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The Epidemic of Facelessness - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-epidemic-of-facelessness.html empathy face facelessness troll internet anonymity psychology
shared by Javier E on 16 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The fact that the case ended up in court is rare; the viciousness it represents is not. Everyone in the digital space is, at one point or another, exposed to online monstrosity, one of the consequences of the uniquely contemporary condition of facelessness.
  • There is a vast dissonance between virtual communication and an actual police officer at the door. It is a dissonance we are all running up against more and more, the dissonance between the world of faces and the world without faces. And the world without faces is coming to dominate.
  • it’s also no mere technical error on the part of Twitter; faceless rage is inherent to its technology.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • the faceless communication social media creates, the linked distances between people, both provokes and mitigates the inherent capacity for monstrosity.
  • The Gyges effect, the well-noted disinhibition created by communications over the distances of the Internet, in which all speech and image are muted and at arm’s reach, produces an inevitable reaction — the desire for impact at any cost, the desire to reach through the screen, to make somebody feel something, anything. A simple comment can so easily be ignored. Rape threat? Not so much. Or, as Mr. Nunn so succinctly put it on Twitter: “If you can’t threaten to rape a celebrity, what is the point in having them?”
  • The challenge of our moment is that the face has been at the root of justice and ethics for 2,000 years.
  • The precondition of any trial, of any attempt to reconcile competing claims, is that the victim and the accused look each other in the face.
  • For the great French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the encounter with another’s face was the origin of identity — the reality of the other preceding the formation of the self. The face is the substance, not just the reflection, of the infinity of another person. And from the infinity of the face comes the sense of inevitable obligation, the possibility of discourse, the origin of the ethical impulse.
  • “Through imitation and mimicry, we are able to feel what other people feel. By being able to feel what other people feel, we are also able to respond compassionately to other people’s emotional states.” The face is the key to the sense of intersubjectivity, linking mimicry and empathy through mirror neurons — the brain mechanism that creates imitation even in nonhuman primates.
  • Inability to see a face is, in the most direct way, inability to recognize shared humanity with another. In a metastudy of antisocial populations, the inability to sense the emotions on other people’s faces was a key correlation. There is “a consistent, robust link between antisocial behavior and impaired recognition of fearful facial affect. Relative to comparison groups, antisocial populations showed significant impairments in recognizing fearful, sad and surprised expressions.”
  • Without a face, the self can form only with the rejection of all otherness, with a generalized, all-purpose contempt — a contempt that is so vacuous because it is so vague, and so ferocious because it is so vacuous. A world stripped of faces is a world stripped, not merely of ethics, but of the biological and cultural foundations of ethics.
  • The spirit of facelessness is coming to define the 21st. Facelessness is not a trend; it is a social phase we are entering that we have not yet figured out how to navigate.
  • the flight back to the face takes on new urgency. Google recently reported that on Android alone, which has more than a billion active users, people take 93 million selfies a day
  • Emojis are an explicit attempt to replicate the emotional context that facial expression provides. Intriguingly, emojis express emotion, often negative emotions, but you cannot troll with them.
  • But all these attempts to provide a digital face run counter to the main current of our era’s essential facelessness. The volume of digital threats appears to be too large for police forces to adequately deal with.
  • The more established wisdom about trolls, at this point, is to disengage. Obviously, in many cases, actual crimes are being committed, crimes that demand confrontation, by victims and by law enforcement officials, but in everyday digital life engaging with the trolls “is like trying to drown a vampire with your own blood,”
  • There is a third way, distinct from confrontation or avoidance: compassion
  • we need a new art of conversation for the new conversations we are having — and the first rule of that art must be to remember that we are talking to human beings: “Never say anything online that you wouldn’t say to somebody’s face.” But also: “Don’t listen to what people wouldn’t say to your face.”
  • The neurological research demonstrates that empathy, far from being an artificial construct of civilization, is integral to our biology.
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The Economics of Well-Being - 0 views

hbr.org/...the-economics-of-well-being
shared by caelengrubb on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Money isn’t everything. But for measuring national success, it has long been pretty much the only thing
  • And the era of GNP and GDP has been characterized by a huge global rise in living standards and in wealth.
  • At the moment, though, GDP is embattled. Economists and national leaders are increasingly talking about measuring a country’s status with other metrics and even with a squishy-seeming concept like “happiness.”
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • As everyone in business knows, you manage what you measure. So although the replacing-GDP discussion may seem a little airy, its growing credibility in important circles could give it a real impact on economic policy
  • The story usually begins with Jeremy Bentham, an Englishman who in 1781 outlined a philosophy of utility that assessed the merits of an action according to how much happiness it produced. This was during the Enlightenment, when thinkers sought to replace religion-based rules with rational, scientific guides to decision making and life.
  • Economists, the most enthusiastic adopters of the concept, came to focus instead on the tangible expression of people’s needs and desires: what they were willing to spend money on.
  • For its original purpose—measuring short-term economic fluctuations—GDP is not likely to be supplanted anytime soon. It may even be gaining ground: A major discussion is under way concerning whether the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks should in times of crisis focus not on inflation but on GDP growth.
  • Compiling GDP involves making a lot of choices, and even reasonable choices can lead to skewed results. Statisticians understandably favor goods and services that are bought and sold—and thus easily valued by market price—over economic activities whose value must be estimated
  • Developing nations with lots of foreign direct investment saw GDP grow much faster than GNP would have—but didn’t necessarily reap the benefits, because the investments’ profits went mostly to multinational corporations.
  • It’s true that the challenges of tracking energy use or pollution aren’t huge. But the politics are extremely tricky. In its early days the Clinton administration pushed the Bureau of Economic Analysis—the agency that measures U.S. GDP—to develop a green GDP
  • Many things of value in life cannot be fully captured by GDP, but they can be measured by metrics of health, education, political freedom, and the like
  • The idea that economic and other data can be better presented with a dashboard of indicators than as a single number or ranked list is very much in the air among experts and policy makers.
  • In Sarkozy’s 2009 report on alternatives to GDP, the word “dashboard” appears 78 times. But the notion of dashboards hasn’t captured the public’s imagination. What has is a word that shows up just 29 times in the Sarkozy report (mostly in the bibliography): “happiness.”
  • In the 1950s and 1960s psychologists and sociologists reopened the question of whether it could be quantified. Opinion polls, then entering their heyday as measurers (and in some cases determiners) of the public mood, were an obvious vehicle for the attempt.
  • The economist Richard Easterlin imported the happiness discussion to his discipline with a 1974 paper pointing out that the results of national happiness polls did not correlate all that well with per capita income.
  • The interest in happiness surveys has also led to critical scrutiny of the Easterlin paradox. After reevaluating decades’ worth of polling data, the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers made headlines in 2008 by refuting the paradox—at least the part that said people in wealthy nations weren’t happier than those in poor nations
  • They were unable to conclusively debunk the argument that rises in income over time fail to deliver increased happiness, but the evidence they marshaled certainly muddied the waters
  • Money can’t buy happiness. But it could perhaps buy the ability to measure it.
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Student loan debt: Here are 7 ways the $1.6 trillion toll affects the U.S. economy - Th... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-loan-debt-is-doing-us-economy
shared by caelengrubb on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • American families are carrying about $1.6 trillion in student loan debt, a massive burden that amounts to nearly 8 percent of national income. That share has roughly doubled since the mid-2000s.
  • Years of research show that such post-college debt compels people to put off marriage and home ownership. It also stifles entrepreneurship and career paths.
  • Student loan debt is taking a bite out of the housing market
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • A $1,000 increase in student loan debt, researchers found, lowered the odds of marriage by 2 percent a month among female bachelor’s degree recipients in the first four years after graduation. That finding has been bolstered by more recent research showing a similar trend.
  • Student loan debt is hampering the growth of small businesses
  • a significant and economically meaningful negative correlation” between rising student loan debt and falling small-business formation. The mechanism isn’t hard to grasp: If you’re paying off a student loan, you’re less able to pull together the cash needed to start a business.
  • The authors note that small businesses are responsible for “approximately 60 percent of net employment activity in the U.S.”
  • Student loan debt is delaying marriage and family formation
  • This year, the Federal Reserve issued a report showing that student loan debt prevented about 400,000 young families from purchasing homes, accounting for about a quarter of the drop in home-ownership rates in this demographic from 2005 to 2014
  • Student loan debt makes it harder to weather financial crises
  • From 2007 to 2009, households with student loans saw 12.4 percent of their total net worth evaporate, while the net worth of those without such loans fell by 9.3 percent
  • Student loan debt is preventing young people from saving for retirement
  • Student loan debt can cause graduates to give up on their dreams
  • The returns on higher education aren’t what they once were
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The Happiness Course: Here What's Some Learned - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...happiness-course.html
shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Over 3 Million People Took This Course on Happiness. Here’s What Some Learned.
  • It may seem simple, but it bears repeating: sleep, gratitude and helping other people.
  • The Yale happiness class, formally known as Psyc 157: Psychology and the Good Life, is one of the most popular classes to be offered in the university’s 320-year history
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • To date, over 3.3 million people have signed up, according to the website.
  • “Everyone knows what they need to do to protect their physical health: wash your hands, and social distance, and wear a mask,” she added. “People were struggling with what to do to protect their mental health.”
  • The Coursera curriculum, adapted from the one Dr. Santos taught at Yale, asks students to, among other things, track their sleep patterns, keep a gratitude journal, perform random acts of kindness, and take note of whether, over time, these behaviors correlate with a positive change in their general mood.
  • Ms. McIntire took the class. She called it “life-changing.”
  • A night owl, she had struggled with sleep and enforcing her own time boundaries.
  • “It’s hard to set those boundaries with yourself sometimes and say, ‘I know this book is really exciting, but it can wait till tomorrow, sleep is more important,’”
  • “That’s discipline, right? But I had never done it in that way, where it’s like, ‘It’s going to make you happier. It’s not just good for you; it’s going to actually legitimately make you happier.’”
  • has stuck with it even after finishing the class
  • Meditation also helped her to get off social media.
  • “I found myself looking inward. It helped me become more introspective,” she said. “Honestly, it was the best thing I ever did.”
  • “There’s no reason I shouldn’t be happy,” she said. “I have a wonderful marriage. I have two kids. I have a nice job and a nice house. And I just could never find happiness.
  • Since taking the course, Ms. Morgan, 52, has made a commitment to do three things every day: practice yoga for one hour, take a walk outside in nature no matter how cold it may be in Alberta, and write three to five entries in her gratitude journal before bed
  • “When you start writing down those things at the end of the day, you only think about it at the end of the day, but once you make it a routine, you start to think about it all throughout the day,”
  • some studies show that finding reasons to be grateful can increase your general sense of well-being.
  • “Somewhere along the second or third year, you do feel a bit burned out, and you need strategies for dealing with it,”
  • “I’m still feeling that happiness months later,”
  • Matt Nadel, 21, a Yale senior, was among the 1,200 students taking the class on campus in 2018. He said the rigors of Yale were a big adjustment when he started at the university in the fall of 2017.
  • “Did the class impact my life in a long term, tangible way? The answer is no.”
  • While the class wasn’t life-changing for him, Mr. Nadel said that he is more expressive now when he feels gratitude.
  • “I think I was struggling to reconcile, and to intellectually interrogate, my religion,” he said. “Also acknowledging that I just really like to hang out with this kind of community that I think made me who I am.”
  • Life-changing? No. But certainly life-affirming
  • “The class helped make me more secure and comfortable in my pre-existing religious beliefs,”
  • negative visualization. This entails thinking of a good thing in your life (like your gorgeous, reasonably affordable apartment) and then imagining the worst-case scenario (suddenly finding yourself homeless and without a safety net).
  • If gratitude is something that doesn’t come naturally, negative visualization can help you to get there.
  • “That’s something that I really keep in mind, especially when I feel like my mind is so trapped in thinking about future hurdles,
  • “I should be so grateful for everything that I have. Because you’re not built to notice these things.”
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Why Is Memory So Good and So Bad? - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...why-memory-so-good-bad
shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Memories of visual images (e.g., dinner plates) are stored in what is called visual memory.
  • Our minds use visual memory to perform even the simplest of computations; from remembering the face of someone we’ve just met, to remembering what time it was last we checked. Without visual memory, we wouldn’t be able to store—and later retrieve—anything we see.
  • ust as a computer’s memory capacity constrains its abilities, visual memory capacity has been correlated with a number of higher cognitive abilities, including academic success, fluid intelligence (the ability to solve novel problems), and general comprehension.
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  • For many reasons, then, it would be very useful to understand how visual memory facilitates these mental operations, as well as constrains our ability to perform them
  • Visual working memory is where visual images are temporarily stored while your mind works away at other tasks—like a whiteboard on which things are briefly written and then wiped away. We rely on visual working memory when remembering things over brief intervals, such as when copying lecture notes to a notebook.
  • Which is exactly what happened: Zhang & Luck found that participants were either very precise, or they completely guessed; that is, they either remembered the square’s color with great accuracy, or forgot it completely
  • The participants had a simple task: to recall the color of one particular square, not knowing in advance which square they would be asked to recall. The psychologists assumed that measuring how visual working memory behaves over increasing demands (i.e., the increasing durations of 1,4 or 10 seconds) would reveal something about how the system works.
  • If short-term visual memories fade away—if they are gradually wiped away from the whiteboard—then after longer intervals participants’ accuracy in remembering the colors should still be high, deviating only slightly from the square’s original color. But if these memories are wiped out all at once—if the whiteboard is left untouched until, all at once, scrubbed clean—then participants should make very precise responses (corresponding to instances when the memories are still untouched) and then, after the interval grows too long, very random guesses.
  • UC Davis psychologists Weiwei Zhang and Steven Luck have shed some light on this problem. In their experiment, participants briefly saw three colored squares flashed on a computer screen, and were asked to remember the colors of each square. Then, after 1, 4 or 10 seconds the squares re-appeared, except this time their colors were missing, so that all that was visible were black squares outlined in white.
  • But this, it turns out, is not true of all memories
  • In a recent paper, Researchers at MIT and Harvard found that, if a memory can survive long enough to make it into what is called “visual long-term memory,” then it doesn’t have to be wiped out at all.
  • Talia Konkle and colleagues showed participants a stream of three thousand images of different scenes, such as ocean waves, golf courses or amusement parks. Then, participants were shown two hundred pairs of images—an old one they had seen in the first task, and a completely new one—and asked to indicate which was the old one.
  • Participants were remarkably accurate at spotting differences between the new and old images—96 percent
  • In a recent review, researchers at Harvard and MIT argue that the critical factor is how meaningful the remembered images are—whether the content of the images you see connects to pre-existing knowledge about them
  • This prior knowledge changes how these images are processed, allowing thousands of them to be transferred from the whiteboard of short-term memory into the bank vault of long-term memory, where they are stored with remarkable detail.
  • Together, these experiments suggest why memories are not eliminated equally— indeed, some don’t seem to be eliminated at all. This might also explain why we’re so hopeless at remembering some things, and yet so awesome at remembering others.
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What is wrong with the way we think? | New Humanist - 0 views

newhumanist.org.uk/...is-wrong-with-the-way-we-think psychology science research knowledge technology social media bias language brain science education
shared by kaylynfreeman on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • One of the very biggest is our inability to fully appreciate the implications of the law of large numbers. In principle it’s totally obvious – it just means that sample values, like the average for example, will resemble the true population value as a function of the size of the sample. You want to find out how people in Bangladesh feel about solar power, you don’t ask two people, you ask a couple of hundred. We understand that principle in situations that we represent to ourselves as highly variable.
  • It matters hugely: it means that I hire the wrong person for the job. If you base your judgment entirely on interview, you have a 55 per cent chance of getting that right. If there’s information in the folder – grades, letters of recommendation, ability tests, and comparable kinds of evidence in the business world – those correlations are high enough that would give you a 70 per cent chance of getting it right. That can be the difference between success of an enterprise and failure.
  • I was convinced human beings are exactly the same with respect to everything, certainly with respect to reasoning.
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Why people choose to wear face coverings -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...201218165103.htm
shared by margogramiak on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Wearing a face covering in public is dependent upon how often people observe others wearing them, according to recent findings.
  • Wearing a face covering in public is dependent upon how often people observe others wearing them, according to recent findings.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      In class, we're talking about science, and the trust of science. I'm confused about the beginning of this article, in that I don't think people wearing masks has anything to do with the fact that other people do. I think it has everything to do trust of science.
  • "In this study, we examined what motivators are behind an individual's choice to wear or not wear a face covering in public,
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I can't think of a reason other than trust of science. I don't understand.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • No evidence was found that a perceived susceptibility to becoming ill and a perceived severity of COVID-19 correlated with an increase in the intent to use a face covering in public.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      That is so confusing. I guess it doesn't matter people's intentions as long as they wear them though.
  • "Based on our findings, it is possible that messaging strategies that focus on susceptibility to and severity of COVID-19 may not be as effective as targeting actions that influence individual intentions and social norms."
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Again, I simply don't understand that. I can say with complete honesty that regardless of who I was with or whether they were wearing a mask, I would have one on.
  • months before the vaccine is readily available to all individuals who seek it.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Those months have past and the time is now!
  • an essential component in the continuing effort to reduce the virus' transmission
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      This piece of information should be reason enough to wear a mask. This article made me sort of disappointed in society.
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A psychologist explains why people believe conspiracy theories - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/-during-uncertain-times-2020-4
shared by mshilling1 on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • a personality trait where a person is so "focused on their own interests they will manipulate, deceive, and exploit others to achieve their goals."
  • In terms of cognitive processes, people with stronger conspiracy beliefs are more likely to overestimate the likelihood of co-occurring events, to attribute intentionality where it is unlikely to exist, and to have lower levels of analytic thinking.
  • But once a person starts inventing a narrative out of thin air, you can see very little critical thinking occurring.
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  • Lantian et al.'s (2017) research examined the role of a person's 'need for uniqueness' and a belief of conspiracy theories, and found a correlation.
  • We argue that people high in need for uniqueness should be more likely than others to endorse conspiracy beliefs because conspiracy theories represent the possession of unconventional and potentially scarce information.
  • People who believe in conspiracy theories can feel "special," in a positive sense, because they may feel that they are more informed than others about important social and political events.
  • Our findings can also be connected to recent research demonstrating that individual narcissism, or a grandiose idea of the self, is positively related to belief in conspiracy theories.
  • Due to these individuals feeling alienated from their peers, they may also turn to conspiracist groups for a sense of belonging and community, or to marginalized subcultures in which conspiracy theories are potentially more rife.
  • In this sense, conspiracy theories give a sense of meaning, security and control over an unpredictable and dangerous world.
  • The Internet has amplified the abilities of these like-minded people to come together to share and expand on their conspiracy theories.
  • Save your breath arguing with people who believe in them, as no amount of facts will dissuade them from their false belief.
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Academics Are Really Worried About Cancel Culture - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...615724 school cancel culture
shared by huffem4 on 02 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Our national reckoning on race has brought to the fore a loose but committed assemblage of people given to the idea that social justice must be pursued via attempts to banish from the public sphere, as much as possible, all opinions that they interpret as insufficiently opposed to power differentials.
  • Valid intellectual and artistic endeavor must hold the battle against white supremacy front and center, white people are to identify and expunge their complicity in this white supremacy with the assumption that this task can never be completed, and statements questioning this program constitute a form of “violence” that merits shaming and expulsion.
  • Another defense of sorts has been to claim that even this cancel-culture lite is not dangerous, because it has no real effect. When, for instance, 153 intellectuals signed an open letter in Harper’s arguing for the value of free speech (I was one of them), we were told that we were comfortable bigwigs chafing at mere criticism, as if all that has been happening is certain people being taken to task, as opposed to being shamed and stripped of honors.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • more than half the respondents consider expressing views beyond a certain consensus in an academic setting quite dangerous to their career trajectory.
  • various people insisted that I was, essentially, lying; they simply do not believe that anyone remotely reasonable has anything to worry about.
  • in July I tweeted that I (as well as my Bloggingheads sparring partner Glenn Loury) have been receiving missives since May almost daily from professors living in constant fear for their career because their opinions are incompatible with the current woke playbook.
  • Overall I found it alarming how many of the letters sound as if they were written from Stalinist Russia or Maoist China.
  • A statistics professor says: I routinely discuss the fallacy of assuming that disparity implies discrimination, which is just a specific way of confusing correlation for causality. Frankly, I'm now somewhat afraid to broach these topics … since according to the new faith, disparity actually is conclusive evidence of discrimination.
  • The new mood has even reached medieval studies; an assistant professor reports having recently just survived an attack by a cadre of scholars who are “unspeakably mean and disingenuous once they have you in their sights,” regularly “mounting PR campaigns to get academics and grad students fired, removed from programs, expelled from scholarly groups, or simply to cease speaking.”
  • Being nonwhite leaves one protected in this environment only to the extent that one toes the ideological line. An assistant professor of color who cannot quite get with the program writes, “At the moment, I’m more anxious about this problem than anything else in my career,” noting that “the truth is that over the last few years, this new norm of intolerance and cult of social justice has marginalized me more than all racism I have ever faced in my life.”
  • The charges levied against many of these professors are rooted in a fanatical worldview, one devoted to spraying for any utterances possibly interpretable as “supremacist,” although the accusers sincerely think they have access to higher wisdom. A white professor read a passage from an interview with a well-known Black public intellectual who mentions the rap group NWA, and because few of the students knew of the group’s work at this late date, the professor parenthetically noted what the initials stand for. None of the Black students batted an eye, according to my correspondent, but a few white students demanded a humiliating public apology.
  • This episode represents a pattern in the letters, wherein it is white students who are “woker” than their Black classmates, neatly demonstrating the degree to which this new religion is more about virtue signaling than social justice
  • let’s face it: Half a dozen reports of teachers grading Black students more harshly than white students would be accepted by many as demonstrating a stain on our entire national fabric. These 150 missives stand as an articulate demonstration of something general—and deeply disturbing—as well.
  • A history professor reports that at his school, the administration is seriously considering setting up an anonymous reporting system for students and professors to report “bias” that they have perceived.
  • So no one should feign surprise or disbelief that academics write to me with great frequency to share their anxieties. In a three-week period early this summer, I counted some 150 of these messages. And what they reveal is a very rational culture of fear among those who dissent, even slightly, with the tenets of the woke left.
  • The result is academics living out loud only in whispers
  • A creative-writing instructor:
  • The majority of my fellow instructors and staff constantly self-censor themselves in fear of being fired for expressing the “wrong opinions.” It’s gotten to the point where many are too terrified to even like or retweet a tweet, lest it lead to some kind of disciplinary measure … They are supporters of free speech, scientific data, and healthy debate, but they are too fearful today to publicly declare such support. However, they’ll tell it to a sympathetic ear in the back corner booth of a quiet bar after two or three pints. These ideas have been reduced to lurking in the shadows now.
  • Some will process this as a kind of whining, supposing that all we should really be concerned about is whether people are outright dismissed. However, elsewhere a hostile work environment is considered a breach of civil rights, and as one correspondent wrote
  • “It isn’t just fear of firing that motivates professors and grad students to be quiet. It is a desire to have friends, to be part of a community. This is a fundamental part of human psychology. Indeed, experiments examining the effects of ostracism highlight what a powerful existential threat it is to be ignored, excluded, or rejected. This has been documented at the neurological level. Ostracism is a form of social death. It is a very potent threat.”
  • Especially sad is the extent to which this new Maoism can dilute the richness of a curriculum and discourage people from becoming professors at all
  • Very few of the people who wrote to me are of conservative political orientation. Rather, a main thread in the missives is people left-of-center wondering why, suddenly, to be anything but radical is to be treated as a retrograde heretic
  • It is now no longer “Why aren’t you on the left?” but “How dare you not be as left as we are.”
  • One professor committed the sin of “privileging the white male perspective” in giving a lecture on the philosophy of one of the Founding Fathers, even though Frederick Douglass sang that Founder’s praises. The administration tried to make him sit in a “listening circle,” in which his job was to stay silent while students explained how he had hurt them—in other words, a 21st-century-American version of a struggle session straight out of the Cultural Revolution.
  • The goal, they suggest, is less to eliminate all signs of a person’s existence—which tends to be impractical anyway— than to supplement critique with punishment of some kind.
  • One professor notes, “Even with tenure and authority, I worry that students could file spurious Title IX complaints … or that students could boycott me or remove me as Chair.”
  • From the same well is this same professor finding that the gay men in his class had no problem with his assigning a book with a gay slur in its title, a layered, ironic title for a book taking issue with traditional concepts of masculinity—but that a group of straight white women did, and reported him to his superiors.
  • degree of sheer worry among the people
    • huffem4
      huffem4 on 01 Nov 20
       
      everyone has to watch what you say in fear of being "cancelled." Instead of teaching or helping the person to learn from their mistakes, their careers and futures are ruined.
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Could a brain scan diagnose you as a psychopath? | Chris Chambers | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-diagnose-you-as-a-psychopath psychopathology logical fallacies neuroscience scientific method
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Society is intrigued by psychopaths, at least from a distance. Hollywood paints them as powerful and emotionless predators – a small few who have embraced their inner dark passengers.
  • Psychopathy is of course a very real disorder and a lot more complex than portrayed on film.
  • What Fallon found was his own scan, which appeared to show reduced activity in a part of the brain associated with empathy. Based on this, and some genetic tests, Fallon concluded that he himself was a psychopath
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • One of the most obvious mistakes in Fallon’s reasoning is called the fallacy of reverse inference.
  • areas of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex are important for empathy and moral reasoning. At the same time, empathy and moral reasoning are lost or impaired in many psychopaths.
  • The flaw with this argument – as Fallon himself must know – is that there is no one-to-one mapping between activity in a given brain region and complex abilities such as empathy. There is no empathy region and there is no psychopath switch.
  • these parts of the brain aren’t like hammers or screwdrivers that perform only one task. They’re more like Swiss army knives that have evolved to support a range of different abilities.
  • just because two things are associated with each other doesn’t mean one of them caused the other.
  • In neuroscience, confusing correlation with causation is close to unforgivable.
  • “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion…draws all things else to support and agree with it.” If we only seek to confirm rather than falsify our beliefs then we will find that we are always right – or at least it will seem that way.
  • This confirmation bias is one of the most powerful traps in reasoning because we all like to be right, and we prefer to be consistent.
  • By consistently interpreting weak evidence in favour of his beliefs, Fallon’s investigation is a case study in bias.
  • real advances require a self-critical mindset and a strict adherence to the scientific method.
  • it can be tempting to forget these rules and exploit logical fallacies that we think others won’t notice.
  • “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”.
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What We Dream When We Dream About Covid-19 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dreams-covid-coronavirus.html
shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • “At least qualitatively, you see some shifts in content of dreams from the beginning of the pandemic into the later months,” Dr. Barrett said. “It’s an indication of what is worrying people most at various points during the year.”
  • Taken together, the papers also hint at an answer to a larger question: What is the purpose of dreaming, if any?
  • In recent years, brain scientists have argued that REM sleep — the period of sleep during which most dreaming occurs — bolsters creative thinking, learning and emotional health, providing a kind of unconscious psychotherapy.
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  • People with persistent waking anxieties also tended to play out scenarios involving future work, relationships and life generally in their heads over the course of a day. Previous research has correlated this pattern to scene-shifting in dreams: the frequent changing of the setting, from indoors to outdoors, city to country, mountains to coast.
  • the continuity hypothesis. This framework holds that the content of dreams simply reflects what people thought, felt and did during the day — the good and the bad, the hopeful and the frightening.
  • dreamers during the first phase of the pandemic recorded far more such shifts in their REM mini-dramas.
  • “I wasn’t expecting this, but the findings suggest to me this idea that men are mainly experiencing fear of getting sick and dying, health fears,”
  • Women have been weathering more secondary effects; they tend to be the ones nursing sick family members, more often than males, for instance. I suspect this is the single most likely reason that sadness is up for women in these times.”
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World UFO Day 2015: Why do people believe in unidentified flying objects, aliens and ab... - 0 views

www.ibtimes.co.uk/ects-aliens-abductions-1508163
shared by caelengrubb on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • A survey from the National Geographic Society in 2012 showed 36% of Americans (around 80 million people) believe UFOs exist. A further 47% said they were undecided, while just 17% gave a firm no.
    • caelengrubb
      caelengrubb on 04 Nov 20
       
      that's higher than I expected
  • evidence suggests certain personality traits make people far more likely to believe in UFOs and all that goes along with it.
  • "You get the sense that there's kind of a dimension of suggestibility, so if you're high on that spectrum ... [you may be more] willing to entertain new ideas and fantasies. You start to get into the domain where people believe things that seem highly improbable.
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  • One study that looked into the belief in alien abductions used a false memory test to show a correlation between susceptibility to lures and belief in abductions.
  • If you go really far along the continuum, you reach delusion beliefs those are problematic.
  • "I think people who are going to be sceptical will always be sceptical and vice versa. Once you have a belief system, you fit the facts into that belief system, so I doubt if anyone is looking at it rationally.
  • "It's the uncritical nature of the judgments people make or the conclusions people reach. Because if you want to believe something and go down that pathway and not be critical. And it is important to maintain a healthy scepticism.
  • . If you go in wanting to believe something, it's going to be pretty hard for you to take that hypothesis-testing approach."
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How Engaging With Art Affects the Human Brain | American Association for the Advancemen... - 0 views

www.aaas.org/...gaging-art-affects-human-brain
shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Today, the neurological mechanisms underlying these responses are the subject of fascination to artists, curators and scientists alike.
  • "Once you circle these little things and come to the end of this little project, you'll be invited to compare where you came out against what the results of this experiment were and are," Vikan said. "What you'll find in this show is that there is an amazing convergence. The people that came to the museum liked and disliked the same categories of shapes as the people in the lab as the people in the fMRIs."
  • "Art accesses some of the most advanced processes of human intuitive analysis and expressivity and a key form of aesthetic appreciation is through embodied cognition, the ability to project oneself as an agent in the depicted scene,
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  • Embodied cognition is "the sense of drawing you in and making you really feel the quality of the paintings,"
  • The Birth of Venus" because it makes them feel as though they are floating in with Venus on the seashell. Similarly, viewers can feel the flinging of the paint on the canvas when appreciating a drip painting by Jackson Pollock.
  • Mirror neurons, cells in the brain that respond similarly when observing and performing an action, are responsible for embodied cognition
  • Most research on the effects of music education has been done on populations that are privileged enough to afford private music instruction so Kraus is studying music instruction in group settings
  • "But observing the action requires the information to flow inward from the image you're seeing into the control centers. So that bidirectional flow is what's captured in this concept of mirror neurons and it gives the extra vividness to this aesthetics of art appreciation
  • Performing an action requires the information to flow out from the control centers to the limbs,
  • While congenitally blind people usually don't have activation in the visual area of the brain, in brain scans done after the subjects were taught to draw from memory,
  • Hearing speech in noise is one area in which musicians are uniquely skilled. In standardized tests, musicians across the lifespan were much better than the general public at listening to sentences and repeating them back as the level of background noise increased, Kraus said.
  • Artists are known to be better observers and exhibit better memory than non-artists. In an effort to see what happens in the brain when an individual is drawing and whether drawing can increase the brain's plasticity
  • Musicians are also known for their ability to keep rhythm, a skill that is correlated with reading ability and how precisely the brain responds to sound. After one year, students who participated in the group music instruction were faster and more accurate at keeping a beat than students in the control group, Kraus said.
  • "To sum things up, we are what we do and our past shapes our present," Kraus said. "Auditory biology is not frozen in time. It's a moving target. And music education really does seem to enhance communication by strengthening language skills."
  • "When you're doing art, your brain is running full speed,"
  • "It's hitting on all eight cylinders. So if you can figure out what's happening to the brain on art,
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BBC - Capital - The dirty secret about success - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...d-work-doesnt-actually-pay-off
shared by runlai_jiang on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • e’re often reluctant to credit our good fortune purely to luck. We’d much rather put a material gain or positive outcome down to our brilliant intelligence, smarts, skills or hard work.But if success is directly correlated to our ability, why do there seem to be so many rich people with mediocre talent? And why aren’t the smartest people in the world also the wealthiest?A new paper authored by a team of Italian researchers, physicists Alessandro Pluchino and Andrea Raspisarda and economist Alessio Biondo, used a computer simulation of success defined by financial wealth to show that the most successful people in the world aren’t necessarily the most talented. They are the luckiest.
  • “It’s hard to get people to think about external forces and events,” says Frank. “But we find that if you prompt them to think about it – by asking about a time when they were lucky, rather than telling them they were lucky – the more generous people become and more willing to contribute to the common good.”
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Asking yourself 'What's the meaning of life?' may extend it - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • "What is the meaning of life?" It's one of those enormous questions that's so important -- both philosophically and practically, in terms of how we live our lives -- and yet we rarely, if ever, stop to really think about the answer.
  • After studying 1,300 subjects from ages 21 to more than 100, the authors found that older people were more likely to have found their life's purpose, while younger people were more likely still searching. That's logical, given that wisdom is often born from experience. According to research by Stanford education professor William Damon, the author of "The Path to Purpose," only 20% of young adults have a fully realized sense of their life's meaning.And according to the new study, the presence of meaning in one's life showed a positive correlation to one's health, including improved cognitive function, while searching for it may have a slight negative effect. Mental and physical well-being was self-reported, and having a sense of purpose tended to peak around age 60, the study found.
  • According to two other studies published in 2014 -- one among 9,000 participants over age 65 and another among 6,000 people between 20 and 75 -- those who could articulate the meaning and purpose of their lives lived longer than those who saw their lives as aimless. It didn't seem to matter what meaning participants ascribed to their life, whether it was personal (like happiness), creative (like making art) or altruistic (like making the world a better place). It was having an answer to the question that mattered.
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  • Great thinkers (and celebrities) have given the question thought, so you can look to the words attributed to them for inspiration. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who lived 2,500 years ago, is believed to have written that the essence of life is "to serve others and to do good," and the Roman philosopher Cicero, born 280 years later, came to the same conclusion. As did Russian author Leo Tolstoy, who wrote, "The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity." And His Holiness the Dalai Lama added, "if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them."
  • My favorite answer, though, is the Zen-like circular reasoning attributed to writer Robert Byrne, who put it, "The purpose of life is a life of purpose."
  • Some have concluded that life's meaning is subjective. "There is not one big cosmic meaning for all," Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary. "There is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person."
  • In 1997, my answer was "the discovery, pursuit and attainment of one's bliss," inspired by myth expert Joseph Campbell. A year later, is was to make "the world a better place." In 2002, the year I got engaged, it was simply "Love." And the year we conceived our oldest daughter, it was the less-romantic "continuation of one's DNA to the next generation." But most years, my answer is some combination of love, legacy, happiness, experience and helping others.
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The year of living thankfully - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Family. Friends. Love. Health. Freedom from war and natural disaster. Imagination. Community. A roof over our heads. Common decency. Hope. Opportunity. Memories. Financial stability. Favorite places. Days off work. Good weather. The golden age of television. Books. Music. Ice cream. Weekends. A friendly exchange. Something good that happened today. Something bad that didn't happen today. A good cup of coffee.
  • What keeps us from longer and more frequent visits to a grateful (and graceful) mental place is that we think about other things. In fact, we are wired to. Our primitive brains smartly evolved the capacity to quickly sense potential threats, to keep us safe. But in a post-saber-toothed-tiger era, we get easily annoyed, worried and distracted by a lot of extraneous noise.
  • Instead, we need more focus on the positive, And you don't have to set the bar high. Allow yourself to be thankful for the small, mundane things that give you joy and meaning, as well as the big ones. And don't try to gather heaps of blessings to count; a handful each day should do it.
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  • Resilience, including the ability to cope with stress and trauma, is another trait correlated with gratitude. Studies have showed that counting blessings was a factor in managing post-traumatic stress for Vietnam War veterans and an effective coping strategy for many after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Other research shows that the more grateful you are, the more you are likely to exhibit patience and self-control. It can even be good for marriages and relationships: Couples good at exhibiting thankfulness tend to be "more committed and more likely to remain in their relationships over time." Our best selves, it seems, are our most grateful selves.
  • A gratitude journal need not be any more complicated than keeping a notebook by your bed and starting a nightly habit of jotting down who and what you were grateful for that day. Journaling was the standard method for some of the studies cited above, so this is a simple but effective option.
  • Roses, Thorns & Buds (or RTB, among its devotees) has been part of so many family dinners since my older daughter was 4 years old that I've forgotten where we first heard about it. It's quite simple: Everyone at the table takes turns sharing "roses," which are something positive and happy-making about their day; "thorns," which are the opposite of that; and "buds" for something we're looking forward to and we anticipate will be a rose. Sometimes, the family meal and sharing these things itself is a rose.
  • Happiness jars, a strategy popularized by "Eat, Pray, Love" author Elizabeth Gilbert, is something of a hybrid of gratitude journal and RTB. The idea is to write down on a slip of paper the happiest moment of the day and drop it in a jar. The advantage of doing it this way is that in moments of unhappiness, you can reach into the jar and be reminded of those moments, perhaps becoming grateful for them anew. Gilbert was struck by how many of her fans shared photos of their decorated happiness jars (see Pinterest if you need inspiration) and by how her happiest moments are "generally really common and quiet and unremarkable."
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Miranda Fricker: Reason and Emotion / Radical Philosophy - 0 views

www.radicalphilosophy.com/...reason-and-emotion
shared by tongoscar on 03 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • The question of how emotion relates to reason acquires its importance from an apparent conflict between the implicit teachings of Western philosophy and and feminism.
  • if feminism has learned that it is a political imperative to acknowledge, share and thereby validate the ways in which women’s emotions may conflict with accepted modes of reasoning,
  • Stress, for example, is one such emotional condition which can often remain unacknowledged by the sufferer until stomach ulcers and the like make it painfully and belatedly evident.
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  • If our emotions are accompanied by correlative judgements, then the cognitivist theory can explain dispositional emotions as simply lacking their physiological accompaniment.
  • One expresses a very different response to the world if a judgement is declared with anger, than if one speaks without apparent emotion.
  • In the light of this acknowledgement of the partial autonomy of emotions and their political import, the traditional idea of emotion needing to be dominated by reason is also exposed as hopelessly biased. Of course reason must regulate wayward emotions and -prejudicial feelings, but equally emotion must regulate reason in order that accepted forms of interpretation and rationality do not brutalise and deny people’s emotions, forbidding them their due interpretation, their meaning, and their political significance.
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How To Bolster Your Negotiations With Informal Fallacies - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...ations-with-informal-fallacies Informal Fallacies Arguments
shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • An informal fallacy is an attempt at making a logical argument where there’s a failure in the reasoning itself. This can stem from a number of causes, such as the misapplication of words and phrases, or misunderstandings based on inappropriate assumptions. Illogical sequences in an argument can also cause informal fallacies. While informal fallacies can result in inaccurate arguments and false conclusions, that doesn’t mean they can’t be very persuasive.
  • When negotiating, for instance, it’s fairly common for self-made millionaires to employ informal fallacies. Many self-made millionaires develop well-defined plans on how they’ll use informal fallacies as part of their preparation as well as regularly incorporate these fallacies into verbal dueling with adversaries.
  • Confusing causality for correlation: You connect events that happened at the same time or one after another even though one need not have caused the other.
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  • Self-made millionaires also rarely want the success of their deal making to hang on informal fallacies. Instead, they use informal fallacies to accentuate and strengthen pieces of their argument. Using informal fallacies this way makes sure that if they don’t get the desired reaction from negotiating adversaries, they can be easily discarded in favor of new proofs.
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The End of Reflection - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...logy-phones-introspection.html brain science knowledge research technology social media
shared by honordearlove on 12 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • In a world in which a phone or computer is rarely more than arm’s length away, are we eliminating introspection at times that may have formerly been conducive to it? And is the depth of that reflection compromised because we have retrained ourselves to seek out the immediate gratification of external stimuli?
  • But our solipsism is frequently given outward expression rather than inward exploration, with more emphasis than ever before on images.
  • in which they correlated introspective ability with the amount of gray matter in the prefrontal cortex. (Introspective ability was defined for the study as the accuracy of measuring one’s own performance on a visual-perception task, a sign of metacognition, or “thinking about thinking.”)
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  • Being distracted by the second task didn’t hurt actual performance on the first task, but it did impair the subjects’ ability to be introspective (again, by accurately self-reporting how they did). The finding supports previous widespread evidence that multitasking leads to lower cognitive performance.
  • If you are awake for 16 hours, turning on or checking your phone 85 times means doing so about once every 11 minutes (and doesn’t account for internet use on a computer), and 5.05 hours is over 30 percent of the day. What might be the effect on reflection of this compulsive behavior?
  • “That hints at the way that, as our technologies increase the intensity of stimulation and the flow of new things, we adapt to that pace,” Mr. Carr said. “We become less patient. When moments without stimulation arise, we start to feel panicked and don’t know what to do with them, because we’ve trained ourselves to expect this stimulation — new notifications and alerts and so on.”
  • Mr. Carr also noted counterarguments: Formulating relatively simple thoughts on the internet can yield more complex ones through real-time exchanges with others, and people whose reflex is to post a notion hastily rather than let it sit may not have been the most deliberative thinkers in a pre-smartphone time, either.
  • “We’ve adopted the Google ideal of the mind, which is that you have a question that you can answer quickly: close-ended, well-defined questions. Lost in that conception is that there’s also this open-ended way of thinking where you’re not always trying to answer a question. You’re trying to go where that thought leads you. As a society, we’re saying that that way of thinking isn’t as important anymore. It’s viewed as inefficient.”
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Better sleep habits lead to better college grades: Data on MIT students underscore the ... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...191001083956.htm psychology research knowledge brain science education
shared by blythewallick on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Two MIT professors have found a strong relationship between students' grades and how much sleep they're getting. What time students go to bed and the consistency of their sleep habits also make a big difference. And no, getting a good night's sleep just before a big test is not good enough -- it takes several nights in a row of good sleep to make a difference.
  • 100 students in an MIT engineering class were given Fitbits, the popular wrist-worn devices that track a person's activity 24/7, in exchange for the researchers' access to a semester's worth of their activity data
  • One of the surprises was that individuals who went to bed after some particular threshold time -- for these students, that tended to be 2 a.m., but it varied from one person to another -- tended to perform less well on their tests no matter how much total sleep they ended up getting.
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  • "What we found at the end of the day was zero correlation with fitness, which I must say was disappointing since I believed, and still believe, there is a tremendous positive impact of exercise on cognitive performance," Grossman says.
  • "When you go to bed matters," Grossman says. "If you get a certain amount of sleep -- let's say seven hours -- no matter when you get that sleep, as long as it's before certain times, say you go to bed at 10, or at 12, or at 1, your performance is the same. But if you go to bed after 2, your performance starts to go down even if you get the same seven hours. So, quantity isn't everything."
  • those who got relatively consistent amounts of sleep each night did better than those who had greater variations from one night to the next, even if they ended up with the same average amount.
  • The overall course grades for students averaging six and a half hours of sleep were down 50 percent from other students who averaged just one hour more sleep. Similarly, those who had just a half-hour more night-to-night variation in their total sleep time had grades that dropped 45 percent below others with less variation. This is huge!"
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