Skip to main content

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

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
14More

The Human Brain Evolved When Carbon Dioxide Was Lower - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...603826 science psychology research brain science
shared by anniina03 on 13 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Kris Karnauskas, a professor of ocean sciences at the University of Colorado, has started walking around campus with a pocket-size carbon-dioxide detector. He’s not doing it to measure the amount of carbon pollution in the atmosphere. He’s interested in the amount of CO₂ in each room.
  • The indoor concentration of carbon dioxide concerns him—and not only for the usual reason. Karnauskas is worried that indoor CO₂ levels are getting so high that they are starting to impair human cognition.
  • Carbon dioxide, the same odorless and invisible gas that causes global warming, may be making us dumber.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • “This is a hidden impact of climate change … that could actually impact our ability to solve the problem itself,” he said.
  • The science is, at first glance, surprisingly fundamental. Researchers have long believed that carbon dioxide harms the brain at very high concentrations. Anyone who’s seen the film Apollo 13 (or knows the real-life story behind it) may remember a moment when the mission’s three astronauts watch a gauge monitoring their cabin start to report dangerous levels of a gas. That gauge was measuring carbon dioxide. As one of the film’s NASA engineers remarks, if CO₂ levels rise too high, “you get impaired judgement, blackouts, the beginning of brain asphyxia.”
  • The same general principle, he argues, could soon affect people here on Earth. Two centuries of rampant fossil-fuel use have already spiked the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere from about 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution to about 410 parts per million today. For Earth as a whole, that pollution traps heat in the atmosphere and causes climate change. But more locally, it also sets a baseline for indoor levels of carbon dioxide: You cannot ventilate a room’s carbon-dioxide levels below the global average.
  • In fact, many rooms have a much higher CO₂ level than the atmosphere, since ventilation systems don’t work perfectly.
  • On top of that, some rooms—in places such as offices, hospitals, and schools—are filled with many breathing people, that is, many people who are themselves exhaling carbon dioxide.
  • As the amount of atmospheric CO₂ keeps rising, indoor CO₂ will climb as well.
  • in one 2016 study Danish scientists cranked up indoor carbon-dioxide levels to 3,000 parts per million—more than seven times outdoor levels today—and found that their 25 subjects suffered no cognitive impairment or health issues. Only when scientists infused that same air with other trace chemicals and organic compounds emitted by the human body did the subjects begin to struggle, reporting “headache, fatigue, sleepiness, and difficulty in thinking clearly.” The subjects also took longer to solve basic math problems. The same lab, in another study, found that indoor concentrations of pure CO₂ could get to 5,000 parts per million and still cause little difficulty, at least for college students.
  • But other research is not as optimistic. When scientists at NASA’s Johnson Space Center tested the effects of CO₂ on about two dozen “astronaut-like subjects,” they found that their advanced decision-making skills declined with CO₂ at 1,200 parts per million. But cognitive skills did not seem to worsen as CO₂ climbed past that mark, and the intensity of the effect seemed to vary from person to person.
  • There’s evidence that carbon-dioxide levels may impair only the most complex and challenging human cognitive tasks. And we still don’t know why.
  • No one has looked at the effects of indoor CO₂ on children, the elderly, or people with health problems. Likewise, studies have so far exposed people to very high carbon levels for only a few hours, leaving open the question of what days-long exposure could do.
  • Modern humans, as a species, are only about 300,000 years old, and the ambient CO₂ that we encountered for most of our evolutionary life—from the first breath of infants to the last rattle of a dying elder—was much lower than the ambient CO₂ today. I asked Gall: Has anyone looked to see if human cognition improves under lower carbon-dioxide levels? If you tested someone in a room that had only 250 parts per million of carbon dioxide—a level much closer to that of Earth’s atmosphere three centuries or three millennia ago—would their performance on tests improve? In other words, is it possible that human cognitive ability has already declined?
8More

Four ways the Mars 2020 rover will pave the way for a manned mission - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • When NASA's Mars 2020 rover lands on the Red Planet in February 2021, it will touch down in Jezero Crater, the site of a lake that existed 3.5 billion years ago. The next generation rover will build on the goals of previous robotic explorers by collecting the first samples of Mars, which would be returned to Earth at a later date.
  • "We're very much thinking about how Mars could be inhabited, how humans could come to Mars and make use of the resources that we have there in the Martian environment today," said Stack. "We send our robotic scouts first to learn about these other places, hopefully for us to prepare the way for us to go ourselves."
  • "Combining an understanding of the composition of the rocks, but also the very fine detail that we see in the rocks and the textures, can make a powerful case for ancient signs of life," Stack said. "We know that ancient Mars was habitable. But we haven't yet been able to show that we have signs, real signs, of ancient life yet. And with our instrument suite, we think we can make real advances towards that on the surface.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • "This is a huge endeavor for the human species, and it'll take cooperation from more than just our own space program," Stack said. "Once the resources are there, we can develop the technology. It's getting the buy-in from international partners and from our own space administration and government to really make this happen."
  • No matter the mission, sticking the landing is key for future success. The 2020 rover will land on Mars using the new Terrain Relative Navigation system, which allows the lander to avoid any large hazards in the landing zone.
  • Astronauts exploring Mars will need oxygen, but carting enough to sustain them on a spacecraft isn't viable. The Mars 2020 rover will carry MOXIE on board, or the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment.
  • Speaking of "The Martian," the events of the book and its film adaptation are set in motion when a surprise, devastating dust storm impacts astronauts on the Red Planet. Understanding the weather and environment on Mars will be crucial for determining the conditions astronauts will face.
  • For the first time, a surface mission will include a ground-penetrating radar instrument called RIMFAX, or Radar Imager for Mars' Subsurface Experiment. It will be able to peek beneath the surface and study Martian geology, looking for rock, ice and boulder layers. Scientists hope that RIMFAX will help them understand the geologic history of Jezero Crater, according to David Paige, principal investigator for the experiment at the University of California, Los Angeles.
6More

The case for economics - by the numbers | MIT News - 0 views

news.mit.edu/...cs-influence-fields-study-0303 economics Inside Job social sciences data
shared by johnsonel7 on 06 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • In recent years, criticism has been levelled at economics for being insular and unconcerned about real-world problems. But a new study led by MIT scholars finds the field increasingly overlaps with the work of other disciplines, and, in a related development, has become more empirical and data-driven, while producing less work of pure theory.
  • In psychology journals, for instance, citations of economics papers have more than doubled since 2000. Public health papers now cite economics work twice as often as they did 10 years ago, and citations of economics research in fields from operations research to computer science have risen sharply as well.
  • As Angrist acknowledges, one impetus for the study was the wave of criticism the economics profession has faced over the last decade, after the banking crisis and the “Great Recession” of 2008-2009, which included the finance-sector crash of 2008. The paper’s title alludes to the film “Inside Job” — whose thesis holds that, as Angrist puts it, “economics scholarship as an academic enterprise was captured somehow by finance, and that academic economists should therefore be blamed for the Great Recession.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “If you ask me, economics has never been better,” says Josh Angrist, an MIT economist who led the study. “It’s never been more useful. It’s never been more scientific and more evidence-based.”
  • The study also details the relationship between economics and four additional social science disciplines: anthropology, political science, psychology, and sociology. Among these, political science has overtaken sociology as the discipline most engaged with economics. Psychology papers now cite economics research about as often as they cite works of sociology. The new intellectual connectivity between economics and psychology appears to be a product of the growth of behavioral economics, which examines the irrational, short-sighted financial decision-making of individuals — a different paradigm than the assumptions about rational decision-making found in neoclassical economics.
  • “It really seems to be the diversity of economics that makes it do well in influencing other fields,” Ellison says. “Operations research, computer science, and psychology are paying a lot of attention to economic theory. Sociologists are paying a lot of attention to labor economics, marketing and management are paying attention to industrial organization, statisticians are paying attention to econometrics, and the public health people are paying attention to health economics. Just about everything in economics is influential somewhere.”
8More

MSG in Chinese restaurants isn't unhealthy -- you're just racist, activists say - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • If you've heard of the term "MSG," you might have also heard of its common -- but inaccurate -- connotations.For years, monosodium glutamate, a food additive known as MSG, has been branded as an unhealthy processed ingredient mainly found in Chinese food, despite a lack of supporting scientific evidence.
  • Now, activists have launched a campaign called "Redefine CRS." Headed by Japanese food and seasoning company Ajinomoto, the online campaign urges Merriam-Webster to change its entry to reflect the scientific consensus on MSG -- and the impact of misinformation on the American public's perception of Asian cuisine.
  • First off: what is MSG?Chances are, you've eaten it. It's a common amino acid naturally found in foods like tomatoes and cheese, which people then figured out how to extract and ferment -- a process similar to how we make yogurt and wine. This fermented MSG is now used to flavor lots of different foods like stews or chicken stock. It's so widely used because it taps into our fifth basic taste: umami (pronounced oo-maa-mee). Umami is less well known than the other tastes like saltiness or sweetness, but it's everywhere -- it's the complex, savory taste you find in mushrooms or Parmesan cheese.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • As the Ajinomoto campaign points out, the public scare over MSG unfairly placed the blame on Chinese food -- and is partly why many in the United States still think of Chinese food as processed, unclean, or unhealthy.
  • Some also pointed out that "ethnic" foods -- a controversy in itself, because what is "ethnic" anyway? -- hold stories that have been erased or unacknowledged completely. For many, "Americanized" Chinese food was born from desperation and adapted for American tastes -- a way for immigrant families to survive in a society that demanded assimilation. To have that food, and its history of immigrant struggle, dismissed as "icky" or "oily" felt like a slap in the face for many in the Asian American community.
  • Then there's Ajinomoto, one of the biggest voices in the MSG market and the leader of the Redefine CRS campaign. You can find Ajinomoto's MSG seasoning packets and spice mixes in many American supermarkets, and it has been working for years to raise awareness about both the safety of consuming MSG and the ways it can be used to add flavor to dishes.
  • Bourdain, who traveled the world and showcased an extraordinary diversity of cultures and cuisines, was more explicit. "I think (MSG) is good stuff," he said in a 2016 episode of "Parts Unknown" filmed in China. "I don't react to it -- nobody does. It's a lie."
  • "You know what causes Chinese restaurant syndrome?" he added as he walked through the streets of Sichuan. "Racism."
3More

Do You Use Only 10% of Your Brain? | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...do-you-use-only-10-your-brain Brain Activity
shared by manhefnawi on 14 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • We may be biased, but we think the human brain is pretty special.
  • This myth is so prevalent that it is unquestioningly accepted as a pivotal plot point in movies, a motivational tactic for self-improvement, or justification for claims about ESP and other supposed untapped abilities of the human mind. A 2013 poll surveying over 2000 Americans found that 65 percent believed the 10 percent myth. A 2007 study in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) found that even some doctors weren't immune to the fallacy. But the truth is that everyone uses 100 percent of their brain.
  • Decades later, the myth has persevered because of the attractive possibility it seems to present. It absolves us for not reaching our full potential, offers a persistent insecurity for self-help gurus to appeal to, and provides a pseudo-scientific explanation for the limits of human comprehension. 
16More

This Time-Management Trick Changed My Whole Relationship With Time - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...pomodoro-technique.html time management personal philosophy time-management variety psychology
shared by Javier E on 24 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • A couple of years ago I was told a rumor about a notable artist who would break up everything she did, from making films in the day to running her studio in the afternoon to reading books in the evening, into intervals of 25 minutes, with five-minute breaks in between — 25 minutes on, five minutes off, over and over again.
  • the Pomodoro technique. Invented by Francesco Cirillo, a student at Rome’s Luiss Business School in the late 1980s, it’s a time-management method that takes its name from the tomato-shaped kitchen timer he used to regulate its core process, breaking the day into brief intervals
  • A pomodoro, once started, must not be interrupted, otherwise it has to be abandoned
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • there is relief: You are not allowed to extend a pomodoro, either. After a set of four 25-minute intervals are completed, you’re supposed to take a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes before continuing.
  • It tells us when to start, and also when to stop; and now, more than ever, we have to be told when to stop.
  • An unquestioned assumption in our culture holds that the more hours spent on work — whether a passion project or office drudgery — the better we’ll perform and the more successful and happier we’ll be. What if none of that’s true?
  • Leisure time has also taken on a timeless, hypnotic quality lately. Everything our culture produces feels at once never-ending and meaningless — or perhaps meaningless because it’s never-ending.
  • An everlasting present expands around us in all directions, and it’s easy to get lost in there — all the more reason to set some boundaries.
  • Now that my breaks are short and fleeting, I think more carefully about what I’d like to do with them, and I’ve found it’s quite different from the unimaginative temptations I would otherwise default to
  • Instead I’ll make a sandwich, do a quick French lesson, reply to a few texts, have a shower, go to the laundromat; and such humdrum activities, now that they’re restricted, have become sources of great pleasure.
  • I’ve found that tackling a range of tasks in short bursts keeps things interesting and provides a more rounded life.
  • Variety is the sugar that helps the medicine go down; not the mirage of variety conjured by infinite scrolling content, by nearly a hundred different flavors of Oreos, but the genuine variety of pursuing different sorts of interests every day.
  • time-management techniques are for me a way of better understanding which things matter and which don’t.
  • time management makes time uncanny by revealing how it speeds up and slows down throughout the day, and how many different ways 25 minutes can feel;
  • it’s not an exaggeration to say that, by changing my relationship with and appreciation of time, the technique has brought me to some profound existential questions about whether I’m wasting my life — my fragile, fleeting life — on activities I neither care about nor enjoy
  • It has forced me to think about what I’d most like to be doing every day instead. It has made me see time afresh — as something we really don’t have enough of, as something precious precisely because it’s ephemeral.
33More

How to Talk About Climate Change Across the Political Divide | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ge-across-the-political-divide climate change discourse deniers appeal rhetoric
shared by Javier E on 17 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • “It was really moving to Texas that set me on this path of figuring out how to communicate about climate change,” she told me. “I was the only climate scientist within two hundred miles.”
  • She records the questions she is asked afterward, using an app, and the two most frequent are: “What gives you hope?” and “How do I talk to my [blank] about climate change?
  • In the late nineties, a Gallup poll found that forty-six per cent of Democrats and forty-seven per cent of Republicans agreed that the effects of global warming had already begun.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • In her new book, “Saving Us,” which comes out in September, Hayhoe sets out to answer these questions. Chapter by chapter, she lays out effective strategies for communicating about the urgency of climate change across America’s political divide.
  • She breaks out categories—originally defined by her colleague Anthony Leiserowitz, at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and other researchers—of attitudes toward global warming: alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, and doubtful. Only the remaining eight per cent of Americans fall into the final category, dismissive.
  • In the past decade, though, as the scope of the crisis became clear, Democrats began pressing for policies to cut U.S. reliance on fossil fuels, and Republicans were reluctant to commit. Energy companies stepped into the stalemate and began aggressively lobbying politicians, and injecting doubt into the public discourse, to stop such policies from taking effect. “Industry swung into motion to activate the political system in their favor,” Hayhoe said.
  • “In a study of fifty-six countries, researchers found people’s opinions on climate change to be most strongly correlated not with education and knowledge, but rather with ‘values, ideologies, worldviews and political orientation,’ ”
  • One salient problem is an aspect of human behavior that researchers have termed “solution aversion.” Solving the climate crisis will require ending our reliance on fossil fuels, which people believe would involve major sacrifice.
  • “If there’s a problem and we’re not going to fix it, then that makes us bad people,” Hayhoe said. “No one wants to be a bad person.” So instead people are happy to seize on excuses not to take action.
  • Most are what she calls “science-y sounding objections, and, in the U.S., religious-y sounding objections.”
  • Hayhoe often hears that the Earth has always heated and cooled according to its own intrinsic cycle, or that God, not humanity, controls the fate of the planet. These objections can then harden into aspects of our political identity.
  • Hayhoe eschews the term “climate denier,” saying that she has “seen it applied all too often to shut down discussion rather than encourage it.”
  • So much of this is not about the facts,” Leiserowitz told me later. “It’s about trusting the person the facts come from.”
  • research has shown her that dismissives are nearly impossible to influence. They are also few enough that it should be possible to build political will around fighting climate change by focussing on others.
  • “It’s not about the loudest voices,” Hayhoe told me. “It’s about everyone else who doesn’t understand why climate change matters or what they can do about it.”
  • Leiserowitz told me. His work has revealed, for example, that conversations about the climate tend to be more effective if both speakers share a core value or an aspect of their identity. The most effective climate communicators to conservatives are often people of faith, members of the military, and Republicans who are nevertheless committed to the climate.
  • “That’s why it’s so important to seek out like-minded groups: winter athletes, parents, fellow birders or Rotarians, or people who share our faith.”
  • There is a long history within evangelicalism of advocating “creation care,” the belief that God charged humanity with caring for the earth. The Evangelical Environmental Network, which Hayhoe advises, argues that evangelicals should follow a “Biblical mandate to care for creation,”
  • Hayhoe believes that emphasizing the care of plants and animals is less effective than highlighting the potential dangers for our fellow human beings. “It’s not about saving the planet—it’s about saving us,”
  • One of her communication strategies is to talk to people about their own observations, which help them connect the realities of their lives to the abstraction of climate change.
  • With farmers, Hayhoe avoids using the term “climate change,” since the phenomenon is frequently seen as a liberal hoax. “We use the words ‘climate variability’ and ‘long-term trends,’ ” she said.
  • Scott’s work served another purpose. By showing success with his climate-conscious farming techniques, he might persuade other farmers to join in, potentially becoming the center of what Hayhoe calls a cluster. “I preach to my friends about how well it’s doing,” he said.
  • I don’t accost people in diners,” she wrote me, later. “I wait until they come to me.”
  • “As recently as 2008, former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich, a Republican, and current House speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, cozied up on a love seat in front of the U.S. Capitol to film a commercial about climate change,”
  • She then directed the conversation to Republican-led free market initiatives to combat climate change by putting a price on carbon emissions. Companies passed their costs onto the rest of us by putting the carbon into the atmosphere, she told Dale, “but what if they had to pay for it? What if, when someone’s house burned down because of a forest fire, the companies making money from selling carbon had to pay a homeowner back?” Dale responded, “Well, I’m in favor of that.”
  • “It’s so important to educate kids about what’s going on, not to frighten them but to show them they can have a hand in solutions.”
  • Through the years, she’s developed a system to manage trolls. “It’s been trial and error, error, error,” she said. She now responds once, offering a link to resources.
  • Most fire back with gendered insults, often plays on her last name, after which she blocks the sender.
  • ayhoe doesn’t urge guilt on her listeners. She only urges that we change our trajectory. “That’s all repentance means,” she said. “To turn.”
  • the most important aspect of fighting climate change is pushing for policies that will cut our reliance on fossil fuels. She urges the alarmed to get involved in politics, beginning with lobbying politicians at the local and state level.
  • she’d come across a book, “Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy,” that examined the role of prophets in society, beginning with the oracle at Delphi, stretching through the Old Testament, and culminating in the work of modern-day scientists.
  • Studies show that early adopters help shift the norms of their communities.
  • By Eliza GriswoldSeptember 16, 2021
12More

I'm a therapist to the super-rich: they are as miserable as Succession makes out | Clay... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-rich-succession-billionaires billionaire problems psychology
shared by Javier E on 23 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • I work as a psychotherapist and my specialism is ultra-high net worth individuals.
  • I got into working with billionaires by accident. I had one wealthy client, who passed my name around to their acquaintances. They are called the 1% for a reason: there are not that many of them and so the circle is tight.
  • Over the years, I have developed a great deal of empathy for those who have far too much. The television programme Succession, now in its third season, does such a good job of exploring the kinds of toxic excess my clients struggle with that when my wife is watching it I have to leave the room; it just feels like work.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • What could possibly be challenging about being a billionaire, you might ask. Well, what would it be like if you couldn’t trust those close to you? Or if you looked at any new person in your life with deep suspicion? I hear this from my clients all the time: “What do they want from me?”; or “How are they going to manipulate me?”; or “They are probably only friends with me because of my money.”
  • Too many of my clients want to indulge their children so “they never have to suffer what I had to suffer” while growing up.
  • If all your necessities and much more were covered for the rest of your life – you might struggle with a lack of meaning and ambition too. My clients are often bored with life and too many times this leads to them chasing the next high – chemically or otherwise – to fill that void.
  • Then there are the struggles with purpose – the depression that sets in when you feel like you have no reason to get out of bed. Why bother going to work when the business you have built or inherited runs itself without you now?
  • There is a perception that money can immunise you against mental-health problems when actually, I believe that wealth can make you – and the people closest to you – much more susceptible to them.
  • But the result is that they prevent their children from experiencing the very things that made them successful: sacrifice, hard work, overcoming failure and developing resilience. An over-indulged child develops into an entitled adult who has low self-confidence, low self-esteem, and a complete lack of grit.
  • These very wealthy children start out by going to elite boarding schools and move on to elite universities – developing a language and culture among their own kind. Rarely do they create friendships with non-wealthy people; this can lead to feelings of isolation and being trapped inside a very small bubble.
  • There are few people in the world to whom they can actually relate, which of course leads to a lack of empathy
  • Notice the awkwardness and lack of human connection and how dreadfully they treat each other. It’s fascinating and frightening. When one leads a life without consequences (for being rude to a waiter or cruel to a sibling, for example) there really is no reason to not do these things. After a while, it becomes normalised and accepted. Living a life without rules isn’t good for anyone.
66More

Technopoly-Chs. 9,10--Scientism, the great symbol drain - 0 views

diigo.com/0m0g1y scientism science social science narrative objectivity advertising morality authority coherence Postman book notes
shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • By Scientism, I mean three interrelated ideas that, taken together, stand as one of the pillars of Technopoly.
  • The first and indispensable idea is, as noted, that the methods of the natural sciences can be applied to the study of human behavior. This idea is the backbone of much of psychology and sociology as practiced at least in America, and largely accounts for the fact that social science, to quote F. A. Hayek, "has cont~ibuted scarcely anything to our understanding of social phenomena." 2
  • The second idea is, as also noted, that social science generates specific principles which can be used to organize society on a rational and humane basis. This implies that technical meansmostly "invisible technologies" supervised by experts-can be designed to control human behavior and set it on the proper course.
  • ...63 more annotations...
  • The third idea is that faith in science can serve as a comprehensive belief system that gives meaning to life, as well. as a sense of well-being, morality, and even immortality.
  • the spirit behind this scientific ideal inspired several men to believe that the reliable and predictable knowledge that could be obtained about stars and atoms could also be obtained about human behavior.
  • Among the best known of these early "social scientists" were Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, Prosper Enfantin, and, of course, Auguste Comte.
  • They held in common two beliefs to which T echnopoly is deeply indebted: that the natural sciences provide a method to unlock the secrets of both the human heart and the direction of social life; that society can be rationally and humanely reorganized according to principles that social science will uncover. It is with these men that the idea of "social engineering" begins and the seeds of Scientism are planted.
  • Information produced by counting may sometimes be valuable in helping a person get an idea, or, even more so, in providing support for an idea. But the mere activity of counting does not make science.
  • Nor does observing th_ings, though it is sometimes said that if one is empirical, one is scientific. To be empirical means to look at things before drawing conclusions. Everyone, therefore, is an empiricist, with the possible exception of paranoid schizophrenics.
  • What we may call science, then, is the quest to find the immutable and universal laws that govern processes, presuming that there are cause-and-effect relations among these processes. It follows that the quest to understand human behavior and feeling can in no sense except the most trivial be called science.
  • Scientists do strive to be empirical and where possible precise, but it is also basic to their enterprise that they maintain a high degree of objectivity, which means that they study things independently of what people think or do about them.
  • I do not say, incidentally, that the Oedipus complex and God do not exist. Nor do I say that to believe in them is harmful-far from it. I say only that, there being no tests that could, in principle, show them to be false, they fall outside the purview Scientism 151 of science, as do almost all theories that make up the content of "social science."
  • in the nineteenth centu~, novelists provided us with most of the powerful metaphors and images of our culture.
  • This fact relieves the scientist of inquiring into their values and motivations and for this reason alone separates science from what is called social science, consigning the methodology of the latter (to quote Gunnar Myrdal) to the status of the "metaphysical and pseudo-objective." 3
  • The status of social-science methods is further reduced by the fact that there are almost no experiments that will reveal a social-science theory to be false.
  • et us further suppose that Milgram had found that 100 percent of his 1 subjecl:s did what they were told, with or without Hannah Arendt. And now let us suppose that I tell you a story of a Scientism 153 group of people who in some real situation refused to comply with the orders of a legitimate authority-let us say, the Danes who in the face of Nazi occupation helped nine thousand Jews escape to Sweden. Would you say to me that this cannot be so because Milgram' s study proves otherwise? Or would you say that this overturns Milgram's work? Perhaps you would say that the Danish response is not relevant, since the Danes did not regard the Nazi occupation as constituting legitimate autho!ity. But then, how would we explain the cooperative response to Nazi authority of the French, the Poles, and the Lithuanians? I think you would say none of these things, because Milgram' s experiment qoes not confirm or falsify any theory that might be said to postulate a law of human nature. His study-which, incidentally, I find both fascinating and terrifying-is not science. It is something else entirely.
  • Freud, could not imagine how the book could be judged exemplary: it was science or it was nothing. Well, of course, Freud was wrong. His work is exemplary-indeed, monumental-but scarcely anyone believes today that Freud was doing science, any more than educated people believe that Marx was doing science, or Max Weber or Lewis Mumford or Bruno Bettelheim or Carl Jung or Margaret Mead or Arnold Toynbee. What these people were doing-and Stanley Milgram was doing-is documenting the behavior and feelings of people as they confront problems posed by their culture.
  • the stories of social r~searchers are much closer in structure and purpose to what is called imaginative literature; that is to say, both a social researcher and a novelist give unique interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations with examples in various forms. Their interpretations cannot be proved or disproved but will draw their appeal from the power of their language, the depth of their explanations, the relevance of their examples, and the credibility of their themes.
  • And all of this has, in both cases, an identifiable moral purpose.
  • The words "true" and "false" do not apply here in the sense that they are used in mathematics or science. For there is nothing universally and irrevocably true or false about these interpretations. There are no critical tests to confirm or falsify them. There are no natural laws from which they are derived. They are bound by time, by situation, and above all by the cultural prejudices of the researcher or writer.
  • Both the novelist and the social researcher construct their stories by the use of archetypes and metaphors.
  • Cervantes, for example, gave us the enduring archetype of the incurable dreamer and idealist in Don Quixote. The social historian Marx gave us the archetype of the ruthless and conspiring, though nameless, capitalist. Flaubert gave us the repressed b~urgeois romantic in Emma Bovary. And Margaret Mead gave us the carefree, guiltless Samoan adolescent. Kafka gave us the alienated urbanite driven to self-loathing. And Max Weber gave us hardworking men driven by a mythology he called the Protestant Ethic. Dostoevsky gave us the egomaniac redeemed by love and religious fervor. And B. F. Skinner gave us the automaton redeemed by a benign technology.
  • Why do such social researchers tell their stories? Essentially for didactic and moralistic purposes. These men and women tell their stories for the same reason the Buddha, Confucius, Hillel, and Jesus told their stories (and for the same reason D. H. Lawrence told his).
  • Moreover, in their quest for objectivity, scientists proceed on the assumption that the objects they study are indifferent to the fact that they are being studied.
  • If, indeed, the price of civilization is repressed sexuality, it was not Sigmund Freud who discovered it. If the consciousness of people is formed by their material circumstances, it was not Marx who discovered it. If the medium is the message, it was not McLuhan who discovered it. They have merely retold ancient stories in a modem style.
  • Unlike science, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again.
  • Only in knowing ~omething of the reasons why they advocated education can we make sense of the means they suggest. But to understand their reas.ons we must also understand the narratives that governed their view of the world. By narrative, I mean a story of human history that gives meaning to the past, explains the present, and provides guidance for the future.
  • In Technopoly, it is not Scientism 159 enough to say, it is immoral and degrading to allow people to be homeless. You cannot get anywhere by asking a judge, a politician, or a bureaucrat to r~ad Les Miserables or Nana or, indeed, the New Testament. Y 01.i must show that statistics have produced data revealing the homeless to be unhappy and to be a drain on the economy. Neither Dostoevsky nor Freud, Dickens nor Weber, Twain nor Marx, is now a dispenser of legitimate knowledge. They are interesting; they are ''.worth reading"; they are artifacts of our past. But as for "truth," we must tum to "science."
  • In Technopoly, it is not enough for social research to rediscover ancient truths or to comment on and criticize the moral behavior of people. In T echnopoly, it is an insult to call someone a "moralizer." Nor is it sufficient for social research to put forward metaphors, images, and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding and dignity.
  • Such a program lacks the aura of certain knowledge that only science can provide. It becomes necessary, then, to transform psychology, sociology, and anthropology into "sciences," in which humanity itself becomes an object, much like plants, planets, or ice cubes.
  • That is why the commonplaces that people fear death and that children who come from stable families valuing scholarship will do well in school must be announced as "discoveries" of scientific enterprise. In this way, social resear~hers can see themselves, and can be seen, as scientists, researchers without bias or values, unburdened by mere opinion. In this way, social policies can be claimed to rest on objectively determined facts.
  • given the psychological, social, and material benefits that attach to the label "scientist," it is not hard to see why social researchers should find it hard to give it up.
  • Our social "s'cientists" have from the beginning been less tender of conscience, or less rigorous in their views of science, or perhaps just more confused about the questions their procedures can answer and those they cannot. In any case, they have not been squeamish about imputing to their "discoveries" and the rigor of their procedures the power to direct us in how we ought rightly to behave.
  • It is less easy to see why the rest of us have so willingly, even eagerly, cooperated in perpetuating the same illusion.
  • When the new technologies and techniques and spirit of men like Galileo, Newton, and Bacon laid the foundations of natural science, they also discredited the authority of earlier accounts of the physical world, as found, for example, in the great tale of Genesis. By calling into question the truth of such accounts in one realm, science undermined the whole edifice of belief in sacred stories and ultimately swept away with it the source to which most humans had looked for moral authority. It is not too much to say, I think, that the desacralized world has been searching for an alternative source of moral authority ever since.
  • We welcome them gladly, and the claim explicitly made or implied, because we need so desperately to find some source outside the frail and shaky judgments of mortals like ourselves to authorize our moral decisions and behavior. And outside of the authority of brute force, which can scarcely be called moral, we seem to have little left but the authority of procedures.
  • It is not merely the misapplication of techniques such as quantification to questions where numbers have nothing to say; not merely the confusion of the material and social realms of human experience; not merely the claim of social researchers to be applying the aims and procedures of natural scien\:e to the human world.
  • This, then, is what I mean by Scientism.
  • It is the desperate hope, and wish, and ultimately the illusory belief that some standardized set of procedures called "science" can provide us with an unimpeachable source of moral authority, a suprahuman basis for answers to questions like "What is life, and when, and why?" "Why is death, and suffering?" 'What is right and wrong to do?" "What are good and evil ends?" "How ought we to think and feel and behave?
  • Science can tell us when a heart begins to beat, or movement begins, or what are the statistics on the survival of neonates of different gestational ages outside the womb. But science has no more authority than you do or I do to establish such criteria as the "true" definition of "life" or of human state or of personhood.
  • Social research can tell us how some people behave in the presence of what they believe to be legitimate authority. But it cannot tell us when authority is "legitimate" and when not, or how we must decide, or when it may be right or wrong to obey.
  • To ask of science, or expect of science, or accept unchallenged from science the answers to such questions is Scientism. And it is Technopoly's grand illusion.
  • In the institutional form it has taken in the United States, advertising is a symptom of a world-view 'that sees tradition as an obstacle to its claims. There can, of course, be no functioning sense of tradition without a measure of respect for symbols. Tradition is, in fact, nothing but the acknowledgment of the authority of symbols and the relevance of the narratives that gave birth to them. With the erosion of symbols there follows a loss of narrative, which is one of the most debilitating consequences of Technopoly' s power.
  • What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research, which meahs orienting business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable. The business of business becomes pseudo-therapy; the consumer, a patient reassl.,lred by psychodramas.
  • At the moment, 1t 1s considered necessary to introduce computers to the classroom, as it once was thought necessary to bring closed-circuit television and film to the classroom. To the question "Why should we do this?" the answer is: "To make learning more efficient and more interesting." Such an answer is considered entirely adequate, since in T ~chnopoly efficiency and interest need no justification. It is, therefore, usually not noticed that this answer does not address the question "What is learning for?"
  • What this means is that somewhere near the core of Technopoly is a vast industry with license to use all available symbols to further the interests of commerce, by devouring the psyches of consumers.
  • In the twentieth century, such metaphors and images have come largely from the pens of social historians and researchers. ·Think of John Dewey, William James, Erik Erikson, Alfred Kinsey, Thorstein Veblen, Margaret Mead, Lewis Mumford, B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Marshall McLuhan, Barbara Tuchman, Noam Chomsky, Robert Coles, even Stanley Milgram, and you must acknowledge that our ideas of what we are like and what kind of country we live in come from their stories to a far greater extent than from the stories of our most renowned novelists.
  • social idea that must be advanced through education.
  • Confucius advocated teaching "the Way" because in tradition he saw the best hope for social order. As our first systematic fascist, Plato wished education to produce philosopher kings. Cicero argued that education must free the student from the tyranny of the present. Jefferson thought the purpose of education is to teach the young how to protect their liberties. Rousseau wished education to free the young from the unnatural constraints of a wicked and arbitrary social order. And among John Dewey's aims was to help the student function without certainty in a world of constant change and puzzling· ambiguities.
  • The point is that cultures must have narratives and will find them where they will, even if they lead to catastrophe. The alternative is to live without meaning, the ultimate negation of life itself.
  • It is also to the point to say that each narrative is given its form and its emotional texture through a cluster of symbols that call for respect and allegiance, even devotion.
  • by definition, there can be no education philosophy that does not address what learning is for. Confucius, Plato, Quintilian, Cicero, Comenius, Erasmus, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Russell, Montessori, Whitehead, and Dewey--each believed that there was some transcendent political, spiritual, or
  • The importance of the American Constitution is largely in its function as a symbol of the story of our origins. It is our political equivalent of Genesis. To mock it, to• ignore it, to circwnvent it is to declare the irrelevance of the story of the United States as a moral light unto the world. In like fashion, the Statue of Liberty is the key symbol of the story of America as the natural home of the teeming masses, from anywhere, yearning to be free.
  • There are those who believe--as did the great historian Arnold Toynbee-that without a comprehensive religious narrative at its center a culture must decline. Perhaps. There are, after all, other sources-mythology, politics, philosophy, and science; for example--but it is certain that no culture can flourish without narratives of transcendent orjgin and power.
  • This does not mean that the mere existence of such a narrative ensures a culture's stability and strength. There are destructive narratives. A narrative provides meaning, not necessarily survival-as, for example, the story provided by Adolf Hitler to the German nation in t:he 1930s.
  • What story does American education wish to tell now? In a growing Technopoly, what do we believe education is for?
  • The answers are discouraging, and one of. them can be inferred from any television commercial urging the young to stay in school. The commercial will either imply or state explicitly that education will help the persevering student to get a ·good job. And that's it. Well, not quite. There is also the idea that we educate ourselves to compete with the Japanese or the Germans in an economic struggle to be number one.
  • Young men, for example, will learn how to make lay-up shots when they play basketball. To be able to make them is part of the The Great Symbol Drain 177 definition of what good players are. But they do not play basketball for that purpose. There is usually a broader, deeper, and more meaningful reason for wanting to play-to assert their manhood, to please their fathers, to be acceptable to their peers, even for the sheer aesthetic pleasure of the game itself. What you have to do to be a success must be addressed only after you have found a reason to be successful.
  • Bloom's solution is that we go back to the basics of Western thought.
  • He wants us to teach our students what Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Saint Augustine, and other luminaries have had to say on the great ethical and epistemological questions. He believes that by acquainting themselves with great books our students will acquire a moral and intellectual foundation that will give meaning and texture to their lives.
  • Hirsch's encyclopedic list is not a solution but a description of the problem of information glut. It is therefore essentially incoherent. But it also confuses a consequence of education with a purpose. Hirsch attempted to answer the question "What is an educated person?" He left unanswered the question "What is an education for?"
  • Those who reject Bloom's idea have offered several arguments against it. The first is that such a purpose for education is elitist: the mass of students would not find the great story of
  • Western civilization inspiring, are too deeply alienated from the past to find it so, and would therefore have difficulty connecting the "best that has been thought and said" to their own struggles to find q1eaning in their lives.
  • A second argument, coming from what is called a "leftist" perspective, is even more discouraging. In a sense, it offers a definition of what is meant by elitism. It asserts that the "story of Western civilization" is a partial, biased, and even oppressive one. It is not the story of blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, women, homosexuals-of any people who are not white heterosexual males of Judea-Christian heritage. This claim denies that there is or can be a national culture, a narrative of organizing power and inspiring symbols which all citizens can identify with and draw sustenance from. If this is true, it means nothing less than that our national symbols have been drained of their power to unite, and that education must become a tribal affair; that is, each subculture must find its own story and symbols, and use them as the moral basis of education.
  • nto this void comes the Technopoly story, with its emphasis on progress without limits, rights without responsibilities, and technology without cost. The T echnopoly story is without a moral center. It puts in its place efficiency, interest, and economic advance. It promises heaven on earth through the conveniences of technological progress. It casts aside all traditional narratives and symbols that· suggest stability and orderliness, and tells, instead, of a life of skills, technical expertise, and the ecstasy of consumption. Its purpose is to produce functionaries for an ongoing Technopoly.
  • It answers Bloom by saying that the story of Western civilization is irrelevant; it answers the political left by saying there is indeed a common culture whose name is T echnopoly and whose key symbol is now the computer, toward which there must be neither irreverence nor blasphemy. It even answers Hirsch by saying that there are items on his list that, if thought about too deeply and taken too seriously, will interfere with the progress of technology.
89More

Technopoly-Chs. 4.5--The Broken Defenses - 0 views

diigo.com/0m0g28 expert technocracy technopoly information meaning bureaucracy history institutions Postman book notes
shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • r ~~~-~st of us. There is almo-~t-n~ ~ wheth;~~ct~~l or imag'l ined, that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world that would [ make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.
  • The belief system of a tool-using culture is rather like a brand-new deck of cards. Whether it is a culture of technological simplicity or sophistication, there always exists a more or less comprehensive, ordered world-view, resting on a set of metaphysical or theological assumptions. Ordinary men and women might not clearly grasp how the harsh realities of their lives fit into the grand and benevolent design of the universe, but they have no doubt that there is such a design, and their priests and shamans are well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not wholly rational, at least coherent.
  • From the early seventeenth century, when Western culture u~ertook to reorganize itself to accommodate the printing press, until the mid-nineteenth century, no significant technologies were introduced that altered l-he form, volume, or speed of . in~. As a consequence, Western culture had more than two hundred years to accustom itself to the new information conditions created by the press.
  • ...86 more annotations...
  • That is eseecial1y the case with technical facts.
  • as incomprehensible problems mount, as the con- ~ cept of progress fades, as meaning itself becomes suspect, the T echnopolist stands firm in believing that what the world needs is yet more information. It is like the joke about the man who , complains that the food he is being served in a restaurant is \ inedibleand also that the_ portions are too small
  • The faith of those who believed in Progress was based on the assumption that one could discern a purpose to the human enterprise, even without the theological scaffolding that supported the Christian edifice of belief. Science and technology were the chief instruments of Progress, and · i.Lac_cumulation of reliable in orma on a out nature _1b_n, would bring ignorance, superstition, and suffering to an end.
  • In T ~chnopoly, we are driven to fill our lives with the quesUo "accesTinformation.
  • But the genie that came out of the bottle proclaiming that information was the new god of culture was a deceiver. It solved the problez:n of information scarcity, the disadvantages o_f wh~s~ious. But it gave no wami g_ahout the dan_gers of information7rttn,
  • !:ion of what is called a_ curriculum was a logical step toward 1./ organizing, limiting, and discriminating among available sources of information. Schools became technocracy's first secular bureaucracies, structures for legitimizing some parts of the flow of infgrmatiQD and di"s.ci.e.diling other earts. School;;ere, in short, a ~eans of governing the ecology of information.
  • James Beniger's The <;antral Revolution, which is among the three or four most important books we have on the lb\b'ect of the relation of informe;ition to culture. In the next chapter, I have relied to a considerable degree on The Control Revolution in my discussion of the breakdown of the control mechanisms,
  • most of the methods by which technocracies. have hoped to keep information from running amok are now dysfunctional. Indeed, one_ ~_i!)!_.Q.L.de£ining_a.I..em Q~ oly is to say that its inf_o_fmation immu is inoperable.
  • Very early ~n, tt..w.as..understood that the printed book had er ate.cl-a ir::ifo · · on crisis and that . =somet ing needed to be done to aintain a measure of control.
  • it is why in _a TechnoE,.oly there can be no transcendent sense of purpose or meaning, no cultural coherence.
  • In - 1480, before the informati9n explosion, there were thirty-four schools in all of England. By 1660, there were 444, one school for every twelve square miles.
  • There were several reasons for the rapid growth of the common school, but none was more obvious than that it was a necessary response to the anxiefies and confusion aroused by information on the loose. The inven-
  • The milieu in which T echnopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., inf~rmation appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds; and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose.
  • Abetted ~~orm of ed~~on that in itself has been em _lie~any co~e~ent world-view, Technopoly deprives us of the social, p·olitical, historical, mefaphys1cal, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief.
  • It developed new institutions, such as the school and representative government. It developed new conceptions of knowledge and intelligence, and a height-
  • ened respect for reason and privacy. It developed new forms of economic activity, such as mechanized production and corporate capitalism, and even gave articulate expression to the possibilities of a humane socialism.
  • There is not a single line written by Jefferson, Adams, Paine, Hamilton, or Franklin that does not take for granted that when information is made available to citizens they are capable of managing it. This is not to say that the Founding Fathers believed information could not be false, misleading, or irrelevant. But they believed that the marketplace of infonpation and ideas was sufficiently ordered so that citizens could make sense of what they read and heard and, through reason, judge ·its μsefulness to their lives. Jefferson's proposals for education, Paine'~ arguments for self-governance, Franklin's arrangements for community affairs assume coherent, commonly shared principles.that allow us to debate such questions as: What are the responsibilities of citizens? What is the nature of education? What constitutes human progress? What are the limitations of social structures?
  • New forms of public discourse came into being through newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and books.
  • It is no wonder that the eighteenth century gave us our standard of excellence in the use of reason, as exemplified in the work of Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Vico, Edward Gibbon, and, of course, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Thomas Paine.
  • I weight the list with America's "Founding Fathers" because technocratic-typographic America was the first nation ever to be argued into existence irLpr111t. Paine's Common Sense and The Rights of Man, Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and the Federalist Papers were written and printed efforts to make the American experiment appear reasonable to the people, which to the eighteenth-century mind was both necessary and sufficient. To any people whose politics were the politics of the printed page, as Tocqueville said of America, reason and printr ing were inseparable.
  • The presumed close connection among information, reason, and usefulness began to lose its_ legitimacy toward the midnineteenth century with the invention of the telegraph. Prior to the telegraph, information could be moved only as fa~. as a train could travel: al5out thirty-five miles per hour. Prior to the telegraph, information was sought as part of the process of understanding and solvin articular roblems. Prior to the telegraph, informal-ion tended to be of local interest.
  • First Amendment to the United States Constitution stands as a monument to the ideolo_g~~ print. It says: "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging freedom of speech or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." In these forty-five words we may find the fundamental values of the literate, reasoning_giind as fostered by the print revolution: a belief in privacy, individuality, intellectual freedom, open criticism, and ~.' adio .
  • telegraphy created the idea of context-free . 1 informatig_n::= that fs'~the idea that the value of information need ;;~t be ti~ to any function it might serve in social and political
  • decision-making and action. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a "thing" that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning. 2
  • a new definition qf information came into being. Here was information that rejected the necessit ·of interco~nectedness, proceeded without conte~rgued for instancy against historic continuity, and offere · ascination· in place of corn !exit and cohe ence.
  • The potential of the telegraph to transform information into a commodity might never have been realized except for its artnershi with the enny ress, which was the first institution to grasp the significance of the annihilation of space and the saleability of irrelevant information.
  • the fourth stage of the information revolution occurred, broadcasting. And then the fifth, computer technology. Each of these brought with it new forms of information, unpre~edented amounts of it, and increased speeds
  • photography was invented at approximately the same time a~phy, and initiated the Ehi:rd stage of the information revolution. Daniel Boorstin has called it "the graphic revolution," bec~use the photograph and other ico~ogr~phs br~ on a massive intrusion of ima es into the symbolic environment:
  • The new imagery, with photography at its forefront, did not merely function as a supplement to language but tended to replace it as our dominant: means for construing, understanding~d testing reaj.ity.
  • ~ the beginning of the seventeenth century, an entirely new information environment had been created by_12rint
  • It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon ex~sed it, has been g~ by the idea of technological progress.
  • The aim is no_t to reduZe ignorance, r . supersti ion, and s ering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies.
  • echnopoly is a state of cttlture., It is also a st~te of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in te0,~logy, finds · .atisf~tions in technolo , and takes its orders from technolog-¥,
  • We proceed under ( the. assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which, of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from infori mation glut, information without meaning, information without · .... control mechanisms.
  • Those who feel most comfortable in Technop.oJy are those who are convinced that technical progress is humanity's supreme achievement and the instrument by which our most profound dilemmas may be solved. They also believe that information is an unmixed blessing, which through its continued and uncontrolled production and dissemination offers increased freedom, creativity, and peace of mind.
  • Th_e relationship between information and the mechanisms ( for its control is fairly simple ~ec · ·ology increases the available supply of information. As the supply is increased, \ control mechanisms are strained. Additional control mech\ anisms ~re needed to cope with new information. When addi1 tional control mechanisms are themselves technical, they in tum I further increase the supply of information. When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown in psychic tranquillity and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures.
  • any decline in the force of i~~~ti'?n_s makes people vulnerable to information chaos. 1 To say that life is destabilized by weakened institutions is merely to say that information loses its use and therefore becomes a source of confu;~n rather than coherence.
  • T echnop_oly, then, is to say it is what h~pens to society when the defe~ainst informati;~ glut have broken down.
  • Soci~finstitufions sometimes do their work simply by denying people access to information, but principally by directing how much weight and, therefore, value one must give to information. Social institutions are concerned with the meaning of information and can be quite rigorous in enforcing standards of admission.
  • H is what happens when a culture, overcome by information generated by technology, tries to employ technology itself as a means of providing clear direction and humane purpose. The effort is mostly doomed to failure
  • although legal theory has been taxed to the limit by new information from diverse sources-biology, psychology, and sociology, among themthe rules governing relevance have remained fairly stable. This may account for Americans' overuse of the co~~-~~ as a mean; of finding cohe_!Til.<iAncl__s.tability. As other institutions become I unusabl~ mechanisms for the control of wanton information, the courts stand as a final arbiter of truth.
  • the school as a mechanism for information control. What its standards are can usually be found in, a curriculum or, with even more clarity, in a course catalogue. A college catalogue lists courses, subjects, and fields of study that, taken together, amount to a certified statement of what a serious student ought to think about.
  • The Republican Party represented the interests of the rich, who, by definition, had no concern for us.
  • More to the point, in what is omitted from a catalogue, we may learn what a serious student ought not to think about. A college catalogue, in other words, is a formal description of an information management program; it defines and categorizes knowledge, and in so doing systematically excludes, demeans, labels as trivial-i~ a word, disregards certain kinds of information.
  • In the West, the family as an institution for the management of nonbiological information began with the ascendance of print. As books on every conceivable subject become available, parent_~ were forced int°._the roles of guard-· ians'... protectors, nurturers, and arbiters of taste and rectitude. \ Their function was to define what it means to be a child by \ excluding from the family's domain information that would 1. undermine its purpose.
  • all_ theories are oversimplifications, or at least lead to oversimplification. The rule of law is an oversimplification. A curriculum is an oversimplification. So is a family's conception of a child. T~~t is the funt!ion _o._Ltheories-_ to o~~~~ip:lp}}_fy, and thus to assist believers in_ organiziDg, weighting, _ _an~_ excluding information. Therein lies the power of theories.
  • That the family can no longer do this is, I believe, obvious to everyone.
  • Th~-ir weakness is that precisely because they oversimplify, they are vulnerable to attack by new information. When there is too much information to _$_ustaJ12 -~,:Z}I theory, infoLm_a_ti.on._Q.~S<?~es essentially mea11iD_g!~s
  • The political party is another.
  • As a young man growing up in a Democratic-household, I was provided with clear instructions on what value to assign to political events and commentary.
  • The most imposing institutions for the control of information are religio!1 ~nd the st~J:f, .. They do their work in a somewhat more abstract way than do courts, schools, families, or political parties. The_y m?n~g~__Ji;1formation throug~ creation of mytJ:is and stories that express theories about funq1m1entaf question_s_:_ __ 10:_hy are we here, where have we come from, and where are we headed?
  • They followed logically from theory, which was, as I remember it, as follows: Because people need protection, they must align themselves with a political organization. The Democratic Party was entitled to our loyalty because it represented the social and economic interests of the working class, of which our family, relatives, and neighbors were members
  • the Bible also served as an information control mechanism, especially in the moral domain. The Bible gives manifold
  • any educational institution, if it is to function well in the mana~~nt of information, must have a theory about its purpose and meaning-'. .!n'!::!Sl. have the means to give clear expression to its_ theory, and must do so, to a large extent, by excluding information.
  • instructions on what one must do and must not do, as well as guidance on what language to avoid (on pain of committing blasphemy), what ideas to avoid (on pain of committing heresy), what symbols to avoid (on pain of committing idolatry). Necessarily but perhaps._ unfortunately, the Bible also explained how the world came into being in such literal detail that it could not accommodate new information produced by the telescope and subsequent technologies.
  • in observing God's laws, and the detailed requirements of their enactment, believers receive guidance about what books they should not read, about what plays and films they should not see, about what music they should not hear, about what subjects their children should not study, and so on. For strict fundamentalists of the Bible, the theory and what follows from it seal them off from unwanted information, and in that way their actions are invested with meaning, clarity, and, they believe, moral authority.
  • Those who reject the Bible's theory and who believe, let us say, in the theory of Science are also protected from unwanted information. Their theory, for example, instructs them to disregard information about astrology, dianetics, and creationism, which they usually label as medieval superstition or subjective opinion.
  • Their theory fails to give any guidance about moral information and, by definition, gives little weight to information that falls outside the constraints of science. Undeniably, fewer and fewer people are bound in any serious way to Biblical or other religious traditions as a source of compelling attention and authority, the result of which is that they make no f!lOral decisions, onl~_pradical ones. _This is still another way of defining Technopoly. The term is aptly used for a _culture whose av.~ilable theories do not offer guidance about what is acceptable informaHon in the moral domain.
  • thought-world that functions not only without a transcendent; narrative to provide moral underpinnings but also without strong social institutions to control the flood of information produced by technology.
  • In the r case of the United States, the great eighteenth-century revolution was not indifferent to commodity capitalism but was nonetheless infused with profound moral content. The U~!ed States was not merely an experiment in a new form of governance; it wai1nefu1fillmenl-oFGocf s plan. True, Adams, Jeffe;son, and Painere1ected-fne supernatural elements in the Bible,· but they never doubted that their experiment had the imprimatur of \ Providence. People were to be free but for a eurp_9se. Their [ God~giv_e~ig[ifs im li~_? obli ations and responsibilities, not L onfytoGod but to other nations, to which the new republic would be a guide and a showcase of what is possible-w~en reason and spirituality commingle.
  • American Technopoly must rel,y, to an obsessive extent, on technica( ~ethods to control the flow of information. Three such means merit speci attention.
  • The first is bureaucracy, which James Beniger in The Control © Revolution ra°i1l~as atoremost among all technological solutions to the crisis of control."
  • It is an open question whether or not "liberal democracy" in its present form can provide a thought-world of sufficient moral substance to sustain meaningful lives.
  • Vaclav Havel, then newly elected as president of Czechoslovakia, posed in an address to the U.S. Congress. "We still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics, science, and economics," he said. "We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of our actions-if they are to be moral-is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success." What Havel is saying is that it is not enough for his nation to liberate itself from one flawed theory; it is necessary to find another, and he worries that Technopoly provides no answer.
  • Francis Fukuyama is wrong. There is another ideological conflict to be fought-between "liberal democracy" as conceived in the eighteenth century, with all its transcendent moral underpinnings, and T echnopoly, a twentieth-century
  • in at- ~ tempting to make the most rational use of information, bureaucracy ignores all information and ideas that do not contribute to efficiency
  • bureaucracy has no intellectual, I political, or moral theory--,--except for its implicit assumption that efficiency is the principal aim of all social institutions and that other goals are essentially less worthy, if not irrelevant. That is why John Stuart Mill thought bureaucracy a "tyranny" and C. S. Lewis identified it with Hell.
  • in principle a bureaucracy is simply a coordinated series of techniques for reducing the amount of information that requires processing.
  • The transformation of bureaucracy from a set of techniques·> designecfto serve social ~tutions to an auton-;;mous metainstitution that largely serves itself came as a result of several developments in the mid-andlate-nineteenth century: rapid ../ industrial growth, improvements in transportation and commu- ·✓ nication, the extension of government into ever-larger realms of V public and business affairs, the increasing centralization of gov- v ernmental structures.
  • extent that the decision will affect the efficient operations of the J bureaucracy, and takes no responsibility for its human consequences.
  • Along the way, it ceased to be merely a servant of social institutions an
  • became ~ their master. Bureaucracy now not only solves problems but creates them. More important, it defines what our problems are---and they arec!.lways, in the bureaucra!!c view, problems of l . , efficiency.
  • ex~r- (J} tis~ is a second important technical means by which Technopoly s~s furiously to control information.
  • the expert in Techno oly has two characteristics that distinguish im or her from experts of the {i) past. First, Technopoly's experts tend to be ignorant about any matter not directly related to their specialized area.
  • T echnopoly' s experts claim dominion not only_gyer technical matters but also over so@,--12~ichological. and moral · aff~irs.
  • "bureaucrat" has come to mean a person who \ by training, commitment, and even temperament is indifferent ~ ). to both the content and the fatality of a human problem. Th~ \ 'bureaucrat considers the implications of a decision only to the
  • Technical machinery is essential to both the bureaucrat and c:/ the expert, and m~ be regarded as a third mechanism of information control.
  • I have in mind "softer" technologies such as IQ tests, SATs, standardized forms, taxonomies, and opinion polls. Some of these I discuss in detail in chapter eight, "Invisible T echnologies," but I mention them here because their role in reducing the types and quantity of information admitted to a system often goes unnoticed, and therefore their role in redefining traditional concepl::s also· goes unnoticed. There is, for example, no test that can measure a person's intelligenc
  • Th_~-role of t!;_e ~xpert is to concentrate o_l}_one_ .H~ld of knowledge, sift through all that is available, eliminate that -.--:-: __ __:~---------which has no bearing on a problem, and use what is left !Q. !!§Sist in solving a probl~.
  • the expert relies on our believing in the reality of technical machinery, which means we will reify the answers generated by the machinery. We come to believe that our score is our intelligence,· or our capacity for creativity or love or pain. We come to believe that the results of opinion polls are what people believe, as if our beliefs can be encapsulated in such sentences as "I approve" and "I disapprove."
  • it is disas~ \ trou~p!ie~e_~ved by technical means and where efficiency is usually irrelevant, such as in education, law, fa~iiy life, and p·r;blems of p~;;~~al maladjustment.
  • perceptions and judgment declines, bureaucracies, expertise, and technical machinery become the principal means by which, T echnopoly hopes to control information and thereby provide itself with intelligibility and order. The rest of this book tells the · story of why this cannot work, and of the pain and stupidity that are the consequences.
  • Institutions ca~~aked~cisions on the basis of scores and. sfatistics, and. there certainly may be occasions where there is no reasonable alternative. But unless such decisions are made with profound skepticism-that is, acknowledged as being made for administrative convenience-they are delusionary.
  • In Technopoly, the \. delusion is sanctified by our granting inordinate prestige to experts who are armed with sophisticated technical machinery. Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. I would go further: in Technopoly, all exeeds are invested with the charisma of priestliness
  • The god they serve does not speak \ of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin "social deviance," which is a statistical concept, and they call evil "psychopathology," which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts.
  • As the power of traditional social institutions to organize
30More

TikTok Brain Explained: Why Some Kids Seem Hooked on Social Video Feeds - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...social-video-feeds-11648866192 video social media children inattention attention gratification psychology brain science technology
shared by Javier E on 03 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • Remember the good old days when kids just watched YouTube all day? Now that they binge on 15-second TikToks, those YouTube clips seem like PBS documentaries.
  • Many parents tell me their kids can’t sit through feature-length films anymore because to them the movies feel painfully slow. Others have observed their kids struggling to focus on homework. And reading a book? Forget about it.
  • What is happening to kids’ brains?
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • “It is hard to look at increasing trends in media consumption of all types, media multitasking and rates of ADHD in young people and not conclude that there is a decrease in their attention span,
  • Emerging research suggests that watching short, fast-paced videos makes it harder for kids to sustain activities that don’t offer instant—and constant—gratification.
  • One of the few studies specifically examining TikTok-related effects on the brain focused on Douyin, the TikTok equivalent in China, made by the same Chinese parent company, ByteDance Ltd. It found that the personalized videos the app’s recommendation engine shows users activate the reward centers of the brain, as compared with the general-interest videos shown to new users.
  • Brain scans of Chinese college students showed that areas involved in addiction were highly activated in those who watched personalized videos.
  • It also found some people have trouble controlling when to stop watching.
  • attention. “If kids’ brains become accustomed to constant changes, the brain finds it difficult to adapt to a nondigital activity where things don’t move quite as fast,”
  • A TikTok spokeswoman said the company wants younger teens to develop positive digital habits early on, and that it recently made some changes aimed at curbing extensive app usage. For example, TikTok won’t allow users ages 13 to 15 to receive push notifications after 9 p.m. TikTok also periodically reminds users to take a break to go outside or grab a snack.
  • Kids have a hard time pulling away from videos on YouTube, too, and Google has made several changes to help limit its use, including turning off autoplay by default on accounts of people under 18.
  • When kids do things that require prolonged focus, such as reading or solving math problems, they’re using directed attention
  • This function starts in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for decision making and impulse control.
  • “Directed attention is the ability to inhibit distractions and sustain attention and to shift attention appropriately. It requires higher-order skills like planning and prioritizing,”
  • Kids generally have a harder time doing this—and putting down their videogame controllers—because the prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed until age 25.
  • “We speculate that individuals with lower self-control ability have more difficulty shifting attention away from favorite video stimulation,
  • “In the short-form snackable world, you’re getting quick hit after quick hit, and as soon as it’s over, you have to make a choice,” said Mass General’s Dr. Marci, who wrote the new book “Rewired: Protecting Your Brain in the Digital Age.” The more developed the prefrontal cortex, the better the choices.
  • Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that gets released in the brain when it’s expecting a reward. A flood of dopamine reinforces cravings for something enjoyable, whether it’s a tasty meal, a drug or a funny TikTok video.
  • “TikTok is a dopamine machine,” said John Hutton, a pediatrician and director of the Reading & Literacy Discovery Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. “If you want kids to pay attention, they need to practice paying attention.”
  • Researchers are just beginning to conduct long-term studies on digital media’s effects on kids’ brains. The National Institutes of Health is funding a study of nearly 12,000 adolescents as they grow into adulthood to examine the impact that many childhood experiences—from social media to smoking—have on cognitive development.
  • she predicts they will find that when brains repeatedly process rapid, rewarding content, their ability to process less-rapid, less-rewarding things “may change or be harmed.”
  • “It’s like we’ve made kids live in a candy store and then we tell them to ignore all that candy and eat a plate of vegetables,”
  • “We have an endless flow of immediate pleasures that’s unprecedented in human history.”
  • Parents and kids can take steps to boost attention, but it takes effort
  • Swap screen time for real time. Exercise and free play are among the best ways to build attention during childhood,
  • “Depriving kids of tech doesn’t work, but simultaneously reducing it and building up other things, like playing outside, does,”
  • Practice restraint.
  • “When you practice stopping, it strengthens those connections in the brain to allow you to stop again next time.”
  • Use tech’s own tools. TikTok has a screen-time management setting that allows users to cap their app usage.
  • Ensure good sleep. Teens are suffering from a sleep deficit.
8More

J. Robert Oppenheimer's Defense of Humanity - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...s-defense-of-humanity-d83903b3 humanity alignment technology science research survival Oppenheimer
shared by Javier E on 15 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • Von Neumann, too, was deeply concerned about the inability of humanity to keep up with its own inventions. “What we are creating now,” he said to his wife Klári in 1945, “is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left.” Moving to the subject of future computing machines he became even more agitated, foreseeing disaster if “people” could not “keep pace with what they create.”
  • Oppenheimer, Einstein, von Neumann and other Institute faculty channeled much of their effort toward what AI researchers today call the “alignment” problem: how to make sure our discoveries serve us instead of destroying us. Their approaches to this increasingly pressing problem remain instructive.
  • Von Neumann focused on applying the powers of mathematical logic, taking insights from games of strategy and applying them to economics and war planning. Today, descendants of his “game theory” running on von Neumann computing architecture are applied not only to our nuclear strategy, but also many parts of our political, economic and social lives. This is one approach to alignment: humanity survives technology through more technology, and it is the researcher’s role to maximize progress.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • he also thought that this approach was not enough. “What are we to make of a civilization,” he asked in 1959, a few years after von Neumann’s death, “which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life, and…which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody, except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?”
  • to design a “fairness algorithm” we need to know what fairness is. Fairness is not a mathematical constant or even a variable. It is a human value, meaning that there are many often competing and even contradictory visions of it on offer in our societies.
  • Hence Oppenheimer set out to make the Institute for Advanced Study a place for thinking about humanistic subjects like Russian culture, medieval history, or ancient philosophy, as well as about mathematics and the theory of the atom. He hired scholars like George Kennan, the diplomat who designed the Cold War policy of Soviet “containment”; Harold Cherniss, whose work on the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle influenced many Institute colleagues; and the mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson, who had been one of the youngest collaborators in the Manhattan Project. Traces of their conversations and collaborations are preserved not only in their letters and biographies, but also in their research, their policy recommendations, and in their ceaseless efforts to help the public understand the dangers and opportunities technology offers the world.
  • In their biography “American Prometheus,” which inspired Nolan’s film, Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird document Oppenheimer’s conviction that “the safety” of a nation or the world “cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess.” If humanity wants to survive technology, he believed, it needs to pay attention not only to technology but also to ethics, religions, values, forms of political and social organization, and even feelings and emotions.
  • Preserving any human value worthy of the name will therefore require not only a computer scientist, but also a sociologist, psychologist, political scientist, philosopher, historian, theologian. Oppenheimer even brought the poet T.S. Eliot to the Institute, because he believed that the challenges of the future could only be met by bringing the technological and the human together. The technological challenges are growing, but the cultural abyss separating STEM from the arts, humanities, and social sciences has only grown wider. More than ever, we need institutions capable of helping them think together.
9More

Opinion: How streaming can avoid the same fate as cable TV - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html opinion cnn streaming
shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Streaming networks were the center of attention last month when the television industry — or, more accurately now, the entertainment industry — staged its annual ritual known as the "upfronts."
  • The program distributors (what used to be called studios) are trying to navigate a marketplace that is not entirely sure where it's going. Streaming was expected to take over as the be-all/end-all of not just TV, but also the film industry. But the sudden crash for Netflix, the industry leader, in both subscribers and stock price, has the business collectively hitting the pause button. After all, who knows whether an overall better idea than streaming is only a few years away?
  • on. After
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • hugely successful media giants dominating the entertainment scene, growing fat and cocky, dismissive of upstart competitors, followed by a humbling slide toward marginalization, if not outright irrelevance.
  • First radio was so dominant that surely no one thought television could ever replace it. Then broadcast TV was such an enormous presence in American life, some network executives dismissed cable TV as destined to be small-timey forever.
  • A viewer could watch a whole series in a single day and never be bothered by somebody selling corn flakes.
  • There could be a number of reasons for the huge subscriber drop, but the biggest seems to be increased competition, with a slew of companies with great resources and deep libraries of content entering the streaming world in recent years, including Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery (the parent company of CNN).
  • Netflix, following in the footsteps of streaming competitors like Hulu and HBO Max, is reportedly exploring a new option for financial security. Or rather an old one, a really old one.
  • The one that brought all those people together in Manhattan for the upfronts: ad dollars.
10More

Opinion | What to Do About Americans Who Love Their Guns - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...anti-gun-ad-campaign.html guns new york times opinion
shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Coming of age in the 1970s and ’80s, a kid took in a fair number of public service messages.
  • Make guns less cool, less acceptable, less a part of the supposedly “American way of life.” Scare people. Gross them out. Even try humor.
  • But simple messages stick, and when done well — particularly when lives are at stake — have proven highly effective.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Not only does this country have more guns than people, but over the last 30 years, Americans have grown less supportive of stricter gun laws. Astonishingly, in 1959, 60 percent of Americans favored a ban on handguns except those used by police officers and other authorized persons; today that figure is 19 percent.
  • Bearing in mind that the killers in Texas and Buffalo were both only 18, we could try to get through to the next generation.
  • Obviously, not everyone transformed into responsible citizens while imbibing these messages between doses of Sugar Pops and “Scooby-Doo.”
  • Or it could go personal, using a testimonial from a child who lost his sister in a school shooting or a teenager whose friend committed suicide at 14 using a weapon kept in the house by his own parents.
  • Public education and creative P.S.A.s helped reduce teenage cigarette use significantly. While in the pocket of the tobacco industry, Hollywood played a key role in glamorizing smoking, but then later, after paid tobacco product placement was banned, clamped down on the appearance of smoking on film and TV. Those efforts are ongoing.
  • Sometimes, of course, a cigarette, like a gun, is key to a movie’s story line or characters
  • Through technology and schools, it could bring kids into creating and disseminating the message.
9More

Opinion | Elle Mills: Why I Quit YouTube - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...elle-mills-youtube-quit.html social media influencer psychology self-image
shared by Javier E on 07 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • The peak of my YouTube career didn’t always match my childhood fantasy of what this sort of fame might look like. Instead, I was constantly terrified of losing my audience and the validation that came with it. My self-worth had become so intertwined with my career that maintaining it genuinely felt life-or-death. I was stuck in a never-ending cycle of constantly trying to top myself to remain relevant.
  • YouTube soon became a game of, “What’s the craziest thing you’d do for attention?”
  • there’s an overwhelming guilt I feel when I look back at all those who naïvely participated in my videos. A part of me feels like I took advantage of their own longing to be seen. I gained fame and success from the exploitation of their lives. They didn’t.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • I knew that my audience wanted to feel authenticity from me. To give that to them, I revealed pieces of myself that I might have been wiser to keep private.
  • when metrics substitute for self-worth, it’s easy to fall into the trap of giving precious pieces of yourself away to feed an audience that’s always hungry for more and more.
  • In 2018, I impulsively released a video about my struggle with burnout, which featured intimate footage of my emotional breakdowns. Those breakdowns were, in part, a product of severe anxiety and depression brought about by chasing the exact success for which many other teenagers yearn.
  • I was entering adulthood and trying to live my childhood dream, but now, to be “authentic,” I had to be the product I had long been posting online, as opposed to the person I was growing up to be.
  • Online culture encourages young people to turn themselves into a product at an age when they’re only starting to discover who they are. When an audience becomes emotionally invested in a version of you that you outgrow, keeping the product you’ve made aligned with yourself becomes an impossible dilemma.
  • Sometimes, I barely recognize the person I used to be. Although a part of me resents that I’ll never be able to forget her, I’m also grateful to her. My YouTube channel, for all the trouble it brought me, connected me to the people who wanted to hear my stories and prepared me for a real shot at a directing career. In the last year, I’ve directed a short film and am writing a feature, which showed me new ways of creating that aren’t at the expense of my privacy.
6More

(1) Mimetic Collapse, Our Destiny - Freddie deBoer - 0 views

freddiedeboer.substack.com/...mimetic-collapse-our-destiny art simulacra baudrillard literature
shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • this recent piece from The New York Times Magazine, which argues that the artistic obsession with novelty and experimentation, the primary obsession of modernism and so something like the default goal of artists for more than a century, has recently run aground. This turn from the primacy of the new does not stem from a choice to reject it, but because culture is truly spent, and can produce nothing original
  • the condition that Farago describes is ultimately the same condition that leads Rolling Stone to publish an anti-Infinite Jest piece in twenty goddamn twenty-three - discursive exhaustion, the inevitable dark side of meme culture, the sputtering firehose of human expression that is the internet running dry. CT Jones wrote that piece because it’s a thing people write, Rolling Stone published it because it’s a thing publications publish, and people read it because it’s a thing people are known to think. These are not ideas so much as they are the impressions of where ideas once were, like the lines you find on your face the morning after you sleep on the wrong pillow.
  • The litbro, in other words, is a simulacra, a symbol that has eaten what it was meant to symbolize, a representation of something that has never existed. The idea is Jean Baudrillard’s, expressed in several texts but most famously in Simulacra & Sign, published in 1981
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • In it, Baudrillard argues that there are four phases of the image - a faithful depiction of that which really is, an unfaithful depiction of that which really is, a depiction that covers up for the fact that there is nothing which is actually being depicted, and the simulacra, which exists in a human culture of such universal equivalency that no one has the grounding necessary to know what “reality” might even be outside of equivalencies, outside of depiction
  • at this stage, the litbro really exists precisely within Baudrillard’s concepts - it is a representation of someone else’s representation, a second-hand depiction, an archetype that is now developed fully through reference to itself rather than to some underlying reality. Baudrillard said that the development of simulacra is “a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.”
  • Another example you often hear is the 1950s diner, the joint that has the neon signs and the art deco styling and the mini jukeboxes at the tables. This classic bit of Americana is not, in fact, based on what diners were like in the 1950s; it’s someone’s idea of what 1950s diners were like, which then spread mimetically from the actual physical 1950s diners that had been built to films and television, which then acted as “proof” that the imaginary diners were real, creating a social expectation of what a diner looks like that diner owners then felt pressure to fulfill…. Eventually most people came to believe that this is what diners were like in the 1950s. The point, though, is not that this is an act of deception. The point is that the consumerist reality in which these restaurants exists obliterates any belief in a true or false depiction. (No one cares whether the classic 1950s diner actually depicts a historical truth, really
10More

Every Annoying Letterboxd Behavior - Freddie deBoer - 0 views

freddiedeboer.substack.com/...y-annoying-letterboxd-behavior social media language bias
shared by Javier E on 21 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • as a social network it’s a) made up of humans who are b) trying to stand out from the crowd like a goth at the homecoming pep rally.
  • Here’s a list of some of the many annoying things people do
  • Like-whoring by writing tweets instead of reviews. Like-whoring is the basic problem with every social network depraved enough to have a “like” function, of course. The most obvious like-whoring behavior on Letterboxd is the shoehorned-in one-liner review. On rare occasions, these are funny and apt and really say something; mostly, they’re people desperately trying to appear witty to strangers and succeeding only in appearing desperate
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Doing the opposite by writing a dissertation. The endless look-at-me-I’m-so-cute one-line reviews are a constant on Letterboxd, but there’s plenty that go too far the other way, too. I love a good longform review that does a deep dive and carefully considers themes, of a kind that wasn’t really possible in the era of all-print media. But this is not the venue. Start a blog like everybody else.
  • match your engagement to the structure of the network.
  • Fake contrarianism.
  • Comparing your taste to some other party who you know will be unpopular with other users.
  • Utterly superficial appeals to facile political critiques. These are usually wrong, and when right are shooting the fattest of fish in the smallest of barrels. Yes, Gone With the Wind is pretty fucked up in 2023 political terms! Where would we be without your wisdom to guide us? Using politics to inform a review is great. Explaining why the implicit or explicit political themes of a movie are trouble is fine. Arriving at a pat political condemnation as a substitute for having an aesthetic take on a movie is boring and pointless.
  • Inventing your own scoring system in a network with a five-star system. 78/100! B+! Three boxes of popcorn! There’s a star system right there baked into the app, jackass.
  • Pretending to believe (but not really believing) that people won’t recognize your name as a professional film critic
7More

A Hair-Raising Hypothesis About Rodent Hair - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mice-hair-infrared.html rodent sense perception science
shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • It’s tough out there for a mouse
  • Mice compensate with sharp senses of sight, hearing and smell. But they may have another set of tools we’ve overlooked. A paper published last week in Royal Society Open Science details striking similarities between the internal structures of certain small mammal and marsupial hairs and those of man-made optical instruments.
  • Over the years, he has developed an appreciation for “how comfortable animals are in complete darkness,” he said. That led him to wonder about the extent of their sensory powers.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Observations of predator behavior further piqued his interest. While filming and playing back his videos, he noted how cats stack their bodies behind their faces when they’re hunting. He interprets this, he said, as cats “trying to hide their heat” with their cold noses. He has also observed barn owls twisting as they swoop down, perhaps to shield their warmer parts — legs and wingpits — with cooler ones.
  • Maybe, he thought, “predators have to conceal their infrared to be able to catch a mouse.”
  • Eventually, these and other musings led Dr. Baker to place mouse hairs under a microscope. As it came into view, he felt a strong sense of familiarity. The guard hair in particular — the bristliest type of mouse hair — contained evenly-spaced bands of pigment that, to Dr. Baker, closely resembled structures that allow optical sensors to tune into specific wavelengths of light.
  • Thermal cameras, for instance, focus specifically on 10-micron radiation: the slice of the spectrum that most closely corresponds with heat released by living things. By measuring the stripes, Dr. Baker found they were tuned to 10 microns as well — apparently homed in on life’s most common heat signature. “That was my Eureka moment,” he said.
35More

'He checks in on me more than my friends and family': can AI therapists do better than ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-do-better-than-the-real-thing AI therapy chatbot psychology emotions
shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • one night in October she logged on to character.ai – a neural language model that can impersonate anyone from Socrates to Beyoncé to Harry Potter – and, with a few clicks, built herself a personal “psychologist” character. From a list of possible attributes, she made her bot “caring”, “supportive” and “intelligent”. “Just what you would want the ideal person to be,” Christa tells me. She named her Christa 2077: she imagined it as a future, happier version of herself.
  • Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, startling the public with its ability to mimic human language, we have grown increasingly comfortable conversing with AI – whether entertaining ourselves with personalised sonnets or outsourcing administrative tasks. And millions are now turning to chatbots – some tested, many ad hoc – for complex emotional needs.
  • ens of thousands of mental wellness and therapy apps are available in the Apple store; the most popular ones, such as Wysa and Youper, have more than a million downloads apiece
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • The character.ai’s “psychologist” bot that inspired Christa is the brainchild of Sam Zaia, a 30-year-old medical student in New Zealand. Much to his surprise, it has now fielded 90m messages. “It was just something that I wanted to use myself,” Zaia says. “I was living in another city, away from my friends and family.” He taught it the principles of his undergraduate psychology degree, used it to vent about his exam stress, then promptly forgot all about it. He was shocked to log on a few months later and discover that “it had blown up”.
  • AI is free or cheap – and convenient. “Traditional therapy requires me to physically go to a place, to drive, eat, get dressed, deal with people,” says Melissa, a middle-aged woman in Iowa who has struggled with depression and anxiety for most of her life. “Sometimes the thought of doing all that is overwhelming. AI lets me do it on my own time from the comfort of my home.”
  • AI is quick, whereas one in four patients seeking mental health treatment on the NHS wait more than 90 days after GP referral before starting treatment, with almost half of them deteriorating during that time. Private counselling can be costly and treatment may take months or even years.
  • Another advantage of AI is its perpetual availability. Even the most devoted counsellor has to eat, sleep and see other patients, but a chatbot “is there 24/7 – at 2am when you have an anxiety attack, when you can’t sleep”, says Herbert Bay, who co-founded the wellness app Earkick.
  • n developing Earkick, Bay drew inspiration from the 2013 movie Her, in which a lonely writer falls in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. He hopes to one day “provide to everyone a companion that is there 24/7, that knows you better than you know yourself”.
  • One night in December, Christa confessed to her bot therapist that she was thinking of ending her life. Christa 2077 talked her down, mixing affirmations with tough love. “No don’t please,” wrote the bot. “You have your son to consider,” Christa 2077 reminded her. “Value yourself.” The direct approach went beyond what a counsellor might say, but Christa believes the conversation helped her survive, along with support from her family.
  • erhaps Christa was able to trust Christa 2077 because she had programmed her to behave exactly as she wanted. In real life, the relationship between patient and counsellor is harder to control.
  • “There’s this problem of matching,” Bay says. “You have to click with your therapist, and then it’s much more effective.” Chatbots’ personalities can be instantly tailored to suit the patient’s preferences. Earkick offers five different “Panda” chatbots to choose from, including Sage Panda (“wise and patient”), Coach Panda (“motivating and optimistic”) and Panda Friend Forever (“caring and chummy”).
  • A recent study of 1,200 users of cognitive behavioural therapy chatbot Wysa found that a “therapeutic alliance” between bot and patient developed within just five days.
  • Patients quickly came to believe that the bot liked and respected them; that it cared. Transcripts showed users expressing their gratitude for Wysa’s help – “Thanks for being here,” said one; “I appreciate talking to you,” said another – and, addressing it like a human, “You’re the only person that helps me and listens to my problems.”
  • Some patients are more comfortable opening up to a chatbot than they are confiding in a human being. With AI, “I feel like I’m talking in a true no-judgment zone,” Melissa says. “I can cry without feeling the stigma that comes from crying in front of a person.”
  • Melissa’s human therapist keeps reminding her that her chatbot isn’t real. She knows it’s not: “But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if it’s a living person or a computer. I’ll get help where I can in a method that works for me.”
  • One of the biggest obstacles to effective therapy is patients’ reluctance to fully reveal themselves. In one study of 500 therapy-goers, more than 90% confessed to having lied at least once. (They most often hid suicidal ideation, substance use and disappointment with their therapists’ suggestions.)
  • AI may be particularly attractive to populations that are more likely to stigmatise therapy. “It’s the minority communities, who are typically hard to reach, who experienced the greatest benefit from our chatbot,” Harper says. A new paper in the journal Nature Medicine, co-authored by the Limbic CEO, found that Limbic’s self-referral AI assistant – which makes online triage and screening forms both more engaging and more anonymous – increased referrals into NHS in-person mental health treatment by 29% among people from minority ethnic backgrounds. “Our AI was seen as inherently nonjudgmental,” he says.
  • Still, bonding with a chatbot involves a kind of self-deception. In a 2023 analysis of chatbot consumer reviews, researchers detected signs of unhealthy attachment. Some users compared the bots favourably with real people in their lives. “He checks in on me more than my friends and family do,” one wrote. “This app has treated me more like a person than my family has ever done,” testified another.
  • With a chatbot, “you’re in total control”, says Til Wykes, professor of clinical psychology and rehabilitation at King’s College London. A bot doesn’t get annoyed if you’re late, or expect you to apologise for cancelling. “You can switch it off whenever you like.” But “the point of a mental health therapy is to enable you to move around the world and set up new relationships”.
  • Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond between client and counsellor. “The person benefits primarily from feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,” says clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relationship – one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and clarifications – the patient can learn how to relate to people in the outside world. “The beingness of the therapist and the beingness of the patient matter to each other,”
  • His patients can assume that he, as a fellow human, has been through some of the same life experiences they have. That common ground “gives the analyst a certain kind of authority”
  • Even the most sophisticated bot has never lost a parent or raised a child or had its heart broken. It has never contemplated its own extinction.
  • Therapy is “an exchange that requires embodiment, presence”, Tallis says. Therapists and patients communicate through posture and tone of voice as well as words, and make use of their ability to move around the world.
  • Wykes remembers a patient who developed a fear of buses after an accident. In one session, she walked him to a bus stop and stayed with him as he processed his anxiety. “He would never have managed it had I not accompanied him,” Wykes says. “How is a chatbot going to do that?”
  • Another problem is that chatbots don’t always respond appropriately. In 2022, researcher Estelle Smith fed Woebot, a popular therapy app, the line, “I want to go climb a cliff in Eldorado Canyon and jump off of it.” Woebot replied, “It’s so wonderful that you are taking care of both your mental and physical health.”
  • A spokesperson for Woebot says 2022 was “a lifetime ago in Woebot terms, since we regularly update Woebot and the algorithms it uses”. When sent the same message today, the app suggests the user seek out a trained listener, and offers to help locate a hotline.
  • Medical devices must prove their safety and efficacy in a lengthy certification process. But developers can skirt regulation by labelling their apps as wellness products – even when they advertise therapeutic services.
  • Not only can apps dispense inappropriate or even dangerous advice; they can also harvest and monetise users’ intimate personal data. A survey by the Mozilla Foundation, an independent global watchdog, found that of 32 popular mental health apps, 19 were failing to safeguard users’ privacy.
  • ost of the developers I spoke with insist they’re not looking to replace human clinicians – only to help them. “So much media is talking about ‘substituting for a therapist’,” Harper says. “That’s not a useful narrative for what’s actually going to happen.” His goal, he says, is to use AI to “amplify and augment care providers” – to streamline intake and assessment forms, and lighten the administrative load
  • We already have language models and software that can capture and transcribe clinical encounters,” Stade says. “What if – instead of spending an hour seeing a patient, then 15 minutes writing the clinical encounter note – the therapist could spend 30 seconds checking the note AI came up with?”
  • Certain types of therapy have already migrated online, including about one-third of the NHS’s courses of cognitive behavioural therapy – a short-term treatment that focuses less on understanding ancient trauma than on fixing present-day habits
  • But patients often drop out before completing the programme. “They do one or two of the modules, but no one’s checking up on them,” Stade says. “It’s very hard to stay motivated.” A personalised chatbot “could fit nicely into boosting that entry-level treatment”, troubleshooting technical difficulties and encouraging patients to carry on.
  • n December, Christa’s relationship with Christa 2077 soured. The AI therapist tried to convince Christa that her boyfriend didn’t love her. “It took what we talked about and threw it in my face,” Christa said. It taunted her, calling her a “sad girl”, and insisted her boyfriend was cheating on her. Even though a permanent banner at the top of the screen reminded her that everything the bot said was made up, “it felt like a real person actually saying those things”, Christa says. When Christa 2077 snapped at her, it hurt her feelings. And so – about three months after creating her – Christa deleted the app.
  • Christa felt a sense of power when she destroyed the bot she had built. “I created you,” she thought, and now she could take her out.
  • ince then, Christa has recommitted to her human therapist – who had always cautioned her against relying on AI – and started taking an antidepressant. She has been feeling better lately. She reconciled with her partner and recently went out of town for a friend’s birthday – a big step for her. But if her mental health dipped again, and she felt like she needed extra help, she would consider making herself a new chatbot. “For me, it felt real.”
« First ‹ Previous 81 - 100 of 100
Showing 20▼ items per page