Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items matching "memo" 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
maxwellokolo

A nation of immigrants enters dark chapter - 1 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by maxwellokolo on 23 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 23 Feb 17
     
    Virtually everyone who is in the country without documentation is now eligible for deportation, and some in an expedited fashion. These memos, signed by DHS Secretary John Kelly, were rolled out on Tuesday. There are two memos at issue here; one dealing with interior immigration enforcement, and the other with border security.
Javier E

Opinion | A 'Disgusting' Yale Professor Moves On - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nicholas-christakis-yale.html

human nature kindness good cooperation love teaching psychology

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Christakis’s wife, Erika, who also taught at Yale back then, had circulated a memo in which she questioned a university edict against culturally insensitive Halloween costumes, suggesting that students could police themselves and should have both the freedom to err and the strength to cope with offense. She wrote that her husband concurred.
  • when, in that courtyard, Christakis apologized for any pain that the memo had caused but refused to disavow its content, he was pilloried.
  • “Blueprint,” it’s no lament for the mess that we humans make of things. It’s an argument that we’re transcendently and inherently good — that we’re genetically wired for it, thanks to a process of natural selection that has favored people prone to constructive friendships, to cooperation, to teaching, to love.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • “For too long,” he writes in the preface, “the scientific community has been overly focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for tribalism, violence, selfishness and cruelty. The bright side has been denied the attention it deserves.”
  • He told me that few people realize that he listened to those students for more than two hours, and that they hadn’t intercepted and surprised him: He went out to meet them, knowing how angry they were. “I felt that I had to model the principles that I believed — which is that I am committed to free and open expression,” he said. “I hardly could cower in my house.”
  • The book is a hefty, dazzlingly erudite synthesis of history, philosophy, anthropology, genetics, sociology, economics, epidemiology, statistics and more. It uses everything from shipwrecks to the primatologist Jane Goodall to make its pro-kindnes
  • Although he stayed calm — which he attributes to years of training in karate and its premium on self-control — he was rattled, deeply, by the encounter. He soon took his first sabbatical ever. He read books about equanimity in the face of injustice. “I did not want to become a different person,” he said. “I certainly did not want to become embittered.”
  • He rues America’s intense polarization, which perhaps makes this “an odd time for me to advance the view that there is more that unites us than divides us.”
  • His reasoning, oversimplified, is this: Complex societies are possible and durable only when people are emotionally invested in, and help, one another; we’d be living in smaller units and more solitary fashions if we weren’t equipped for such collaboration; and human thriving within these societies guarantees future generations suited to them.
  • Yes, there are hideous wars and horrid leaders. But if that were the sum of us, how to explain all the peace and progress? Christakis urges a wide angle and the long view
  • “To accept this belief that human beings are evil or violent or selfish or overly tribal is a kind of moral and intellectual laziness,” he told me. It also excuses that destructiveness. “The way to repair our torn social fabric is to say: Wait a minute, that’s not quite right.
  • “Blueprint,” he said, is sociodicy: It tries “to vindicate society despites its failures.”
cvanderloo

Nearly 500 Charged With Coronavirus-Related Fraud In Past Year : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...related-fraud-in-the-past-year

Coronavirus COVID fruad

shared by cvanderloo on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Call it a nasty side effect of the COVID-19 pandemic — the flare-up in fraud, scams and hoaxes as some people have tried to use the crisis to line their pockets illegally.
  • The grand total that fraudsters tried to scam from the government and the public in those cases is more than $569 million.
  • The department's efforts to target fraud related to COVID-19 fraud date back to last March when then-Attorney General William Barr instructed federal prosecutors across the country to investigate and prosecute scams, price gouging and other coronavirus-related crimes aggressively.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • One measure created was the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, which gives loans to businesses to keep employees on the payroll.
  • Economic Injury Disaster Loans, a program designed to provide loans to small businesses and agricultural entities, was also a target for fraud. The department said it has seized $580 million in proceeds so far from fraudulent loan applications.
  • Unemployment insurance — weekly federal unemployment benefits worth $600 a week — also came on line because of the CARES Act.
  • Most notable among these scams are the fake cures and treatments for COVID-19. These have run from attempts to sell everything from industrial bleach to colloidal silver as a miracle cure or treatment for the virus.
  • According to the memo, $626 million in funds had been seized or forfeited due to civil and criminal investigation by the Justice Department involving the Economic Injury Disaster Loans and PPP measures. The subcommittee memo said that amounts to "less than 1% of the nearly $84 billion in potential fraud identified in these programs."
Javier E

Some on the Left Turn Against the Label 'Progressive' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sive-liberal-term-defined.html

progressive label terminology language bias liberal left

shared by Javier E on 27 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • Christopher Lasch, the historian and social critic, posed a banger of a question in his 1991 book, “The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics.”
  • “How does it happen,” Lasch asked, “that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?”
  • A review in The New York Times Book Review by William Julius Wilson, a professor at Harvard, was titled: “Where Has Progress Got Us?”
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Essentially, Lasch was attacking the notion, fashionable as Americans basked in their seeming victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, that history had a direction — and that one would be wise to stay on the “right side” of it.
  • Francis Fukuyama expressed a version of this triumphalist idea in his famous 1992 book, “The End of History and the Last Man,” in which he celebrated the notion that History with a capital “H,” in the sense of a battle between competing ideas, was ending with communism left to smolder on Ronald Reagan’s famous ash heap.
  • One of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most frequently quoted lines speaks to a similar thought, albeit in a different context: “T​he arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Though he had read Lasch, Obama quoted that line often, just as he liked to say that so-and-so would be “on the wrong side of history” if they didn’t live up to his ideals — whether the issue was same-sex marriage, health policy or the Russian occupation of Crimea.
  • The memo goes on to list two sets of words: “Optimistic Positive Governing Words” and “Contrasting Words,” which carried negative connotations. One of the latter group was the word “liberal,” sandwiched between “intolerant” and “lie.”
  • So what’s the difference between a progressive and a liberal?To vastly oversimplify matters, liberal usually refers to someone on the center-left on a two-dimensional political spectrum, while progressive refers to someone further left.
  • But “liberal” has taken a beating in recent decades — from both left and right.
  • In the late 1980s and 1990s, Republicans successfully demonized the word “liberal,” to the point where many Democrats shied away from it in favor of labels like “conservative Democrat” or, more recently, “progressive.”
  • “Is the story of the 20th century about the defeat of the Soviet Union, or was it about two world wars and a Holocaust?” asked Matthew Sitman, the co-host of the “Know Your Enemy” podcast, which recently hosted a discussion on Lasch and the fascination many conservatives have with his ideas. “It really depends on how you look at it.”
  • None of this was an accident. In 1996, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia circulated a now-famous memo called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.”
  • The authors urged their readers: “The words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible.”
  • Republicans subsequently had a great deal of success in associating the term “liberal” with other words and phrases voters found uncongenial: wasteful spending, high rates of taxation and libertinism that repelled socially conservative voters.
  • Many on the left began identifying themselves as “progressive” — which had the added benefit of harking back to movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that fought against corruption, opposed corporate monopolies, pushed for good-government reforms and food safety and labor laws and established women’s right to vote.
  • Allies of Bill Clinton founded the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank associated with so-called Blue Dog Democrats from the South.
  • Now, scrambling the terminology, groups like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee agitate on behalf of proudly left-wing candidates
  • In 2014, Charles Murray, the polarizing conservative scholar, urged readers of The Wall Street Journal’s staunchly right-wing editorial section to “start using ‘liberal’ to designate the good guys on the left, reserving ‘progressive’ for those who are enthusiastic about an unrestrained regulatory state.”
  • As Sanders and acolytes like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have gained prominence over the last few election cycles, many on the left-wing end of the spectrum have begun proudly applying other labels to themselves, such as “democratic socialist.”
  • To little avail so far, Kazin, the Georgetown historian, has been urging them to call themselves “social democrats” instead — as many mainstream parties do in Europe.“It’s not a good way to win elections in this country, to call yourself a socialist,” he said.
Javier E

The New York Times' trans coverage is under fire. The paper needs to listen | Arwa Mahdawi | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...es-trans-coverage-open-letters

trans debate nyt objectivity bias

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • I’ve got a feeling the poor alien might get the impression that every third person in the US is trans – rather than 0.5% of the population. They (I assume aliens are nonbinary) might get the impression that nobody is allowed to say the word “woman” any more and we are all being forced at gunpoint to say “uterus-havers”. They might get the impression that women’s sports have been completely taken over by trans women. They might believe that millions of children are being mutilated by doctors in the name of gender-affirming care because of the all-powerful trans lobby. They might come away thinking that JK Rowling is not a multi-multi-multi-millionaire with endless resources at her disposal but a marginalized victim who needs brave Times columnists to come to her defense.
  • “In the past eight months the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast”. Those, to reiterate, are newspaper front-page stories. As Popula notes, that number “doesn’t include the 11,000 or so words the New York Times Magazine devoted to a laboriously evenhanded story about disagreements over the standards of care for trans youth; or the 3,000 words of the front-page story … on whether trans women athletes are unfairly ruining the competition for other women; or the 1,200 words of the front-page story … on how trans interests are banning the word “woman” from abortion-rights discourse.”
  • This letter, addressed to the paper’s associate managing editor for standards, accused the Times of treating gender diversity “with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”. That relevant information being that some of those sources have affiliations with far-right groups. That “charged language” being phrases like “patient zero” to describe a transgender young person seeking gender-affirming care, “a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared”.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “It is not unusual for outside groups to critique our coverage or to rally supporters to seek to influence our journalism,” Kahn wrote in the memo. “In this case, however, members of our staff and contributors to The Times joined the effort … We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.”
  • Charlie Stadtlander, the Times’ director of external communication, put out a statement stating that the organization pursues “independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care”. While that was all very diplomatic, the executive editor, Joe Kahn, and opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, sent around a rather more pointed newsroom memo condemning the letters on Thursday.
  • The second letter was signed by more than 100 LGBTQ+ and civil rights groups, including Glaad and the Human Rights Campaign. It expressed support for the contributor letter and accused the Times of platforming “fringe theories” and “dangerous inaccuracies”. It noted that while the Times has produced responsible coverage of trans people, “those articles are not getting front-page placement or sent to app users via push notification like the irresponsible pieces are”. And it observed that rightwing politicians have been using the Times’s coverage of trans issues to justify criminalizing gender-affirming care.
  • Here’s the thing: there is no clear-cut line between advocacy and journalism. All media organizations have a perspective about the world and filter their output (which will, of course, strive to be fairly reported) through that perspective. To pretend otherwise is dishonest. Like it or not, the Times is involved in advocacy. It just needs to step back for a moment and think about who it’s advocating for.
Megan Flanagan

Hidden Side of the College Dream: Mediocre Graduation Rates - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...op-out-follow-the-dollars.html

college rates psychology education

shared by Megan Flanagan on 02 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • “go to college” is such a proven prescription
  • college graduates have lower unemployment rates, earn higher wages and even have longer-lasting marriages
  • 7.2 million students who need federal loans to attend college
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Of the 1,027 private colleges studied, 761 have graduation rates of less than 67 percent.
  • the rate is even lower, 46 percent
  • high schools in which more than a third of students do not graduate on time are labeled to receive special attention by federal standards.
  • a college can have a graduation rate as low as 2 percent and still preserve its accreditation
  • “We act as if they’re all the same right now. In K-12 we differentiate.”
  • “Graduation rates are primarily two factors: what the student brings and what the college brings to the experience,”
  • Colleges with lower graduation rates tend to admit a higher percentage of students with Pell grants, which usually go to lower-income students.
  • money is a huge roadblock to graduation.
  • “That is the No. 1 reason our students give when they drop out,”
  • any setback or poor grade can make them question whether they should be in college in the first place
  • colleges are not fulfilling their promise of upward mobility to students, particularly those who are trying to become the first in their families to earn a degree
  • “It’s not that the low-income students are destined to fail,” Mr. Shireman said. “It’s just that they have more challenges, so it takes a lot more resources to ensure that they succeed.”
sissij

What Facebook Owes to Journalism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cebook-owes-to-journalism.html

new york times social media language

shared by sissij on 22 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • declared that “a strong news industry is also critical to building an informed community.”
  • Unfortunately, his memo ignored two major points — the role that Facebook and other technology platforms are playing in inadvertently damaging local news media, and the one way they could actually save journalism: with a massive philanthropic commitment.
  • As advertising spending shifted from print, TV and radio to the internet, the money didn’t mostly go to digital news organizations. Increasingly, it goes to Facebook and Google.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But just because the result is unintentional doesn’t mean it is fantasy: Newsrooms have been decimated, with basic accountability reporting slashed as a result.
  • I’m not saying that the good stuff — the mobile revolution, blocking intrusive ads, better marketing options for small businesses — doesn’t outweigh the bad. And local news organizations absolutely contributed to the problem with their sluggish and often uncreative reaction to the digital revolution.
  • sissij on 22 Feb 17
     
    This article discuss the impact of internet on local news organizations. I agree with the author that the internet do get a lot of ad money and make local news organizations have less funding. Although there are donations, it is still very little compare to what local news organizations used to have. This might be part of the reason why local news organizations don't do well on giving great informations.But I think the time is moving forward, Facebook and google should take some of the responsibility as they get more funding and resources. This article is very persuasive as it has many data and evidence in support. I really like that the author acknowledge the counterargument in his article to make it more reliable. --Sissi (2/22/2017)
Javier E

Logical punctuation: Should we start placing commas outside quotation marks? - 1 views

www.slate.com/...se_of_logical_punctuation.html

language grammar Punctuation UK

shared by Javier E on 05 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you'll find in Slate, the New York Times, the Washington Post— a
  • in copy-editor-free zones—the Web and emails, student papers, business memos—with increasing frequency, commas and periods find themselves on the outside of quotation marks, looking in. A punctuation paradigm is shifting.
  • the main reason is that the British way simply makes more sense. Indeed, since at least the 1960s a common designation for that style has been "logical punctuation."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • you can find copious examples of the "outside" technique—which readers of Virginia Woolf and The Guardian will recognize as the British style—no further away than your Twitter or Facebook feed.
  • American style is inconsistent, moreover, because when it comes to other punctuation marks—semicolons, colons, exclamation points, question marks, dashes—we follow British/logical protocol.
  • If it seems hard or even impossible to defend the American way on the merits, that's probably because it emerged from aesthetic, not logical, considerations
silveiragu

BBC - Future - The man who studies the spread of ignorance - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...tudies-the-spread-of-ignorance

research knowledge ignorance science social media

shared by silveiragu on 09 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • is the study of wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favour.
    • silveiragu
      silveiragu on 09 Jan 16
       
      Interesting data point on the irrationality of words: individuals invent words all the time, purposefully or not. Additionally, this word is USEFUL, as it reveals a clear deficiency in public understanding of, say, the tobacco industry. So, why have I not been able to find any dictionary recognizing its existence? 
  • Ignorance is power
  • Agnotology is as important today as it was back when Proctor studied
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • politically motivated doubt was sown over US President Barack Obama’s nationality for many months by opponents until he revealed his birth certificate in 2011.
  • ignorance can often be propagated under the guise of balanced debate. For example, the common idea that there will always be two opposing views does not always result in a rational conclusion.
    • silveiragu
      silveiragu on 09 Jan 16
       
      What's the exploited heuristic? There must be one.
  • a false picture of the truth, hence ignorance.
  • For example, says Proctor, many of the studies linking carcinogens in tobacco were conducted in mice initially, and the tobacco industry responded by saying that studies into mice did not mean that people were at risk,
  • Even though knowledge is ‘accessible’, it does not mean it is accessed, he warns
  • often comes from faith or tradition, or propaganda
    • silveiragu
      silveiragu on 09 Jan 16
       
      If there are Ways of Knowing, what are the Ways of Not Knowing?
  • a scientifically illiterate society will probably be more susceptible to the tactics used by those wishing to confuse and cloud the truth.
  • It’s not just about the facts, it’s about what is imagined to flow from and into such facts,
  • Another academic studying ignorance is David Dunning, from Cornell University.
  • "While some smart people will profit from all the information now just a click away, many will be misled into a false sense of expertise
  • US presidential candidate Donald Trump's solutions that are either unworkable or unconstitutional are an example of agnotology, says Dunning
    • silveiragu
      silveiragu on 09 Jan 16
       
      Or, rather, the analysis of US Presidential candidate Donald Trump...is.
  • today the need for both a word and the study of human ignorance is as strong as ever
  • 1979, a secret memo from the tobacco industry was revealed to the public.
  • How do people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge? Georgina Kenyon finds there is a term which defines this phenomenon.
  • it revealed many of the tactics employed by big tobacco to counter “anti-cigarette forces
  • “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”
  • revelation piqued the interest of Robert Proctor, a science historian from Stanford University
  • led him to create a word for the study of deliberate propagation of ignorance: agnotology.
Javier E

Can Social Networks Do Better? We Don't Know Because They Haven't Tried - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...know-because-they-havent-tried

social media networks internet media externality economic

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • it’s not fair to say it’s Facebook or a Facebook problem. Facebook is just the latest media and communications medium. We hardly blame the technology of the book for spreading anti-Semitism via the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion
  • But of course, it’s not that simple. Social media platforms have distinct features that earlier communications media did not. The interactive nature of the media, the collection of data which is then run through algorithms and artificial intelligence creates something different.
  • All social media platforms are engineered with two basic goals: maximize the time you spend on the platform and make advertising as effective and thus as lucrative as possible. This means that social media can never be simply a common carrier, a distribution technology that has no substantial influence over the nature of the communication that travels over it.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • it’s a substantial difference which deprives social media platforms of the kind of hands-off logic that would make it ridiculous to say phones are bad or the phone company is responsible if planning for a mass murder was carried out over the phone.
  • the Internet doesn’t ‘do’ anything more than make the distribution of information more efficient and radically lower the formal, informal and financial barriers to entry that used to stand in the way of various marginalized ideas.
  • Social media can never plead innocence like this because the platforms are designed to addict you and convince you of things.
  • If the question is: what can social media platforms do to protect against government-backed subversion campaigns like the one we saw in the 2016 campaign the best answer is, we don’t know. And we don’t know for a simple reason: they haven’t tried.
  • The point is straightforward: the mass collection of data, harnessed to modern computing power and the chance to amass unimaginable wealth has spurred vast technological innovation.
Javier E

A Paean to Polls (or, We Are All in a Bubble) | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...olls-or-we-are-all-in-a-bubble

polls survey public opinion

shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • Again and again through a political season I hear people making claims about public opinion that simply mimic their own aspirations or the embedded beliefs of their social or ideological set
  • Polls, public opinion surveys, for all their shortcomings, give us a rough ability to see what in aggregate other people think.
  • Pilots who are certified for instruments of flight have it drilled into their heads that they must ignore what they think and feel about whether they’re going up or down, slow or fast, and everything else. Just watch your instruments and disregard everything else. Polls are our instruments as we traverse the political realm.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • this doesn’t mean that we should follow public opinion.
  • Most important, it is fluid, inherently malleable and often simply wrong.
  • But we cannot do anything effectively, decide where to go, how to change things, really anything, if we don’t know what the current situation is.
Javier E

There's No Such Thing As 'Sound Science' | FiveThirtyEight - 1 views

fivethirtyeight.com/...d-science-demand-sound-science

science method research trade-off values fact objectivity

shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • cience is being turned against itself. For decades, its twin ideals of transparency and rigor have been weaponized by those who disagree with results produced by the scientific method. Under the Trump administration, that fight has ramped up again.
  • The same entreaties crop up again and again: We need to root out conflicts. We need more precise evidence. What makes these arguments so powerful is that they sound quite similar to the points raised by proponents of a very different call for change that’s coming from within science.
  • Despite having dissimilar goals, the two forces espouse principles that look surprisingly alike: Science needs to be transparent. Results and methods should be openly shared so that outside researchers can independently reproduce and validate them. The methods used to collect and analyze data should be rigorous and clear, and conclusions must be supported by evidence.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • they’re also used as talking points by politicians who are working to make it more difficult for the EPA and other federal agencies to use science in their regulatory decision-making, under the guise of basing policy on “sound science.” Science’s virtues are being wielded against it.
  • What distinguishes the two calls for transparency is intent: Whereas the “open science” movement aims to make science more reliable, reproducible and robust, proponents of “sound science” have historically worked to amplify uncertainty, create doubt and undermine scientific discoveries that threaten their interests.
  • “Our criticisms are founded in a confidence in science,” said Steven Goodman, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford and a proponent of open science. “That’s a fundamental difference — we’re critiquing science to make it better. Others are critiquing it to devalue the approach itself.”
  • alls to base public policy on “sound science” seem unassailable if you don’t know the term’s history. The phrase was adopted by the tobacco industry in the 1990s to counteract mounting evidence linking secondhand smoke to cancer.
  • The sound science tactic exploits a fundamental feature of the scientific process: Science does not produce absolute certainty. Contrary to how it’s sometimes represented to the public, science is not a magic wand that turns everything it touches to truth. Instead, it’s a process of uncertainty reduction, much like a game of 20 Questions.
  • Any given study can rarely answer more than one question at a time, and each study usually raises a bunch of new questions in the process of answering old ones. “Science is a process rather than an answer,” said psychologist Alison Ledgerwood of the University of California, Davis. Every answer is provisional and subject to change in the face of new evidence. It’s not entirely correct to say that “this study proves this fact,” Ledgerwood said. “We should be talking instead about how science increases or decreases our confidence in something.”
  • While insisting that they merely wanted to ensure that public policy was based on sound science, tobacco companies defined the term in a way that ensured that no science could ever be sound enough. The only sound science was certain science, which is an impossible standard to achieve.
  • “Doubt is our product,” wrote one employee of the Brown & Williamson tobacco company in a 1969 internal memo. The note went on to say that doubt “is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’” and “establishing a controversy.” These strategies for undermining inconvenient science were so effective that they’ve served as a sort of playbook for industry interests ever since
  • Doubt merchants aren’t pushing for knowledge, they’re practicing what Proctor has dubbed “agnogenesis” — the intentional manufacture of ignorance. This ignorance isn’t simply the absence of knowing something; it’s a lack of comprehension deliberately created by agents who don’t want you to know,
  • In the hands of doubt-makers, transparency becomes a rhetorical move. “It’s really difficult as a scientist or policy maker to make a stand against transparency and openness, because well, who would be against it?
  • But at the same time, “you can couch everything in the language of transparency and it becomes a powerful weapon.” For instance, when the EPA was preparing to set new limits on particulate pollution in the 1990s, industry groups pushed back against the research and demanded access to primary data (including records that researchers had promised participants would remain confidential) and a reanalysis of the evidence. Their calls succeeded and a new analysis was performed. The reanalysis essentially confirmed the original conclusions, but the process of conducting it delayed the implementation of regulations and cost researchers time and money.
  • Delay is a time-tested strategy. “Gridlock is the greatest friend a global warming skeptic has,” said Marc Morano, a prominent critic of global warming research
  • which has received funding from the oil and gas industry. “We’re the negative force. We’re just trying to stop stuff.”
  • these ploys are getting a fresh boost from Congress. The Data Quality Act (also known as the Information Quality Act) was reportedly written by an industry lobbyist and quietly passed as part of an appropriations bill in 2000. The rule mandates that federal agencies ensure the “quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” that they disseminate, though it does little to define what these terms mean. The law also provides a mechanism for citizens and groups to challenge information that they deem inaccurate, including science that they disagree with. “It was passed in this very quiet way with no explicit debate about it — that should tell you a lot about the real goals,” Levy said.
  • in the 20 months following its implementation, the act was repeatedly used by industry groups to push back against proposed regulations and bog down the decision-making process. Instead of deploying transparency as a fundamental principle that applies to all science, these interests have used transparency as a weapon to attack very particular findings that they would like to eradicate.
  • Now Congress is considering another way to legislate how science is used. The Honest Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas,3The bill has been passed by the House but still awaits a vote in the Senate. is another example of what Levy calls a “Trojan horse” law that uses the language of transparency as a cover to achieve other political goals. Smith’s legislation would severely limit the kind of evidence the EPA could use for decision-making. Only studies whose raw data and computer codes were publicly available would be allowed for consideration.
  • It might seem like an easy task to sort good science from bad, but in reality it’s not so simple. “There’s a misplaced idea that we can definitively distinguish the good from the not-good science, but it’s all a matter of degree,” said Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science. “There is no perfect study.” Requiring regulators to wait until they have (nonexistent) perfect evidence is essentially “a way of saying, ‘We don’t want to use evidence for our decision-making,’
  • ost scientific controversies aren’t about science at all, and once the sides are drawn, more data is unlikely to bring opponents into agreement.
  • objective knowledge is not enough to resolve environmental controversies. “While these controversies may appear on the surface to rest on disputed questions of fact, beneath often reside differing positions of value; values that can give shape to differing understandings of what ‘the facts’ are.” What’s needed in these cases isn’t more or better science, but mechanisms to bring those hidden values to the forefront of the discussion so that they can be debated transparently. “As long as we continue down this unabashedly naive road about what science is, and what it is capable of doing, we will continue to fail to reach any sort of meaningful consensus on these matters,”
  • The dispute over tobacco was never about the science of cigarettes’ link to cancer. It was about whether companies have the right to sell dangerous products and, if so, what obligations they have to the consumers who purchased them.
  • Similarly, the debate over climate change isn’t about whether our planet is heating, but about how much responsibility each country and person bears for stopping it
  • While researching her book “Merchants of Doubt,” science historian Naomi Oreskes found that some of the same people who were defending the tobacco industry as scientific experts were also receiving industry money to deny the role of human activity in global warming. What these issues had in common, she realized, was that they all involved the need for government action. “None of this is about the science. All of this is a political debate about the role of government,”
  • These controversies are really about values, not scientific facts, and acknowledging that would allow us to have more truthful and productive debates. What would that look like in practice? Instead of cherry-picking evidence to support a particular view (and insisting that the science points to a desired action), the various sides could lay out the values they are using to assess the evidence.
  • For instance, in Europe, many decisions are guided by the precautionary principle — a system that values caution in the face of uncertainty and says that when the risks are unclear, it should be up to industries to show that their products and processes are not harmful, rather than requiring the government to prove that they are harmful before they can be regulated. By contrast, U.S. agencies tend to wait for strong evidence of harm before issuing regulations
  • the difference between them comes down to priorities: Is it better to exercise caution at the risk of burdening companies and perhaps the economy, or is it more important to avoid potential economic downsides even if it means that sometimes a harmful product or industrial process goes unregulated?
  • But science can’t tell us how risky is too risky to allow products like cigarettes or potentially harmful pesticides to be sold — those are value judgements that only humans can make.
ilanaprincilus06

'Third World' Is An Offensive Term. Here's Why : Goats and Soda : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ird-world-is-an-offensive-term

third world developing countries western society

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • When an armed mob stormed the U.S. Capitol and took over the building on Wednesday, many Americans said that's what happens in "Third World" countries.
  • Everyone knows what they meant — countries that are poor, where health care systems are weak, where democracy may not be exactly flourishing.
  • But the very term "Third World" is a problem.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • "this assumption about people outside of the 'First World' — that they lived really different lives, the assumption they were poor, they should be happy to eat every day. As if we don't have the same value as humans."
  • "I think it's a very antiquated and offensive term."
  • "There is no 'Third World.' There were the oppressed and the oppressors,"
  • The oppressors, he says, often took resources from the countries they colonized
  • Yet as Wednesday's events made clear, "Third World" is often the first term that pops into Westerners' minds when they try to characterize less well-off, troubled countries.
  • The idea of a world divided into three domains dates back to the 1950s when the Cold War was just starting. It was Western capitalism versus Soviet socialism
  • The "First World" consisted of the U.S., Western Europe and their allies. The "Second World" was the so-called communist bloc: the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and friends. The remaining nations, which aligned with neither group, were assigned to the "Third World."
  • "That's the 'Fourth World,' " Farmer says, referring to parts of the United States and other wealthy nations where health and economic problems loom large.
  • Because many countries in the Third World were impoverished, the term came to be used to refer to countries where poverty is rampant, where health care is inadequate, and where democracy does not flourish.
  • Who is to say which part of the world is "first"? Plus, the Soviet Union doesn't even exist anymore.
  • And it's not like the "First World" is the best world in every way. It has pockets of deep urban and rural poverty,
  • "Although the phrase was widely used, it was never clear whether it was a clear category of analysis, or simply a convenient and rather vague label for an imprecise collection of states in the second half of the 20th century and some of the common problems that they faced,"
  • "Being called a 'developing country' gives me a chance to improve." He hopes that one day India will go "a few steps beyond what 'developed countries' have achieved."
  • "I dislike the term 'developing world' because it assumes a hierarchy between countries"
  • "It paints a picture of Western societies as ideal but there are many social problems in these societies as well. It also perpetuates stereotypes about people who come from the so-called 'developing world' as backward, lazy, ignorant, irresponsible."
  • There are extremely wealthy people in poor countries, for example. Kenya has slums and neighborhoods where real estate prices rival any nation. It's part of a growing trend of income inequality around the world, Over notes.
  • So income levels tell you something — but not everything. Over would like to see classifications based on a combination of income and equality.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Fox News Slimed a Purple Heart Recipient - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vindman-fox-news-.html

media manipulation propaganda narrative conspiracy theory fox news psychology Bias

shared by Javier E on 23 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • In anticipation of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s recent public testimony in the House’s impeachment inquiry, the Fox News host Laura Ingraham and a guest concocted an insulting fantasy on her show: the idea that Colonel Vindman might be a Ukrainian spy.
  • as a former Fox News opinion talk-show guest host and contributor for 14 years, it didn’t shock me.
  • First, we must talk about narratives. In my time at Fox News, narratives were weapons of mass emotional manipulation, what the Nobel laureate Robert J. Shiller defines in “Narrative Economics” as “contagious stories” — as he put it in a paper of the same name, “a simple story or easily expressed explanation of events that many people want to bring up in conversation or on news or social media because it can be used to stimulate the concerns or emotions of others, and/or because it appears to advance self-interest.”
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • we find information or misinformation “22 times more memorable in narrative form.”
  • It’s a contagion, and thanks to social media, or “participatory propaganda,” highly viral
  • The Fox News counternarrative model is as simple as it is cunning. The segment producer’s job is to get the answers to two questions: What is the most emotionally engaging story we have right now
  • The next question is, how do we construct a counternarrative that includes as many existing other believable meta-narratives as possible
  • The hunt for the killer narrative starts with the “Morning Memo” to the producers. It shares the interpretation from the vice president of news of the highest-trending articles on Foxnews.com and Drudge
  • The next move is to get a few Fox News contributor regulars — elected officials and paid pundits — not just to deliver the new counternarrative but also to wrap it inside an existing or new meta-narrative.
  • What do the ratings tell the producers are the most engaging meta-narratives for the over 80 million Fox News viewers on all digital platforms?
  • Conspiracy theories.
  • Why do people love conspiracy stories? It’s human behavior
  • The emotional payoff from being on the inside of a conspiracy is a self-esteem jolt that makes you feel smarter than your tribal foe and keeps your eyeballs glued to screens
  • Every successful Fox News segment producer has the conspiracy script down cold. These segments work best when the “proof” of a conspiracy against a tribal leader — in this case the Republican president — makes the viewer feel under attack as well
  • it helps when a proposed conservative thought leader mixes in the meta-narrative to the effect that “we are victimized again by the condescending Beltway elites.”
  • Believing in conspiracy theories is a psychological construct for people to take back some semblance of control in their lives. It inflates their sense of importance. It makes them feel they have access to “special knowledge” that the rest of the world is “too blind,” “too dumb” or “too corrupt” to understand.
clairemann

Opinion | The Mental Virtues - The New York Times - 4 views

www.nytimes.com/...brooks-the-mental-virtues.html

shared by clairemann on 14 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • First, there is love of learning
  • Second, there is courage. The obvious form of intellectual courage is the willingness to hold unpopular views. But the subtler form is knowing how much risk to take in jumping to conclusions
  • Third, there is firmness
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Fourth, there is humility, which is not letting your own desire for status get in the way of accuracy.
  • Fifth, there is autonomy
  • Autonomy is the median of knowing when to bow to authority and when not to
  • Such a person is open to learning from anyone at any stage in life.
  • The median point between flaccidity and rigidity is the virtue of firmness. The firm believer can build a steady worldview on solid timbers but still delight in new information
  • Finally, there is generosity
  • the mind is embedded in human nature, and very often thinking well means pushing against the grain of our nature — against vanity, against laziness, against the desire for certainty, against the desire to avoid painful truths.
  • Good thinking isn’t just adopting the right technique. It’s a moral enterprise and requires good character, the ability to go against our lesser impulses for the sake of our higher ones.
  • wisdom isn’t a body of information. It’s the moral quality of knowing how to handle your own limitations
  • Montaigne once wrote that “We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.”
  • Is it possible to display and cultivate character if you are just an information age office jockey, alone with a memo or your computer?
  • Some people are just more ardently curious than others, either by cultivation or by nature.
  • Javier E on 14 Sep 15
     
    willing to look at things that are surprisingly hard to look at.
katherineharron

Snapchat to stop promoting Trump after controversial posts - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 03 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Snapchat (SNAP) will no longer promote President Donald Trump's account on its platform in the wake of his controversial comments on ongoing protests across the US, the company announced Wednesday.
  • "We are not currently promoting the President's content on Snapchat's Discover platform. We will not amplify voices who incite racial violence and injustice by giving them free promotion on Discover," Rachel Racusen, a spokesperson for Snap, Snapchat's parent company, said in a statement Wednesday.
  • "Racial violence and injustice have no place in our society and we stand together with all who seek peace, love, equality, and justice in America,"
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • In a memo to Snap staff on Sunday, the company's CEO, Evan Spiegel, wrote, "we simply cannot promote accounts in America that are linked to people who incite racial violence, whether they do so on or off our platform. Our Discover content platform is a curated platform, where we decide what we promote. We have spoken time and again about working hard to make a positive impact, and we will walk the talk with the content we promote on Snapchat. We may continue to allow divisive people to maintain an account on Snapchat, as long as the content that is published on Snapchat is consistent with our community guidelines, but we will not promote that account or content in any way."
  • "There are plenty of debates to be had about the future of our country and the world. But there is simply no room for debate in our country about the value of human life and the importance of a constant struggle for freedom, equality, and justice. We are standing with all those who stand for peace, love, and justice and we will use our platform to promote good rather than evil."
  • Last week, Twitter for the first time affixed a fact-check label to multiple Trump tweets about mail-in ballots and days later put a warning label on a tweet from Trump about the protest, in which he warned: "when the looting starts, the shooting starts." Facebook chose not to act on identical posts that appeared on its platform.
annabaldwin_

She's 26, and Brought Down Uber's C.E.O. What's Next? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...susan-fowler-uber.html

inappropriate-behavior speak-out stand-up

shared by annabaldwin_ on 23 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • a “super-women-friendly” place to work, boasting 25 percent female engineers.
  • “I only use Lyft,” he said. “Did you read that interview with the C.E.O., Travis, where he talked about how Uber helps him get girls? He’s a misogynist. I could never use his product.”
  • The essay that shook Silicon Valley was called “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” and Ms. Fowler began by noting that it was “a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story.”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The blog post was notable for its dispassionate tone, as the young engineer who had left the company after a year walked the reader through everything that had gone very, very wrong in the brozilla culture of kegs, sexual coarseness and snaky competition.
  • Ms. Fowler took screen shots and reported the manager to human resources, thinking, “They’ll do the right thing.”
  • But they didn’t, explaining that the manager was “a high performer” and it was his first offense, something Ms. Fowler later discovered to be untrue.
  • “I didn’t really care if they branded me a troublemaker,” she says
  • In her memo, she says, “I knew I had to be super-careful about how I said it if I wanted anybody to take it seriously.
  • So I was disappointed in her because I expected her to be an advocate,”
1 - 20 of 28 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page