other words, more empathic. Books make us see in a way that casual immersion in the Internet, and the quicksilver virtual world it offers, doesn't.
  • if society really is becoming more psychopathic, it's not all doom and gloom. In the right context, certain psychopathic characteristics can actually be very constructive. A neurosurgeon I spoke with (who rated high on the psychopathic spectrum) described the mind-set he enters before taking on a difficult operation as "an intoxication that sharpens rather than dulls the senses." In fact, in any kind of crisis, the most effective individuals are often those who stay calm—who are able to respond to the exigencies of the moment while at the same time maintaining the requisite degree of detachment.
  • mental toughness isn't the only characteristic that Special Forces soldiers have in common with psychopaths. There's also fearlessness.
  • I ask Andy whether he ever felt any regret over anything he'd done. Over the lives he'd taken on his numerous secret missions around the world. "No," he replies matter-of-factly, his arctic-blue eyes showing not the slightest trace of emotion. "You seriously don't think twice about it. When you're in a hostile situation, the primary objective is to pull the trigger before the other guy pulls the trigger. And when you pull it, you move on. Simple as that. Why stand there, dwelling on what you've done? Go down that route and chances are the last thing that goes through your head will be a bullet from an M16. "The regiment's motto is 'Who Dares Wins.' But sometimes it can be shortened to 'F--- It.' "
  • one of the things that we know about psychopaths is that the light switches of their brains aren't wired up in quite the same way as the rest of ours are—and that one area particularly affected is the amygdala, a peanut-size structure located right at the center of the circuit board. The amygdala is the brain's emotion-control tower. It polices our emotional airspace and is responsible for the way we feel about things. But in psychopaths, a section of this airspace, the part that corresponds to fear, is empty.
  • Turn down the signals to the amygdala, of course, and you're well on the way to giving someone a psychopath makeover. Indeed, Liane Young and her team in Boston have since kicked things up a notch and demonstrated that applying TMS to the right temporoparietal junction—a neural ZIP code within that neighborhood—has significant effects not just on lying ability but also on moral-reasoning ability: in particular, ascribing intentionality to others' actions.
  • at an undisclosed moment sometime within the next 60 seconds, the image you see at the present time will change, and images of a different nature will appear on the screen. These images will be violent. And nauseating. And of a graphic and disturbing nature. "As you view these images, changes in your heart rate, skin conductance, and EEG activity will be monitored and compared with the resting levels that are currently being recorded
  • "OK," says Nick. "Let's get the show on the road." He disappears behind us, leaving Andy and me merrily soaking up the incontinence ad. Results reveal later that, at this point, as we wait for something to happen, our physiological output readings are actually pretty similar. Our pulse rates are significantly higher than our normal resting levels, in anticipation of what's to come. But with the change of scene, an override switch flips somewhere in Andy's brain. And the ice-cold Special Forces soldier suddenly swings into action. As vivid, florid images of dismemberment, mutilation, torture, and execution flash up on the screen in front of us (so vivid, in fact, that Andy later confesses to actually being able to "smell" the blood: a "kind of sickly-sweet smell that you never, ever forget"), accompanied not by the ambient spa music of before but by blaring sirens and hissing white noise, his physiological readings start slipping into reverse. His pulse rate begins to slow. His GSR begins to drop, his EEG to quickly and dramatically attenuate. In fact, by the time the show is over, all three of Andy's physiological output measures are pooling below his baseline.
  • Nick has seen nothing like it. "It's almost as if he was gearing himself up for the challenge," he says. "And then, when the challenge eventually presented itself, his brain suddenly responded by injecting liquid nitrogen into his veins. Suddenly implemented a blanket neural cull of all surplus feral emotion. Suddenly locked down into a hypnotically deep code red of extreme and ruthless focus." He shakes his head, nonplused. "If I hadn't recorded those readings myself, I'm not sure I would have believed them," he continues. "OK, I've never tested Special Forces before. And maybe you'd expect a slight attenuation in response. But this guy was in total and utter control of the situation. So tuned in, it looked like he'd completely tuned out."
  • My physiological output readings, in contrast, went through the roof. Exactly like Andy's, they were well above baseline as I'd waited for the carnage to commence. But that's where the similarity ended. Rather than go down in the heat of battle, in the midst of the blood and guts, mine had appreciated exponentially. "At least it shows that the equipment is working properly," comments Nick. "And that you're a normal human being."
  • TMS can't penetrate far enough into the brain to reach the emotion and moral-reasoning precincts directly. But by damping down or turning up the regions of the cerebral cortex that have links with such areas, it can simulate the effects of deeper, more incursive influence.
  • Before the experiment, I'd been curious about the time scale: how long it would take me to begin to feel the rush. Now I had the answer: about 10 to 15 minutes. The same amount of time, I guess, that it would take most people to get a buzz out of a beer or a glass of wine.
  • The effects aren't entirely dissimilar. An easy, airy confidence. A transcendental loosening of inhibition. The inchoate stirrings of a subjective moral swagger: the encroaching, and somehow strangely spiritual, realization that hell, who gives a s---, anyway? There is, however, one notable exception. One glaring, unmistakable difference between this and the effects of alcohol. That's the lack of attendant sluggishness. The enhancement of attentional acuity and sharpness. An insuperable feeling of heightened, polished awareness. Sure, my conscience certainly feels like it's on ice, and my anxieties drowned with a half-dozen shots of transcranial magnetic Jack Daniel's. But, at the same time, my whole way of being feels as if it's been sumptuously spring-cleaned with light. My soul, or whatever you want to call it, immersed in a spiritual dishwasher.
  • So this, I think to myself, is how it feels to be a psychopath. To cruise through life knowing that no matter what you say or do, guilt, remorse, shame, pity, fear—all those familiar, everyday warning signals that might normally light up on your psychological dashboard—no longer trouble you.
  • I suddenly get a flash of insight. We talk about gender. We talk about class. We talk about color. And intelligence. And creed. But the most fundamental difference between one individual and another must surely be that of the presence, or absence, of conscience. Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels good. But what if it's as tough as old boots? What if one's conscience has an infinite, unlimited pain threshold and doesn't bat an eye when others are screaming in agony?
Javier E

A 5-Step Technique for Producing Ideas circa 1939 | Brain Pickings - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...ique-for-producing-ideas-young

creativity innovation ideas technique learning method principles

shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • In learning any art the important things to learn are, first, Principles, and second, Method. This is true of the art of producing ideas. Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up [of] so called rapidly aging facts. Principles and method are everything.
  • So with the art of producing ideas. What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which all ideas are produced and how to grasp the principles which are at the source of all ideas.
  • What you do is to take the different bits of material which you have gathered and feel them all over, as it were, with the tentacles of the mind. You take one fact, turn it this way and that, look at it in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it. You bring two facts together and see how they fit. What you are seeking now is the relationship, a synthesis where everything will come together in a neat combination, like a jig-saw puzzle.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Every really good creative person…whom I have ever known has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested — from, say, Egyptian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information.
  • Then and only then, Young promises, everything will click in the fourth stage of the seemingly serendipitous a-ha! moment: Out of nowhere the Idea will appear. It will come to you when you are least expecting it
  • articulates the increasing importance of quality information filters in our modern information diet. This notion of gathering raw material is the first step in his outline of the creative process:
  • [W]hen you reach this third stage in the production of an idea, drop the problem completely and turn to whatever stimulates your imagination and emotions. Listen to music, go to the theater or movies, read poetry or a detective story.
  • In his third stage of the creative process, Young stresses the importance of making absolutely “no effort of a direct nature”: It is important to realize that this is just as definite and just as necessary a stage in the process as the two preceding ones. What you have to do at this time, apparently, is to turn the problem over to your unconscious mind and let it work while you sleep.
  • Young calls the last stage “the cold, gray dawn of the morning after,” when your newborn idea has to face reality: It requires a deal of patient working over to make most ideas fit the exact conditions, or the practical exigencies, under which they must work. And here is where many good ideas are lost. The idea man, like the inventor, is often not patient enough or practical enough to go through with this adapting part of the process. But it has to be done if you are to put ideas to work in a work-a-day world. Do not make the mistake of holding your idea close to your chest at this stage. Submit it to the criticism of the judicious. When you do, a surprising thing will happen. You will find that a good idea has, as it were, self-expanding qualities. It stimulates those who see it to add to it. Thus possibilities in it which you have overlooked will come to light.
  • what’s perhaps most interesting is the following note he made to the postscript of a reprint: From my own further experience in advertising, government, and public affairs I find no essential points which I would modify in the idea-producing process. There is one, however, on which I would put greater emphasis. This is as to the store of general materials in the idea-producer’s reservoir. […] I am convinced, however, that you gather this vicarious experience best, not when you are boning up on it for an immediate purpose, but when you are pursuing it as an end in itself.
Javier E

The Choice Explosion - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-choice-explosion.html

choice decision-making bias

shared by Javier E on 03 May 16 - No Cached
  • the social psychologist Sheena Iyengar asked 100 American and Japanese college students to take a piece of paper. On one side, she had them write down the decisions in life they would like to make for themselves. On the other, they wrote the decisions they would like to pass on to others.
  • The Americans desired choice in four times more domains than the Japanese.
  • Americans now have more choices over more things than any other culture in human history. We can choose between a broader array of foods, media sources, lifestyles and identities. We have more freedom to live out our own sexual identities and more religious and nonreligious options to express our spiritual natures.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • But making decisions well is incredibly difficult, even for highly educated professional decision makers. As Chip Heath and Dan Heath point out in their book “Decisive,” 83 percent of corporate mergers and acquisitions do not increase shareholder value, 40 percent of senior hires do not last 18 months in their new position, 44 percent of lawyers would recommend that a young person not follow them into the law.
  • It’s becoming incredibly important to learn to decide well, to develop the techniques of self-distancing to counteract the flaws in our own mental machinery. The Heath book is a very good compilation of those techniques.
  • assume positive intent. When in the midst of some conflict, start with the belief that others are well intentioned. It makes it easier to absorb information from people you’d rather not listen to.
  • Suzy Welch’s 10-10-10 rule. When you’re about to make a decision, ask yourself how you will feel about it 10 minutes from now, 10 months from now and 10 years from now. People are overly biased by the immediate pain of some choice, but they can put the short-term pain in long-term perspective by asking these questions.
  • An "explosion" that may also be a "dissolution" or "disintegration," in my view. Unlimited choices. Conduct without boundaries. All of which may be viewed as either "great" or "terrible." The poor suffer when they have no means to pursue choices, which is terrible. The rich seem only to want more and more, wealth without boundaries, which is great for those so able to do. Yes, we need a new decision-making tool, but perhaps one that is also very old: simplify, simplify,simplify by setting moral boundaries that apply to all and which define concisely what our life together ought to be.
  • our tendency to narrow-frame, to see every decision as a binary “whether or not” alternative. Whenever you find yourself asking “whether or not,” it’s best to step back and ask, “How can I widen my options?”
  • deliberate mistakes. A survey of new brides found that 20 percent were not initially attracted to the man they ended up marrying. Sometimes it’s useful to make a deliberate “mistake” — agreeing to dinner with a guy who is not your normal type. Sometimes you don’t really know what you want and the filters you apply are hurting you.
  • It makes you think that we should have explicit decision-making curriculums in all schools. Maybe there should be a common course publicizing the work of Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein, Dan Ariely and others who study the way we mess up and the techniques we can adopt to prevent error.
  • The explosion of choice places extra burdens on the individual. Poorer Americans have fewer resources to master decision-making techniques, less social support to guide their decision-making and less of a safety net to catch them when they err.
  • the stress of scarcity itself can distort decision-making. Those who experienced stress as children often perceive threat more acutely and live more defensively.
  • The explosion of choice means we all need more help understanding the anatomy of decision-making.
  • living in an area of concentrated poverty can close down your perceived options, and comfortably “relieve you of the burden of choosing life.” It’s hard to maintain a feeling of agency when you see no chance of opportunity.
  • In this way the choice explosion has contributed to widening inequality.
  • The relentless all-hour reruns of "Law and Order" in 100 channel cable markets provide direct rebuff to the touted but hollow promise/premise of wider "choice." The small group of personalities debating a pre-framed trivial point of view, over and over, nightly/daily (in video clips), without data, global comparison, historic reference, regional content, or a deep commitment to truth or knowledge of facts has resulted in many choosing narrower limits: streaming music, coffee shops, Facebook--now a "choice" of 1.65 billion users.
  • It’s important to offer opportunity and incentives. But we also need lessons in self-awareness — on exactly how our decision-making tool is fundamentally flawed, and on mental frameworks we can adopt to avoid messing up even more than we do.
sissij

When Did 'Ambition' Become a Dirty Word? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-international-womens-day.html

knowledge social media bias

shared by sissij on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • but is instead a stark, black-and-white video, a public service announcement that takes on a thorny issue that dominated the last presidential campaign and has divided people on the right and left.
  • “Embrace Ambition,”
  • “I can think of a lot of dirty words,” Ms. Witherspoon says. “Ambition is not one of them.”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Nevertheless, she seemed to choose her words carefully as she spoke about the campaign.
  • she wanted to get away from the idea that this project was politically motivated, or anti-Trump.
  • But the issue of ambition, and the way it is used to defame women, is nevertheless personal to her.
  • This was confusing to Ms. Burch, who never saw herself as being a particularly threatening person.
  • “I do it, too,” she said. “I’m guilty of all of it.”
  • And the word “feminist” began to shed its Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan connotations, as women like Madonna went from saying they are “not feminists” but “humanists” to wearing T-shirts at anti-Trump events that had the word “feminist” emblazoned across the center.
  • sissij on 02 Mar 17
     
    Sometimes, people are ashamed of their ambition. They are afraid to have a dream because they would not bear any failure. I think people don't dare to dream big now. I think it might be because of the concept of economics we have in the recent years. Most people follow the efficiency rule so nobody is willing to risk and make a revolution. Putting on big stake is not the most efficient choice in economics. Although it tells us it is okay to be greedy, but it limited us to the model and make us less willingly to make a breakthrough. --Sissi (3/2/2017)
Javier E

Is Algebra Necessary? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...is-algebra-necessary.html

math education requirement

shared by Javier E on 30 Jul 12 - Cached
  • My aim is not to spare students from a difficult subject, but to call attention to the real problems we are causing by misdirecting precious resources.
  • one in four ninth graders fail to finish high school. In South Carolina, 34 percent fell away in 2008-9, according to national data released last year; for Nevada, it was 45 percent. Most of the educators I’ve talked with cite algebra as the major academic reason.
  • Algebra is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white. In New Mexico, 43 percent of white students fell below “proficient,” along with 39 percent in Tennessee
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • The depressing conclusion of a faculty report: “failing math at all levels affects retention more than any other academic factor.” A national sample of transcripts found mathematics had twice as many F’s and D’s compared as other subjects.
  • Of all who embark on higher education, only 58 percent end up with bachelor’s degrees. The main impediment to graduation: freshman math.
  • California’s two university systems, for instance, consider applications only from students who have taken three years of mathematics and in that way exclude many applicants who might excel in fields like art or history. Community college students face an equally prohibitive mathematics wall. A study of two-year schools found that fewer than a quarter of their entrants passed the algebra classes they were required to take.
  • a definitive analysis by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce forecasts that in the decade ahead a mere 5 percent of entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra or above.
  • “mathematical reasoning in workplaces differs markedly from the algorithms taught in school.” Even in jobs that rely on so-called STEM credentials — science, technology, engineering, math — considerable training occurs after hiring, including the kinds of computations that will be required.
  • I fully concur that high-tech knowledge is needed to sustain an advanced industrial economy. But we’re deluding ourselves if we believe the solution is largely academic.
  • Nor will just passing grades suffice. Many colleges seek to raise their status by setting a high mathematics bar. Hence, they look for 700 on the math section of the SAT, a height attained in 2009 by only 9 percent of men and 4 percent of women. And it’s not just Ivy League colleges that do this: at schools like Vanderbilt, Rice and Washington University in St. Louis, applicants had best be legacies or athletes if they have scored less than 700 on their math SATs.
  • A January 2012 analysis from the Georgetown center found 7.5 percent unemployment for engineering graduates and 8.2 percent among computer scientists.
  • “Our civilization would collapse without mathematics.” He’s absolutely right.
  • Quantitative literacy clearly is useful in weighing all manner of public policies
  • Mathematics is used as a hoop, a badge, a totem to impress outsiders and elevate a profession’s status.
  • Instead of investing so much of our academic energy in a subject that blocks further attainment for much of our population, I propose that we start thinking about alternatives. Thus mathematics teachers at every level could create exciting courses in what I call “citizen statistics.” This would not be a backdoor version of algebra, as in the Advanced Placement syllabus. Nor would it focus on equations used by scholars when they write for one another. Instead, it would familiarize students with the kinds of numbers that describe and delineate our personal and public lives.
  • This need not involve dumbing down. Researching the reliability of numbers can be as demanding as geometry.
  • I hope that mathematics departments can also create courses in the history and philosophy of their discipline, as well as its applications in early cultures. Why not mathematics in art and music — even poetry — along with its role in assorted sciences? The aim would be to treat mathematics as a liberal art, making it as accessible and welcoming as sculpture or ballet
  • Yes, young people should learn to read and write and do long division, whether they want to or not. But there is no reason to force them to grasp vectorial angles and discontinuous functions. Think of math as a huge boulder we make everyone pull, without assessing what all this pain achieves. So why require it, without alternatives or exceptions? Thus far I haven’t found a compelling answer.
Javier E

Facebook's New Strategy to Turn Eyeballs Into Influence - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-a-push-to-be-a-media-hub.html

facebook social media knowledge search sharing information

shared by Javier E on 24 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Facebook, in short, aims not to be a Web site you spend a lot of time on, but something that defines your online — and increasingly offline — life.
  • Searching the Web is still the way most people discover content — whether it is news, information about wedding photographers or Swiss chard recipes. Facebook is trying to change that: in effect, friends will direct other friends to content.
  • it is teaming up with companies that distribute music, movies, information and games in positioning itself to become the conduit where news and entertainment is found and consumed.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • A new feature called Timeline lets users post information about their past, like weddings and big vacations. And everywhere on the site, users will be able to more precisely signal what they are reading, watching, hearing or eating. This will let Facebook reap even more valuable data than it does now about its users’ habits and desires, which in turn can be used to sell more fine-tuned advertising.
  • The site’s evolution could make it easier for them to decide how to spend their time and money. But it could also potentially allow them to shut out alternative viewpoints and information that is not being shared among their set of friends.
Javier E

The Evangelical Rejection of Reason - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...lical-rejection-of-reason.html

evangelicalism reason anti-intellectualism science

shared by Javier E on 18 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • THE Republican presidential field has become a showcase of evangelical anti-intellectualism. Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann deny that climate change is real and caused by humans. Mr. Perry and Mrs. Bachmann dismiss evolution as an unproven theory.
  • The rejection of science seems to be part of a politically monolithic red-state fundamentalism, textbook evidence of an unyielding ignorance on the part of the religious. As one fundamentalist slogan puts it, “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.”
  • Fundamentalism appeals to evangelicals who have become convinced that their country has been overrun by a vast secular conspiracy; denial is the simplest and most attractive response to change.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • In response, many evangelicals created what amounts to a “parallel culture,” nurtured by church, Sunday school, summer camps and colleges, as well as publishing houses, broadcasting networks, music festivals and counseling groups.
  • But in fact their rejection of knowledge amounts to what the evangelical historian Mark A. Noll, in his 1994 book, “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” described as an “intellectual disaster.” He called on evangelicals to repent for their neglect of the mind, decrying the abandonment of the intellectual heritage of the Protestant Reformation. “The scandal of the evangelical mind,” he wrote, “is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”
  • Scholars like Dr. Collins and Mr. Noll, and publications like Books & Culture, Sojourners and The Christian Century, offer an alternative to the self-anointed leaders. They recognize that the Bible does not condemn evolution and says next to nothing about gay marriage. They understand that Christian theology can incorporate Darwin’s insights and flourish in a pluralistic society.
julia rhodes

You Can't Take It With You, but You Still Want More - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...u-but-you-still-want-more.html

psychology brain science research science knowledge education nytimes

shared by julia rhodes on 06 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • So say scholars behind research, published in the journal Psychological Science in June, that shows a deeply rooted instinct to earn more than can possibly be consumed, even when this imbalance makes us unhappy
  • Nonetheless, the researchers note that productivity rates have risen, which theoretically lets many people be just as comfortable as previous generations while working less. Yet they choose not to.
  • In the first phase, subjects sat for five minutes in front of a computer wearing a headset, and had the choice of listening to pleasant music or to obnoxious-sounding white noi
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • All were told that there would be a second phase to the experiment, also lasting five minutes, in which they could eat the chocolate they earned. But they were told they would forfeit any chocolate they couldn’t consume, and they were asked how much they expected to be able to eat.
  • On average, people in the high-earner group predicted that they could consume 3.75 chocolates. But when it came time to “earn” chocolates, they accumulated well beyond their estimate
  • “We introduce the concept of ‘mindless accumulation,’ ” said one of the paper’s authors, Christopher Hsee, a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Busi
  • The impulse seemed less pronounced, even mixed, with the low earners. They earned less chocolate than they predicted they could eat. But the high earners and the low earners listened to about the same amount of obnoxious noise in the five-minute period, which Dr. Hsee said strongly suggested that both groups were driven by the same thing: not by how much they need, but by how much work they could withstand.
1 - 20 of 30 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page