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Europe shows the way to protect privacy from Facebook-like violations - MarketWatch - 0 views

www.marketwatch.com/...ook-like-violations-2018-04-12 privacy europe facebook social media technology
shared by Javier E on 15 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, recently noted that the public scrutiny of Facebook is “very much overdue,” declaring that “it’s shocking to me that they didn’t have to answer more of these questions earlier on.”
  • Stefano Quintarelli, one of Europe’s top IT experts and a leading advocate for online privacy (and, until recently, a member of the Italian Parliament), has been a persistent and prophetic critic of Facebook’s abuse of its market position and misuse of online personal data
  • He has long championed a powerful idea: that each of us should retain control of our online profile, which should be readily transferable across portals. If we decide we don’t like Facebook, we should be able to shift to a competitor without losing the links to contacts who remain on Facebook.
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  • Quintarelli says that the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which takes effect on May 25, following six years of preparation and debate, “can serve as guidance in some aspects.
  • Under the GDPR, he notes, “non-compliant organizations can face heavy fines, up to 4% of their revenues.
  • Had the GDPR already been in place, Facebook, in order to avoid such fines, would have had to notify the authorities of the data leak as soon as the company became aware of it, well in advance of the last U.S. election.”
  • the GDPR should help, because it “introduces the concept of profile portability, whereby a user can move her profile from one service provider to another, like we do when porting our telephone profile — the mobile phone number — from one operator to another.”
  • Just as important is “interconnection: the operator to which we port our profile should be interconnected to the source operator so that we don’t lose contact with our online friends. This is possible today thanks to technologies like IPFS and Solid, developed by the web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.”
  • Spiekermann, a global authority on the trafficking of our online identities for purposes of targeted advertising, political propaganda, public and private surveillance, or other nefarious purposes, emphasizes the need to crack down on “personal data markets.”
  • “personal data markets have thrived on the idea that personal data might be the ‘new oil’ of the digital economy as well as — so it seems — of politics.”
  • “more than a thousand companies are now involved in a digital information value chain that harvests data from any online activity and delivers targeted content to online or mobile users within roughly 36 seconds of their entry into the digital realm.”
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A New Understanding of How Movement Decreases Stress - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...496679 stress research science psychology brain science neural nets psychosomatic
shared by Javier E on 24 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • If stress is controlled by these few cortical areas—the part of the brain that deals in high-level executive functioning, our beliefs and existential understandings of ourselves—why would any sort of body movement play a part in decreasing stress?
  • Pittsburgh neuroscientists showed that they have discovered a discrete, elaborate network in the cerebral cortex that controls the adrenal medulla. It seems that the connections between the brain and the adrenal medulla are much more elaborate than previously understood. Complex networks throughout the primary sensory and motor cortices are tied directly to our stress responses.
  • “This is suggesting a much more decentralized process,” said Bruno of the findings. He was not involved in the study.“You have lots of different circuits built on top of one another, and they’re all feeding back to one of our most primitive and primordial response systems. They've really shown that stress is controlled by more than the traditional high-level cognitive areas. I think that’s a big deal.
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  • Rabies moves at a predictable rate, replicating every eight to 10 hours, moving rapidly through chains of neurons and revealing a network. The researchers could allow the virus to move up the nervous system and reach the brain but could sacrifice the monkey before it showed any symptoms of infection.
  • When the virus has had enough time to travel a predictable distance, the researchers anesthetize the animal, wash out its blood, perfuse the central nervous system with fixatives, and use antibodies to detect where the virus has spread. The kills were timed to various stages to create a map. By the time you’ve gone through several sets of synapses that mapping is an enormous task. There’s an exponential increase in the number of neurons.
  • the researchers were astounded at what they saw. The motor areas in the brain connect to the adrenal glands. In the primary motor cortex of the brain, there’s a map of the human body—areas that correspond to the face, arm, and leg area, as well as a region that controls the axial body muscles (known to many people now as “the core”).
  • “Something about axial control has an impact on stress responses,” Strick reasons. “There’s all this evidence that core strengthening has an impact on stress. And when you see somebody that's depressed or stressed out, you notice changes in their posture. When you stand up straight, it has an effect on how you project yourself and how you feel.  Well, lo and behold, core muscles have an impact on stress. And I suspect that if you activate core muscles inappropriately with poor posture, that’s going to have an impact on stress.”
  • “These neural pathways might explain our intuitive sense for why there are many different strategies for coping with stress,” said Bruno. “I like the examples they give in the paper—that maybe this is why yoga and pilates are so successful. But there are lots of other things where people talk about mental imagery and all sorts of other ways that people deal with stress. I think having so many neural pathways having direct lines to the stress control system, that’s really interesting.”
  • Bruno specializes more in sensory neuroscience, so he read a more into the findings in the primary somatosensory cortex. Some of these tactile areas in the brain seem to be providing as much input to the adrenal medulla as the cortical areas. “To me that's really new and interesting,” said Bruno. “It might explain why certain sensations we find very relaxing or stressful.”
  • “It's not clear to me—from our work, and from their work—that what we call motor cortex is really motor cortex,” he said. “Maybe the primary sensory cortex is doing something more than we thought. When I see results like these, I go, hm, maybe these areas aren’t so simple.”
  • With this come implications for what’s currently known as “psychosomatic illness”—how the mind has an impact over organ functions. The name tends to have a bad connotation. The notion that this mind-body connection isn’t really real; that psychosomatic illnesses are “all in your head.” Elaborate connections like this would explain that, yes, it is all in your head. The fact that cortical areas in the brain that have multi-synaptic connections that control organ function could strip the negative connotations
  • As he put it, “How we move, think, and feel have an impact on the stress response through real neural connections.”
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Sex, Morality, and Modernity: Can Immanuel Kant Unite Us? - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...276009 sexual abuse ethics sexual ethics morality discourse kant consent condemnation hookup golden rule psychology
shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Before I jump back into the conversation about sexual ethics that has unfolded on the Web in recent days, inspired by Emily Witt's n+1 essay "What Do You Desire?" and featuring a fair number of my favorite writers, it's worth saying a few words about why I so value debate on this subject, and my reasons for running through some sex-life hypotheticals near the end of this article.
  • As we think and live, the investment required to understand one another increases. So do the stakes of disagreeing. 18-year-olds on the cusp of leaving home for the first time may disagree profoundly about how best to live and flourish, but the disagreements are abstract. It is easy, at 18, to express profound disagreement with, say, a friend's notions of child-rearing. To do so when he's 28, married, and raising a son or daughter is delicate, and perhaps best avoided
  • I have been speaking of friends. The gulfs that separate strangers can be wider and more difficult to navigate because there is no history of love and mutual goodwill as a foundation for trust. Less investment has been made, so there is less incentive to persevere through the hard parts.
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  • I've grown very close to new people whose perspectives are radically different than mine.
  • It floors me: These individuals are all repositories of wisdom. They've gleaned it from experiences I'll never have, assumptions I don't share, and brains wired different than mine. I want to learn what they know.
  • Does that get us anywhere? A little ways, I think.
  • "Are we stuck with a passé traditionalism on one hand, and total laissez-faire on the other?" Is there common ground shared by the orthodox-Christian sexual ethics of a Rod Dreher and those who treat consent as their lodestar?
  • Gobry suggests that Emmanuel Kant provides a framework everyone can and should embrace, wherein consent isn't nearly enough to make a sexual act moral--we must, in addition, treat the people in our sex lives as ends, not means.
  • Here's how Kant put it: "Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end."
  • the disappearance of a default sexual ethic in America and the divergence of our lived experiences means we have more to learn from one another than ever, even as our different choices raise the emotional stakes.
  • Nor does it seem intuitively obvious that a suffering, terminally ill 90-year-old is regarding himself as a means, or an object, if he prefers to end his life with a lethal injection rather than waiting three months in semi-lucid agony for his lungs to slowly shut down and suffocate him. (Kant thought suicide impermissible.) The terminally ill man isn't denigrating his own worth or the preciousness of life or saying it's permissible "any time" it is difficult. He believes ending his life is permissible only because the end is nigh, and the interim affords no opportunity for "living" in anything except a narrow biological sense.
  • It seems to me that, whether we're talking about a three-week college relationship or a 60-year marriage, it is equally possible to treat one's partner as a means or as an end (though I would agree that "treating as means" is more common in hookups than marriage)
  • my simple definition is this: It is wrong to treat human persons in such a way that they are reduced to objects. This says nothing about consent: a person may consent to be used as an object, but it is still wrong to use them that way. It says nothing about utility: society may approve of using some people as objects; whether those people are actual slaves or economically oppressed wage-slaves it is still wrong to treat them like objects. What it says, in fact, is that human beings have intrinsic worth and dignity such that treating them like objects is wrong.
  • what it means to treat someone as a means, or as an object, turns out to be in dispute.
  • Years ago, I interviewed a sister who was acting as a surrogate for a sibling who couldn't carry her own child. The notion that either regarded the other (or themselves) as an object seems preposterous to me. Neither was treating the other as a means, because they both freely chose, desired and worked in concert to achieve the same end.
  • It seems to me that the Kantian insight is exactly the sort of challenge traditionalist Christians should make to college students as they try to persuade them to look more critically at hookup culture. I think a lot of college students casually mislead one another about their intentions and degree of investment, feigning romantic interest when actually they just want to have sex. Some would say they're transgressing against consent. I think Kant has a more powerful challenge. 
  • Ultimately, Kant only gets us a little way in this conversation because, outside the realm of sex, he thinks consent goes a long way toward mitigating the means problem, whereas in the realm of sex, not so much. This is inseparable from notions he has about sex that many of us just don't share.
  • two Biblical passages fit my moral intuition even better than Kant. "Love your neighbor as yourself." And "therefore all things whatsoever would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.
  • "do unto others..." is extremely demanding, hard to live up to, and a very close fit with my moral intuitions.
  • "Do unto others" is also enough to condemn all sorts of porn, and to share all sorts of common ground with Dreher beyond consent. Interesting that it leaves us with so many disagreements too. "Do unto others" is core to my support for gay marriage.
  • Are our bones always to be trusted?) The sexual behavior parents would be mortified by is highly variable across time and cultures. So how can I regard it as a credible guide of inherent wrong? Professional football and championship boxing are every bit as violent and far more physically damaging to their participants than that basement scene, yet their cultural familiarity is such that most people don't feel them to be morally suspect. Lots of parents are proud, not mortified, when a son makes the NFL.
  • "Porn operates in fantasy the way boxing and football operate in fantasy. The injuries are quite real." He is, as you can see, uncomfortable with both. Forced at gunpoint to choose which of two events could proceed on a given night, an exact replica of the San Francisco porn shoot or an Ultimate Fighting Championship tournament--if I had to shut one down and grant the other permission to proceed--what would the correct choice be?
  • insofar as there is something morally objectionable here, it's that the audience is taking pleasure in the spectacle of someone being abused, whether that abuse is fact or convincing illusion. Violent sports and violent porn interact with dark impulses in humanity, as their producers well know.
  • If Princess Donna was failing to "do unto others" at all, the audience was arguably who she failed. Would she want others to entertain her by stoking her dark human impulses? Then again, perhaps she is helping to neuter and dissipate them in a harmless way. That's one theory of sports, isn't it? We go to war on the gridiron as a replacement for going to war? And the rise in violent porn has seemed to coincide with falling, not rising, incidence of sexual violence. 
  • On all sorts of moral questions I can articulate confident judgments. But I am confident in neither my intellect nor my gut when it comes to judging Princess Donna, or whether others are transgressing against themselves or "nature" when doing things that I myself wouldn't want to do. Without understanding their mindset, why they find that thing desirable, or what it costs them, if anything, I am loath to declare that it's grounded in depravity or inherently immoral just because it triggers my disgust instinct, especially if the people involved articulate a plausible moral code that they are following, and it even passes a widely held standard like "do unto others."
  • Here's another way to put it. Asked to render moral judgments about sexual behaviors, there are some I would readily label as immoral. (Rape is an extreme example. Showing the topless photo your girlfriend sent to your best friend is a milder one.) But I often choose to hold back and error on the side of not rendering a definitive judgment, knowing that occasionally means I'll fail to label as unethical some things that actually turn out to be morally suspect.
  • Partly I take that approach because, unlike Dreher, I don't see any great value or urgency in the condemnations, and unlike Douthat, I worry more about wrongful stigma than lack of rightful stigmas
  • In a society where notions of sexual morality aren't coercively enforced by the church or the state, what purpose is condemnation serving?
  • People are great! Erring on the side of failing to condemn permits at least the possibility of people from all of these world views engaging in conversation with one another.
  • Dreher worries about the fact that, despite our discomfort, neither Witt nor I can bring ourselves to say that the sexual acts performed during the S.F. porn shoot were definitely wrong. Does that really matter? My interlocutors perhaps see a cost more clearly than me, as well they might. My bias is that just arguing around the fire is elevating.
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How scientists fool themselves - and how they can stop : Nature News & Comment - 1 views

www.nature.com/...-and-how-they-can-stop-1.18517
shared by oliviaodon on 09 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • In 2013, five years after he co-authored a paper showing that Democratic candidates in the United States could get more votes by moving slightly to the right on economic policy1, Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University in New York City, was chagrined to learn of an error in the data analysis. In trying to replicate the work, an undergraduate student named Yang Yang Hu had discovered that Gelman had got the sign wrong on one of the variables.
  • Gelman immediately published a three-sentence correction, declaring that everything in the paper's crucial section should be considered wrong until proved otherwise.
  • Reflecting today on how it happened, Gelman traces his error back to the natural fallibility of the human brain: “The results seemed perfectly reasonable,” he says. “Lots of times with these kinds of coding errors you get results that are just ridiculous. So you know something's got to be wrong and you go back and search until you find the problem. If nothing seems wrong, it's easier to miss it.”
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  • This is the big problem in science that no one is talking about: even an honest person is a master of self-deception. Our brains evolved long ago on the African savannah, where jumping to plausible conclusions about the location of ripe fruit or the presence of a predator was a matter of survival. But a smart strategy for evading lions does not necessarily translate well to a modern laboratory, where tenure may be riding on the analysis of terabytes of multidimensional data. In today's environment, Our talent for jumping to conclusions makes it all too easy to find false patterns in randomness, to ignore alternative explanations for a result or to accept 'reasonable' outcomes without question — that is, to ceaselessly lead Ourselves astray without realizing it.
  • Failure to understand our own biases has helped to create a crisis of confidence about the reproducibility of published results
  • Although it is impossible to document how often researchers fool themselves in data analysis, says Ioannidis, findings of irreproducibility beg for an explanation. The study of 100 psychology papers is a case in point: if one assumes that the vast majority of the original researchers were honest and diligent, then a large proportion of the problems can be explained only by unconscious biases. “This is a great time for research on research,” he says. “The massive growth of science allows for a massive number of results, and a massive number of errors and biases to study. So there's good reason to hope we can find better ways to deal with these problems.”
  • Although the human brain and its cognitive biases have been the same for as long as we have been doing science, some important things have changed, says psychologist Brian Nosek, executive director of the non-profit Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia, which works to increase the transparency and reproducibility of scientific research. Today's academic environment is more competitive than ever. There is an emphasis on piling up publications with statistically significant results — that is, with data relationships in which a commonly used measure of statistical certainty, the p-value, is 0.05 or less. “As a researcher, I'm not trying to produce misleading results,” says Nosek. “But I do have a stake in the outcome.” And that gives the mind excellent motivation to find what it is primed to find.
  • Another reason for concern about cognitive bias is the advent of staggeringly large multivariate data sets, often harbouring only a faint signal in a sea of random noise. Statistical methods have barely caught up with such data, and our brain's methods are even worse, says Keith Baggerly, a statistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. As he told a conference on challenges in bioinformatics last September in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, “our intuition when we start looking at 50, or hundreds of, variables sucks.”
  • One trap that awaits during the early stages of research is what might be called hypothesis myopia: investigators fixate on collecting evidence to support just one hypothesis; neglect to look for evidence against it; and fail to consider other explanations.
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New Research Suggests Working Out With a Friend, Even Online, Makes You Healthier | Big... - 0 views

bigthink.com/...ven-online-makes-you-healthier research psychology social media
shared by sissij on 25 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • That exercise is a social activity is not surprising. For millions of years our forebears physically worked together to provide shelter, craft rudimentary tools, hunt, and gather. If anything is strange today it’s how little we need to use our bodies to survive, which helps account for so many of our physical and emotional problems. 
  • Being socially active is the main reason I’m drawn to teaching group fitness, which has accounted for half of my career since 2004 (and complements the solitary time spent writing and editing nicely).
  • As it turns out, your friends don’t even have to live near you—social media is helping foster this trend as well.
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  • The researchers collected over five years of data from over a million runners, who collectively clocked in nearly 225 million miles. 
  • They noticed similar training patterns even if the runners were separated.
  • Weather, it turns out, did not dissuade one friend who saw their counterpart clocking in an extra ten minutes that day.
  • Risk of lagging behind proved to be a necessary catalyst for upping the ante. 
  • Which, obviously, is in good humor. But it helps.
  • sissij on 25 Apr 17
     
    Human is essentially a social animal. People cannot live without a community. Although loneliness is a aspect of life deep in everybody's heart, nobody can refuse their nature to make friends, talk to people, and emotionally engaged with others. This follows the logic of revolution. In cross-country, our coach always tells us to run together and work together in practices and races. I think maybe he is doing that in purpose since people tends to perform better with their friends around them.
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There's No Such Thing As 'Sound Science' | FiveThirtyEight - 1 views

fivethirtyeight.com/...d-science-demand-sound-science science method research trade-off values fact objectivity
shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • cience is being turned against itself. For decades, its twin ideals of transparency and rigor have been weaponized by those who disagree with results produced by the scientific method. Under the Trump administration, that fight has ramped up again.
  • The same entreaties crop up again and again: We need to root out conflicts. We need more precise evidence. What makes these arguments so powerful is that they sound quite similar to the points raised by proponents of a very different call for change that’s coming from within science.
  • Despite having dissimilar goals, the two forces espouse principles that look surprisingly alike: Science needs to be transparent. Results and methods should be openly shared so that outside researchers can independently reproduce and validate them. The methods used to collect and analyze data should be rigorous and clear, and conclusions must be supported by evidence.
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  • they’re also used as talking points by politicians who are working to make it more difficult for the EPA and other federal agencies to use science in their regulatory decision-making, under the guise of basing policy on “sound science.” Science’s virtues are being wielded against it.
  • What distinguishes the two calls for transparency is intent: Whereas the “open science” movement aims to make science more reliable, reproducible and robust, proponents of “sound science” have historically worked to amplify uncertainty, create doubt and undermine scientific discoveries that threaten their interests.
  • “Our criticisms are founded in a confidence in science,” said Steven Goodman, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford and a proponent of open science. “That’s a fundamental difference — we’re critiquing science to make it better. Others are critiquing it to devalue the approach itself.”
  • alls to base public policy on “sound science” seem unassailable if you don’t know the term’s history. The phrase was adopted by the tobacco industry in the 1990s to counteract mounting evidence linking secondhand smoke to cancer.
  • The sound science tactic exploits a fundamental feature of the scientific process: Science does not produce absolute certainty. Contrary to how it’s sometimes represented to the public, science is not a magic wand that turns everything it touches to truth. Instead, it’s a process of uncertainty reduction, much like a game of 20 Questions.
  • Any given study can rarely answer more than one question at a time, and each study usually raises a bunch of new questions in the process of answering old ones. “Science is a process rather than an answer,” said psychologist Alison Ledgerwood of the University of California, Davis. Every answer is provisional and subject to change in the face of new evidence. It’s not entirely correct to say that “this study proves this fact,” Ledgerwood said. “We should be talking instead about how science increases or decreases our confidence in something.”
  • While insisting that they merely wanted to ensure that public policy was based on sound science, tobacco companies defined the term in a way that ensured that no science could ever be sound enough. The only sound science was certain science, which is an impossible standard to achieve.
  • “Doubt is our product,” wrote one employee of the Brown & Williamson tobacco company in a 1969 internal memo. The note went on to say that doubt “is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’” and “establishing a controversy.” These strategies for undermining inconvenient science were so effective that they’ve served as a sort of playbook for industry interests ever since
  • Doubt merchants aren’t pushing for knowledge, they’re practicing what Proctor has dubbed “agnogenesis” — the intentional manufacture of ignorance. This ignorance isn’t simply the absence of knowing something; it’s a lack of comprehension deliberately created by agents who don’t want you to know,
  • In the hands of doubt-makers, transparency becomes a rhetorical move. “It’s really difficult as a scientist or policy maker to make a stand against transparency and openness, because well, who would be against it?
  • But at the same time, “you can couch everything in the language of transparency and it becomes a powerful weapon.” For instance, when the EPA was preparing to set new limits on particulate pollution in the 1990s, industry groups pushed back against the research and demanded access to primary data (including records that researchers had promised participants would remain confidential) and a reanalysis of the evidence. Their calls succeeded and a new analysis was performed. The reanalysis essentially confirmed the original conclusions, but the process of conducting it delayed the implementation of regulations and cost researchers time and money.
  • Delay is a time-tested strategy. “Gridlock is the greatest friend a global warming skeptic has,” said Marc Morano, a prominent critic of global warming research
  • which has received funding from the oil and gas industry. “We’re the negative force. We’re just trying to stop stuff.”
  • these ploys are getting a fresh boost from Congress. The Data Quality Act (also known as the Information Quality Act) was reportedly written by an industry lobbyist and quietly passed as part of an appropriations bill in 2000. The rule mandates that federal agencies ensure the “quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” that they disseminate, though it does little to define what these terms mean. The law also provides a mechanism for citizens and groups to challenge information that they deem inaccurate, including science that they disagree with. “It was passed in this very quiet way with no explicit debate about it — that should tell you a lot about the real goals,” Levy said.
  • in the 20 months following its implementation, the act was repeatedly used by industry groups to push back against proposed regulations and bog down the decision-making process. Instead of deploying transparency as a fundamental principle that applies to all science, these interests have used transparency as a weapon to attack very particular findings that they would like to eradicate.
  • Now Congress is considering another way to legislate how science is used. The Honest Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas,3The bill has been passed by the House but still awaits a vote in the Senate. is another example of what Levy calls a “Trojan horse” law that uses the language of transparency as a cover to achieve other political goals. Smith’s legislation would severely limit the kind of evidence the EPA could use for decision-making. Only studies whose raw data and computer codes were publicly available would be allowed for consideration.
  • It might seem like an easy task to sort good science from bad, but in reality it’s not so simple. “There’s a misplaced idea that we can definitively distinguish the good from the not-good science, but it’s all a matter of degree,” said Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science. “There is no perfect study.” Requiring regulators to wait until they have (nonexistent) perfect evidence is essentially “a way of saying, ‘We don’t want to use evidence for our decision-making,’
  • ost scientific controversies aren’t about science at all, and once the sides are drawn, more data is unlikely to bring opponents into agreement.
  • objective knowledge is not enough to resolve environmental controversies. “While these controversies may appear on the surface to rest on disputed questions of fact, beneath often reside differing positions of value; values that can give shape to differing understandings of what ‘the facts’ are.” What’s needed in these cases isn’t more or better science, but mechanisms to bring those hidden values to the forefront of the discussion so that they can be debated transparently. “As long as we continue down this unabashedly naive road about what science is, and what it is capable of doing, we will continue to fail to reach any sort of meaningful consensus on these matters,”
  • The dispute over tobacco was never about the science of cigarettes’ link to cancer. It was about whether companies have the right to sell dangerous products and, if so, what obligations they have to the consumers who purchased them.
  • Similarly, the debate over climate change isn’t about whether our planet is heating, but about how much responsibility each country and person bears for stopping it
  • While researching her book “Merchants of Doubt,” science historian Naomi Oreskes found that some of the same people who were defending the tobacco industry as scientific experts were also receiving industry money to deny the role of human activity in global warming. What these issues had in common, she realized, was that they all involved the need for government action. “None of this is about the science. All of this is a political debate about the role of government,”
  • These controversies are really about values, not scientific facts, and acknowledging that would allow us to have more truthful and productive debates. What would that look like in practice? Instead of cherry-picking evidence to support a particular view (and insisting that the science points to a desired action), the various sides could lay out the values they are using to assess the evidence.
  • For instance, in Europe, many decisions are guided by the precautionary principle — a system that values caution in the face of uncertainty and says that when the risks are unclear, it should be up to industries to show that their products and processes are not harmful, rather than requiring the government to prove that they are harmful before they can be regulated. By contrast, U.S. agencies tend to wait for strong evidence of harm before issuing regulations
  • the difference between them comes down to priorities: Is it better to exercise caution at the risk of burdening companies and perhaps the economy, or is it more important to avoid potential economic downsides even if it means that sometimes a harmful product or industrial process goes unregulated?
  • But science can’t tell us how risky is too risky to allow products like cigarettes or potentially harmful pesticides to be sold — those are value judgements that only humans can make.
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The best time of day - and year - to work most effectively - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-year-to-work-most-effectively time psychology research
shared by Javier E on 05 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Some of us are larks -- some of us are owls. But if you look at distribution, most of us are a little bit of both — what I call “third birds.”
  • There's a period of day when we’re at our peak, and that's best for doing analytic tasks things like writing a report or auditing a financial statement. There's the trough, which is the dip -- that’s not good for anything. And then there’s recovery, which is less optimal, but we do better at insight and creativity tasks.
  • the bigger issue here is that we have thought of "when" as a second order question. We take questions of how we do things, what we do, and who I do it with very seriously, but we stick the "when" questions over at the kids’ table.
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  • What is it about a new year? How does our psychology influence how we think about that and making fresh starts? We do what social psychologists call temporal accounting -- that is, we have a ledger in our head of how we are spending our time. What we’re trying to do, in some cases, is relegate our previous selves to the past: This year we’re going to do a lot better.
  • breaks are much more important than we realize.
  • Many hard-core workplaces think of breaks as a deviation from performance, when in fact the science of breaks tells us they’re a part of performance.
  • Research shows us that social breaks are better than solo breaks -- taking a break with somebody else is more restorative than doing it on your own. A break that involves movement is better than a stationary one. And then there's the restorative power in nature. Simply going outside outside rather than being inside, simply being able to look out a window during a break is better. And there's the importance of being fully detached,
  • Every day I write down two breaks that I’m going to take. I make a 'break list,' and I try to treat them with the same reverence with which I’d treat scheduled meetings. We would never skip a meeting.
  • When you're giving feedback to employees, should you give good news or bad news first?
  • Here’s where you should go first: If you’re not the default choice
  • If you are the default choice, you’re better off not going first. What happens is that early in a process, people are more likely to be open-minded, to challenge assumptions. But over time, they wear out, and they’re more likely to go with the default choice.
  • Also, if you’re operating in an uncertain environment -- and this is actually really important -- where the criteria for selections are not fully fully sharp, you’re better off going at the end. In the beginning, the judges are still trying to figure out what they want.
  • In fact, what researchers have found is that at the beginning, project teams pretty much do nothing. They bicker, they dicker. Yet astonishingly, many project teams she followed ended up really getting started in earnest at the exact midpoint. If you give a team 34 days, they’ll get started in earnest on day 17. This is actually a big shift in the way organizational scholars thought about how teams work.
  • There are two key things a leader can do at a midpoint. One is to identify it to make it salient: Say "ok guys, it’s day 17 of this 35 day project. We better get going."
  • The second comes from research on basketball. It shows that when teams are ahead at the midpoint, they get complacent. When they’re way behind at the midpoint, they get demoralized. But when they’re a little behind, it can be galvanizing. So what leaders can do is suggest hey, we’re a little bit behind.
  • One of the issues you explore is when it pays to go first — whether you’re up for a competitive pitch or trying to get a job. When is it good to go first
  • If you ask people what they prefer, four out of five prefer getting the bad news first. The reason has to do with endings. Given the choice, human beings prefer endings that elevate. We prefer endings that go up, that have a rising sequence rather than a declining sequence.
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Opinion | I Don't Want Another Family to Lose a Child the Way We Did - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...suicide-prevention.html
shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • I Don’t Want Another Family to Lose a Child the Way We Did
  • The thought of suicide is terrifying, but we have to make talking about it a part of everyday life.
  • I always felt so blessed watching my boy-girl twins; even as teenagers they would walk arm in arm down the street, chatting and laughing together.
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • But that blessed feeling evaporated in June of 2019, when I lost my daughter, Frankie, to suicide, three weeks before her high school graduation
  • Ever since that day, I have thought of little else except how I could help the next struggling teenager, the next Frankie.
  • Several days after her passing, we opened our home up to our community, including Frankie’s very large group of teenage friends
  • “What strength Frankie had. It must have taken enormous energy for her to do what she did each day.”
  • That was Frankie. She had the strength to engage in school and in theater, despite her anxiety and depression. She had an ability to connect — emotionally, profoundly — with others, even when she was struggling herself
  • “empathy personified, with quite the fabulous earring collection.”
  • Whether that strength came from her home or somewhere else, or both, Frankie just had a way of drawing out warmth wherever she went.
  • Just as my parents couldn’t predict in the 1980s what seatbelt safety would look like now, I am not sure what suicide prevention should look like in the future.
  • Suicidal thinking, whether it is the result of mental illness, stress, trauma or loss, is actually far more common and difficult to see than many of us realize
  • A June 2020 Centers for Disease Control survey found that one in four 18- to 24-year-olds reported that they had seriously thought about taking their lives in the past 30 days; prepandemic estimates found that just under one in five high schoolers had seriously considered suicide, and just under one in 10 had made at least one suicide attempt during the previous year.
  • Despite 50 years of research, predicting death by suicide is still nearly impossible
  • Like others who have lost a child to suicide, I have spent countless hours going over relentless “what ifs.”
  • Maybe what we need are seatbelts for suicide.
  • “Click it or Ticket” was born in part out of a concern in the 1980s about teenagers dying in car accidents. Just as with suicides today, adults couldn’t predict who would get into a car accident, and one of the best solutions we had — seatbelts — was used routinely, in some estimates, by only 15 percent of the population. Indeed, as children, my siblings and I used to make a game of rolling around in the back of our car, seatbelts ignored.
  • Three decades later, our world is unlike anything I could have imagined as a child. Putting on a seatbelt is the first lesson of driver’s education; cars get inspected annually for working seatbelts; car companies embed those annoying beeping sounds to remind you to buckle your seatbelt
  • But like many who struggle with suicidal thinking, she kept her own pain camouflaged for a long time, perhaps for too long.
  • Most of us (estimates range as high as 91 percent) now wear a seatbelt.
  • But I imagine a world in which every health worker, school professional, employer and religious leader can recognize the signs of suicidal thinking and know how to ask about it, respond to it and offer resources to someone who is struggling
  • When I told Frankie’s orthodontist about her suicide, his response surprised me: “We really don’t come across that in our practice.” Even though orthodontists don’t ask about it, they see children during their early teenage years, when suicidal thinking often begins to emerge. Can you imagine a world in which signs for the prevention hotline and text line are posted for kids to see as they get their braces adjusted?
  • What if the annual teenage pediatric checkup involved a discussion of one-at-a-time pill packaging and boxes to lock up lethal medications, the way there is a discussion of baby-proofing homes when children start to crawl? What if pediatricians handed each adolescent a card with the prevention hotline on it (or better yet, if companies preprogrammed that number into cellphones) and the pediatrician talked through what happens when a teenager calls? What if doctors coached parents on how to ask their teenager, “Are you thinking about suicide?”
  • What if we required and funded every school to put in place one of the existing programs that train teachers and other school professionals to be a resource for struggling students?
  • I recognize that despite progress identifying effective programs to combat suicidal thinking, their success rate and simplicity does not compare with what we see with seatbelts. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do more.
  • Part of doing more also includes making the world more just and caring. To give one example, state-level same-sex-marriage policies that were in place before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationally have been linked to reductions in suicide attempts among adolescents, especially among sexual minorities.
  • Just as safer highways and car models make seatbelts more effective, asking about and responding to suicidal thinking is only one part of a solution that also includes attention to societal injustices.
  • I understand, of course, that asking about suicidal thinking is scary. But if it is scary for you to ask about it, it is even scarier for the teenager who is thinking about it.
  • I will never forget sitting with Frankie in the waiting room in the pediatric psychiatric wing on the night I brought her to the inpatient unit, three months before she took her life
  • “You know, I am so glad you finally know.” I could hear the relief in her voice. I just nodded, understandingly, but it broke my heart that she held on to such a painful secret for so long.
  • I find myself inspired by Frankie’s teenage friends, who cared deeply for her and now support one another after her passing.
  • On good days, she would sit on the worn couch in that office, snuggle in a pile of teenagers and discuss plays, schoolwork and their lives.
  • And in that corner space, she would text a friend to help her get to class or, after she had opened up about her struggles, encourage others to open up as well.
  • The fall after Frankie left us, some students decided to remake that hidden corner, dotting the walls with colored Post-it notes. Scrawled on a pink Post-it were the words “you matter”; a yellow one read “it gets better”; an orange one shared a cellphone number to call for help. Tiny Post-it squares had transformed the corner into a space to comfort, heal and support the next struggling teenager.
  • I don’t know if a seatbelt approach would have saved Frankie. And I understand that all the details of such an approach aren’t fully worked out here. But I don’t want us to lose any more children because we weren’t brave enough to take on something that scares us, something we don’t fully understand, something that is much more prevalent than many of us realize.
  • If 17- and 18-year-olds who’ve lost a friend have the strength to imagine a world dotted with healing, then the least we can do as adults is design and build the structure to support them
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Cognitive Biases: What They Are and How They Affect People - Effectiviology - 0 views

effectiviology.com/cognitive-biases
shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from rationality, which occurs due to the way our cognitive system works. Accordingly, cognitive biases cause us to be irrational in the way we search for, evaluate, interpret, judge, use, and remember information, as well as in the way we make decisions.
  • Cognitive biases affect every area of our life, from how we form our memories, to how we shape our beliefs, and to how we form relationships with other people. In doing so, they can lead to both relatively minor issues, such as forgetting a small detail from a past event, as well as to major ones, such as choosing to avoid an important medical treatment that could save our life.Because cognitive biases can have such a powerful and pervasive influence on ourselves and on others, it’s important to understand them. As such, in the following article you will learn more about cognitive biases, understand why we experience them, see what types of them exist, and find out what you can do in order to mitigate them successfully.
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Frontiers | A Neural Network Framework for Cognitive Bias | Psychology - 0 views

www.frontiersin.org/...full
shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Human decision-making shows systematic simplifications and deviations from the tenets of rationality (‘heuristics’) that may lead to suboptimal decisional outcomes (‘cognitive biases’). There are currently three prevailing theoretical perspectives on the origin of heuristics and cognitive biases: a cognitive-psychological, an ecological and an evolutionary perspective. However, these perspectives are mainly descriptive and none of them provides an overall explanatory framework for
  • the underlying mechanisms of cognitive biases. To enhance our understanding of cognitive heuristics and biases we propose a neural network framework for cognitive biases, which explains why our brain systematically tends to default to heuristic (‘Type 1’) decision making. We argue that many cognitive biases arise from intrinsic brain mechanisms that are fundamental for the working of biological neural networks. To substantiate our viewpoint, we discern and explain four basic neural network principles: (1) Association, (2) Compatibility, (3) Retainment, and (4) Focus. These principles are inherent to (all) neural networks which were originally optimized to perform concrete biological, perceptual, and motor functions. They form the basis for our inclinations to associate and combine (unrelated) information, to prioritize information that is compatible with our present state (such as knowledge, opinions, and expectations), to retain given information that sometimes could better be ignored, and to focus on dominant information while ignoring relevant information that is not directly activated. The supposed mechanisms are complementary and not mutually exclusive. For different cognitive biases they may all contribute in varying degrees to distortion of information. The present viewpoint not only complements the earlier three viewpoints, but also provides a unifying and binding framework for many cognitive bias phenomena.
  • The cognitive-psychological (or heuristics and biases) perspective (Evans, 2008; Kahneman and Klein, 2009) attributes cognitive biases to limitations in the available data and in the human information processing capacity (Simon, 1955; Broadbent, 1958; Kahneman, 1973, 2003; Norman and Bobrow, 1975)
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Opinion | Why Covid's Airborne Transmission Was Acknowledged So Late - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rus-airborne-transmission.html who cdc transmission Covid-19 Science research psychology bias
shared by Javier E on 08 May 21 - No Cached
  • A week ago, more than a year after the World Health Organization declared that we face a pandemic, a page on its website titled “Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19): How Is It Transmitted?” got a seemingly small update.
  • The revised response still emphasizes transmission in close contact but now says it may be via aerosols — smaller respiratory particles that can float — as well as droplets. It also adds a reason the virus can also be transmitted “in poorly ventilated and/or crowded indoor settings,” saying this is because “aerosols remain suspended in the air or travel farther than 1 meter.”
  • on Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also updated its guidance on Covid-19, clearly saying that inhalation of these smaller particles is a key way the virus is transmitted, even at close range, and put it on top of its list of how the disease spreads.
  • ...38 more annotations...
  • But these latest shifts challenge key infection control assumptions that go back a century, putting a lot of what went wrong last year in context
  • They may also signal one of the most important advancements in public health during this pandemic.
  • If the importance of aerosol transmission had been accepted early, we would have been told from the beginning that it was much safer outdoors, where these small particles disperse more easily, as long as you avoid close, prolonged contact with others.
  • We would have tried to make sure indoor spaces were well ventilated, with air filtered as necessary.
  • Instead of blanket rules on gatherings, we would have targeted conditions that can produce superspreading events: people in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, especially if engaged over time in activities that increase aerosol production, like shouting and singing
  • We would have started using masks more quickly, and we would have paid more attention to their fit, too. And we would have been less obsessed with cleaning surfaces.
  • The implications of this were illustrated when I visited New York City in late April — my first trip there in more than a year.
  • A giant digital billboard greeted me at Times Square, with the message “Protecting yourself and others from Covid-19. Guidance from the World Health Organization.”
  • That billboard neglected the clearest epidemiological pattern of this pandemic: The vast majority of transmission has been indoors, sometimes beyond a range of three or even six feet. The superspreading events that play a major role in driving the pandemic occur overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, indoors.
  • The billboard had not a word about ventilation, nothing about opening windows or moving activities outdoors, where transmission has been rare and usually only during prolonged and close contact. (Ireland recently reported 0.1 percent of Covid-19 cases were traced to outdoor transmission.)
  • Mary-Louise McLaws, an epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and a member of the W.H.O. committees that craft infection prevention and control guidance, wanted all this examined but knew the stakes made it harder to overcome the resistance. She told The Times last year, “If we started revisiting airflow, we would have to be prepared to change a lot of what we do.” She said it was a very good idea, but she added, “It will cause an enormous shudder through the infection control society.”
  • In contrast, if the aerosols had been considered a major form of transmission, in addition to distancing and masks, advice would have centered on ventilation and airflow, as well as time spent indoors. Small particles can accumulate in enclosed spaces, since they can remain suspended in the air and travel along air currents. This means that indoors, three or even six feet, while helpful, is not completely protective, especially over time.
  • To see this misunderstanding in action, look at what’s still happening throughout the world. In India, where hospitals have run out of supplemental oxygen and people are dying in the streets, money is being spent on fleets of drones to spray anti-coronavirus disinfectant in outdoor spaces. Parks, beaches and outdoor areas keep getting closed around the world. This year and last, organizers canceled outdoor events for the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C. Cambodian customs officials advised spraying disinfectant outside vehicles imported from India. The examples are many.
  • Meanwhile, many countries allowed their indoor workplaces to open but with inadequate aerosol protections. There was no attention to ventilation, installing air filters as necessary or even opening windows when possible, more to having people just distancing three or six feet, sometimes not requiring masks beyond that distance, or spending money on hard plastic barriers, which may be useless at best
  • clear evidence doesn’t easily overturn tradition or overcome entrenched feelings and egos. John Snow, often credited as the first scientific epidemiologist, showed that a contaminated well was responsible for a 1854 London cholera epidemic by removing the suspected pump’s handle and documenting how the cases plummeted afterward. Many other scientists and officials wouldn’t believe him for 12 years, when the link to a water source showed up again and became harder to deny.
  • Along the way to modern public health shaped largely by the fight over germs, a theory of transmission promoted by the influential public health figure Charles Chapin took hold
  • Dr. Chapin asserted in the early 1900s that respiratory diseases were most likely spread at close range by people touching bodily fluids or ejecting respiratory droplets, and did not allow for the possibility that such close-range infection could occur by inhaling small floating particles others emitted
  • He was also concerned that belief in airborne transmission, which he associated with miasma theories, would make people feel helpless and drop their guard against contact transmission. This was a mistake that would haunt infection control for the next century and more.
  • It was in this context in early 2020 that the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. asserted that SARS-CoV-2 was transmitted primarily via these heavier, short-range droplets, and provided guidance accordingly
  • Amid the growing evidence, in July, hundreds of scientists signed an open letter urging the public health agencies, especially the W.H.O., to address airborne transmission of the coronavirus.
  • Last October, the C.D.C. published updated guidance acknowledging airborne transmission, but as a secondary route under some circumstances, until it acknowledged airborne transmission as crucial on Friday. And the W.H.O. kept inching forward in its public statements, most recently a week ago.
  • Linsey Marr, a professor of engineering at Virginia Tech who made important contributions to our understanding of airborne virus transmission before the pandemic, pointed to two key scientific errors — rooted in a lot of history — that explain the resistance, and also opened a fascinating sociological window into how science can get it wrong and why.
  • Dr. Marr said that if you inhale a particle from the air, it’s an aerosol.
  • biomechanically, she said, nasal transmission faces obstacles, since nostrils point downward and the physics of particles that large makes it difficult for them to move up the nose. And in lab measurements, people emit far more of the easier-to-inhale aerosols than the droplets, she said, and even the smallest particles can be virus laden, sometimes more so than the larger ones, seemingly because of how and where they are produced in the respiratory tract.
  • Second, she said, proximity is conducive to transmission of aerosols as well because aerosols are more concentrated near the person emitting them. In a twist of history, modern scientists have been acting like those who equated stinky air with disease, by equating close contact, a measure of distance, only with the larger droplets, a mechanism of transmission, without examination.
  • Since aerosols also infect at close range, measures to prevent droplet transmission — masks and distancing — can help dampen transmission for airborne diseases as well. However, this oversight led medical people to circularly assume that if such measures worked at all, droplets must have played a big role in their transmission.
  • Another dynamic we’ve seen is something that is not unheard-of in the history of science: setting a higher standard of proof for theories that challenge conventional wisdom than for those that support it.
  • Another key problem is that, understandably, we find it harder to walk things back. It is easier to keep adding exceptions and justifications to a belief than to admit that a challenger has a better explanation.
  • The ancients believed that all celestial objects revolved around the earth in circular orbits. When it became clear that the observed behavior of the celestial objects did not fit this assumption, those astronomers produced ever-more-complex charts by adding epicycles — intersecting arcs and circles — to fit the heavens to their beliefs.
  • In a contemporary example of this attitude, the initial public health report on the Mount Vernon choir case said that it may have been caused by people “sitting close to one another, sharing snacks and stacking chairs at the end of the practice,” even though almost 90 percent of the people there developed symptoms of Covid-19
  • So much of what we have done throughout the pandemic — the excessive hygiene theater and the failure to integrate ventilation and filters into our basic advice — has greatly hampered our response.
  • Some of it, like the way we underused or even shut down outdoor space, isn’t that different from the 19th-century Londoners who flushed the source of their foul air into the Thames and made the cholera epidemic worse.
  • Righting this ship cannot be a quiet process — updating a web page here, saying the right thing there. The proclamations that we now know are wrong were so persistent and so loud for so long.
  • the progress we’ve made might lead to an overhaul in our understanding of many other transmissible respiratory diseases that take a terrible toll around the world each year and could easily cause other pandemics.
  • So big proclamations require probably even bigger proclamations to correct, or the information void, unnecessary fears and misinformation will persist, damaging the W.H.O. now and in the future.
  • I’ve seen our paper used in India to try to reason through aerosol transmission and the necessary mitigations. I’ve heard of people in India closing their windows after hearing that the virus is airborne, likely because they were not being told how to respond
  • The W.H.O. needs to address these fears and concerns, treating it as a matter of profound change, so other public health agencies and governments, as well as ordinary people, can better adjust.
  • It needs to begin a campaign proportional to the importance of all this, announcing, “We’ve learned more, and here’s what’s changed, and here’s how we can make sure everyone understands how important this is.” That’s what credible leadership looks like. Otherwise, if a web page is updated in the forest without the requisite fanfare, how will it matter?
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Who Decides What's Racist? - Persuasion - 1 views

www.persuasion.community/...who-decides-whats-racist persuasion racism Critical Theory race Culture Politics epistemology perspective bias
shared by Javier E on 14 May 21 - No Cached
  • The implication of Hannah-Jones’s tweet and candidate Biden’s quip seems to be that you can have African ancestry, dark skin, textured hair, and perhaps even some “culturally black” traits regarding tastes in food, music, and ways of moving through the world. But unless you hold the “correct” political beliefs and values, you are not authentically black.
  • In a now-deleted tweet from May 22, 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, opined, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.”
  • Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks
  • black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.
  • we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices
  • This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.
  • When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”
  • Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.
  • Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.
  • This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.
  • The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools
  • one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.
  • To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.
  • It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:
  • Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”
  • In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”
  • The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.
  • Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California
  • Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”
  • A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”
  • Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.
  • Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?
  • Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.
  • So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.
  • Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease
  • Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”
  • We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation
  • We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.
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Fight the Future - The Triad - 1 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...fight-the-future tech social network social media disinformation extremism ch= psychology brain science bias friction
shared by Javier E on 22 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In large part because our major tech platforms reduced the coefficient of friction (μ for my mechanics nerd posse) to basically zero. QAnons crept out of the dark corners of the web—obscure boards like 4chan and 8kun—and got into the mainstream platforms YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
  • Why did QAnon spread like wildfire in America?
  • These platforms not only made it easy for conspiracy nuts to share their crazy, but they used algorithms that actually boosted the spread of crazy, acting as a force multiplier.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • So it sounds like a simple fix: Impose more friction at the major platform level and you’ll clean up the public square.
  • But it’s not actually that simple because friction runs counter to the very idea of the internet.
  • The fundamental precept of the internet is that it reduces marginal costs to zero. And this fact is why the design paradigm of the internet is to continually reduce friction experienced by users to zero, too. Because if the second unit of everything is free, then the internet has a vested interest in pushing that unit in front of your eyeballs as smoothly as possible.
  • the internet is “broken,” but rather it’s been functioning exactly as it was designed to:
  • Perhaps more than any other job in the world, you do not want the President of the United States to live in a frictionless state of posting. The Presidency is not meant to be a frictionless position, and the United States government is not a frictionless entity, much to the chagrin of many who have tried to change it. Prior to this administration, decisions were closely scrutinized for, at the very least, legality, along with the impact on diplomacy, general norms, and basic grammar. This kind of legal scrutiny and due diligence is also a kind of friction--one that we now see has a lot of benefits. 
  • The deep lesson here isn’t about Donald Trump. It’s about the collision between the digital world and the real world.
  • In the real world, marginal costs are not zero. And so friction is a desirable element in helping to get to the optimal state. You want people to pause before making decisions.
  • described friction this summer as: “anything that inhibits user action within a digital interface, particularly anything that requires an additional click or screen.” For much of my time in the technology sector, friction was almost always seen as the enemy, a force to be vanquished. A “frictionless” experience was generally held up as the ideal state, the optimal product state.
  • Trump was riding the ultimate frictionless optimized engagement Twitter experience: he rode it all the way to the presidency, and then he crashed the presidency into the ground.
  • From a metrics and user point of view, the abstract notion of the President himself tweeting was exactly what Twitter wanted in its original platonic ideal. Twitter has been built to incentivize someone like Trump to engage and post
  • The other day we talked a little bit about how fighting disinformation, extremism, and online cults is like fighting a virus: There is no “cure.” Instead, what you have to do is create enough friction that the rate of spread becomes slow.
  • Our challenge is that when human and digital design comes into conflict, the artificial constraints we impose should be on the digital world to become more in service to us. Instead, we’ve let the digital world do as it will and tried to reconcile Ourselves to the havoc it wreaks.
  • And one of the lessons of the last four years is that when you prize the digital design imperatives—lack of friction—over the human design imperatives—a need for friction—then bad things can happen.
  • We have an ongoing conflict between the design precepts of humans and the design precepts of computers.
  • Anyone who works with computers learns to fear their capacity to forget. Like so many things with computers, memory is strictly binary. There is either perfect recall or total oblivion, with nothing in between. It doesn't matter how important or trivial the information is. The computer can forget anything in an instant. If it remembers, it remembers for keeps.
  • This doesn't map well onto human experience of memory, which is fuzzy. We don't remember anything with perfect fidelity, but we're also not at risk of waking up having forgotten our own name. Memories tend to fade with time, and we remember only the more salient events.
  • And because we live in a time when storage grows ever cheaper, we learn to save everything, log everything, and keep it forever. You never know what will come in useful. Deleting is dangerous.
  • Our lives have become split between two worlds with two very different norms around memory.
  • [A] lot of what's wrong with the Internet has to do with memory. The Internet somehow contrives to remember too much and too little at the same time, and it maps poorly on our concepts of how memory should work.
  • The digital world is designed to never forget anything. It has perfect memory. Forever. So that one time you made a crude joke 20 years ago? It can now ruin your life.
  • Memory in the carbon-based world is imperfect. People forget things. That can be annoying if you’re looking for your keys but helpful if you’re trying to broker peace between two cultures. Or simply become a better person than you were 20 years ago.
  • The digital and carbon-based worlds have different design parameters. Marginal cost is one of them. Memory is another.
  • 2. Forget Me Now
  • 1. Fix Tech, Fix America
12More

How Our Brains Make Memories | Science | Smithsonian Magazine - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...-brains-make-memories-14466850
shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Most people have so-called flashbulb memories of where they were and what they were doing when something momentous happened: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, say, or the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.
  • But as clear and detailed as these memories feel, psychologists find they are surprisingly inaccurate.
  • Nader believes he may have an explanation for such quirks of memory. His ideas are unconventional within neuroscience, and they have caused researchers to reconsider some of their most basic assumptions about how memory works
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • In short, Nader believes that the very act of remembering can change our memories
  • Much of his research is on rats, but he says the same basic principles apply to human memory as well. In fact, he says, it may be impossible for humans or any other animal to bring a memory to mind without altering it in some way.
  • Memories surrounding a major event like September 11 might be especially susceptible, he says, because we tend to replay them over and over in our minds and in conversation with others—with each repetition having the potential to alter them
  • cientists have long known that recording a memory requires adjusting the connections between neurons
  • Each memory tweaks some tiny subset of the neurons in the brain (the human brain has 100 billion neurons in all), changing the way they communicate. Neurons send messages to one another across narrow gaps called synapses
  • According to this view, the brain’s memory system works something like a pen and notebook. For a brief time before the ink dries, it’s possible to smudge what’s written
  • Researchers had found that a memory could be weakened if they gave an animal an electric shock or a drug that interferes with a particular neurotransmitter just after they prompted the animal to recall the memory. This suggested that memories were vulnerable to disruption even after they had been consolidated.
  • If memories are consolidated just once, when they are first created, he reasoned, the drug would have no effect on the rat’s memory of the tone or on the way it would respond to the tone in the future.
  • Perhaps it’s better if we can rewrite our memories every time we recall them. Nader suggests that reconsolidation may be the brain’s mechanism for recasting old memories in the light of everything that has happened since. In other words, it just might be what keeps us from living in the past.
12More

Joe Biden to highlight gains and face tough scrutiny in first formal news conference - ... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html Politics us
shared by edencottone on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • President Joe Biden's first two months in power went remarkably smoothly considering he took office amid a once-in-a-century pandemic, a consequent economic crisis and his predecessor's refusal to recognize his victory.
  • The doubling of the pace of vaccinations in the last two months represents tangible progress on the one issue on which Biden's first year will likely be mostly judged -- the quest to revive a semblance of normal life.
  • "Now is not the time to let down our guard. If we all do our part, after a long, dark year, we can show once again that we are the United States of America. ... We're going to beat this pandemic," Biden said in Ohio on Tuesday, striking the balance between caution and hope that has marked his management of the pandemic, which polls show wins the approval of a majority of Americans.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • A surge in border crossings by migrant children appeared to catch a White House focused on the pandemic off guard and offered Republicans an opening as they seek to slow his momentum -- and build their 2022 attack lines against Biden's narrow Democratic congressional majority.
  • And with its customary sense of timing, North Korea is testing the new commander-in-chief with missile launches that are ratcheting up tensions in a showdown that no president in the last 70 years has managed to solve.
  • The President has maintained approval ratings above 50% in his early months in office because he arrived with a mandate to tackle the pandemic head on and executed his agenda with a steady approach that was the antithesis of the erratic
  • Unlike the coronavirus crisis that has killed more than half-a-million Americans, the issues that are now at the top of the nightly newscasts have defied bipartisan consensus for decades -- and will provide a severe test of the President's calls for national unity and cooperation between Democrats and Republicans.
  • Two years ago, Democrats excoriated Trump administration officials for its handling of the crisis at the border. Now the problem is squarely within Biden's domain and government resources are once again strained to the brink as more than 600 unaccompanied children cross the Mexico border each day.
  • "We're not seeing any action. Our experience has taught us that now is the time to act. We need Congress to get on board. We need a recognition of the fact that there's a crisis on the Southwest border," Roy Villareal, who served as chief patrol agent in the Tucson sector from 2018 to 2020, told CNN's Priscilla Alvarez.
  • "This is just the first step in a process of providing greater access to the media," Psaki said during a news briefing.
  • "It's a huge problem. I'm not going to pretend that it's not. It's a huge problem," Harris said in remarks that appeared to be somewhat of a do-over of the administration's initial downplaying of the situation.
  • "I asked her, the VP today, because she's the most qualified person to do it, to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle, and the countries that can help, need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border," Biden said on Wednesday.
56More

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

www.nytimes.com/...societal-collapse.html collapse civilization decline history crisis politics economics culture complexity
shared by Javier E on 21 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Tainter seemed calm. He walked me through the arguments of the book that made his reputation, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which has for years been the seminal text in the study of societal collapse, an academic subdiscipline that arguably was born with its publication in 1988
  • It is only a mild overstatement to suggest that before Tainter, collapse was simply not a thing.
  • His own research has moved on; these days, he focuses on “sustainability.”
  • ...53 more annotations...
  • He writes with disarming composure about the factors that have led to the disintegration of empires and the abandonment of cities and about the mechanism that, in his view, makes it nearly certain that all states that rise will one day fall
  • societal collapse and its associated terms — “fragility” and “resilience,” “risk” and “sustainability” — have become the objects of extensive scholarly inquiry and infrastructure.
  • Princeton has a research program in Global Systemic Risk, Cambridge a Center for the Study of Existential Risk
  • even Tainter, for all his caution and reserve, was willing to allow that contemporary society has built-in vulnerabilities that could allow things to go very badly indeed — probably not right now, maybe not for a few decades still, but possibly sooner. In fact, he worried, it could begin before the year was over.
  • Plato, in “The Republic,” compared cities to animals and plants, subject to growth and senescence like any living thing. The metaphor would hold: In the early 20th century, the German historian Oswald Spengler proposed that all cultures have souls, vital essences that begin falling into decay the moment they adopt the trappings of civilization.
  • that theory, which became the heart of “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” Tainter’s argument rests on two proposals. The first is that human societies develop complexity, i.e. specialized roles and the institutional structures that coordinate them, in order to solve problems
  • All history since then has been “characterized by a seemingly inexorable trend toward higher levels of complexity, specialization and sociopolitical control.”
  • Eventually, societies we would recognize as similar to our own would emerge, “large, heterogeneous, internally differentiated, class structured, controlled societies in which the resources that sustain life are not equally available to all.”
  • Something more than the threat of violence would be necessary to hold them together, a delicate balance of symbolic and material benefits that Tainter calls “legitimacy,” the maintenance of which would itself require ever more complex structures, which would become ever less flexible, and more vulnerable, the more they piled up.
  • Social complexity, he argues, is inevitably subject to diminishing marginal returns. It costs more and more, in other words, while producing smaller and smaller profits.
  • Take Rome, which, in Tainter's telling, was able to win significant wealth by sacking its neighbors but was thereafter required to maintain an ever larger and more expensive military just to keep the imperial machine from stalling — until it couldn’t anymore.
  • This is how it goes. As the benefits of ever-increasing complexity — the loot shipped home by the Roman armies or the gentler agricultural symbiosis of the San Juan Basin — begin to dwindle, Tainter writes, societies “become vulnerable to collapse.”
  • haven’t countless societies weathered military defeats, invasions, even occupations and lengthy civil wars, or rebuilt themselves after earthquakes, floods and famines?
  • Only complexity, Tainter argues, provides an explanation that applies in every instance of collapse.
  • Complexity builds and builds, usually incrementally, without anyone noticing how brittle it has all become. Then some little push arrives, and the society begins to fracture.
  • A disaster — even a severe one like a deadly pandemic, mass social unrest or a rapidly changing climate — can, in Tainter’s view, never be enough by itself to cause collapse
  • The only precedent Tainter could think of, in which pandemic coincided with mass social unrest, was the Black Death of the 14th century. That crisis reduced the population of Europe by as much as 60 percent.
  • Whether any existing society is close to collapsing depends on where it falls on the curve of diminishing returns.
  • The United States hardly feels like a confident empire on the rise these days. But how far along are we?
  • Scholars of collapse tend to fall into two loose camps. The first, dominated by Tainter, looks for grand narratives and one-size-fits-all explanations
  • The second is more interested in the particulars of the societies they study
  • Patricia McAnany, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has questioned the usefulness of the very concept of collapse — she was an editor of a 2010 volume titled “Questioning Collapse” — but admits to being “very, very worried” about the lack, in the United States, of the “nimbleness” that crises require of governments.
  • We’re too vested and tied to places.” Without the possibility of dispersal, or of real structural change to more equitably distribute resources, “at some point the whole thing blows. It has to.”
  • In Turchin’s case the key is the loss of “social resilience,” a society’s ability to cooperate and act collectively for common goals. By that measure, Turchin judges that the United States was collapsing well before Covid-19 hit. For the last 40 years, he argues, the population has been growing poorer and more unhealthy as elites accumulate more and more wealth and institutional legitimacy founders. “The United States is basically eating itself from the inside out,
  • Inequality and “popular immiseration” have left the country extremely vulnerable to external shocks like the pandemic, and to internal triggers like the killings of George Floyd
  • Societies evolve complexity, he argues, precisely to meet such challenges.
  • Eric H. Cline, who teaches at the George Washington University, argued in “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed” that Late Bronze Age societies across Europe and western Asia crumbled under a concatenation of stresses, including natural disasters — earthquakes and drought — famine, political strife, mass migration and the closure of trade routes. On their own, none of those factors would have been capable of causing such widespread disintegration, but together they formed a “perfect storm” capable of toppling multiple societies all at once.
  • Collapse “really is a matter of when,” he told me, “and I’m concerned that this may be the time.”
  • In “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Tainter makes a point that echoes the concern that Patricia McAnany raised. “The world today is full,” Tainter writes. Complex societies occupy every inhabitable region of the planet. There is no escaping. This also means, he writes, that collapse, “if and when it comes again, will this time be global.” Our fates are interlinked. “No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”
  • If it happens, he says, it would be “the worst catastrophe in history.”
  • The quest for efficiency, he wrote recently, has brought on unprecedented levels of complexity: “an elaborate global system of production, shipping, manufacturing and retailing” in which goods are manufactured in one part of the world to meet immediate demands in another, and delivered only when they’re needed. The system’s speed is dizzying, but so are its vulnerabilities.
  • A more comprehensive failure of fragile supply chains could mean that fuel, food and other essentials would no longer flow to cities. “There would be billions of deaths within a very short period,” Tainter says.
  • If we sink “into a severe recession or a depression,” Tainter says, “then it will probably cascade. It will simply reinforce itself.”
  • Tainter tells me, he has seen “a definite uptick” in calls from journalists: The study of societal collapse suddenly no longer seems like a purely academic pursuit
  • Turchin is keenly aware of the essential instability of even the sturdiest-seeming systems. “Very severe events, while not terribly likely, are quite possible,” he says. When he emigrated from the U.S.S.R. in 1977, he adds, no one imagined the country would splinter into its constituent parts. “But it did.”
  • He writes of visions of “bloated bureaucracies” becoming the basis of “entire political careers.” Arms races, he observes, presented a “classic example” of spiraling complexity that provides “no tangible benefit for much of the population” and “usually no competitive advantage” either.
  • It is hard not to read the book through the lens of the last 40 years of American history, as a prediction of how the country might deteriorate if resources continued to be slashed from nearly every sector but the military, prisons and police.
  • The more a population is squeezed, Tainter warns, the larger the share that “must be allocated to legitimization or coercion.
  • And so it was: As U.S. military spending skyrocketed — to, by some estimates, a total of more than $1 trillion today from $138 billion in 1980 — the government would try both tactics, ingratiating itself with the wealthy by cutting taxes while dismantling public-assistance programs and incarcerating the poor in ever-greater numbers.
  • “As resources committed to benefits decline,” Tainter wrote in 1988, “resources committed to control must increase.”
  • The overall picture drawn by Tainter’s work is a tragic one. It is our very creativity, our extraordinary ability as a species to organize ourselves to solve problems collectively, that leads us into a trap from which there is no escaping
  • Complexity is “insidious,” in Tainter’s words. “It grows by small steps, each of which seems reasonable at the time.” And then the world starts to fall apart, and you wonder how you got there.
  • Perhaps collapse is not, actually, a thing. Perhaps, as an idea, it was a product of its time, a Cold War hangover that has outlived its usefulness, or an academic ripple effect of climate-change anxiety, or a feedback loop produced by some combination of the two
  • if you pay attention to people’s lived experience, and not just to the abstractions imposed by a highly fragmented archaeological record, a different kind of picture emerges.
  • Tainter’s understanding of societies as problem-solving entities can obscure as much as it reveals
  • Plantation slavery arose in order to solve a problem faced by the white landowning class: The production of agricultural commodities like sugar and cotton requires a great deal of backbreaking labor. That problem, however, has nothing to do with the problems of the people they enslaved. Which of them counts as “society”?
  • Since the beginning of the pandemic, the total net worth of America’s billionaires, all 686 of them, has jumped by close to a trillion dollars.
  • If societies are not in fact unitary, problem-solving entities but heaving contradictions and sites of constant struggle, then their existence is not an all-or-nothing game.
  • Collapse appears not as an ending, but a reality that some have already suffered — in the hold of a slave ship, say, or on a long, forced march from their ancestral lands to reservations faraway — and survived.
  • The current pandemic has already given many of us a taste of what happens when a society fails to meet the challenges that face it, when the factions that rule over it tend solely to their own problems
  • the real danger comes from imagining that we can keep living the way we always have, and that the past is any more stable than the present.
  • If you close your eyes and open them again, the periodic disintegrations that punctuate our history — all those crumbling ruins — begin to fade, and something else comes into focus: wiliness, stubbornness and, perhaps the strongest and most essential human trait, adaptability.
  • When one system fails, we build another. We struggle to do things differently, and we push on. As always, we have no other choice.
9More

Logic and Neutrality - The New York Times - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...logic-and-neutrality
shared by pier-paolo on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • an idea many philosophers and logicians have about the function of logic in our cognitive life, our inquiries and debates
  • It isn’t a player. Rather, it’s an umpire, a neutral arbitrator between opposing theories, imposing some basic rules on all sides in a dispute. The picture is that logic has no substantive conten
  • The idea that logic is uninformative strikes me as deeply mistaken,
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • when we extend our knowledge by deducing logical consequences of what we already know. If you know that either Mary or Mark did the murder (only they had access to the crime scene at the right time), and then Mary produces a rock-solid alibi, so you know she didn’t do it, you can deduce that Mark did it
  • Logic also helps us recognize our mistakes, when our beliefs turn out to contain inconsistencies. If I believe that no politicians are honest, and that John is a politician, and that he is honest, at least one of those three beliefs must be false, although logic doesn’t tell me which one.
  • The power of logic becomes increasingly clear when we chain together such elementary steps into longer and longer chains of reasoning, and the idea of logic as uninformative becomes correspondingly less and less plausible. Mathematics provides the most striking examples, since all its theorems are ultimately derived from a few simple axioms by chains of logical reasoning
  • The conception of logic as a neutral umpire of debate also fails to withstand scrutiny, for similar reasons. Principles of logic can themselves be debated,
  • one principle of standard logic is the law of excluded middle, which says that something either is the case, or it isn’t. Either it’s raining, or it’s not.
  • Whichever side is right, logical theories are players in these debates, not neutral umpires.
10More

Opinion: We should have seen the Capitol riot coming - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html capitol opinion cnn
shared by jmfinizio on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • None of us should have been surprised. Months of escalating threats and violence at our state capitols should have served as notice of what was coming.
  • All too often, these rioters have been greeted as allies by Republican state legislators -- one allegedly opened the door to protesters.
  • In Oregon last month, where the state Capitol has been closed to the public, a Republican lawmaker, who said that legislative proceedings should be open to everyone, allegedly held open a side entrance to allow a gathered mob inside.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • And while the astounding crimes at the US Capitol last week rightly captured headlines, the day was also rife with violence and threatened violence at other state capitol buildings as well.
  • Perhaps the original dress rehearsal for the Washington assault, however, occurred in Michigan last May, when an armed mob pushed its way into the state Capitol to protest a pandemic stay-at-home order issued by Democratic Gov.
  • In Idaho last August, anti-government and anti-vaxxer groups succeeded in disrupting a special session on the pandemic by overwhelming police and forcing their way into the Idaho House chamber.
  • If this comes as news, it could be because there are fewer reporters than ever covering statehouses.
  • Armed extremists have been allowed to menace lawmakers in buildings that belong to the people and must remain transparent and accessible to the people.
  • We ignore what happens in our state capitols at our peril.
  • Our state capitols stand as the symbols and workplaces of Our democracy at home
32More

Children's Screen Time Has Soared in the Pandemic, Alarming Parents and Researchers - T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-kids-tech-use.html psychology research social media technology education bias brain science new york times pandemic
shared by adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • overlooked the vastly increasing time that his son was spending on video games and social media
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      Very important and notable to all of our lives
  • calling his phone his “whole life.”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      This seems extreme and unreasonable, but technology is very important to our generation.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • I’m not losing my son to this.”
  • are watching their children slide down an increasingly slippery path into an all-consuming digital life.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      Very important note because some want this all-virtual to be a future but forget the toll it takes on us as humans.
  • There
  • “There will be a period of epic withdrawal,”
  • that children’s brains, well through adolescence, are considered “plastic,” meaning they can adapt and shift to changing circumstances.
  • elling parents not to feel guilty about allowing more screen time, given the stark challenges of lockdowns. Now, she said, she’d have given different advice if she had known how long children would end up stuck at home.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      I think that her advice was good for the beginning of quarantine because anything to allow our brains to be stimulated during that period helped.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      I think that her advice was good for the beginning of quarantine because anything to allow our brains to be stimulated during that period helped.
  • I probably would have encouraged families to turn off Wi-Fi except during school hours so kids don’t feel tempted every moment, night and day,”
  • nine months of 2020, an increase of 82 percent over the year before.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      I wonder how this effects younger kids mental progression
  • In the United States, for instance, children spent, on average, 97
  • minutes a day on YouTube in March and April, up from 57 minutes in February, and nearly double the use a year prior
  • “The Covid Effect.”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      Have never heard of "the covid effect" makes perfect sense though.
  • What concerns researchers, at a minimum, is that the use of devices is a poor substitute for activities known to be central to health, social and physical development, including physical play and other interactions that help children learn how to confront challenging social situations.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      Similar to TOK and how our brains learn to interact with others
  • Dr. Briasouli said. Some days, she said, she watches her son sit with three devices, alternating play among them.
  • These are the tools of their lives,” he said. “Everything they will do, they will do through one of these electronic devices, socialization included.”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      Seems to be the clear counter argument
  • “he laughs and has some social interaction with his buddies,”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      The social aspect is also very important
  • said he believed that adults and children alike could, with disciplined time away from devices, learn to disconnect. But doing so has become complicated by the fact that the devices now are at once vessels for school, social life, gaming and other activities central to life.
  • Dr. Radesky said that the mingling of all of these functions not only gives children a chance to multitask, it also allows young people to “escape” from any uncomfortable moment they may face.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      This is so true and I think almost everyone I know does this all the time.
  • Instead, he hangs out online with his old frie
  • I’ve failed you as a father,”
15More

We hear what we expect to hear -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...210108120110.htm
shared by margogramiak on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Despite senses being the only window to the outside world, people do rarely question how faithfully they represent the external physical reality.
  • Despite senses being the only window to the outside world, people do rarely question how faithfully they represent the external physical reality.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      We've questioned our senses A LOT in TOK!
  • the cerebral cortex constantly generates predictions on what will happen next, and that neurons in charge of sensory processing only encode the difference between our predictions and the actual reality.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      That's really interesting. We've touched on similar concepts, but nothing exactly like this.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • that not only the cerebral cortex, but the entire auditory pathway, represents sounds according to prior expectations.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      So, multiple parts of our brain make predictions about what's going to happen next.
  • Although participants recognised the deviant faster when it was placed on positions where they expected it, the subcortical nuclei encoded the sounds only when they were placed in unexpected positions.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      That's interesting. How will this research affect medicine etc?
  • Predictive coding assumes that the brain is constantly generating predictions about how the physical world will look, sound, feel, and smell like in the next instant, and that neurons in charge of processing our senses save resources by representing only the differences between these predictions and the actual physical world.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I remember from class that the brain looks for patterns with its senses. Does that apply here?
  • e have now shown that this process also dominates the most primitive and evolutionary conserved parts of the brain. All that we perceive might be deeply contaminated by our subjective beliefs on the physical world."
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Perception is crazy...
  • Developmental dyslexia, the most wide-spread learning disorder, has already been linked to altered responses in subcortical auditory pathway and to difficulties on exploiting stimulus regularities in auditory perception.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      That's interesting. I can see why that would affect learning.
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