The Unpopular Virtue of Moral Certainty | Foreign Policy - 1 views
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We are different, of course. Our household gods are not Plato and Aristotle — philosophers of a fixed cosmos — but Darwin and Freud.
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We know the past better than Adams did, but it speaks to us from a far greater remove. And our implicit notion of what lies at the bottom of history is not a moral but a psychological one
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What does Adams have to say to us today? I have trouble answering this question without resorting to Adams’s own habits of thought — without, that is, thinking in moral rather than psychological terms. Born in 1767, old enough to have seen the Battle of Bunker Hill with his own eyes, drilled by both parents in the imperishable virtues of republicanism, Adams exalted the ideal of public service to a degree that almost beggars our imagination.
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Microsoft Created a Twitter Bot to Learn From Users. It Quickly Became a Racist Jerk. -... - 0 views
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Microsoft, in an emailed statement, described the machine-learning project as a social and cultural experiment.
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Microsoft said the artificial intelligence project had been designed to “engage and entertain people” through “casual and playful conversation,” and that it was built through mining public data. It was targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States and was developed by a staff that included improvisational comedians.
Trump again proved he is incapable of presidential behavior - The Washington Post - 1 views
The Middle-Age Surge - The New York Times - 1 views
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Hopefully you’ve built up some wisdom, which, as the psychologists define it, means seeing the world with more compassion, grasping opposing ideas at the same time, tolerating ambiguity and reacting with equanimity to the small setbacks of life.
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By middle age you might begin to see, retrospectively, the dominant motifs that have been running through your various decisions. You might begin to see how all your different commitments can be integrated into one meaning and purpose
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You might see the social problem your past has made you uniquely equipped to tackle. You might have enough clarity by now to orient your life around a true north on some ultimate horizon.
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An Experimental Autism Treatment Cost Me My Marriage - The New York Times - 2 views
Anxiety and Depression Are on an 80-Year Upswing -- Science of Us - 1 views
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Ever since the 1930s, young people in America have reported feeling increasingly anxious and depressed. And no one knows exactly why.One of the researchers who has done the most work on this subject is Dr. Jean Twenge, a social psychologist at San Diego State University who is the author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before. She’s published a handful of articles on this trajectory, and the underlying story, she thinks, is a rather negative one. “I think the research tells us that modern life is not good for mental health,” she said.
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The words “depression” and “anxiety” themselves, after all, mean very different things to someone asked about them in 1935 as compared to 1995, so surveys that invoke these concepts directly only have limited utility for longitudinal study. To get around this, Twenge prefers to rely on surveys and inventories in which respondents are asked about specific symptoms which are frequently correlated with anxiety and depression
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Much of the richest data on this question, then, comes from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), which has been administered to high school and college students since the 1930s — and which includes many questions about symptoms. Specifically, it asks — among many other things — whether respondents feel well-rested when they wake up, whether they have trouble thinking, and whether they have experienced dizzy spells, headaches, shortness of breath, a racing heart, and so on.
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The Shame Culture - The New York Times - 5 views
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Some sort of moral system is coming into place. Some new criteria now exist, which people use to define correct and incorrect action. The big question is: What is the nature of this new moral system?
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The ultimate sin today, Crouch argues, is to criticize a group, especially on moral grounds. Talk of good and bad has to defer to talk about respect and recognition.
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the omnipresence of social media has created a new sort of shame culture. The world of Facebook, Instagram and the rest is a world of constant display and observation. The desire to be embraced and praised by the community is intense. People dread being exiled and condemned. Moral life is not built on the continuum of right and wrong; it’s built on the continuum of inclusion and exclusion.
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The Superior Social Skills of Bilinguals - The New York Times - 2 views
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We found that bilingual children were better than monolingual children at this task. If you think about it, this makes intuitive sense. Interpreting someone’s utterance often requires attending not just to its content, but also to the surrounding context. What does a speaker know or not know? What did she intend to convey? Children in multilingual environments have social experiences that provide routine practice in considering the perspectives of others: They have to think about who speaks which language to whom, who understands which content, and the times and places in which different languages are spoken.
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children who were effectively monolingual yet regularly exposed to another language — for example, those who had grandparents who spoke another language — were just as talented as the bilingual children at this task. It seems that being raised in an environment in which multiple languages are spoken, rather than being bilingual per se, is the driving factor.
Dogs, Cats and Leadership - The New York Times - 1 views
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the performance of presidents, especially on foreign policy, is shaped by how leaders attach to problems. Some leaders are like dogs: They want to bound right in and make things happen. Some are more like cats: They want to detach and maybe look for a pressure point here or there.
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we should be asking them a different set of questions:
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How much do you think a president can change the flow of world events? President Obama, for example, has a limited or, if you want to put it that way, realistic view of the extent of American influence. He subscribes to a series of propositions that frequently push him toward nonintervention: The world “is a tough, complicated, messy, mean place and full of hardship and tragedy,” he told Goldberg. You can’t fix everything. Sometimes you can only shine a spotlight.
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These nomadic people can see like dolphins and hold their breath twice as long as you. - 0 views
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But in Southeast Asia, there are a few incredible kids who are closer than the rest of us to achieving these aquatic dreams.
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They can see clearly underwater and hold their breath for twice as long as the rest of us.
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so that they can help the rest of the tribe
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Googling Is Believing: Trumping the Informed Citizen - The New York Times - 1 views
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Rubio’s Google gambit and Trump’s (non)reaction to it, reveals an interesting, and troubling, new change in attitude about a philosophical foundation of democracy: the ideal of an informed citizenry.
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The idea is obvious: If citizens are going to make even indirect decisions about policy, we need to know the facts about the problem the policy is meant to rectify, and to be able to gain some understanding about how effective that policy would be.
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Noam Chomsky argued in the 1980s that consent was being “manufactured” by Big Media — large consolidated content-delivery companies (like this newspaper) that could cause opinions to sway one way or the other at their whim.
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Which Republican presidential candidate is actually the most moderate? - Quora - 0 views
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John Kaisch has done quite a lot to present himself as moderate
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So aside from general moderateness, are there any specific issues that should indicate any of the candidates lean further to the left or right than there platform suggests?UpdateCancelAnswer Wiki
BBC - Future - Why does walking through doorways make us forget? - 0 views
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We’ve all done it. Run upstairs to get your keys, but forget that it is them you’re looking for once you get to the bedroom. Open the fridge door and reach for the middle shelf only to realise that we can't remember why we opened the fridge in the first place. Or wait for a moment to interrupt a friend to find that the burning issue that made us want to interrupt has now vanished from our minds
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It’s known as the “Doorway Effect”, and it reveals some important features of how our minds are organised. Understanding this might help us appreciate those temporary moments of forgetfulness as more than just an annoyance
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“What are you doing today?” she asks the first. “I’m putting brick after sodding brick on top of another,” sighs the first. “What are you doing today?” she asks the second. “I’m building a wall,” is the simple reply. But the third builder swells with pride when asked, and replies: “I’m building a cathedral!”
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Philosophy's True Home - The New York Times - 0 views
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We’ve all heard the argument that philosophy is isolated, an “ivory tower” discipline cut off from virtually every other progress-making pursuit of knowledge, including math and the sciences, as well as from the actual concerns of daily life. The reasons given for this are many. In a widely read essay in this series, “When Philosophy Lost Its Way,” Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle claim that it was philosophy’s institutionalization in the university in the late 19th century that separated it from the study of humanity and nature, now the province of social and natural sciences.
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This institutionalization, the authors claim, led it to betray its central aim of articulating the knowledge needed to live virtuous and rewarding lives. I have a different view: Philosophy isn’t separated from the social, natural or mathematical sciences, nor is it neglecting the study of goodness, justice and virtue, which was never its central aim.
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identified philosophy with informal linguistic analysis. Fortunately, this narrow view didn’t stop them from contributing to the science of language and the study of law. Now long gone, neither movement defined the philosophy of its day and neither arose from locating it in universities.
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PBS Is Creating a Channel Exclusively for Children - The New York Times - 0 views
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“There’s a huge distinction between the content that’s available through other media providers and PBS,” said Lesli Rotenberg, the broadcaster’s general manager of children’s programming. “Even though there may be more, there isn’t necessarily more educational content for kids.”
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“There are a lot of children, particularly that are home in early prime time, we aren’t able to accommodate them except for on-demand.
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“Actually, deep into prime time, there are still a lot of kids watching television
Why Doctors Care About Happiness - The New York Times - 1 views
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Along with a swinging pendulum of medical conditions came a similar array, it seemed, of emotions
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The correlation of happiness and health — or unhappiness and poor health — has been noted over the centuries. “He who can believe himself well, will be well,”
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Happy people are more likely to make salutary choices in their life — exercise, eat their veggies, get regular medical care — and so will become more healthy.
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BBC - Future - Why contemplating death changes how you think - 0 views
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Our reluctance to talk about death is often taken as evidence that we are afraid, and therefore suppress thoughts about it. However, there is little direct evidence to support that we are. So what is a “normal” amount of death anxiety? And how does it manifest itself?
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Judging by studies using questionnaires, we seem more bothered by the prospect of losing our loved ones than we do about dying ourselves.
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Reminders of death also affect our political and religious beliefs in interesting ways. On the one hand, they polarise us: political liberals become more liberal while conservatives become more conservative. Similarly, religious people tend to assert their beliefs more fervently while nonreligious people disavow more.
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BBC - Future - Do ruthless people really get ahead? - 0 views
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When we think of success, we often picture rather brutal characters who will happily trample over others’ feelings in the pursuit of fame and fortune. It’s not hard to imagine how such individuals could win in a cut-throat world.
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Previous evidence had suggested that psychopathy is slightly more common among high-flying CEOs than the general population
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Despite the previous findings on “snakes in suits”, Spurk found that the psychopaths in his sample actually performed worse on his measures of success
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