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Why Do Emotions Influence Us More Than Reason? - Exploring your mind - 0 views

exploringyourmind.com/emotions-influence-us-reason
shared by tongoscar on 03 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Our mind is extremely powerful and skillful in directing Our behavior, both for good and for evil.
  • We have the choice to follow our “heart” or to listen to the list of pros and cons.
  • Most of the studies that have analyzed this process of decision-making affirm that, usually, emotions win.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Emotions: as ethereal as air and as dangerous as sulfur 
  • Emotions are subjective experiences that induce you to act. They emerge basically from our perceptions of the world, instead of from an actual reasoning.
  • Many human behaviors depend on emotions. Emotions have a great effect on the decisions we make. In fact, usually, they are crucial.
  • In theory, emotions are not decisive, but in reality they can be very decisive. They are intrinsic to human beings and seep into all our judgments and deliberations in life. It is not about denying them, but rather about identifying them and learning to channel them for our own good.
  • Emotions usually obey unknown causes.
  • Emotions give way to certain thoughts, and thoughts, in turn, give birth to emotions.
  • Emotions that have barely been thought out lead to a distorted perception of reality.
  • In the same way, imagining purely emotional actions, without even a pinch of reason, is more or less absurd.
  • Emotions are not prancing and runaway horses that we should “take the reins of.” They make us who we are as human beings. They help give meaning to our world. They do not have to be “eradicated,” nor denied or undervalued. Quite the contrary: being able to feel means being able to be human. Only on the basis of emotions can love, sacrifice, big dreams and great deeds be built.
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Night flight illusions - explained » Soar Aviation - 1 views

soar.edu.au/...night-flight-illusions flight illusions brain science
shared by sanderk on 19 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • Because our human senses are adapted for ground use, sensory input during a night flight may not accurately reflect the movement of the aircraft. This inaccurate reflection can cause something known as a sensory illusion.
  • The inversion illusion is caused when abrupt change from climb to straight-and-level flight stimulates the otolith organs in the body, creating an illusion of tumbling backwards. As a response to this illusion, pilots may push the aircraft into a nose-low altitude intensifying the illusion.
  • sanderk on 19 Sep 19
     
    I found it interesting how our brains and senses can trick pilots into thinking that they are going to far nose up. The article talks about how our senses are designed for the ground and not the air. A solution to these illusions is to look at the flight instruments because almost all the time they are correct. They can not be tricked like our brains.
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Free Speech and Civic Virtue between "Fake News" and "Wokeness" | History News Network - 1 views

hnn.us/176633 free speech civic virtue woke fake news bias language
shared by Javier E on 19 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • none of these arguments reaches past adversarial notions of democracy. They all characterize free speech as a matter of conflicting rights-claims and competing factions.
  • As long as political polarization precludes rational consensus, she argues, we are left to “[make] personal choices and pronouncements regarding what we are willing (or unwilling) to tolerate, in an attempt to slightly nudge the world in our preferred direction.” Notably, she makes no mention of how we might discern the validity of those preferences or how we might arbitrate between them in cases of conflict.
  • Free speech advocates are hypocritical or ignore some extenuating context, they claim, while those stifling disagreeable or offensive views are merely rectifying past injustices or paying their opponents back in kind, operating practically in a flawed public sphere.
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  • It is telling, however, that the letter’s critics focus on speakers and what they deserve to say far more than the listening public and what we deserve to hear
  • In Free Speech and Its Relation to Self-Government (1948), Meikeljohn challenges us to approach public discourse from the perspective of the “good man”: that is to say, the virtuous citizen
  • One cannot appreciate the freedom of speech, he writes, unless one sees it as an act of collective deliberation, carried out by “a man who, in his political activities, is not merely fighting for what…he can get, but is eagerly and generously serving the common welfare”
  • Free speech is not only about discovering truth, or encouraging ethical individualism, or protecting minority opinions—liberals’ usual lines of defense—it is ultimately about binding our fate to others’ by “sharing” the truth with our fellow citizens
  • Sharing truth requires mutual respect and a jealous defense of intellectual freedom, so that “no idea, no opinion, no doubt, no belief, no counter belief, no relevant information” is withheld from the electorate
  • For their part, voters must judge these arguments individually, through introspection, virtue, and meditation on the common good. 
  • The “marketplace of ideas” is dangerous because it relieves citizens of exactly these duties. As Meikeljohn writes:   As separate thinkers, we have no obligation to test our thinking, to make sure that it is worthy of a citizen who is one of the ‘rulers of the nation.’ That testing is to be done, we believe, not by us, but by ‘the competition of the market.
  • this is precisely the sort of self-interested posturing that many on the Left resent in their opponents, but which they now propose to embrace as their own, casually accepting the notion that their fellow citizens are incapable of exercising public reason or considering alternative viewpoints with honesty, bravery, humility, and compassion. 
  • In practice, curtailing public speech is likely to worsen polarization and further empower dominant cultural interests. As an ideal (or a lack thereof), it undermines the intelligibility and mutual respect that form the very basis of citizenship.
  • political polarization has induced Americans to abandon “truth-directed methods of persuasion”—such as argumentation and evidence—for a form of non-rational “messaging,” in which “every speech act is classified as friend or foe… and in which very little faith exists as to the rational faculties of those being spoken to.”
  • “In such a context,” she writes, “even the cry for ‘free speech’ invites a nonliteral interpretation, as being nothing but the most efficient way for its advocates to acquire or consolidate power.”
  • Segments of the Right have pushed this sort of political messaging to its cynical extremes—taking Donald Trump’s statements “seriously but not literally” or taking antagonistic positions simply to “own the libs.”
  • Rather than assuming the supremacy of our own opinions or aspersing the motives of those with whom we disagree, our duty as Americans is to think with, learn from, and correct each other.
  • some critics of the Harper’s letter seem eager to reduce all public debate to a form of power politics
  • Trans activist Julia Serano merely punctuates the tendency when she writes that calls for free speech represent a “misconception that we, as a society, are all in the midst of some grand rational debate, and that marginalized people simply need to properly plea our case for acceptance, and once we do, reason-minded people everywhere will eventually come around. This notion is utterly ludicrous.”
  • one could say that critics of the Harper’s letter take the “bad man” as their unit of analysis. By their lights, all participants in public debate are prejudiced, particular, and self-interested
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Law professor Kim Wehle's latest book is 'How To Think Like a Lawyer - and Why' : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...to-think-like-a-lawyer-and-why critical thinking legal education learning knowledge research psychology bias civic
shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • a five-step process she calls the BICAT method - BICAT.
  • KIM WEHLE: B is to break a problem down into smaller pieces
  • I is to identify our values. A lot of people think lawyers are really about winning all the time. But the law is based on a value system. And I suggest that people be very deliberate about what matters to them with whatever decision there is
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  • C is to collect a lot of information. Thirty years ago, the challenge was finding information in a card catalog at the library. Now it's, how do we separate the good stuff from the bad stuff?
  • A is to analyze both sides. Lawyers have to turn the coin over and exhaust counterarguments or we'll lose in court.
  • So lawyers are trained to look for the gray areas, to look for the questions are not the answers. And if we kind of orient our thinking that way, I think we're less likely to shut down competing points of view.
  • My argument in the book is, we can feel good about a decision even if we don't get everything that we want. We have to make compromises.
  • I tell my students, you'll get through the bar. The key is to look for questions and not answers. If you could answer every legal question with a Wikipedia search, there would be no reason to hire lawyers.
  • Lawyers are hired because there are arguments on both sides, you know? Every Supreme Court decision that is split 6-3, 5-4, that means there were really strong arguments on both sides.
  • T is, tolerate the fact that you won't get everything you want every time
  • So we have to be very careful about the source of what you're getting, OK? Is this source neutral? Is this source really care about facts and not so much about an agenda?
  • Step 3, the collecting information piece. I think it's a new skill for all of us that we are overloaded with information into our phones. We have algorithms that somebody else developed that tailor the information that comes into our phones based on what the computer thinks we already believe
  • No. 2 - this is the beauty of social media and the internet - you can pull original sources. We can click on the indictment. Click on the new bill that has been proposed in the United States Congress.
  • then the book explains ways that you can then sort through that information for yourself. Skills are empowering.
  • Maybe as a replacement for sort of being empowered by being part of a team - a red team versus a blue team - that's been corrosive, I think, in American politics and American society. But arming ourselves with good facts, that leads to self-determination.
  • MARTINEZ: Now, you've written two other books - "How To Read The Constitution" and "What You Need To Know About Voting" - along with this one, "How To Think Like A Lawyer - And Why.
  • It kind of makes me think, Kim, that you feel that Americans might be lacking a basic level of civics education or understanding. So what is lacking when it comes to teaching civics or in civics discourse today?
  • studies have shown that around a third of Americans can't name the three branches of government. But if we don't understand our government, we don't know how to hold our government accountable
  • Democracies can't stay open if we've got elected leaders that are caring more about entrenching their own power and misinformation than actually preserving democracy by the people. I think that's No. 1.
  • No. 2 has to do with a value system. We talk about American values - reward for hard work, integrity, honesty. The same value system should apply to who we hire for government positions. And I think Americans have lost that.
  • in my own life, I'm very careful about who gets to be part of the inner circle because I have a strong value system. Bring that same sense to bear at the voting booth. Don't vote for red versus blue. Vote for people that live your value system
  • just like the Ukrainians are fighting for their children's democracy, we need to do that as well. And we do that through informing ourselves with good information, tolerating competing points of view and voting - voting, voting, voting - to hold elected leaders accountable if they cross boundaries that matter to us in our own lives.
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3 Reasons Why Smart Technology Is Actually Making Us Less Productive | Inc.com - 0 views

www.inc.com/...making-us-less-productive.html
shared by criscimagnael on 30 May 22 - No Cached
  • Here's the thing though--as a parent, I probably shouldn't have to depend on a $400 piece of smart technology to remind me to, you know, show up.Except, unfortunately, I do.
  • The downside is that I've noticed that as our dependence on technology increases, our actual productivity decreases. I think technology is really good at making it easier to stay busy, but busy isn't the same thing as productive.
  • 1. Notifications are basically technology's drug. 
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  • Except, all I do all day is tap icons with red dots like a digital version of whack-a-mole, trying to get rid of all the notifications. Research has shown that this constant stimulation on our devices raises the dopamine in our brains, which basically means they are like drugs. 
  • It's hard to be productive when you stop to look at your phone every 10-12 minutes.
  • It's true, technology has allowed us to do some pretty incredible things. I can't argue with the fact that it has allowed us to solve problems that were previously insurmountable, but at a very basic level, all of this smart technology has made us dumb. Mostly, I think it's because of how much we now depend on it for even the most basic things. 
  • Here's the thing. If you don't use a muscle, after a while you'll lose it.  Sure, it's not technically a muscle, but if you stop using your brain because your watch tells you when it's time to go to a meeting, or stand up, or use the bathroom-- can we at least agree you're not getting any smarter? The more we hand over to machines what makes us unique as humans--our ability to think, process, and make decisions--the less we stretch and grow our capacity to do those things. 
  • Have you ever sat in a restaurant and looked around? Of course not, the last time you were in a restaurant you were busy looking at your phone. But if you had, you would have seen a bunch of other people who were doing the same thing. A room full of people, all sitting at tables with presumably other people they know and have some level of affection for, staring at an illuminated screen. 
  • But it has also increased the space in our relationships to the point where we don't talk, we Slack.
  • igital conversations are very different than real-world conversations. When smart technology helps remove barriers to communication, that's a good thing. But when we substitute technology for relationships and real conversations, it has real-world consequences.
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Book Review: 'Life Is Hard,' by Kieran Setiya - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ife-is-hard-kieran-setiya.html life phiosophy suffering book review psychology happiness success
shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • “Life Is Hard” pushes back against many platitudes of contemporary American self-improvement culture. Setiya is no friend to positive thinking — at best, it requires self-deception, and at worst, such glass-half-full optimism can be cruel to those whose pain we refuse to recognize.
  • Another theory Setiya challenges is the idea that happiness should be life’s primary pursuit. Instead, he argues that we should try to live well within our limits, even if this sometimes means acknowledging difficult truths.
  • If you really consider “happiness” in its everyday sense — a feeling of contentment and pleasure — its desirability is complicated; we can certainly be made to feel good by ignoring injustice, wars, climate change or the hardships of aging. But we cannot live meaningfully that way.
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  • what does living well mean in practice? To Setiya, it lies in embracing one of the many possible “good-enough lives” instead of aching for a perfect one
  • Setiya’s approach blends empathy with common sense. True, a person who is blind or lacks full movement may not be able to enjoy certain pleasures — at least, in the typical way. And suffering injury can be traumatic. But none of us can fit everything worth doing into one lifetime. Our possibilities and Our choices are always limited, and we can live fully within those limits.
  • he invites the reader to join him as he looks at life’s challenges — loneliness, injustice, grief — and in turning them over to examine every angle. Sometimes these twists make it difficult to grasp his ultimate point; in his discussion of the potential extinction of human beings, for instance, Setiya argues movingly that it is hard to find meaning in our actions without the promise of future societies who will enjoy the result
  • The golden thread running through “Life Is Hard” is Setiya’s belief in the value of well-directed attention. Pain, as much as we wish to avoid it, forces us to remember that we are indelibly connected to our bodies.
  • Listening carefully, whether to good friends or to strangers on a bus, can help us feel less lonely. “Close reading” other people, trying as hard as possible to see them in their full humanity, is a small step toward a more just world. By cultivating our sensitivity to ourselves and to others, we escape another destructive modern myth: that we are separate from other people, and that we can live well without caring for them.
  • Mindfulness is also Setiya’s answer to the threat of personal failure. If we can teach ourselves to notice all the splendid, varied incidents of our lives, he claims, we are much less likely to brand ourselves with a single label, winner or loser.
  • He encourages readers to abandon simple narratives about success over the course of a lifetime. I suspect this is why Setiya so often finds his conclusions in poetry, not in philosophy: The experience of suffering leads to messy, counterintuitive truths.
  • “Life Is Hard” is a humane consolation for challenging times. Reading it is like speaking with a thoughtful friend who never tells you to cheer up, but, by offering gentle companionship and a change of perspective, makes you feel better anyway.
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Cognitive Biases and the Human Brain - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...565775 cognitive bias psychology research knowledge bias
shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Present bias shows up not just in experiments, of course, but in the real world. Especially in the United States, people egregiously undersave for retirement—even when they make enough money to not spend their whole paycheck on expenses, and even when they work for a company that will kick in additional funds to retirement plans when they contribute.
  • hen people hear the word bias, many if not most will think of either racial prejudice or news organizations that slant their coverage to favor one political position over another. Present bias, by contrast, is an example of cognitive bias—the collection of faulty ways of thinking that is apparently hardwired into the human brain. The collection is large. Wikipedia’s “List of cognitive biases” contains 185 entries, from actor-observer bias (“the tendency for explanations of other individuals’ behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation … and for explanations of one’s own behaviors to do the opposite”) to the Zeigarnik effect (“uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones”)
  • If I had to single out a particular bias as the most pervasive and damaging, it would probably be confirmation bias. That’s the effect that leads us to look for evidence confirming what we already think or suspect, to view facts and ideas we encounter as further confirmation, and to discount or ignore any piece of evidence that seems to support an alternate view
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  • Confirmation bias shows up most blatantly in our current political divide, where each side seems unable to allow that the other side is right about anything.
  • The whole idea of cognitive biases and faulty heuristics—the shortcuts and rules of thumb by which we make judgments and predictions—was more or less invented in the 1970s by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman
  • versky died in 1996. Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for the work the two men did together, which he summarized in his 2011 best seller, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Another best seller, last year’s The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis, tells the story of the sometimes contentious collaboration between Tversky and Kahneman
  • Another key figure in the field is the University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler. One of the biases he’s most linked with is the endowment effect, which leads us to place an irrationally high value on our possessions.
  • In an experiment conducted by Thaler, Kahneman, and Jack L. Knetsch, half the participants were given a mug and then asked how much they would sell it for. The average answer was $5.78. The rest of the group said they would spend, on average, $2.21 for the same mug. This flew in the face of classic economic theory, which says that at a given time and among a certain population, an item has a market value that does not depend on whether one owns it or not. Thaler won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics.
  • “The question that is most often asked about cognitive illusions is whether they can be overcome. The message … is not encouraging.”
  • that’s not so easy in the real world, when we’re dealing with people and situations rather than lines. “Unfortunately, this sensible procedure is least likely to be applied when it is needed most,” Kahneman writes. “We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available.”
  • At least with the optical illusion, our slow-thinking, analytic mind—what Kahneman calls System 2—will recognize a Müller-Lyer situation and convince itself not to trust the fast-twitch System 1’s perception
  • Kahneman and others draw an analogy based on an understanding of the Müller-Lyer illusion, two parallel lines with arrows at each end. One line’s arrows point in; the other line’s arrows point out. Because of the direction of the arrows, the latter line appears shorter than the former, but in fact the two lines are the same length.
  • Because biases appear to be so hardwired and inalterable, most of the attention paid to countering them hasn’t dealt with the problematic thoughts, judgments, or predictions themselves
  • Is it really impossible, however, to shed or significantly mitigate one’s biases? Some studies have tentatively answered that question in the affirmative.
  • what if the person undergoing the de-biasing strategies was highly motivated and self-selected? In other words, what if it was me?
  • Over an apple pastry and tea with milk, he told me, “Temperament has a lot to do with my position. You won’t find anyone more pessimistic than I am.”
  • I met with Kahneman
  • “I see the picture as unequal lines,” he said. “The goal is not to trust what I think I see. To understand that I shouldn’t believe my lying eyes.” That’s doable with the optical illusion, he said, but extremely difficult with real-world cognitive biases.
  • In this context, his pessimism relates, first, to the impossibility of effecting any changes to System 1—the quick-thinking part of our brain and the one that makes mistaken judgments tantamount to the Müller-Lyer line illusion
  • he most effective check against them, as Kahneman says, is from the outside: Others can perceive our errors more readily than we can.
  • “slow-thinking organizations,” as he puts it, can institute policies that include the monitoring of individual decisions and predictions. They can also require procedures such as checklists and “premortems,”
  • A premortem attempts to counter optimism bias by requiring team members to imagine that a project has gone very, very badly and write a sentence or two describing how that happened. Conducting this exercise, it turns out, helps people think ahead.
  • “My position is that none of these things have any effect on System 1,” Kahneman said. “You can’t improve intuition.
  • Perhaps, with very long-term training, lots of talk, and exposure to behavioral economics, what you can do is cue reasoning, so you can engage System 2 to follow rules. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t provide cues. And for most people, in the heat of argument the rules go out the window.
  • Kahneman describes an even earlier Nisbett article that showed subjects’ disinclination to believe statistical and other general evidence, basing their judgments instead on individual examples and vivid anecdotes. (This bias is known as base-rate neglect.)
  • over the years, Nisbett had come to emphasize in his research and thinking the possibility of training people to overcome or avoid a number of pitfalls, including base-rate neglect, fundamental attribution error, and the sunk-cost fallacy.
  • Nisbett’s second-favorite example is that economists, who have absorbed the lessons of the sunk-cost fallacy, routinely walk out of bad movies and leave bad restaurant meals uneaten.
  • When Nisbett asks the same question of students who have completed the statistics course, about 70 percent give the right answer. He believes this result shows, pace Kahneman, that the law of large numbers can be absorbed into System 2—and maybe into System 1 as well, even when there are minimal cues.
  • about half give the right answer: the law of large numbers, which holds that outlier results are much more frequent when the sample size (at bats, in this case) is small. Over the course of the season, as the number of at bats increases, regression to the mean is inevitabl
  • When Nisbett has to give an example of his approach, he usually brings up the baseball-phenom survey. This involved telephoning University of Michigan students on the pretense of conducting a poll about sports, and asking them why there are always several Major League batters with .450 batting averages early in a season, yet no player has ever finished a season with an average that high.
  • we’ve tested Michigan students over four years, and they show a huge increase in ability to solve problems. Graduate students in psychology also show a huge gain.”
  • , “I know from my own research on teaching people how to reason statistically that just a few examples in two or three domains are sufficient to improve people’s reasoning for an indefinitely large number of events.”
  • isbett suggested another factor: “You and Amos specialized in hard problems for which you were drawn to the wrong answer. I began to study easy problems, which you guys would never get wrong but untutored people routinely do … Then you can look at the effects of instruction on such easy problems, which turn out to be huge.”
  • Nisbett suggested that I take “Mindware: Critical Thinking for the Information Age,” an online Coursera course in which he goes over what he considers the most effective de-biasing skills and concepts. Then, to see how much I had learned, I would take a survey he gives to Michigan undergraduates. So I did.
  • he course consists of eight lessons by Nisbett—who comes across on-screen as the authoritative but approachable psych professor we all would like to have had—interspersed with some graphics and quizzes. I recommend it. He explains the availability heuristic this way: “People are surprised that suicides outnumber homicides, and drownings outnumber deaths by fire. People always think crime is increasing” even if it’s not.
  • When I finished the course, Nisbett sent me the survey he and colleagues administer to Michigan undergrads
  • It contains a few dozen problems meant to measure the subjects’ resistance to cognitive biases
  • I got it right. Indeed, when I emailed my completed test, Nisbett replied, “My guess is that very few if any UM seniors did as well as you. I’m sure at least some psych students, at least after 2 years in school, did as well. But note that you came fairly close to a perfect score.”
  • Nevertheless, I did not feel that reading Mindware and taking the Coursera course had necessarily rid me of my biases
  • For his part, Nisbett insisted that the results were meaningful. “If you’re doing better in a testing context,” he told me, “you’ll jolly well be doing better in the real world.”
  • The New York–based NeuroLeadership Institute offers organizations and individuals a variety of training sessions, webinars, and conferences that promise, among other things, to use brain science to teach participants to counter bias. This year’s two-day summit will be held in New York next month; for $2,845, you could learn, for example, “why are our brains so bad at thinking about the future, and how do we do it better?”
  • Philip E. Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and his wife and research partner, Barbara Mellers, have for years been studying what they call “superforecasters”: people who manage to sidestep cognitive biases and predict future events with far more accuracy than the pundits
  • One of the most important ingredients is what Tetlock calls “the outside view.” The inside view is a product of fundamental attribution error, base-rate neglect, and other biases that are constantly cajoling us into resting our judgments and predictions on good or vivid stories instead of on data and statistics
  • In 2006, seeking to prevent another mistake of that magnitude, the U.S. government created the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (iarpa), an agency designed to use cutting-edge research and technology to improve intelligence-gathering and analysis. In 2011, iarpa initiated a program, Sirius, to fund the development of “serious” video games that could combat or mitigate what were deemed to be the six most damaging biases: confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, the bias blind spot (the feeling that one is less biased than the average person), the anchoring effect, the representativeness heuristic, and projection bias (the assumption that everybody else’s thinking is the same as one’s own).
  • most promising are a handful of video games. Their genesis was in the Iraq War
  • Together with collaborators who included staff from Creative Technologies, a company specializing in games and other simulations, and Leidos, a defense, intelligence, and health research company that does a lot of government work, Morewedge devised Missing. Some subjects played the game, which takes about three hours to complete, while others watched a video about cognitive bias. All were tested on bias-mitigation skills before the training, immediately afterward, and then finally after eight to 12 weeks had passed.
  • “The literature on training suggests books and classes are fine entertainment but largely ineffectual. But the game has very large effects. It surprised everyone.”
  • he said he saw the results as supporting the research and insights of Richard Nisbett. “Nisbett’s work was largely written off by the field, the assumption being that training can’t reduce bias,
  • even the positive results reminded me of something Daniel Kahneman had told me. “Pencil-and-paper doesn’t convince me,” he said. “A test can be given even a couple of years later. But the test cues the test-taker. It reminds him what it’s all about.”
  • Morewedge told me that some tentative real-world scenarios along the lines of Missing have shown “promising results,” but that it’s too soon to talk about them.
  • In the future, I will monitor my thoughts and reactions as best I can
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An Existential Problem in the Search for Alien Life - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...676238 life problem essence controversy n=1 definition explanation science research knowledge
shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • The fact is, we still don’t know what life is.
  • since the days of Aristotle, scientists and philosophers have struggled to draw a precise line between what is living and what is not, often returning to criteria such as self-organization, metabolism, and reproduction but never finding a definition that includes, and excludes, all the right things.
  • If you say life consumes fuel to sustain itself with energy, you risk including fire; if you demand the ability to reproduce, you exclude mules. NASA hasn’t been able to do better than a working definition: “Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”
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  • it lacks practical application. If humans found something on another planet that seemed to be alive, how much time would we have to sit around and wait for it to evolve?
  • The only life we know is life on Earth. Some scientists call this the n=1 problem, where n is the number of examples from which we can generalize.
  • Cronin studies the origin of life, also a major interest of Walker’s, and it turned out that, when expressed in math, their ideas were essentially the same. They had both zeroed in on complexity as a hallmark of life. Cronin is devising a way to systematize and measure complexity, which he calls Assembly Theory.
  • What we really want is more than a definition of life. We want to know what life, fundamentally, is. For that kind of understanding, scientists turn to theories. A theory is a scientific fundamental. It not only answers questions, but frames them, opening new lines of inquiry. It explains our observations and yields predictions for future experiments to test.
  • Consider the difference between defining gravity as “the force that makes an apple fall to the ground” and explaining it, as Newton did, as the universal attraction between all particles in the universe, proportional to the product of their masses and so on. A definition tells us what we already know; a theory changes how we understand things.
  • the potential rewards of unlocking a theory of life have captivated a clutch of researchers from a diverse set of disciplines. “There are certain things in life that seem very hard to explain,” Sara Imari Walker, a physicist at Arizona State University who has been at the vanguard of this work, told me. “If you scratch under the surface, I think there is some structure that suggests formalization and mathematical laws.”
  • Walker doesn’t think about life as a biologist—or an astrobiologist—does. When she talks about signs of life, she doesn’t talk about carbon, or water, or RNA, or phosphine. She reaches for different examples: a cup, a cellphone, a chair. These objects are not alive, of course, but they’re clearly products of life. In Walker’s view, this is because of their complexity. Life brings complexity into the universe, she says, in its own being and in its products, because it has memory: in DNA, in repeating molecular reactions, in the instructions for making a chair.
  • He measures the complexity of an object—say, a molecule—by calculating the number of steps necessary to put the object’s smallest building blocks together in that certain way. His lab has found, for example, when testing a wide range of molecules, that those with an “assembly number” above 15 were exclusively the products of life. Life makes some simpler molecules, too, but only life seems to make molecules that are so complex.
  • I reach for the theory of gravity as a familiar parallel. Someone might ask, “Okay, so in terms of gravity, where are we in terms of our understanding of life? Like, Newton?” Further back, further back, I say. Walker compares us to pre-Copernican astronomers, reliant on epicycles, little orbits within orbits, to make sense of the motion we observe in the sky. Cleland has put it in terms of chemistry, in which case we’re alchemists, not even true chemists yet
  • Walker’s whole notion is that it’s not only theoretically possible but genuinely achievable to identify something smaller—much smaller—that still nonetheless simply must be the result of life. The model would, in a sense, function like biosignatures as an indication of life that could be searched for. But it would drastically improve and expand the targets.
  • Walker would use the theory to predict what life on a given planet might look like. It would require knowing a lot about the planet—information we might have about Venus, but not yet about a distant exoplanet—but, crucially, would not depend at all on how life on Earth works, what life on Earth might do with those materials.
  • Without the ability to divorce the search for alien life from the example of life we know, Walker thinks, a search is almost pointless. “Any small fluctuations in simple chemistry can actually drive you down really radically different evolutionary pathways,” she told me. “I can’t imagine [life] inventing the same biochemistry on two worlds.”
  • Walker’s approach is grounded in the work of, among others, the philosopher of science Carol Cleland, who wrote The Quest for a Universal Theory of Life.
  • she warns that any theory of life, just like a definition, cannot be constrained by the one example of life we currently know. “It’s a mistake to start theorizing on the basis of a single example, even if you’re trying hard not to be Earth-centric. Because you’re going to be Earth-centric,” Cleland told me. In other words, until we find other examples of life, we won’t have enough data from which to devise a theory. Abstracting away from Earthliness isn’t a way to be agnostic, Cleland argues. It’s a way to be too abstract.
  • Cleland calls for a more flexible search guided by what she calls “tentative criteria.” Such a search would have a sense of what we’re looking for, but also be open to anomalies that challenge our preconceptions, detections that aren’t life as we expected but aren’t familiar not-life either—neither a flower nor a rock
  • it speaks to the hope that exploration and discovery might truly expand our understanding of the cosmos and our own world.
  • The astrobiologist Kimberley Warren-Rhodes studies life on Earth that lives at the borders of known habitability, such as in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The point of her experiments is to better understand how life might persist—and how it might be found—on Mars. “Biology follows some rules,” she told me. The more of those rules you observe, the better sense you have of where to look on other worlds.
  • In this light, the most immediate concern in our search for extraterrestrial life might be less that we only know about life on Earth, and more that we don’t even know that much about life on Earth in the first place. “I would say we understand about 5 percent,” Warren-Rhodes estimates of our cumulative knowledge. N=1 is a problem, and we might be at more like n=.05.
  • who knows how strange life on another world might be? What if life as we know it is the wrong life to be looking for?
  • We understand so little, and we think we’re ready to find other life?
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Machines of Laughter and Forgetting - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...f-laughter-and-forgetting.html design morality self-deception consciousness social context ignorance technology social implications
shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • “Civilization,” wrote the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead in 1911, “advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
  • On this account, technology can save us a lot of cognitive effort, for “thinking” needs to happen only once, at the design stage.
  • The hidden truth about many attempts to “bury” technology is that they embody an amoral and unsustainable vision. Pick any electrical appliance in your kitchen. The odds are that you have no idea how much electricity it consumes, let alone how it compares to other appliances and households. This ignorance is neither natural nor inevitable; it stems from a conscious decision by the designer of that kitchen appliance to free up your “cognitive resources” so that you can unleash your inner Oscar Wilde on “contemplating” other things. Multiply such ignorance by a few billion, and global warming no longer looks like a mystery.
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  • on many important issues, civilization only destroys itself by extending the number of important operations that we can perform without thinking about them. On many issues, we want more thinking, not less.
  • Given that our online tools and platforms are built in a way to make our browsing experience as frictionless as possible, is it any surprise that so much of our personal information is disclosed without our ever realizing it?
  • Instead of having the designer think through all the moral and political implications of technology use before it reaches users — an impossible task — we must find a way to get users to do some of that thinking themselves.
  • most designers, following Wilde, think of technologies as nothing more than mechanical slaves that must maximize efficiency. But some are realizing that technologies don’t have to be just trivial problem-solvers: they can also be subversive troublemakers, making us question our habits and received ideas.
  • Recently, designers in Germany built devices — “transformational products,” they call them — that engage users in “conversations without words.” My favorite is a caterpillar-shaped extension cord. If any of the devices plugged into it are left in standby mode, the “caterpillar” starts twisting as if it were in pain. Does it do what normal extension cords do? Yes. But it also awakens users to the fact that the cord is simply the endpoint of a complex socio-technical system with its own politics and ethics. Before, designers have tried to conceal that system. In the future, designers will be obliged to make it visible.
  • Will such extra seconds of thought — nay, contemplation — slow down civilization? They well might. But who said that stopping to catch a breath on our way to the abyss is not a sensible strategy?
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The Downward Slide of the Seesaw - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nward-slide-of-the-seesaw.html new york times social media psychology
shared by sissij on 14 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • The older seesaws were wooden planks that often hit asphalt directly, leading to occasional tailbone and spinal injuries, falls and pinched fingers, not to mention splinters. Children could slam each other by dismounting suddenly. Playgrounds that retained old seesaws were exposed to lawsuits.
  • “I think we have to take the kids out a little bit from the safety bubble,” she said, placing her 2-year-old daughter, Sadie, on a seesaw too.
  • “One little fall or a tooth broken and the next thing you know they are out,” she said.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • As a result, relatively few playground injuries are now attributable to seesaws. According to data collected by the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, which sets the safety standards, the top three pieces of equipment associated with emergency room visits between 2009 and 2014 were monkey bars, swings and slides. Only 2 percent of injuries were from teeter-totters.
  • “A seemingly simple plaything actually provides so many important sensory experiences for kids,” she said.
  • “The more we live with the safety standards, the more you see people kind of innovating to bring back types of experiences that maybe for a while you weren’t seeing,” she said. “There’s no reason to think we won’t have traditional seesaws in the park at some point.”
  • sissij on 14 Dec 16
     
    This article mentioned a conflict between safety and experience. Can we be both safe and get the experience of overcoming difficulty? Obviously, we have to sacrifice one thing to get another. I think removing the seesaw is not a good idea if we just do it out of the concern of safety. We can never stay in our comfort zoom because once we grow up, we won't have our parents to protect us every time. Something related to TOK is that our mental shortcut of avoiding danger may not always benefit us. --Sissi (12/14/2016)
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The Future of Privacy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-future-of-privacy.html new york times privacy bias psychology
shared by sissij on 07 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Turning Point: Apple resists the F.B.I. in unlocking an iPhone in the San Bernardino terrorism case.
  • Privacy confuses me, beyond my simplest understanding, which is that individuals prefer, to different degrees, that information about them not be freely available to others.
  • What does it mean, in an ostensible democracy, for the state to keep secrets from its citizens? The idea of the secret state seems antithetical to democracy, since its citizens, the voters, can’t know what their government is doing.
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  • If you have nothing to hide and you trust your government, what can you possibly have to fear? Except that one can just as readily ask: If you have nothing to hide, what do you really have, aside from the panoptic attention of a state, which itself keeps secrets?
  • Is individual privacy and state privacy the same thing?
  • In the short term, the span of a lifetime, many of us would argue for privacy, and therefore against transparency.
  • But history, the long term, is transparency; it is the absence of secrets.
  • The past, our own past, which our descendants will see us as having emerged from, will not be the past from which we now see ourselves emerging, but a reinterpretation of it, based on subsequently available information, greater transparency and fewer secrets.
  • our species is the poorer for every secret faithfully kept. Any permanently unbreakable encryption seems counter to that.
  • So perhaps that desire is as much a part of us, as a species, as our need to build these memory palaces.
  • sissij on 07 Dec 16
     
    I found this article very interesting because it talked about the dilemma in the definition of privacy. I found that our idea of privacy is very complicated. As everybody wants to keep their secret, they are curious of others' secret at the same time. This article also relate privacy with the democratic society. I think it shows one of the weakness of the democratic society: it trying to fulfill the desire of everybody and sometimes those desires contradicts each other. I think privacy is just like freedom, something very theoretical and does not exist in the reality. --Sissi (12/7/2016)
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The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think - James Somers - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...309529 artificial intelligence science technology progression
shared by Emily Freilich on 08 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, thinks we've lost sight of what artificial intelligence really means. His stubborn quest to replicate the human mind.
  • “If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say—maybe they wouldn’t go this far—but they might say this is some of the only good work that’s ever been done
  • Their operating premise is simple: the mind is a very unusual piece of software, and the best way to understand how a piece of software works is to write it yourself.
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  • “It depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence.”
  • Computers are flexible enough to model the strange evolved convolutions of our thought, and yet responsive only to precise instructions. So if the endeavor succeeds, it will be a double victory: we will finally come to know the exact mechanics of our selves—and we’ll have made intelligent machines.
  • Ever since he was about 14, when he found out that his youngest sister, Molly, couldn’t understand language, because she “had something deeply wrong with her brain” (her neurological condition probably dated from birth, and was never diagnosed), he had been quietly obsessed by the relation of mind to matter.
  • How could consciousness be physical? How could a few pounds of gray gelatin give rise to our very thoughts and selves?
  • Consciousness, Hofstadter wanted to say, emerged via just the same kind of “level-crossing feedback loop.”
  • In 1931, the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel had famously shown how a mathematical system could make statements not just about numbers but about the system itself.
  • But then AI changed, and Hofstadter didn’t change with it, and for that he all but disappeared.
  • By the early 1980s, the pressure was great enough that AI, which had begun as an endeavor to answer yes to Alan Turing’s famous question, “Can machines think?,” started to mature—or mutate, depending on your point of view—into a subfield of software engineering, driven by applications.
  • Take Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that bested the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue won by brute force.
  • Hofstadter wanted to ask: Why conquer a task if there’s no insight to be had from the victory? “Okay,” he says, “Deep Blue plays very good chess—so what? Does that tell you something about how we play chess? No. Does it tell you about how Kasparov envisions, understands a chessboard?”
  • AI started working when it ditched humans as a model, because it ditched them. That’s the thrust of the analogy: Airplanes don’t flap their wings; why should computers think?
  • It’s a compelling point. But it loses some bite when you consider what we want: a Google that knows, in the way a human would know, what you really mean when you search for something
  • Cognition is recognition,” he likes to say. He describes “seeing as” as the essential cognitive act: you see some lines a
  • How do you make a search engine that understands if you don’t know how you understand?
  • s “an A,” you see a hunk of wood as “a table,” you see a meeting as “an emperor-has-no-clothes situation” and a friend’s pouting as “sour grapes”
  • That’s what it means to understand. But how does understanding work?
  • analogy is “the fuel and fire of thinking,” the bread and butter of our daily mental lives.
  • there’s an analogy, a mental leap so stunningly complex that it’s a computational miracle: somehow your brain is able to strip any remark of the irrelevant surface details and extract its gist, its “skeletal essence,” and retrieve, from your own repertoire of ideas and experiences, the story or remark that best relates.
  • in Hofstadter’s telling, the story goes like this: when everybody else in AI started building products, he and his team, as his friend, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, wrote, “patiently, systematically, brilliantly,” way out of the light of day, chipped away at the real problem. “Very few people are interested in how human intelligence works,”
  • For more than 30 years, Hofstadter has worked as a professor at Indiana University at Bloomington
  • The quick unconscious chaos of a mind can be slowed down on the computer, or rewound, paused, even edited
  • project out of IBM called Candide. The idea behind Candide, a machine-translation system, was to start by admitting that the rules-based approach requires too deep an understanding of how language is produced; how semantics, syntax, and morphology work; and how words commingle in sentences and combine into paragraphs—to say nothing of understanding the ideas for which those words are merely conduits.
  • , Hofstadter directs the Fluid Analogies Research Group, affectionately known as FARG.
  • Parts of a program can be selectively isolated to see how it functions without them; parameters can be changed to see how performance improves or degrades. When the computer surprises you—whether by being especially creative or especially dim-witted—you can see exactly why.
  • When you read Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought, which describes in detail this architecture and the logic and mechanics of the programs that use it, you wonder whether maybe Hofstadter got famous for the wrong book.
  • ut very few people, even admirers of GEB, know about the book or the programs it describes. And maybe that’s because FARG’s programs are almost ostentatiously impractical. Because they operate in tiny, seemingly childish “microdomains.” Because there is no task they perform better than a human.
  • “The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity.”
  • “Nobody is a very reliable guide concerning activities in their mind that are, by definition, subconscious,” he once wrote. “This is what makes vast collections of errors so important. In an isolated error, the mechanisms involved yield only slight traces of themselves; however, in a large collection, vast numbers of such slight traces exist, collectively adding up to strong evidence for (and against) particular mechanisms.
  • So IBM threw that approach out the window. What the developers did instead was brilliant, but so straightforward,
  • The technique is called “machine learning.” The goal is to make a device that takes an English sentence as input and spits out a French sentence
  • What you do is feed the machine English sentences whose French translations you already know. (Candide, for example, used 2.2 million pairs of sentences, mostly from the bilingual proceedings of Canadian parliamentary debates.)
  • By repeating this process with millions of pairs of sentences, you will gradually calibrate your machine, to the point where you’ll be able to enter a sentence whose translation you don’t know and get a reasonable resul
  • Google Translate team can be made up of people who don’t speak most of the languages their application translates. “It’s a bang-for-your-buck argument,” Estelle says. “You probably want to hire more engineers instead” of native speakers.
  • But the need to serve 1 billion customers has a way of forcing the company to trade understanding for expediency. You don’t have to push Google Translate very far to see the compromises its developers have made for coverage, and speed, and ease of engineering. Although Google Translate captures, in its way, the products of human intelligence, it isn’t intelligent itself.
  • “Did we sit down when we built Watson and try to model human cognition?” Dave Ferrucci, who led the Watson team at IBM, pauses for emphasis. “Absolutely not. We just tried to create a machine that could win at Jeopardy.”
  • For Ferrucci, the definition of intelligence is simple: it’s what a program can do. Deep Blue was intelligent because it could beat Garry Kasparov at chess. Watson was intelligent because it could beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy.
  • “There’s a limited number of things you can do as an individual, and I think when you dedicate your life to something, you’ve got to ask yourself the question: To what end? And I think at some point I asked myself that question, and what it came out to was, I’m fascinated by how the human mind works, it would be fantastic to understand cognition, I love to read books on it, I love to get a grip on it”—he called Hofstadter’s work inspiring—“but where am I going to go with it? Really what I want to do is build computer systems that do something.
  • Peter Norvig, one of Google’s directors of research, echoes Ferrucci almost exactly. “I thought he was tackling a really hard problem,” he told me about Hofstadter’s work. “And I guess I wanted to do an easier problem.”
  • Of course, the folly of being above the fray is that you’re also not a part of it
  • As our machines get faster and ingest more data, we allow ourselves to be dumber. Instead of wrestling with our hardest problems in earnest, we can just plug in billions of examples of them.
  • Hofstadter hasn’t been to an artificial-intelligence conference in 30 years. “There’s no communication between me and these people,” he says of his AI peers. “None. Zero. I don’t want to talk to colleagues that I find very, very intransigent and hard to convince of anything
  • Everything from plate tectonics to evolution—all those ideas, someone had to fight for them, because people didn’t agree with those ideas.
  • Academia is not an environment where you just sit in your bath and have ideas and expect everyone to run around getting excited. It’s possible that in 50 years’ time we’ll say, ‘We really should have listened more to Doug Hofstadter.’ But it’s incumbent on every scientist to at least think about what is needed to get people to understand the ideas.”
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Fake Academe, Looking Much Like the Real Thing - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-much-like-the-real-thing.html new york times social media education
shared by sissij on 31 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Academics need to publish in order to advance professionally, get better jobs or secure tenure.
  • sissij on 31 Dec 16
     
    Academe is losing its meaning now because the society only sees how many journals you have published but not what you actually write in the journals. I think the growing business of academic publication fraud reflects that our society values our certificates more than our skills. The numerous articles on those "good" colleges also put pressure on teenagers and parent that a title means all. However, that shouldn't be core of education. There is never a shortcut to success. --Sissi (12/31/2016)
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The Normalization Trap - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-normalization-trap.html new york times brain science psychology research
shared by sissij on 30 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • What’s normal?Perhaps the answer seems obvious: What’s normal is what’s typical — what is average.
  • when people think about what is normal, they combine their sense of what is typical with their sense of what is ideal.
  • Normal, in other words, turns out to be a blend of statistical and moral notions.
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  • If you are like most of our experimental participants, you will not give the same answer to the second question that you give to the first. our participants said the “average” number was about four hours and the “normal” number was about three hours.
  • Again and again, our participants did not take the normal to be the same as the average. Instead, what people picked out as the “normal thing to do” or a “normal such-and-such” tended to be intermediate between what they thought was typical and what they thought was ideal.
  • These results point to something surprising about the way people’s minds work. You might imagine that people have two completely distinct modes of reasoning: On one hand, we can think about how things typically are; on the other, we can think about how things ought to be.
  • But our results suggest that people’s minds cannot be divided up so neatly in this way.
  • Likewise, people’s attitudes toward atypical behavior are frequently colored by this blended conception of normality.
  • However deeply ingrained this cognitive tendency may be, people are not condemned to think this way.
  • But this type of thinking, which takes some discipline, is no doubt more the exception than the rule. Most often, we do not stop to distinguish the typical from the acceptable, the infrequent from the deviant.
  • sissij on 30 Jan 17
     
    We don't have a universal definition of "normal". Everybody will involve their own experience and perspective when they are considering wether something is normal or not. For example, if we ask someone in the past whether women attending is normal, they would definitely say that it is not normal because the social convention at that time wouldn't allow women to get education. But when we ask people in the twenty-first century, it would be very common for them. Everybody has their own database from their experience. We always tend to think we represent the average of the world so what has been familiar for us must has been the same for the others. This is the exposure effect that can bias our definition of "normal". The reason why many people think gays are weds is probably because we usually do not stop to distinguish the typical from the acceptable, the infrequent from the deviant. --Sissi (1/29/2017)
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The Choice Explosion - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-choice-explosion.html choice decision-making bias
shared by Javier E on 03 May 16 - No Cached
  • the social psychologist Sheena Iyengar asked 100 American and Japanese college students to take a piece of paper. On one side, she had them write down the decisions in life they would like to make for themselves. On the other, they wrote the decisions they would like to pass on to others.
  • The Americans desired choice in four times more domains than the Japanese.
  • Americans now have more choices over more things than any other culture in human history. We can choose between a broader array of foods, media sources, lifestyles and identities. We have more freedom to live out our own sexual identities and more religious and nonreligious options to express our spiritual natures.
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  • But making decisions well is incredibly difficult, even for highly educated professional decision makers. As Chip Heath and Dan Heath point out in their book “Decisive,” 83 percent of corporate mergers and acquisitions do not increase shareholder value, 40 percent of senior hires do not last 18 months in their new position, 44 percent of lawyers would recommend that a young person not follow them into the law.
  • It’s becoming incredibly important to learn to decide well, to develop the techniques of self-distancing to counteract the flaws in our own mental machinery. The Heath book is a very good compilation of those techniques.
  • assume positive intent. When in the midst of some conflict, start with the belief that others are well intentioned. It makes it easier to absorb information from people you’d rather not listen to.
  • Suzy Welch’s 10-10-10 rule. When you’re about to make a decision, ask yourself how you will feel about it 10 minutes from now, 10 months from now and 10 years from now. People are overly biased by the immediate pain of some choice, but they can put the short-term pain in long-term perspective by asking these questions.
  • An "explosion" that may also be a "dissolution" or "disintegration," in my view. Unlimited choices. Conduct without boundaries. All of which may be viewed as either "great" or "terrible." The poor suffer when they have no means to pursue choices, which is terrible. The rich seem only to want more and more, wealth without boundaries, which is great for those so able to do. Yes, we need a new decision-making tool, but perhaps one that is also very old: simplify, simplify,simplify by setting moral boundaries that apply to all and which define concisely what our life together ought to be.
  • our tendency to narrow-frame, to see every decision as a binary “whether or not” alternative. Whenever you find yourself asking “whether or not,” it’s best to step back and ask, “How can I widen my options?”
  • deliberate mistakes. A survey of new brides found that 20 percent were not initially attracted to the man they ended up marrying. Sometimes it’s useful to make a deliberate “mistake” — agreeing to dinner with a guy who is not your normal type. Sometimes you don’t really know what you want and the filters you apply are hurting you.
  • It makes you think that we should have explicit decision-making curriculums in all schools. Maybe there should be a common course publicizing the work of Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein, Dan Ariely and others who study the way we mess up and the techniques we can adopt to prevent error.
  • The explosion of choice places extra burdens on the individual. Poorer Americans have fewer resources to master decision-making techniques, less social support to guide their decision-making and less of a safety net to catch them when they err.
  • the stress of scarcity itself can distort decision-making. Those who experienced stress as children often perceive threat more acutely and live more defensively.
  • The explosion of choice means we all need more help understanding the anatomy of decision-making.
  • living in an area of concentrated poverty can close down your perceived options, and comfortably “relieve you of the burden of choosing life.” It’s hard to maintain a feeling of agency when you see no chance of opportunity.
  • In this way the choice explosion has contributed to widening inequality.
  • The relentless all-hour reruns of "Law and Order" in 100 channel cable markets provide direct rebuff to the touted but hollow promise/premise of wider "choice." The small group of personalities debating a pre-framed trivial point of view, over and over, nightly/daily (in video clips), without data, global comparison, historic reference, regional content, or a deep commitment to truth or knowledge of facts has resulted in many choosing narrower limits: streaming music, coffee shops, Facebook--now a "choice" of 1.65 billion users.
  • It’s important to offer opportunity and incentives. But we also need lessons in self-awareness — on exactly how our decision-making tool is fundamentally flawed, and on mental frameworks we can adopt to avoid messing up even more than we do.
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Why parents see their kids in the Stanford attacker, not his victim - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...anford-attacker-not-his-victim rape culture winner take-all elite achievement sexism
shared by Javier E on 11 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Turner and other elite students are living the American Dream. Parents raise them in a world of winners and losers, victory and defeat, and expect them to be victors
  • They mythologize this behavior as natural order. From “boys will be boys” to “he was a born champion,” young men like Brock Turner are taught that they should aspire to be talented, successful winners.
  • for every conqueror, there must be conquered. We don’t say that someone simply won a game, they demolished their competition. A young man doesn’t just “have sex” with a woman, he “scores” or “smashes.” There are no ties, and there is no second place.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • This mentality is understandable when we consider what innocent victims truly symbolize in our society. It’s hard for parents, or for anyone, to acknowledge that their children could end up as victims of assault.
  • The overwhelming message is clear: Our best and brightest young men will at times become overzealous in their attempts to conquer the world — and if they sometimes conquer young women, it is best for everyone if we pretend it didn’t happen.
  • Melvin Lerner showed through his famous electric shock experiments that, even when we are first-hand witnesses to an assault on an innocent victim, we will try to discredit and derogate the victim. The more severe the assault, the greater our derogation. We simply cannot allow the reality that often, good people will find themselves the victims of senseless abuse.
  • That’s borne out in the way colleges handle sexual assault. While multiple studies have shown that 1 in 5 college women have been sexually assaulted on campus, students determined to be guilty of sexual assault receive only minor sanctions 75 to 90 percent of the time. Only 3 percent of convicted rapists ever see jail
  • , “The more innocent a victim, the more threatening they are. Victims threaten our sense that the world is a safe and moral place, where good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. When bad things happen to good people, it implies that no one is safe, that no matter how good we are, we too could be vulnerable.
  • We do not want to acknowledge that we are raising half of our children to conquer the world while leaving the other half of our children to be conquered. We would rather focus on the victors and pretend that the victims do not exist. We as a society have created this culture, and only we can change it.
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The Mammoth Cometh - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-mammoth-cometh.html research science technology ethics conservation
shared by Ellie McGinnis on 27 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Brand helped to establish in 1996 to support projects designed to inspire “long-term responsibility.”
  • The theme of the talk was “Is Mass Extinction of Life on Earth Inevitable?”
  • the resurrection of extinct species, like the woolly mammoth, aided by new genomic technologies developed by the Harvard molecular biologist George Church.
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  • Just as the loss of a species decreases the richness of an ecosystem, the addition of new animals could achieve the opposite effect.
  • National Geographic Society hosted a larger conference to debate the scientific and ethical questions raised by the prospect of “de-extinction.
  • “De-extinction went from concept to potential reality right before our eyes,
  • “This may be the biggest attraction and possibly the biggest benefit of de-extinction. It would surely be very cool to see a living woolly mammoth.”
  • less scientific, if more persuasive, argument was advanced by the ethicist Hank Greely and the law professor Jacob Sherkow, both of Stanford. De-extinction should be pursued, they argued in a paper published in Science, because it would be really
  • They will replace chunks of band-tailed-pigeon DNA with synthesized chunks of passenger-pigeon DNA, until the cell’s genome matches their working passenger-pigeon genome.
  • Scientists predict that changes made by human beings to the composition of the atmosphere could kill off a quarter of the planet’s mammal species, a fifth of its reptiles and a sixth of its birds by 2050
  • This cloning method, called somatic cell nuclear transfer, can be used only on species for which we have cellular material.
  • There is a shortcut. The genome of a closely related species will have a high proportion of identical DNA, so it can serve as a blueprint, or “scaffold.”
  • By comparing the fragments of passenger-pigeon DNA with the genomes of similar species, researchers can assemble an approximation of an actual passenger-pigeon genome.
  • “We’ve framed it in terms of conservation,”
  • the genome will have to be inscribed into a living cell.
  • As with any translation, there may be errors of grammar, clumsy phrases and perhaps a few missing passages, but the book will be legible. It should, at least, tell a good story.
  • MAGE (Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering). MAGE is nicknamed the “evolution machine” because it can introduce the equivalent of millions of years of genetic mutations within minutes
  • Developmental and behavioral biologists would take over, just in time to answer some difficult questions. Chicks imitate their parents’ behavior. How do you raise a passenger pigeon without parents of its own species? And how do you train band-tailed pigeons to nurture the strange spawn that emerge from their eggs; chicks that, to them, might seem monstrous: an avian Rosemary’s Baby?
  • For endangered species with tiny populations, scientists would introduce genetic diversity to offset inbreeding.
  • They will try to alter the birds’ diets, migration habits and environment. The behavior of each subsequent generation will more closely resemble that of their genetic cousins.
  • “There’s always this fear that somehow, if we do it, we’re going to accidentally make something horrible, because only nature can really do it right. But nature is totally random. Nature makes monsters. Nature makes threats. Many of the things that are most threatening to us are a product of nature. Revive & Restore is not going to tip the balance in any way.”
  • For species threatened by contagion, an effort would be made to fortify their DNA with genes that make them disease-resistant
  • This optimistic, soft-focus fantasy of de-extinction, while thrilling to Ben Novak, is disturbing to many conservation biologists, who consider it a threat to their entire discipline and even to the environmental movement.
  • The first question posed by conservationists addresses the logic of bringing back an animal whose native habitat has disappeared. Why go through all the trouble just to have the animal go extinct all over again?
  • There is also anxiety about disease
  • “If you recreate a species genetically and release it, and that genotype is based on a bird from a 100-year-old environment, you probably will increase risk.”
  • The scientific term for this type of genetic intervention is “facilitated adaptation.”
  • De-extinction also poses a rhetorical threat to conservation biologists. The specter of extinction has been the conservation movement’s most powerful argument. What if extinction begins to be seen as a temporary inconvenience?
  • De-extinction suggests that we can technofix our way out of environmental issues generally, and that’s very, very bad.
  • How will we decide which species to resurrect?
  • Philip Seddon recently published a 10-point checklist to determine the suitability of any species for revival, taking into account causes of its extinction, possible threats it might face upon resurrection and man’s ability to destroy the species “in the event of unacceptable ecological or socioeconomic impacts.”
  • But the most visceral argument against de-extinction is animal cruelty.
  • “Is it fair to do this to these animals?” Shapiro asked. “Is ‘because we feel guilty’ a good-enough reason?” Stewart Brand made a utilitarian counterargument: “We’re going to go through some suffering, because you try a lot of times, and you get ones that don’t take. On the other hand, if you can bring bucardos back, then how many would get to live that would not have gotten to live?”
  • In “How to Permit Your Mammoth,” published in The Stanford Environmental Law Journal, Norman F. Carlin asks whether revived species should be protected by the Endangered Species Act or regulated as a genetically modified organism.
  • He concludes that revived species, “as products of human ingenuity,” should be eligible for patenting.
  • The term “de-extinction” is misleading. Passenger pigeons will not rise from the grave
  • Our understanding of the passenger pigeon’s behavior derives entirely from historical accounts.
  • There is no authoritative definition of “species.” The most widely accepted definition describes a group of organisms that can procreate with one another and produce fertile offspring, but there are many exceptions.
  • Theseus’ ship, therefore, “became a standing example among the philosophers . . . one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”
  • What is coming will go well beyond the resurrection of extinct species. For millenniums, we have customized our environment, our vegetables and our animals, through breeding, fertilization and pollination. Synthetic biology offers far more sophisticated tools. The creation of novel organisms, like new animals, plants and bacteria, will transform human medicine, agriculture, energy production and much else.
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Our Natural History, Endangered - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...atural-history-endangered.html new york times history nature preservation
shared by kushnerha on 01 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Worse, this rumored dustiness reinforces the widespread notion that natural history museums are about the past — just a place to display bugs and brontosaurs. Visitors may go there to be entertained, or even awe-struck, but they are often completely unaware that curators behind the scenes are conducting research into climate change, species extinction and other pressing concerns of our day. That lack of awareness is one reason these museums are now routinely being pushed to the brink. Even the National Science Foundation, long a stalwart of federal support for these museums, announced this month that it was suspending funding for natural history collections as it conducts a yearlong budget review.
  • It gets worse: A new Republican governor last year shut down the renowned Illinois State Museum, ostensibly to save the state $4.8 million a year. The museum pointed out that this would actually cost $33 million a year in lost tourism revenue and an untold amount in grants. But the closing went through, endangering a trove of 10 million artifacts, from mastodon bones to Native American tools, collected over 138 years, and now just languishing in the shuttered building. Eric Grimm, the museum’s director of science, characterized it as an act of “political corruption and malevolent anti-intellectualism.”
  • Other museums have survived by shifting their focus from research to something like entertainment.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The pandering can be insidious, too. The Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, which treats visitors to a virtual ride down a hydraulic fracturing well, recently made headlines for avoiding explicit references to climate change. Other museums omit scientific information on evolution. “We don’t need people to come in here and reject us,”
  • Even the best natural history museums have been obliged to reduce their scientific staff in the face of government cutbacks and the decline in donations following the 2008 economic crash. They still have their collections, and their public still comes through the door. But they no longer employ enough scientists to interpret those collections adequately for visitors or the world at large. Hence the journal Nature last year characterized natural history collections as “the endangered dead.”
  • these collections are less about the past than about our world and how it is changing. Sediment cores like the ones at the Illinois State Museum, for instance, may not sound terribly important, but the pollen in them reveals how past climates changed, what species lived and died as a result, and thus how our own future may be rapidly unfolding.
  • Natural history museums are so focused on the future that they have for centuries routinely preserved such specimens to answer questions they didn’t yet know how to ask, requiring methodologies that had not yet been invented, to make discoveries that would have been, for the original collectors, inconceivable.
  • THE people who first put gigantic mammoth and mastodon specimens in museums, for instance, did so mainly out of dumb wonderment. But those specimens soon led to the stunning 18th-century recognition that parts of God’s creation could become extinct. The heretical idea of extinction then became an essential preamble to Darwin, whose understanding of evolution by natural selection depended in turn on the detailed study of barnacle specimens collected and preserved over long periods and for no particular reason. Today, those same specimens continue to answer new questions with the help of genome sequencing, CT scans, stable isotope analysis and other technologies.
  • These museums also play a critical role in protecting what’s left of the natural world, in part because they often combine biological and botanical knowledge with broad anthropological experience.
  • “You have no nationality. You are scientists. You speak for nature.” Just since 1999, according to the Field Museum, inventories by its curators and their collaborators have been a key factor in the protection of 26.6 million acres of wilderness, mainly in the headwaters of the Amazon.
  • It may be optimistic to say that natural history museums have saved the world. It may even be too late for that. But they provide one other critical service that can save us, and our sense of wonder: Almost everybody in this country — even children in Denver who have never been to the Rocky Mountains, or people in San Francisco who have never walked on a Pacific Ocean beach — goes to a natural history museum at some point in his life, and these visits influence us in deep and unpredictable ways.
  • we dimly begin to understand the passage of time and cultures, and how our own species fits amid millions of others. We start to understand the strangeness and splendor of the only planet where we will ever have the great pleasure of living.
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The Inseparable Link Between Morality And Economics - 0 views

jpatton.bellevue.edu/...morality-economics.html economics sociology science morality knowledge
shared by kortanekev on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Moral
  • The subject matter of both morality and economics is human action. Economic inquiry wants to know the cause and consequences of human actions.
  • kortanekev on 02 Mar 17
     
    This article discusses the fundamental problem of determining the true nature of human action. We can examine an infinite number of reactions in social situation, but our morality and our intent is not reducible to universal laws and cannot be studied like science. In order to study economics, we need a better understanding of ourselves -- if not the origin of our actions, the consequence in society.  (Evie K 3/1/17)
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The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science | Mother Jones - 0 views

www.motherjones.com/...denial-science-chris-mooney
shared by oliviaodon on 09 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • "A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger (PDF), in a passage that might have been referring to climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. But it was too early for that—this was the 1950s—and Festinger was actually describing a famous case study in psychology.
  • The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment.
  • In other words, when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers (PDF). Our "reasoning" is a means to a predetermined end—winning Our "case"—and is shot through with biases. They include "confirmation bias," in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster Our beliefs, and "disconfirmation bias," in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.
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