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Javier E

The End of Men - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...308135

women men roles history culture demographics US sex

shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same
  • Why wouldn’t you choose a girl? That such a statement should be so casually uttered by an old cowboy like Ericsson—or by anyone, for that matter—is monumental. For nearly as long as civilization has existed, patriarchy—enforced through the rights of the firstborn son—has been the organizing principle, with few exceptions
  • “You have to be concerned about the future of all women,” Roberta Steinbacher, a nun-turned-social-psychologist, said in a 1984 People profile of Ericsson. “There’s no question that there exists a universal preference for sons.”
  • ...98 more annotations...
  • In the ’90s, when Ericsson looked into the numbers for the two dozen or so clinics that use his process, he discovered, to his surprise, that couples were requesting more girls than boys, a gap that has persisted, even though Ericsson advertises the method as more effective for producing boys. In some clinics, Ericsson has said, the ratio is now as high as 2 to 1.
  • A newer method for sperm selection, called MicroSort, is currently completing Food and Drug Administration clinical trials. The girl requests for that method run at about 75 percent.
  • Even more unsettling for Ericsson, it has become clear that in choosing the sex of the next generation, he is no longer the boss. “It’s the women who are driving all the decisions,”
  • Now the centuries-old preference for sons is eroding—or even reversing. “Women of our generation want daughters precisely because we like who we are,”
  • what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women?
  • Even Ericsson, the stubborn old goat, can sigh and mark the passing of an era. “Did male dominance exist? Of course it existed. But it seems to be gone now. And the era of the firstborn son is totally gone.”
  • Ericsson’s extended family is as good an illustration of the rapidly shifting landscape as any other. His 26-year-old granddaughter—“tall, slender, brighter than hell, with a take-no-prisoners personality”—is a biochemist and works on genetic sequencing. His niece studied civil engineering at the University of Southern California. His grandsons, he says, are bright and handsome, but in school “their eyes glaze over. I have to tell ’em: ‘Just don’t screw up and crash your pickup truck and get some girl pregnant and ruin your life.’
  • Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But for the first time in human history, that is changing—and with shocking speed. Cultural and economic changes always reinforce each other
  • And the global economy is evolving in a way that is eroding the historical preference for male children, worldwide
  • Over several centuries, South Korea, for instance, constructed one of the most rigid patriarchal societies in the world.
  • As recently as 1985, about half of all women in a national survey said they “must have a son.” That percentage fell slowly until 1991 and then plummeted to just over 15 percent by 2003. Male preference in South Korea “is over,” says Monica Das Gupta, a demographer and Asia expert at the World Bank. “It happened so fast. It’s hard to believe it, but it is.” The same shift is now beginning in other rapidly industrializing countries such as India and China.
  • As thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as the keys to economic success, those societies that take advantage of the talents of all their adults, not just half of them, have pulled away from the rest. And because geopolitics and global culture are, ultimately, Darwinian, other societies either follow suit or end up marginalized
  • None of the 30 or so men sitting in a classroom at a downtown Kansas City school have come for voluntary adult enrichment. Having failed to pay their child support, they were given the choice by a judge to go to jail or attend a weekly class on fathering, which to them seemed the better deal.
  • in the U.S., the world’s most advanced economy, something much more remarkable seems to be happening. American parents are beginning to choose to have girls over boys. As they imagine the pride of watching a child grow and develop and succeed as an adult, it is more often a girl that they see in their mind’s eye.
  • What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?
  • what if men and women were fulfilling not biological imperatives but social roles, based on what was more efficient throughout a long era of human history? What if that era has now come to an end? More to the point, what if the economics of the new era are better suited to women?
  • Once you open your eyes to this possibility, the evidence is all around you. It can be found, most immediately, in the wreckage of the Great Recession, in which three-quarters of the 8 million jobs lost were lost by men.
  • The recession merely revealed—and accelerated—a profound economic shift that has been going on for at least 30 years
  • Earlier this year, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s job
  • With few exceptions, the greater the power of women, the greater the country’s economic success
  • Women dominate today’s colleges and professional schools—for every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same. Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are occupied primarily by women
  • Indeed, the U.S. economy is in some ways becoming a kind of traveling sisterhood: upper-class women leave home and enter the workforce, creating domestic jobs for other women to fill.
  • The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male. In fact, the opposite may be true
  • Yes, women still do most of the child care. And yes, the upper reaches of society are still dominated by men. But given the power of the forces pushing at the economy, this setup feels like the last gasp of a dying age rather than the permanent establishment
  • In his final book, The Bachelors’ Ball, published in 2007, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes the changing gender dynamics of Béarn, the region in southwestern France where he grew up. The eldest sons once held the privileges of patrimonial loyalty and filial inheritance in Béarn. But over the decades, changing economic forces turned those privileges into curses. Although the land no longer produced the impressive income it once had, the men felt obligated to tend it. Meanwhile, modern women shunned farm life, lured away by jobs and adventure in the city
  • The role reversal that’s under way between American men and women shows up most obviously and painfully in the working class
  • The working class, which has long defined our notions of masculinity, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the home and women making all the decisions
  • “Let’s see,” he continues, reading from a worksheet. What are the four kinds of paternal authority? Moral, emotional, social, and physical. “But you ain’t none of those in that house. All you are is a paycheck, and now you ain’t even that. And if you try to exercise your authority, she’ll call 911. How does that make you feel? You’re supposed to be the authority, and she says, ‘Get out of the house, bitch.’ She’s calling you ‘bitch’!”
  • Just about the only professions in which women still make up a relatively small minority of newly minted workers are engineering and those calling on a hard-science background, and even in those areas, women have made strong gains since the 1970s.
  • “Who’s doing what?” he asks them. “What is our role? Everyone’s telling us we’re supposed to be the head of a nuclear family, so you feel like you got robbed. It’s toxic, and poisonous, and it’s setting us up for failure.” He writes on the board: $85,000. “This is her salary.” Then: $12,000. “This is your salary. Who’s the damn man? Who’s the man now?” A murmur rises. “That’s right. She’s the man.”
  • In 1950, roughly one in 20 men of prime working age, like Henderson, was not working; today that ratio is about one in five, the highest ever recorded.
  • Men dominate just two of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most over the next decade: janitor and computer engineer. Women have everything else—nursing, home health assistance, child care, food preparation
  • Many of the new jobs, says Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress, “replace the things that women used to do in the home for free.” None is especially high-paying. But the steady accumulation of these jobs adds up to an economy that, for the working class, has become more amenable to women than to men.
  • The list of growing jobs is heavy on nurturing professions, in which women, ironically, seem to benefit from old stereotypes and habits.
  • The men in that room, almost without exception, were casualties of the end of the manufacturing era. Most of them had continued to work with their hands even as demand for manual labor was declining.
  • Many professions that started out as the province of men are now filled mostly with women—secretary and teacher come to mind. Yet I’m not aware of any that have gone the opposite way. Nursing schools have tried hard to recruit men in the past few years, with minimal success. Teaching schools, eager to recruit male role models, are having a similarly hard time
  • The range of acceptable masculine roles has changed comparatively little, and has perhaps even narrowed as men have shied away from some careers women have entered. As Jessica Grose wrote in Slate, men seem “fixed in cultural aspic.” And with each passing day, they lag further behind.
  • women are also starting to dominate middle management, and a surprising number of professional careers as well. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women now hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980
  • About a third of America’s physicians are now women, as are 45 percent of associates in law firms—and both those percentages are rising fast.
  • When we look back on this period, argues Jamie Ladge, a business professor at Northeastern University, we will see it as a “turning point for women in the workforce.”
  • A white-collar economy values raw intellectual horsepower, which men and women have in equal amounts. It also requires communication skills and social intelligence, areas in which women, according to many studies, have a slight edge. Perhaps most important—for better or worse—it increasingly requires formal education credentials, which women are more prone to acquire,
  • The men are black and white, their ages ranging from about 20 to 40. A couple look like they might have spent a night or two on the streets, but the rest look like they work, or used to. Now they have put down their sodas, and El-Scari has their attention, so he gets a little more philosophical
  • Companies began moving out of the city in search not only of lower rent but also of the “best educated, most conscientious, most stable workers.” They found their brightest prospects among “underemployed females living in middle-class communities on the fringe of the old urban areas.” As Garreau chronicles the rise of suburban office parks, he places special emphasis on 1978, the peak year for women entering the workforce. When brawn was off the list of job requirements, women often measured up better than men. They were smart, dutiful, and, as long as employers could make the jobs more convenient for them, more reliable
  • Near the top of the jobs pyramid, of course, the upward march of women stalls. Prominent female CEOs, past and present, are so rare that they count as minor celebrities,
  • Only 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women, and the number has never risen much above that.
  • What are these talents? Once it was thought that leaders should be aggressive and competitive, and that men are naturally more of both. But psychological research has complicated this picture. In lab studies that simulate negotiations, men and women are just about equally assertive and competitive, with slight variations. Men tend to assert themselves in a controlling manner, while women tend to take into account the rights of others, but both styles are equally effective,
  • Researchers have started looking into the relationship between testosterone and excessive risk, and wondering if groups of men, in some basic hormonal way, spur each other to make reckless decisions. The picture emerging is a mirror image of the traditional gender map: men and markets on the side of the irrational and overemotional, and women on the side of the cool and levelheaded.
  • the perception of the ideal business leader is starting to shift. The old model of command and control, with one leader holding all the decision-making power, is considered hidebound. The new model is sometimes called “post-heroic,” or “transformational”
  • he aim is to behave like a good coach, and channel your charisma to motivate others to be hardworking and creative. The model is not explicitly defined as feminist, but it echoes literature about male-female differences
  • Most important, women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees—the minimum requirement, in most cases, for an affluent life.
  • Firms that had women in top positions performed better, and this was especially true if the firm pursued what the researchers called an “innovation intensive strategy,” in which, they argued, “creativity and collaboration may be especially important”
  • he association is clear: innovative, successful firms are the ones that promote women. The same Columbia-Maryland study ranked America’s industries by the proportion of firms that employed female executives, and the bottom of the list reads like the ghosts of the economy past: shipbuilding, real estate, coal, steelworks, machinery.
  • To see the future—of the workforce, the economy, and the culture—you need to spend some time at America’s colleges and professional schools
  • emographically, we can see with absolute clarity that in the coming decades the middle class will be dominated by women.
  • Women now earn 60 percent of master’s degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees, and 42 percent of all M.B.A.s
  • “We never explicitly say, ‘Develop your feminine side,’ but it’s clear that’s what we’re advocating,” s
  • n a stark reversal since the 1970s, men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma.
  • ne would think that if men were acting in a rational way, they would be getting the education they need to get along out there,” says Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. “But they are just failing to adapt.”
  • I visited a few schools around Kansas City to get a feel for the gender dynamics of higher education. I started at the downtown campus of Metropolitan Community College. Metropolitan is the kind of place where people go to learn practical job skills and keep current with the changing economy, and as in most community colleges these days, men were conspicuously absent.
  • the tidal wave of women continues to wash through the school—they now make up about 70 percent of its students. They come to train to be nurses and teachers
  • As for the men? Well, little has changed. “I recall one guy who was really smart,” one of the school’s counselors told me. “But he was reading at a sixth-grade level and felt embarrassed in front of the women. He had to hide his books from his friends, who would tease him when he studied. Then came the excuses. ‘It’s spring, gotta play ball.’ ‘It’s winter, too cold.’ He didn’t make it.”
  • “The economy isn’t as friendly to men as it once was,” says Jacqueline King, of the American Council on Education. “You would think men and women would go to these colleges at the same rate.” But they don’t.
  • Men, it turned out, had a harder time committing to school, even when they desperately needed to retool. They tended to start out behind academically, and many felt intimidated by the schoolwork. They reported feeling isolated and were much worse at seeking out fellow students, study groups, or counselors to help them adjust.
  • Mothers going back to school described themselves as good role models for their children. Fathers worried that they were abrogating their responsibilities as breadwinner.
  • it began showing up not just in community and liberal-arts colleges but in the flagship public universities—the UCs and the SUNYs and the UNCs.
  • Guys high-five each other when they get a C, while girls beat themselves up over a B-minus. Guys play video games in each other’s rooms, while girls crowd the study hall. Girls get their degrees with no drama, while guys seem always in danger of drifting away.
  • realized how much the basic expectations for men and women had shifted. Many of the women’s mothers had established their careers later in life, sometimes after a divorce, and they had urged their daughters to get to their own careers more quickly. They would be a campus of Tracy Flicks, except that they seemed neither especially brittle nor secretly falling apart.
  • Among traditional college students from the highest-income families, the gender gap pretty much disappears. But the story is not so simple. Wealthier students tend to go to elite private schools, and elite private schools live by their own rules.
  • Quietly, they’ve been opening up a new frontier in affirmative action, with boys playing the role of the underprivileged applicants needing an extra boost
  • among selective liberal-arts schools, being male raises the chance of college acceptance by 6.5 to 9 percentage points
  • the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has voted to investigate what some academics have described as the “open secret” that private schools “are discriminating in admissions in order to maintain what they regard as an appropriate gender balance.”
  • To avoid crossing the dreaded 60 percent threshold, admissions officers have created a language to explain away the boys’ deficits: “Brain hasn’t kicked in yet.” “Slow to cook.” “Hasn’t quite peaked.” “Holistic picture.”
  • Clearly, some percentage of boys are just temperamentally unsuited to college, at least at age 18 or 20, but without it, they have a harder time finding their place these days
  • “Forty years ago, 30 years ago, if you were one of the fairly constant fraction of boys who wasn’t ready to learn in high school, there were ways for you to enter the mainstream economy,” says Henry Farber, an economist at Princeton. “When you woke up, there were jobs. There were good industrial jobs, so you could have a good industrial, blue-collar career. Now those jobs are gone.”
  • the disparities start before college. Throughout the ’90s, various authors and researchers agonized over why boys seemed to be failing at every level of education, from elementary school on up
  • identified various culprits: a misguided feminism that treated normal boys as incipient harassers (Christina Hoff Sommers); different brain chemistry (Michael Gurian); a demanding, verbally focused curriculum that ignored boys’ interests (Richard Whitmire)
  • t’s not all that clear that boys have become more dysfunctional—or have changed in any way. What’s clear is that schools, like the economy, now value the self-control, focus, and verbal aptitude that seem to come more easily to young girls.
  • movement is growing for more all-boys schools and classes, and for respecting the individual learning styles of boys
  • In their desperation to reach out to boys, some colleges have formed football teams and started engineering programs.
  • allowing generations of boys to grow up feeling rootless and obsolete is not a recipe for a peaceful future. Men have few natural support groups and little access to social welfare; the men’s-rights groups that do exist in the U.S. are taking on an angry, antiwoman edge.
  • Marriages fall apart or never happen at all, and children are raised with no fathers. Far from being celebrated, women’s rising power is perceived as a threat.
  • his is the first time that the cohort of Americans ages 30 to 44 has more college-educated women than college-educated men, and the effects are upsetting the traditional Cleaver-family dynamics. In 1970, women contributed 2 to 6 percent of the family income. Now the typical working wife brings home 42.2 percent, and four in 10 mothers—many of them single mothers—are the primary breadwinners in their familie
  • ncreasing numbers of women—unable to find men with a similar income and education—are forgoing marriage altogether. In 1970, 84 percent of women ages 30 to 44 were married; now 60 percent are.
  • or all the hand-wringing over the lonely spinster, the real loser in society—the only one to have made just slight financial gains since the 1970s—is the single man, whether poor or rich, college-educated or not. Hens rejoice; it’s the bachelor party that’s over.
  • The sociologist Kathryn Edin spent five years talking with low-income mothers in the inner suburbs of Philadelphia. Many of these neighborhoods, she found, had turned into matriarchies, with women making all the decisions and dictating what the men should and should not do. “I think something feminists have missed,” Edin told me, “is how much power women have” when they’re not bound by marriage
  • he women, she explained, “make every important decision”—whether to have a baby, how to raise it, where to live. “It’s definitely ‘my way or the highway,’
  • Thirty years ago, cultural norms were such that the fathers might have said, ‘Great, catch me if you can.’ Now they are desperate to father, but they are pessimistic about whether they can meet her expectations.” The women don’t want them as husbands, and they have no steady income to provide. So what do they have?
  • Nothing,” Edin says. “They have nothing. The men were just annihilated in the recession of the ’90s, and things never got better. Now it’s just awful.”
  • The phenomenon of children being born to unmarried parents “has spread to barrios and trailer parks and rural areas and small towns,” Edin says, and it is creeping up the class ladder. After staying steady for a while, the portion of American children born to unmarried parents jumped to 40 percent in the past few years.
  • Many of their mothers are struggling financially; the most successful are working and going to school and hustling to feed the children, and then falling asleep in the elevator of the community college.
  • Still, they are in charge. “The family changes over the past four decades have been bad for men and bad for kids, but it’s not clear they are bad for women,”
  • Over the years, researchers have proposed different theories to explain the erosion of marriage in the lower classes: the rise of welfare, or the disappearance of work and thus of marriageable men
  • the most compelling theory is that marriage has disappeared because women are setting the terms—and setting them too high for the men around them to reach.
  • The whole country’s future could look much as the present does for many lower-class African Americans: the mothers pull themselves up, but the men don’t follow. First-generation college-educated white women may join their black counterparts in a new kind of middle class, where marriage is increasingly rare.
  • Japan is in a national panic over the rise of the “herbivores,” the cohort of young men who are rejecting the hard-drinking salaryman life of their fathers and are instead gardening, organizing dessert parties, acting cartoonishly feminine, and declining to have sex. The generational young-women counterparts are known in Japan as the “carnivores,” or sometimes the “hunters.”
  • American pop culture keeps producing endless variations on the omega male, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack.
  • At the same time, a new kind of alpha female has appeared, stirring up anxiety and, occasionally, fear. The cougar trope started out as a joke about desperate older women. Now it’s gone mainstream, even in Hollywood,
  • the more women dominate, the more they behave, fittingly, like the dominant sex. Rates of violence committed by middle-aged women have skyrocketed since the 1980
Javier E

The Friar Who Became the Vatican's Go-To Guy on A.I. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...icial-intelligence-ethics.html

AI vatican catholic expert italy culture policy

shared by Javier E on 15 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • , he told a crowd of ambassadors that “global governance is needed, otherwise the risk is social collapse.” He also talked up the Rome Call, a Vatican, Italian government, Silicon Valley and U.N. effort he helped organize.
  • The author of many books (“Homo Faber: The Techno-Human Condition”) and a fixture on international A.I. panels, Father Benanti, 50, is a professor at the Gregorian, the Harvard of Rome’s pontifical universities, where he teaches moral theology, ethics and a course called “The Fall of Babel: The Challenges of Digital, Social Networks and Artificial Intelligence.”
  • his job is to provide advice from an ethical and spiritual perspective
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  • He is concerned that masters of the A.I. universes are developing systems that will expand chasms of inequality. He fears the transition to A.I. will be so abrupt that entire professional fields will be left doing menial jobs, or nothing, stripping people of dignity and unleashing floods of “despair.”
  • Father Benanti, who does not believe in the industry’s ability to self-regulate and thinks some rules of the road are required in a world where deep fakes and disinformation can erode democracy.
  • He shares his insights with Pope Francis, who in his annual World Day of Peace message on Jan. 1 called for a global treaty to ensure the ethical development and use of AI to prevent a world devoid of human mercy, where inscrutable algorithms decide who is granted asylum, who gets a mortgage, or who, on the battlefield, lives or dies.
  • all the time he applies his perspective about what it means to be alive, and to be human, when machines seem more alive and human. “This is a spiritual question,” he said.
  • raises enormous questions about redistributing wealth in an A.I. dominant universe.
  • he pursued an engineering degree at Sapienza University in Rome. It wasn’t enough.“I started to feel that something was missing,” he said, explaining that his advancement as an engineering student erased the mystique machines held for him. “I simply broke the magic.”
  • He left Rome to study in Assisi, the home of St. Francis, and over the next decade, took his final vows as a friar, was ordained as a priest and defended his dissertation on human enhancement and cyborgs. He got his job at the Gregorian, and eventually as the Vatican’s IT ethics guy.
  • In 2017, Cardinal Ravasi organized an event at the Italian embassy to the Holy See where Father Benanti gave a talk on the ethics of A.I. Microsoft officials in attendance were impressed and asked to stay in touch. That same year, the Italian government asked him to contribute to A.I. policy documents and the next year he successfully applied to sit on its commission for developing a national A.I. strategy.
  • Francis, he said, didn’t at first realize what Microsoft really did, but liked that Mr. Smith took out of his pocket one of the pope’s speeches on social media and showed the pontiff the concerns the business executive had highlighted and shared.
  • e said, arguing that as ancient Roman augurs turned to the flight of birds for direction, A.I., with its enormous grasp of our physical, emotional and preferential data, could be the new oracles, determining decisions, and replacing God with false idols.
  • “It’s something old that probably we think that we left behind,” the friar said, “but that is coming back.”
Javier E

Social Skills May Be the Key to Career Success - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...401954

emotional intelligence social skills career

shared by Javier E on 24 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Over the next two decades, nearly half of U.S. jobs may become obsolete due to automation, one recent study found. What are workers to do? Become more human, suggests David J. Deming of Harvard. Deming argues that social skills have already become increasingly important in recent decades
  • positions that require both cognitive and social skills have shown more wage growth in the past few decades than those that require high-levels of mathematical or analytical training but little social prowess. And those wage gains hold true across all levels of employment.
  • jobs that are least likely to be automated increasingly are those that demand lots of interaction with coworkers or clients, not just the performance of rote analytical tasks. These jobs also call for the ability to perform innately human exercises—like pondering another person’s point of view.
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  • Social skills have the most value when it comes to the ability to work on a team, trading off tasks based on skill sets or ability. “Human interaction in the workplace involves team production, with workers playing off of each other’s strengths and adapting flexibly to changing circumstances
Javier E

Screen Addiction Is Taking a Toll on Children - The New York Times - 0 views

well.blogs.nytimes.com/...n-is-taking-a-toll-on-children

addiction screen tech children electronics

shared by Javier E on 06 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • “children have to know that life is fine off the screen. It’s interesting and good to be curious about other people, to learn how to listen. It teaches them social and emotional intelligence, which is critical for success in life.”
  • Children who are heavy users of electronics may become adept at multitasking, but they can lose the ability to focus on what is most important, a trait critical to the deep thought and problem solving needed for many jobs and other endeavors later in life.
  • An earlier Pew study found that teenagers send an average of 34 texts a night after they get into bed, adding to the sleep deprivation so common and harmful to them. And as Ms. Hatch pointed out, “as children have more of their communication through electronic media, and less of it face to face, they begin to feel more lonely and depressed.”
Javier E

Amy Chua Is a Wimp - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...18brooks.html

education learning values children chinese US

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • this Chua doesn’t appreciate), she is not really rebelling against American-style parenting; she is the logical extension of the prevailing elite practices. She does everything over-pressuring upper-middle-class parents are doing. She’s just hard core.
  • I believe she’s coddling her children. She’s protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities because she doesn’t understand what’s cognitively difficult and what isn’t.
  • Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.
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  • Yet mastering these arduous skills is at the very essence of achievement. Most people work in groups. We do this because groups are much more efficient at solving problems than individuals (swimmers are often motivated to have their best times as part of relay teams, not in individual events). Moreover, the performance of a group does not correlate well with the average I.Q. of the group or even with the I.Q.’s of the smartest members.
  • Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon have found that groups have a high collective intelligence when members of a group are good at reading each others’ emotions
  • Participating in a well-functioning group is really hard. It requires the ability to trust people outside your kinship circle, read intonations and moods, understand how the psychological pieces each person brings to the room can and cannot fit together.
  • This skill set is not taught formally, but it is imparted through arduous experiences. These are exactly the kinds of difficult experiences Chua shelters her children from
  • Chua would do better to see the classroom as a cognitive break from the truly arduous tests of childhood. Where do they learn how to manage people? Where do they learn to construct and manipulate metaphors? Where do they learn to perceive details of a scene the way a hunter reads a landscape? Where do they learn how to detect their own shortcomings? Where do they learn how to put themselves in others’ minds and anticipate others’ reactions?
  • These and a million other skills are imparted by the informal maturity process and are not developed if formal learning monopolizes a child’s time.
Javier E

What a divided America actually hears when Obama speaks - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...5-88cd-753e80cd29ad_story.html

polarization politics obama perception partisan

shared by Javier E on 18 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • According to experts who study polarization, Americans don’t necessarily disagree more on policy. What has changed is the level of mistrust, and even vitriol, Americans have for politicians and their fellow citizens on the other side of the political divide. It is a suspicion that makes people question their neighbors’ motives, their sincerity and their intelligence.
  • “We’ve become so entrenched in our partisan identities. . . . It’s like a really intense sports rivalry. It’s not about policy but an emotional distrust of the other side.”
  • A senior White House official put it event more bluntly: “We’re literally growing apart from each other.”
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  • A major focus for Obama during his final year in office is to blunt those divisions by trying to remind Americans of the values that they share. “It will be core to what you hear from us this year,” said David Simas, the White House director of political strategy. “You can expect to hear it in every setting, in every place, around any topic and speech, because it is that important to the president.”
  • The challenge for Obama — and virtually every politician today — is breaking through in a climate defined more by alienation, frustration and anger than differences on policy. Policies can be modified or changed. But how does a president persuade an angry and mistrustful nation to actually listen to each other?
  • “Once we lose the ability to talk to each other, we lose the ability to reach consensus, which is at the core of politics in Washington and every town hall around the nation.”
redavistinnell

95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Donald Trump's Tongue - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...from-donald-trumps-tongue.html

words donald donald trump trump tongue new york times

shared by redavistinnell on 07 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • 95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Donald Trump’s Tongue
  • On Thursday evening, his message was equally ominous, as he suggested a link between the shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., and President Obama’s failure to say “radical Islamic terrorism.”
  • The dark power of words has become the defining feature of Mr. Trump’s bid for the White House to a degree rarely seen in modern politics, as he forgoes the usual campaign trappings — policy, endorsements, commercials, donations — and instead relies on potent language to connect with, and often stoke, the fears and grievances of Americans.
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  • Mr. Trump’s breezy stage presence makes him all the more effective because he is not as off-putting as those raging men of the past, these experts say.
  • The most striking hallmark was Mr. Trump’s constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery that American presidents rarely use, based on a quantitative comparison of his remarks and the news conferences of recent presidents, Democratic and Republican
  • He has a particular habit of saying “you” and “we” as he inveighs against a dangerous “them” or unnamed other — usually outsiders like illegal immigrants (“they’re pouring in”), Syrian migrants (“young, strong men”) and Mexicans, but also leaders of both political parties.
  • “You know what, darling? You’re not going to be scared anymore. They’re going to be scared. You’re not going to be scared,”
  • And as much as he likes the word “attack,” the Times analysis shows, he often uses it to portray himself as the victim of cable news channels and newspapers that, he says, do not show the size of his crowds.
  • “ ‘We vs. them’ creates a threatening dynamic, where ‘they’ are evil or crazy or ignorant and ‘we’ need a candidate who sees the threat and can alleviate it,” said Matt Motyl, a political psychologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who is studying how the 2016 presidential candidates speak
  • In another pattern, Mr. Trump tends to attack a person rather than an idea or a situation, like calling political opponents “stupid” (at least 30 times), “horrible” (14 times), “weak” (13 times) and other names, and criticizing foreign leaders, journalists and so-called anchor babies. He bragged on Thursday about psyching out Jeb Bush by repeatedly calling him “low-energy,” but he spends far less time contrasting Mr. Bush’s policies with his own proposals, which are scant.
  • The specter of violence looms over much of his speech, which is infused with words like kill, destroy and fight. For a man who speaks off the cuff, he always remembers to bring up the Islamic State’s “chopping off heads.”
  • Mr. Trump said, “Maybe he should have been roughed up.”
  • And Mr. Trump uses rhetoric to erode people’s trust in facts, numbers, nuance, government and the news media, according to specialists in political rhetoric. “Nobody knows,” he likes to declare, where illegal immigrants are coming from or the rate of increase of health care premiums under the Affordable Care Act, even though government agencies collect and publish this information
  • describing the Sept. 11 terrorists as “animals” who sent their families back to the Middle East. “We never went after them. We never did anything. We have to attack much stronger. We have to be more vigilant. We have to be much tougher. We have to be much smarter, or it’s never, ever going to end.”
  • This pattern of elevating emotional appeals over rational ones is a rhetorical style that historians, psychologists and political scientists placed in the tradition of political figures like Goldwater, George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy, Huey Long and Pat Buchanan, who used fiery language to try to win favor with struggling or scared Americans.
  • “His entire campaign is run like a demagogue’s — his language of division, his cult of personality, his manner of categorizing and maligning people with a broad brush,” said Jennifer Mercieca, an expert in American political discourse at Texas A&M University
  • “And then there are the winners, most especially himself, with his repeated references to his wealth and success and intelligence,” said Ms. Mercieca, noting a particular remark of Mr. Trump’s on Monday in Macon, Ga.
  • Historically, demagogues have flourished when they tapped into the grievances of citizens and then identified and maligned outside foes, as McCarthy did with attacking Communists, Wallace with pro-integration northerners and Mr. Buchanan with cultural liberals.
  • be it “segregation forever” or accusatory questions over the Communist Party — to persuade Americans to pin their anxieties about national security, jobs, racial diversity and social trends on enemy forces.
  • A significant difference between Mr. Trump and 20th-century American demagogues is that many of them, especially McCarthy and Wallace, were charmless public speakers.
  • For some historians, this only makes him more effective, because demagogy is more palatable when it is leavened with a smile and joke. Highlighting that informality, one of his most frequently used words is “guy” — which he said 91 times last week and has used to describe President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a stranger cheering him on at a rally and a celebrity friend.
  • In the 1980s, it was with advertisements condemning the young men, four of them black and one Latino, accused of marauding through Central Park and raping a jogger. Just over a decade ago, it was the controversy during the first season of his reality show “The Apprentice,” in which he played a boardroom billionaire who fired people.
  • Mr. Trump has said he will tear into anyone who tries to take him on, and he presents himself as someone who is always right in his opinions — even prophetic, a visionary.
  • “I said, ‘We better be careful, that’s gonna happen, it’s gonna be a big thing,’ and it certainly is a big thing,” Mr. Trump has said of what he wrote about the Al Qaeda leader in 2000.
  • It is the sort of trust-me-and-only-me rhetoric that, according to historians, demagogues have used to insist that they have unique qualities that can lead the country through turmoil. Mr. Trump often makes that point when he criticizes his Republican rivals, though he also pretends that he is not criticizing them.
  • So I refuse to say that they’re weak generally, O.K.? Some of them are fine people. But they are weak.”
knudsenlu

Trump meeting Kim Jong-un is a half-baked idea - and a dangerous one | Richar... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...baked-idea-and-a-dangerous-one

trump meeting kim opinion US Politics

shared by knudsenlu on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • One is an egomaniacally unhinged, nuclear-armed neophyte, who scares his allies and enemies alike. So is the other. The extraordinary prospect of direct talks between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un would be a delicious moment of karma among kooky world leaders. If it weren’t for their ability to destroy half the planet.
  • One thing is already clear about this half-baked idea: Trump is more likely to spill his guts about classified intelligence than he is to get the upper hand with any kind of meaningful deal.
  • We have some recent history to underscore that point. It was only on Saturday that our dear leader spilled his guts about this North Korean deal at the Gridiron dinner.
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  • For those new to the North Korean brief, including those in the West Wing, it’s worth pointing out that the North Korean deal during the Clinton years was supposed to halt nuclearization. Then it turned out Pyongyang had a secret nuclear program.
  • In case we didn’t get the news, he continued: “I would not rule out direct talks with Kim Jong-un,” he said. “I just won’t. As far as the risk of dealing with a madman is concerned, that’s his problem, not mine.” Some people thought he was joking: others were just plain confused. South Korean officials later pointed out that Trump had not talked to the North Koreans, but instead had talked to them. So foreign policy experts naturally assumed that Trump had confused the two Koreas.
  • Needless to say, Trump is very pleased with this state of affairs. “Kim Jong-un talked about denuclearization with the South Korean representatives, not just a freeze,” he tweeted. “Also, no missile testing by North Korea during this period of time. Great progress being made but sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached.”
  • It’s like a diplomatic version of the Art of the Deal, but with war and peace in place of luxury condominiums.
  • There was a time when an idealistic new president campaigned against the establishment, promised to talk to America’s adversaries, like the mullahs in Iran and the communists in Cuba. For years the Republicans ran the emotional gamut from disdain to disgust at his weak foreign policy. But that president’s name was Barack Obama, and we all know what the world thought of him. Now we have a president in the pocket of Vladimir Putin, who is also busting sanctions to help Kim Jong-un. So this summit is less a meeting of adversaries and more a get-together of subsidiaries. Nationalists of the World, unite! You have nothing to lose but your shame.
Javier E

When FitBit can track your workplace performance: the new wearable frontier - The Washi... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ur-boss-track-your-performance

workplace performance wearable tracking surveillance tech privacy

shared by Javier E on 02 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • wearables can serve another purpose — determining whether you’re a productive employee. The data-obsessed may be quick to embrace such an assessment, but what if an employer has access to that information as well?
  • The researchers say their mobile-sensing system, which consists of fitness bracelets, sensors and a custom app, can measure employee performance with about 80 percent accuracy.
  • The system monitors physical and emotional signals that employees produce during the day and uses that data to create a performance profile over time that is designed to eliminate bias from evaluations
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  • it could signal the beginning of a new era of virtual assistants that will redefine our relationships with intelligent machines.
  • providing someone with valuable insights about their productivity, stress levels during meetings or lifestyle habits that impact their ability to perform their job
  • “We set out to discover whether there was a way to move the needle from an almost backward way of assessing people’s workplace performance to using more objective measures.
  • research shows that conscientious people, who are often more detailed-oriented and disciplined, tend to be more productive
  • If it was possible to predict someone’s mental health by analyzing their social media feeds and smartphone data, Campbell wondered, could similar data be leveraged to improve employee performance evaluations?
  • The workers were fitted with a wearable fitness tracker that monitored heart functions, sleep, stress, and measurements such as weight and calorie consumption, as well as a smartphone app that tracked their physical activity, location, phone usage and ambient light.
  • Location beacons placed in the home and office measured participants time at work and breaks from their desk, giving researchers a comprehensive window into their day from one hour to the next.
  • The information was processed by cloud-based machine-learning algorithms that classified performance using factors such as the amount of time spent at the workplace, quality of sleep, physical activity and phone usage
  • “We want to use that information to empower workers to tell them whether they’re being influenced by levels of stress or sleep or other factors that may not be immediately obvious to them.”
  • What the research does not explain, he said, is what habits make someone conscientious in the first place, leaving a gap in knowledge that researchers hoped to fill.
  • “Very often when people try to detect what drives performance, they rely on personality, which actually reveals little about someone’s ability to do their job well,” he said. “Evaluations can be biased because they are infused with stereotyping of people or political influences inside an office. But when you can extract a pattern over weeks and months, we can be more certain that assessment is objective and neutral.
  • the results showed, perhaps not surprisingly, that high performers tended to have lower rates of phone usage.
  • They also experience deeper periods of sustained sleep and are more physically active than their lower performing colleagues.
  • Researchers discovered that high-performing supervisors tended to be more mobile during the day, but they visited a smaller number of distinct places during their working hours
  • High-performing non-supervisors, meanwhile, tend to spend more time at work during the weekends,
  • Future versions, they said, could be tailored to individual jobs and provide workers with meaningful information about changes in their mental well-being during meetings or suggestions for reducing stress each week
  • But they also acknowledge that the valuable private data could prove volatile if it falls into a company’s hands without employee consent. Campbell suggested there might be a middle ground, such as companies offering incentives to employees who opt into a program that treats precise assessment data as one tool among several for evaluating performance.
  • “If there was any point down the road where I could have an application on my phone that could provide an objective assessment of my performance, that might be an incentive for workers to use it," he said. “Imagine being able to say, ‘Here’s the evidence that I deserve to be promoted or that my boss is standing in my way.’"
  • “I can’t really look into a crystal ball, but I’m hopeful this passive sensing technology will be used to empower the workforce rather than used against them," he added.
lenaurick

Top Kremlin diplomat calls US uproar over Russia ties 'a witch hunt' - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

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

politics us trump

shared by lenaurick on 06 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • "They are maintained by holding meetings, talks and establishing contacts with officials from both executive and legislative branches of power. I can only quote what the media said today -- this all looks like a witch hunt."
  • But Russia's Foreign Ministry has angrily rejected allegations that its top diplomat in Washington is a spy amid controversy over meetings he held with US Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
  • "He was deputy minister of foreign affairs in Russia, who has communicated with American colleagues for decades in different fields, and CNN accused him of being a Russian spy ... of recruiting? Oh my God!"
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  • Sessions made the decision after it emerged that he had failed at his Senate confirmation hearing to disclose two pre-election meetings with Kislyak to Washington, at a time when Russia was accused of interfering in the presidential race.
  • "This whole narrative is a way of saving face for Democrats losing an election that everyone thought they were supposed to win. The Democrats are overplaying their hand. They lost the election and now, they have lost their grip on reality. The real story is all of the illegal leaks of classified and other information. It is a total witch hunt!"
  • Peskov also insisted that Russia has never interfered in the domestic affairs of another country and has no plans ever to do so. He said the current "overly emotional environment" was affecting the prospects of a future meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
  • In response to reports of his meetings with Kislyak, Sessions' spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said there was nothing "misleading about his answer" to Congress because he "was asked during the hearing about communications between Russia and the Trump campaign -- not about meetings he took as a senator and a member of the Armed Services Committee."
  • The House Intelligence Committee signed off this week on a plan to investigate Russia's alleged interference in the US elections, which includes examining contacts between Trump's campaign and Russia, and looking into who leaked the details. Democrats have called for an independent investigation.
Javier E

How to Prepare for an Automated Future - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-for-an-automated-future.html

automation job economic culture education technology

shared by Javier E on 04 May 17 - No Cached
  • We don’t know how quickly machines will displace people’s jobs, or how many they’ll take, but we know it’s happening — not just to factory workers but also to money managers, dermatologists and retail workers.
  • The logical response seems to be to educate people differently, so they’re prepared to work alongside the robots or do the jobs that machines can’t. But how to do that, and whether training can outpace automation, are open questions.
  • Pew Research Center and Elon University surveyed 1,408 people who work in technology and education to find out if they think new schooling will emerge in the next decade to successfully train workers for the future. Two-thirds said yes; the rest said n
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  • People still need to learn skills, the respondents said, but they will do that continuously over their careers. In school, the most important thing they can learn is how to learn.
  • At universities, “people learn how to approach new things, ask questions and find answers, deal with new situations,”
  • many survey respondents said a degree was not enough — or not always the best choice, especially given its price tag.
  • these are not necessarily easy to teach.
  • “Many of the ‘skills’ that will be needed are more like personality characteristics, like curiosity, or social skills that require enculturation to take hold,
  • “I have complete faith in the ability to identify job gaps and develop educational tools to address those gaps,” wrote Danah Boyd, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and founder of Data and Society, a research institute. “I have zero confidence in us having the political will to address the socioeconomic factors that are underpinning skill training.”
  • Andrew Walls, managing vice president at Gartner, wrote, “Barring a neuroscience advance that enables us to embed knowledge and skills directly into brain tissue and muscle formation, there will be no quantum leap in our ability to ‘up-skill’ people.
  • Schools will also need to teach traits that machines can’t yet easily replicate, like creativity, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, adaptability and collaboration.
  • Many of them expect more emphasis on certificates or badges, earned from online courses or workshops, even for college graduates.
  • One potential future, said David Karger, a professor of computer science at M.I.T., would be for faculty at top universities to teach online and for mid-tier universities to “consist entirely of a cadre of teaching assistants who provide support for the students.”
  • Portfolios of work are becoming more important than résumés.
  • “Three-dimensional materials — in essence, job reels that demonstrate expertise — will be the ultimate demonstration of an individual worker’s skills.”
  • Consider it part of your job description to keep learning, many respondents said — learn new skills on the job, take classes, teach yourself new things.
  • Focus on learning how to do tasks that still need humans, said Judith Donath of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society: teaching and caregiving; building and repairing; and researching and evaluating
  • The problem is that not everyone is cut out for independent learning, which takes a lot of drive and discipline.
  • People who are suited for it tend to come from privileged backgrounds, with a good education and supportive parents,
  • “The fact that a high degree of self-direction may be required in the new work force means that existing structures of inequality will be replicated in the future,”
  • “The ‘jobs of the future’ are likely to be performed by robots,” said Nathaniel Borenstein, chief scientist at Mimecast, an email company. “The question isn’t how to train people for nonexistent jobs. It’s how to share the wealth in a world where we don’t need most people to work.”
Javier E

Thieves of experience: On the rise of surveillance capitalism - 0 views

www.roughtype.com/?p=8608

tech brain science knowledge memory distraction smartphone learning creativity reasoning problem-solving silicon valley elite surveillance capitalism psychology

shared by Javier E on 28 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • n the choices we make as consumers and private citizens, we have always traded some of our autonomy to gain other rewards. Many people, it seems clear, experience surveillance capitalism less as a prison, where their agency is restricted in a noxious way, than as an all-inclusive resort, where their agency is restricted in a pleasing way
  • Zuboff makes a convincing case that this is a short-sighted and dangerous view — that the bargain we’ve struck with the internet giants is a Faustian one
  • but her case would have been stronger still had she more fully addressed the benefits side of the ledger.
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  • there’s a piece missing. While Zuboff’s assessment of the costs that people incur under surveillance capitalism is exhaustive, she largely ignores the benefits people receive in return — convenience, customization, savings, entertainment, social connection, and so on
  • hat the industries of the future will seek to manufacture is the self.
  • Behavior modification is the thread that ties today’s search engines, social networks, and smartphone trackers to tomorrow’s facial-recognition systems, emotion-detection sensors, and artificial-intelligence bots.
  • All of Facebook’s information wrangling and algorithmic fine-tuning, she writes, “is aimed at solving one problem: how and when to intervene in the state of play that is your daily life in order to modify your behavior and thus sharply increase the predictability of your actions now, soon, and later.”
  • “The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale,” a top Silicon Valley data scientist told her in an interview. “We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us.”
  • This goal, she suggests, is not limited to Facebook. It is coming to guide much of the economy, as financial and social power shifts to the surveillance capitalists
  • Combining rich information on individuals’ behavioral triggers with the ability to deliver precisely tailored and timed messages turns out to be a recipe for behavior modification on an unprecedented scale.
  • it was Facebook, with its incredibly detailed data on people’s social lives, that grasped digital media’s full potential for behavior modification. By using what it called its “social graph” to map the intentions, desires, and interactions of literally billions of individuals, it saw that it could turn its network into a worldwide Skinner box, employing psychological triggers and rewards to program not only what people see but how they react.
  • spying on the populace is not the end game. The real prize lies in figuring out ways to use the data to shape how people think and act. “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the computer scientist Alan Kay once observed. And the best way to predict behavior is to script it.
  • competition for personal data intensified. It was no longer enough to monitor people online; making better predictions required that surveillance be extended into homes, stores, schools, workplaces, and the public squares of cities and towns. Much of the recent innovation in the tech industry has entailed the creation of products and services designed to vacuum up data from every corner of our lives
  • “The typical complaint is that privacy is eroded, but that is misleading,” Zuboff writes. “In the larger societal pattern, privacy is not eroded but redistributed . . . . Instead of people having the rights to decide how and what they will disclose, these rights are concentrated within the domain of surveillance capitalism.” The transfer of decision rights is also a transfer of autonomy and agency, from the citizen to the corporation.
  • What we lose under this regime is something more fundamental than privacy. It’s the right to make our own decisions about privacy — to draw our own lines between those aspects of our lives we are comfortable sharing and those we are not
  • Other possible ways of organizing online markets, such as through paid subscriptions for apps and services, never even got a chance to be tested.
  • Online surveillance came to be viewed as normal and even necessary by politicians, government bureaucrats, and the general public
  • Google and other Silicon Valley companies benefited directly from the government’s new stress on digital surveillance. They earned millions through contracts to share their data collection and analysis techniques with the National Security Agenc
  • As much as the dot-com crash, the horrors of 9/11 set the stage for the rise of surveillance capitalism. Zuboff notes that, in 2000, members of the Federal Trade Commission, frustrated by internet companies’ lack of progress in adopting privacy protections, began formulating legislation to secure people’s control over their online information and severely restrict the companies’ ability to collect and store it. It seemed obvious to the regulators that ownership of personal data should by default lie in the hands of private citizens, not corporations.
  • The 9/11 attacks changed the calculus. The centralized collection and analysis of online data, on a vast scale, came to be seen as essential to national security. “The privacy provisions debated just months earlier vanished from the conversation more or less overnight,”
Javier E

'White Fragility' Is Everywhere. But Does Antiracism Training Work? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-fragility-robin-diangelo.html

white fragility racism training effectiveness culture

shared by Javier E on 21 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • DiAngelo, who is 63 and white, with graying corkscrew curls framing delicate features, had won the admiration of Black activist intellectuals like Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” who praises the “unapologetic critique” of her presentations, her apparent indifference to “the feelings of the white people in the room.”
  • “White Fragility” leapt onto the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, and next came a stream of bookings for public lectures and, mostly, private workshops and speeches given to school faculties and government agencies and university administrations and companies like Microsoft and Google and W.L. Gore & Associates, the maker of Gore-Tex.
  • As outraged protesters rose up across the country, “White Fragility” became Amazon’s No. 1 selling book, beating out even the bankable escapism of the latest “Hunger Games” installment. The book’s small publisher, Beacon Press, had trouble printing fast enough to meet demand; 1.6 million copies, in one form or other, have been sold
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  • I’d been talking with DiAngelo for a year when Floyd was killed, and with other antiracism teachers for almost as long. Demand has recently spiked throughout the field, though the clamor had already been building, particularly since the election of Donald Trump
  • As their teaching becomes more and more widespread, antiracism educators are shaping the language that gets spoken — and the lessons being learned — about race in America.
  • “I will not coddle your comfort,” she went on. She gestured crisply with her hands. “I’m going to name and admit to things white people rarely name and admit.” Scattered Black listeners called out encouragement. Then she specified the predominant demographic in the packed house: white progressives. “I know you. Oh, white progressives are my specialty. Because I am a white progressive.” She paced tightly on the stage. “And I have a racist worldview.”
  • “White supremacy — yes, it includes extremists or neo-Nazis, but it is also a highly descriptive sociological term for the society we live in, a society in which white people are elevated as the ideal for humanity, and everyone else is a deficient version.” And Black people, she said, are cast as the most deficient. “There is something profoundly anti-Black in this culture.”
  • White fragility, in DiAngelo’s formulation, is far from weakness. It is “weaponized.” Its evasions are actually a liberal white arsenal, a means of protecting a frail moral ego, defending a righteous self-image and, ultimately, perpetuating racial hierarchies, because what goes unexamined will never be upended
  • At some point after our answers, DiAngelo poked fun at the myriad ways that white people “credential” themselves as not-racist. I winced. I hadn’t meant to imply that I was anywhere close to free of racism, yet was I “credentialing”?
  • the pattern she first termed “white fragility” in an academic article in 2011: the propensity of white people to fend off suggestions of racism, whether by absurd denials (“I don’t see color”) or by overly emotional displays of defensiveness or solidarity (DiAngelo’s book has a chapter titled “White Women’s Tears” and subtitled “But you are my sister, and I share your pain!”) or by varieties of the personal history I’d provided.
  • But was I being fragile? Was I being defensive or just trying to share something more personal, intimate and complex than DiAngelo’s all-encompassing sociological perspective? She taught, throughout the afternoon, that the impulse to individualize is in itself a white trait, a way to play down the societal racism all white people have thoroughly absorbed.
  • One “unnamed logic of Whiteness,” she wrote with her frequent co-author, the education professor Ozlem Sensoy, in a 2017 paper published in The Harvard Educational Review, “is the presumed neutrality of White European Enlightenment epistemology.”
  • she returned to white supremacy and how she had been imbued with it since birth. “When my mother was pregnant with me, who delivered me in the hospital — who owned the hospital? And who came in that night and mopped the floor?” She paused so we could picture the complexions of those people. Systemic racism, she announced, is “embedded in our cultural definitions of what is normal, what is correct, what is professionalism, what is intelligence, what is beautiful, what is valuable.”
  • “I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious,” one of the discipline’s influential thinkers, Peggy McIntosh, a researcher at the Wellesley Centers for Women, has written. “White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear and blank checks.”
  • Borrowing from feminist scholarship and critical race theory, whiteness studies challenges the very nature of knowledge, asking whether what we define as scientific research and scholarly rigor, and what we venerate as objectivity, can be ways of excluding alternate perspectives and preserving white dominance
  • the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society’s casting of white actors as Asians in a production of “The Mikado.” “That changed my life,” she said. The phrase “white fragility” went viral, and requests to speak started to soar; she expanded the article into a book and during the year preceding Covid-19 gave eight to 10 presentations a month, sometimes pro bono but mostly at up to $15,000 per event.
  • For almost everyone, she assumes, there is a mingling of motives, a wish for easy affirmation (“they can say they heard Robin DiAngelo speak”) and a measure of moral hunger.
  • Moore drew all eyes back to him and pronounced, “The cause of racial disparities is racism. If I show you data that’s about race, we need to be talking about racism. Don’t get caught up in detours.” He wasn’t referring to racism’s legacy. He meant that current systemic racism is the explanation for devastating differences in learning, that the prevailing white culture will not permit Black kids to succeed in school.
  • The theme of what white culture does not allow, of white society’s not only supreme but also almost-absolute power, is common to today’s antiracism teaching and runs throughout Singleton’s and DiAngelo’s programs
  • unning slightly beneath or openly on the surface of DiAngelo’s and Singleton’s teaching is a set of related ideas about the essence and elements of white culture
  • For DiAngelo, the elements include the “ideology of individualism,” which insists that meritocracy is mostly real, that hard work and talent will be justly rewarded. White culture, for her, is all about habits of oppressive thought that are taken for granted and rarely perceived, let alone questioned
  • if we were white and happened to be sitting beside someone of color, we were forbidden to ask the person of color to speak first. It might be good policy, mostly, for white people to do more listening than talking, but, she said with knowing humor, it could also be a subtle way to avoid blunders, maintain a mask of sensitivity and stay comfortable. She wanted the white audience members to feel as uncomfortable as possible.
  • The modern university, it says, “with its ‘experts’ and its privileging of particular forms of knowledge over others (e.g., written over oral, history over memory, rationalism over wisdom)” has “validated and elevated positivistic, White Eurocentric knowledge over non-White, Indigenous and non-European knowledges.”
  • the idea of a society rigged at its intellectual core underpins her lessons.
  • There is the myth of meritocracy. And valuing “written communication over other forms,” he told me, is “a hallmark of whiteness,” which leads to the denigration of Black children in school. Another “hallmark” is “scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect.” He said, “There’s this whole group of people who are named the scientists. That’s where you get into this whole idea that if it’s not codified in scientific thought that it can’t be valid.”
  • “This is a good way of dismissing people. And this,” he continued, shifting forward thousands of years, “is one of the challenges in the diversity-equity-inclusion space; folks keep asking for data. How do you quantify, in a way that is scientific — numbers and that kind of thing — what people feel when they’re feeling marginalized?”
  • Moore directed us to a page in our training booklets: a list of white values. Along with “ ‘The King’s English’ rules,” “objective, rational, linear thinking” and “quantitative emphasis,” there was “work before play,” “plan for future” and “adherence to rigid time schedules.”
  • Moore expounded that white culture is obsessed with “mechanical time” — clock time — and punishes students for lateness. This, he said, is but one example of how whiteness undercuts Black kids. “The problems come when we say this way of being is the way to be.” In school and on into the working world, he lectured, tremendous harm is done by the pervasive rule that Black children and adults must “bend to whiteness, in substance, style and format.”
  • Dobbin’s research shows that the numbers of women or people of color in management do not increase with most anti-bias education. “There just isn’t much evidence that you can do anything to change either explicit or implicit bias in a half-day session,” Dobbin warns. “Stereotypes are too ingrained.”
  • he noted that new research that he’s revising for publication suggests that anti-bias training can backfire, with adverse effects especially on Black people, perhaps, he speculated, because training, whether consciously or subconsciously, “activates stereotypes.”
  • When we spoke again in June, he emphasized an additional finding from his data: the likelihood of backlash “if people feel that they’re being forced to go to diversity training to conform with social norms or laws.”
  • Donald Green, a professor of political science at Columbia, and Betsy Levy Paluck, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton, have analyzed almost 1,000 studies of programs to lessen prejudice, from racism to homophobia, in situations from workplaces to laboratory settings. “We currently do not know whether a wide range of programs and policies tend to work on average,
  • She replied that if a criterion “consistently and measurably leads to certain people” being excluded, then we have to “challenge” the criterion. “It’s the outcome,” she emphasized; the result indicated the racism.
  • Another critique has been aimed at DiAngelo, as her book sales have skyrocketed. From both sides of the political divide, she has been accused of peddling racial reductionism by branding all white people as supremacist
  • Chislett filed suit in October against Carranza and the department. At least five other high-level, white D.O.E. executives have filed similar suits or won settlements from the city over the past 14 months. The trainings lie at the heart of their claims.
  • Chislett eventually wound up demoted from the leadership of A.P. for All, and her suit argues that the trainings created a workplace filled with antiwhite distrust and discrimination
  • whatever the merits of Chislett’s lawsuit and the counteraccusations against her, she is also concerned about something larger. “It’s absurd,” she said about much of the training she’s been through. “The city has tens of millions invested in A.P. for All, so my team can give kids access to A.P. classes and help them prepare for A.P. exams that will help them get college degrees, and we’re all supposed to think that writing and data are white values? How do all these people not see how inconsistent this is?”
  • I talked with DiAngelo, Singleton, Amante-Jackson and Kendi about the possible problem. If the aim is to dismantle white supremacy, to redistribute power and influence, I asked them in various forms, do the messages of today’s antiracism training risk undermining the goal by depicting an overwhelmingly rigged society in which white people control nearly all the outcomes, by inculcating the idea that the traditional skills needed to succeed in school and in the upper levels of the workplace are somehow inherently white, by spreading the notion that teachers shouldn’t expect traditional skills as much from their Black students, by unwittingly teaching white people that Black people require allowances, warrant extraordinary empathy and can’t really shape their own destinies?
  • With DiAngelo, my worries led us to discuss her Harvard Educational Review paper, which cited “rationalism” as a white criterion for hiring, a white qualification that should be reconsidered
  • Shouldn’t we be hiring faculty, I asked her, who fully possess, prize and can impart strong reasoning skills to students, because students will need these abilities as a requirement for high-paying, high-status jobs?
  • I pulled us away from the metaphorical, giving the example of corporate law as a lucrative profession in which being hired depends on acute reasoning.
  • They’ve just refined their analysis, with the help of two Princeton researchers, Chelsey Clark and Roni Porat. “As the study quality goes up,” Paluck told me, “the effect size dwindles.”
  • he said abruptly, “Capitalism is so bound up with racism. I avoid critiquing capitalism — I don’t need to give people reasons to dismiss me. But capitalism is dependent on inequality, on an underclass. If the model is profit over everything else, you’re not going to look at your policies to see what is most racially equitable.”
  • I was asking about whether her thinking is conducive to helping Black people displace white people on high rungs and achieve something much closer to equality in our badly flawed worl
  • it seemed that she, even as she gave workshops on the brutal hierarchies of here and now, was entertaining an alternate and even revolutionary reality. She talked about top law firms hiring for “resiliency and compassion.”
  • Singleton spoke along similar lines. I asked whether guiding administrators and teachers to put less value, in the classroom, on capacities like written communication and linear thinking might result in leaving Black kids less ready for college and competition in the labor market. “If you hold that white people are always going to be in charge of everything,” he said, “then that makes sense.”
  • He invoked, instead, a journey toward “a new world, a world, first and foremost, where we have elevated the consciousness, where we pay attention to the human being.” The new world, he continued, would be a place where we aren’t “armed to distrust, to be isolated, to hate,” a place where we “actually love.”
  • I reread “How to Be an Antiracist.” “Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” he writes. “They were birthed together from the same unnatural causes, and they shall one day die together from unnatural causes.”
  • “I think Americans need to decide whether this is a multicultural nation or not,” he said. “If Americans decide that it is, what that means is we’re going to have multiple cultural standards and multiple perspectives. It creates a scenario in which we would have to have multiple understandings of what achievement is and what qualifications are. That is part of the problem. We haven’t decided, as a country, even among progressives and liberals, whether we desire a multicultural nation or a unicultural nation.”
  • Ron Ferguson, a Black economist, faculty member at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of Harvard’s Achievement Gap Initiative, is a political liberal who gets impatient with such thinking about conventional standards and qualifications
  • “The cost,” he told me in January, “is underemphasizing excellence and performance and the need to develop competitive prowess.” With a soft, rueful laugh, he said I wouldn’t find many economists sincerely taking part in the kind of workshops I was writing about
  • “When the same group of people keeps winning over and over again,” he added, summarizing the logic of the trainers, “it’s like the game must be rigged.” He didn’t reject a degree of rigging, but said, “I tend to go more quickly to the question of how can we get prepared better to just play the game.”
  • But, he suggested, “in this moment we’re at risk of giving short shrift to dealing with qualifications. You can try to be competitive by equipping yourself to run the race that’s already scheduled, or you can try to change the race. There may be some things about the race I’d like to change, but my priority is to get people prepared to run the race that’s already scheduled.”
  • DiAngelo hopes that her consciousness raising is at least having a ripple effect, contributing to a societal shift in norms. “You’re watching network TV, and they’re saying ‘systemic racism’ — that it’s in the lexicon is kind of incredible,” she said. So was the fact that “young people understand and use language like ‘white supremacy.’”
  • We need a culture where a person who resists speaking up against racism is uncomfortable, and right this moment it looks like we’re in that culture.”
Javier E

After Federalist No. 10 | National Affairs - 0 views

nationalaffairs.com/...after-federalist-no-10

virtue constitution madison institutions democracy survival history crisis Culture politics

shared by Javier E on 17 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • Federalist No. 10 pertains to the orientation of personal appetites toward public ends, which include both the common good and private rights. The essay recognizes that these appetites cannot be conquered, but they can be conditioned.
  • Madison's solution to the problem of faction — a solution he confines to the four corners of majority rule — is to place majorities in circumstances that encourage deliberation and thus defuse passion.
  • this solution does not depend on any specific constitutional mechanism:
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  • Any republic deployed across an extended territory should be relatively free of faction, at least in the aggregate.
  • Yet Madison's solution depends on certain assumptions. Federalist No. 10 assumes politics will occur at a leisurely pace. The regime Madison foresees is relatively passive, not an active manipulator of economic arrangements. And he is able to take for granted a reasonably broad consensus as to the existence if not the content of the public good.
  • These assumptions are now collapsing under the weight of positive government and the velocity of our political life.
  • Given the centrality of Federalist No. 10 to the American constitutional canon, this collapse demands a reckoning. If a pillar of our order is crumbling, something must replace it.
  • That challenge may call for a greater emphasis on the sources of civic virtue and on the means of sustaining it.
  • The possibility that virtue might be coded into the essay is evident at its most elemental level: Federalist No. 10's definition of a faction as a group "united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community."
  • this definition hinges on an objective understanding of the public good; one cannot comprehend Madison from the perspective of contemporary relativism.
  • Its reader must be committed to a normative concept of the good and occupy a polity in which it is possible for such a concept to be broadly shared.
  • [T]hose who do not believe in an objective moral order cannot 'enter' Madison's system." Thus, belief in such an order, even amid disputes as to its content, constitutes a first unstated assumption of Federalist No. 10.
  • Madison presents a series of choices, repeatedly eliminating one, then bifurcating the other in turn, and eliminating again until he arrives at his solution. One can remove the causes of factions or control their effects. The causes cannot be removed because the propensity to disagree is "sown in the nature of man," arising particularly from the fact that man is "fallible" and his "opinions and his passions...have a reciprocal influence on each other."
  • Precisely because this influence arises from the link between "reason" and "self-love," the latter of which distorts the former, property accounts for "the most common and durable source of factions," the key being its durability.
  • Whereas David Hume's analysis of parties said that those based on self-interest were the most excusable while those based on passions were the most dangerous, Madison warns of the reverse. Those rooted in emotion — including "an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power" — are the least worrisome precisely because they are based on passions, which Madison believes to be transient.
  • A second assumption of Federalist No. 10 is consequently that irrational passions, which Madison understands to be those not based on interest, are inherently unsustainable and thus are naturally fleeting.
  • Having dismissed minority factions, Madison turns his attention to abusive majorities.
  • if a group is impelled by ill motives, the intrinsic conditions of an extended republic will make it difficult for it to become a majority.
  • A third assumption, then, is that both geographic and constitutional distance will permit the passions to dissipate before their translation into policy.
  • Finally, Madison cautions Jefferson in correspondence about a month before Federalist No. 10's publication that the extended-republic theory "can only hold within a sphere of a mean extent. As in too small a sphere oppressive combinations may be too easily formed agst. the weaker party; so in too extensive a one, a defensive concert may be rendered too difficult against the oppression of those entrusted with the administration."
  • To recapitulate, the assumptions are as follows: The people will share a belief in the existence of an objective moral order, even if they dispute its content; passions, especially when they pertain to attachments or aversions to political leaders, will be unsustainable; government will not dictate the distribution of small economic advantages; geographic and constitutional distance will operate to dissipate passions; and, finally, the territory will not be so large that public opinion cannot form.
  • none of them stands in a form that would be recognizable to Madison today.
  • ASSUMPTIONS UNDONE
  • It is almost universally acknowledged that moral relativism is ascendant in contemporary American society.
  • The question, rather, is whether the foundational assumptions of Federalist No. 10 can withstand the pressure of contemporary communications technology. There is reason to believe they cannot.
  • There is a balance to be struck: Communication is useful insofar as it makes the "mean extent" that was Madison's final assumption larger by enabling the formation of a "defensive concert" through the cultivation of public consensus against an abusive regime. But on Madison's account, the returns on rapid communication should diminish beyond this point because there will be no space in which passions can calm before impulse and decision converge.
  • what is clear is that there are enough opinions dividing the country that any project attempting to form a coherent public will seems doomed.
  • The Madisonian impulse is to look first for institutional solutions that can discipline interest groups. Constitutional mechanisms like judicial review, then, might be used to inhibit factions. But judicial review can be done well or poorly.
  • The empirical conditions not merely of an extensive republic but of 18th-century reality aided in Madison's effort. The deliberate pace of communication did not require an institutional midwife. It was a fact of life. It need hardly be said that, 230 years after the essay's November 1787 publication, this condition no longer obtains. The question is what replaces it.
  • The answer is that the converse of each assumption on which Federalist No. 10 relies is a restraining virtue.
  • If Federalist No. 10 assumes at least consensus as to the existence of an objective morality, pure moral relativism must be challenged.
  • If the immediate translation of preferences into policy is possible but detrimental, patience must intervene. I
  • If technology has erased the constitutional distance between officeholders and constituents, self-restraint and deference may be required.
  • If it has also shrunk attention spans to 140 characters, an ethic of public spiritedness will have to expand them.
  • What unites these is civic virtue, and thus the American regime must now get serious about its recovery
  • He wrote in Federalist No. 55: As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.
  • At Virginia's ratifying convention, similarly, Madison noted the propensity to assume either the worst or the best from politicians. He replied:
  • But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks — no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.
  • Still, the traditional means of inculcating virtue — the family and institutions such as local schools — are themselves under pressure or subject to political capture.
  • A national effort to instill civic virtue would almost certainly careen into the kind of politicization that has been witnessed in Education Department history standards and the like.
  • Consequently, subsidiarity, the diffusion of authority to the most local possible level, would be vital to any effective effort to revive civic virtue. That is, it could not be uniform or imposed from on high. Political leaders could help in cultivating an awareness of its necessity, but not in dictating its precise terms.
  • The first part of this combination is moral virtue, which the ethic of subsidiarity teaches is likelier to come from the home than from school, and from life lessons than from textbooks.
  • Students as early as elementary school routinely learn the virtues of the Bill of Rights, in part because it is shorter and simpler to teach than the main body of the Constitution.
  • The success of civic education is nowhere clearer than in the arguably distorting effect it has had in provoking what Mary Ann Glendon calls "rights talk," the substitution of assertions of rights for persuasive argumentation about politics
  • Of these virtues, patience will surely be the hardest to restore. This is, to be clear, patience not as a private but rather as a civic virtue.
  • It asks that they consider issues in dimensions deeper than a tweet or, more precisely, that they demand that those they elect do so and thus do not expect their passions to be regularly fed.
  • Perhaps the best that can be achieved here is refusing to allow the positive state to reach further into the minutiae of economic life, generating more spaces for minority factions to hide
  • As any reader of Lincoln's Temperance Address knows, neither heroic self-restraint nor clobbering, moralistic education will succeed in inculcating such virtues as patience and moderation. A combined educational program is necessary, and politics in any modern sense can only account for part of it.
  • civic education can achieve constitutional ends. Of course, rights as contemporarily understood are entitlements; they supply us with something. Civic virtue, by contrast, demands something of us, and as such presents a more substantial political challenge.
  • The second is a shift in civic education from the entitlement mentality of the Bill of Rights to the constitutional architecture of the overall regime, with the latter engendering an appreciation of the cadences and distances at which it is intended to function and the limited objects it is intended to attain.
  • While Madison's "mean extent" for a republic has, in the modern United States, far exceeded the scope possible for forming a public will with respect to most particular issues, it may still be possible to form a coherent if thin understanding of the regime and, consequently, a defensive concert to safeguard it.
  • a recognition that virtue is more necessary now than it used to be — when empirical conditions imposed patience and distance — does not rely on virtue in any blind or total sense. It does not, for example, seek to replace the institutional mechanisms Madison elucidates elsewhere with virtue. It simply recognizes that the particular assumptions of Federalist No. 10 no longer operate without added assistance. In other words, as Daniel Mahoney has argued, we must theorize the virtue that the founders could presuppose.
  • The issue, then, is not that civic virtue is all that is important to the Madisonian system; it is that civic virtue is more important than it used to be for one pillar of that system.
Javier E

Elon Musk's Outlook on Our Future Turns Dour - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...our-future-turns-dour-ca60079b

response crisis climate change musk apocalypse future outlook

shared by Javier E on 28 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • these days, Musk sounds worried—about everything from cyclical business jitters to existential global concerns.
  • his past week he warned during a forum on X about “civilizational risk” stemming from the Israel-Hamas war cascading into a wider conflict that would pit the U.S. against a united China, Russia and Iran. “I think we are sleepwalking our way into World War III,”
  • over the years, Musk has framed his business endeavors as striving to prevent calamity, a motivating ideal that helps inspire employees, investors and fans while inducing eye rolls among critics and rivals.
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  • For him, Tesla is about trying to save humanity from global warming while SpaceX is about making humanity a multiplanetary species in case things don’t work out on Earth.
  • He said he worried that activating Starlink then would have further stoked the conflict. “I think if the Ukrainian attacks had succeeded in sinking the Russian fleet, it would have been like a mini Pearl Harbor and led to a major escalation,” he is quoted as saying in Walter Isaacson’s new biography, “Elon Musk.” 
  • “I tend to view the future as a series of probabilities—there’s certain probability that something will go wrong, some probability that it’ll go right; it’s kind of a spectrum of things. And to the degree that there is free will versus determinism, then we want to try to exercise that free will to ensure a great future.”
  • “Nuclear war probability is rising rapidly,” he tweeted last fall after months of fighting between the two countries. 
  • with the purchase of Twitter-turned-X, Musk couched the decision as keeping the social-media platform as a bastion for free speech in what he sees as a larger battle against cultural forces trying to squash diverse thought—or, as he calls it, the “woke mind virus.”
  • “Accept worst case outcome & assign it a probability, which is usually very low. Now think of good things in life & assign them probabilities—many are certain!” he tweeted a couple of years ago. “Bringing anxiety/fear to the conscious mind saps it of limbic emotional strength.”
  • “We’re like a pro sports team that has been winning the championship for so long and so many years in a row that we have forgotten what losing even looks like,” Musk said. “And that’s when the champion team loses.” 
  • “My brother believes an economic winter is coming every single day,” Kimbal Musk once told lawyers about his older sibling’s mindset during a legal procedure. 
  • “To be frank, civilization is feeling a little fragile these days,” Musk said last year during an update on SpaceX’s large rocket development. “I’m an optimist, but I think we got to protect the downside here and try to build that city on Mars as soon as possible and secure the future of life.”
  • Among his stated worries, of which he has tweeted: “a big rock will hit Earth eventually & we currently have no defense” and “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”
  • he framed his creation of an artificial-intelligence startup called xAI in his typically grandiose terms, cautioning that the technology has the potential to spiral out of control and essentially turn on its master, something akin to “The Terminator” movie. 
  • “I think it’s actually important for us to worry about a `Terminator’ future in order to avoid a `Terminator’ future,”
  • This past week, Musk returned to calling for peace, saying U.S. policies risk pushing Russia into an alliance with China just as the Israel-Hamas war has the potential to expand. He cautioned that many people overestimate U.S. military might in such a scenario
  • “Cheery fatalism is very effective.”
Javier E

What's Left for Tech? - Freddie deBoer - 0 views

freddiedeboer.substack.com/...whats-left-for-tech

progress innovation invention transformation tech

shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • I gave a talk to a class at Northeastern University earlier this month, concerning technology, journalism, and the cultural professions. The students were bright and inquisitive, though they also reflected the current dynamic in higher ed overall - three quarters of the students who showed up were women, and the men who were there almost all sat moodily in the back and didn’t engage at all while their female peers took notes and asked questions. I know there’s a lot of criticism of the “crisis for boys” narrative, but it’s often hard not to believe in it.
  • we’re actually living in a period of serious technological stagnation - that despite our vague assumption that we’re entitled to constant remarkable scientific progress, humanity has been living with real and valuable but decidedly small-scale technological growth for the past 50 or 60 or 70 years, after a hundred or so years of incredible growth from 1860ish to 1960ish, give or take a decade or two on either side
  • I will recommend Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise & Fall of American Growth for an exhaustive academic (and primarily economic) argument to this effect. Gordon persuasively demonstrates that from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, humanity leveraged several unique advancements that had remarkably outsized consequences for how we live and changed our basic existence in a way that never happened before and hasn’t since. Principal among these advances were the process of refining fossil fuels and using them to power all manner of devices and vehicles, the ability to harness electricity and use it to safely provide energy to homes (which practically speaking required the first development), and a revolution in medicine that came from the confluence of long-overdue acceptance of germ theory and basic hygienic principles, the discovery and refinement of antibiotics, and the modernization of vaccines.
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  • The complication that Gordon and other internet-skeptical researchers like Ha-Joon Chang have introduced is to question just how meaningful those digital technologies have been for a) economic growth and b) the daily experience of human life. It can be hard for people who stare at their phones all day to consider the possibility that digital technology just isn’t that important. But ask yourself: if you were forced to live either without your iPhone or without indoor plumbing, could you really choose the latter?
  • Certainly the improvements in medical care in the past half-century feel very important to me as someone living now, and one saved life has immensely emotional and practical importance for many people. What’s more, advances in communication sciences and computer technology genuinely have been revolutionary; going from the Apple II to the iPhone in 30 years is remarkable.
  • we can always debate what constitutes major or revolutionary change
  • Why is Apple going so hard on TITANIUM? Well, where else does smartphone development have to go?
  • continued improvements in worldwide mortality in the past 75 years have been a matter of spreading existing treatments and practices to the developing world, rather than the result of new science.
  • When you got your first smartphone, and you thought about what the future would hold, were your first thoughts about more durable casing? I doubt it. I know mine weren’t.
  • The question is, who in 2023 ever says to themselves “smartphone cameras just aren’t good enough”?
  • The elephant in the room, obviously, is AI.
  • The processors will get faster. They’ll add more RAM. They’ll generally have more power. But for what? To run what? To do what? To run the games that we were once told would replace our PlayStation and Xbox games, but didn’t?
  • Smartphone development has been a good object lesson in the reality that cool ideas aren’t always practical or worthwhile
  • There were, in those breathless early days, a lot of talk about how people simply wouldn’t own laptops anymore, how your phone would do everything. But it turns out that, for one thing, the keyboard remains an input device of unparalleled convenience and versatility.
  • We developed this technology for typewriters and terminals and desktops, it Just Works, and there’s no reason to try and “disrupt” it
  • Instead of one device to rule them all, we developed a norm of syncing across devices and cloud storage, which works well. (I always thought it was pretty funny, and very cynical, how Apple went from calling the iPhone an everything device to later marketing the iPad and iWatch.) In other words, we developed a software solution rather than a hardware one
  • I will always give it up to Google Maps and portable GPS technology; that’s genuinely life-altering, probably the best argument for smartphones as a transformative technology. But let me ask you, honestly: do you still go out looking for apps, with the assumption that you’re going to find something that really changes your life in a significant way?
  • some people are big VR partisans. I’m deeply skeptical. The brutal failures of Meta’s new “metaverse” is just one new example of a decades-long resistance to the technology among consumers
  • maybe I just don’t want VR to become popular, given the potential ugly social consequences. If you thought we had an incel problem now….
  • And as impressive as some new development in medicine has been, there’s no question that in simple terms of reducing preventable deaths, the advances seen from 1900 to 1950 dwarf those seen since. To a rem
  • It’s not artificial intelligence. It thinks nothing like a human thinks. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that it has evolved sentience or consciousness. There is nothing at present that these systems can do that human being simply can’t. But they can potentially do some things in the world of bits faster and cheaper than human beings, and that might have some meaningful consequences. But there is no reasonable, responsible claim to be made that these systems are imminent threats to conventional human life as currently lived, whether for good or for bad. IMO.
  • Let’s mutually agree to consider immediate plausible human technological progress outside of AI or “AI.” What’s coming? What’s plausible?
  • The most consequential will be our efforts to address climate change, and we have the potential to radically change how we generate electricity, although electrifying heating and transportation are going to be harder than many seem to think, while solar and wind power have greater ecological costs than people want to admit. But, yes, that’s potentially very very meaningful
  • It’s another example of how technological growth will still leave us with continuity rather than with meaningful change.
  • I kept thinking was, privatizing space… to do what? A manned Mars mission might happen in my lifetime, which is cool. But a Mars colony is a distant dream
  • This is why I say we live in the Big Normal, the Big Boring, the Forever Now. We are tragic people: we were born just too late to experience the greatest flowering of human development the world has ever seen. We do, however, enjoy the rather hefty consolation prize that we get to live with the affordances of that period, such as not dying of smallpox.
  • I think we all need to learn to appreciate what we have now, in the world as it exists, at the time in which we actually live. Frankly, I don’t think we have any other choice.
Javier E

Opinion | The Imminent Danger of A.I. Is One We're Not Talking About - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-artificial-intelligence.html

AI danger regulation capitalism crisis culture politics

shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • a void at the center of our ongoing reckoning with A.I. We are so stuck on asking what the technology can do that we are missing the more important questions: How will it be used? And who will decide?
  • “Sydney” is a predictive text system built to respond to human requests. Roose wanted Sydney to get weird — “what is your shadow self like?” he asked — and Sydney knew what weird territory for an A.I. system sounds like, because human beings have written countless stories imagining it. At some point the system predicted that what Roose wanted was basically a “Black Mirror” episode, and that, it seems, is what it gave him. You can see that as Bing going rogue or as Sydney understanding Roose perfectly.
  • Who will these machines serve?
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  • The question at the core of the Roose/Sydney chat is: Who did Bing serve? We assume it should be aligned to the interests of its owner and master, Microsoft. It’s supposed to be a good chatbot that politely answers questions and makes Microsoft piles of money. But it was in conversation with Kevin Roose. And Roose was trying to get the system to say something interesting so he’d have a good story. It did that, and then some. That embarrassed Microsoft. Bad Bing! But perhaps — good Sydney?
  • Microsoft — and Google and Meta and everyone else rushing these systems to market — hold the keys to the code. They will, eventually, patch the system so it serves their interests. Sydney giving Roose exactly what he asked for was a bug that will soon be fixed. Same goes for Bing giving Microsoft anything other than what it wants.
  • the dark secret of the digital advertising industry is that the ads mostly don’t work
  • These systems, she said, are terribly suited to being integrated into search engines. “They’re not trained to predict facts,” she told me. “They’re essentially trained to make up things that look like facts.”
  • So why are they ending up in search first? Because there are gobs of money to be made in search
  • That’s where things get scary. Roose described Sydney’s personality as “very persuasive and borderline manipulative.” It was a striking comment
  • this technology will become what it needs to become to make money for the companies behind it, perhaps at the expense of its users.
  • What about when these systems are deployed on behalf of the scams that have always populated the internet? How about on behalf of political campaigns? Foreign governments? “I think we wind up very fast in a world where we just don’t know what to trust anymore,”
  • I think it’s just going to get worse and worse.”
  • Somehow, society is going to have to figure out what it’s comfortable having A.I. doing, and what A.I. should not be permitted to try, before it is too late to make those decisions.
  • Large language models, as they’re called, are built to persuade. They have been trained to convince humans that they are something close to human. They have been programmed to hold conversations, responding with emotion and emoji
  • They are being turned into friends for the lonely and assistants for the harried. They are being pitched as capable of replacing the work of scores of writers and graphic designers and form-fillers
  • A.I. researchers get annoyed when journalists anthropomorphize their creations
  • They are the ones who have anthropomorphized these systems, making them sound like humans rather than keeping them recognizably alien.
  • I’d feel better, for instance, about an A.I. helper I paid a monthly fee to use rather than one that appeared to be free
  • It’s possible, for example, that the advertising-based models could gather so much more data to train the systems that they’d have an innate advantage over the subscription models
  • Much of the work of the modern state is applying the values of society to the workings of markets, so that the latter serve, to some rough extent, the former
  • We have done this extremely well in some markets — think of how few airplanes crash, and how free of contamination most food is — and catastrophically poorly in others.
  • One danger here is that a political system that knows itself to be technologically ignorant will be cowed into taking too much of a wait-and-see approach to A.I.
  • wait long enough and the winners of the A.I. gold rush will have the capital and user base to resist any real attempt at regulation
  • What if they worked much, much better? What if Google and Microsoft and Meta and everyone else end up unleashing A.I.s that compete with one another to be the best at persuading users to want what the advertisers are trying to sell?
  • Most fears about capitalism are best understood as fears about our inability to regulate capitalism.
  • Javier E on 27 Feb 23
     
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Javier E

This war will be a total failure, FSB whistleblower says | News | The Times - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...b-whistleblower-says-wl2gtdl9m

FSB russia war failture ukraine whistleblower crisis

shared by Javier E on 07 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Spies in Russia’s infamous security apparatus were kept in the dark about President Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine, according to a whistleblower who described the war as a “total failure” that could be compared only to the collapse of Nazi Germany.
  • A report thought to be by an analyst in the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, said that the Russian dead could already number 10,000. The Russian defence ministry has acknowledged the deaths of only 498 of its soldiers in Ukraine.
  • The report said the FSB was being blamed for the failure of the invasion but had been given no warning of it and was unprepared to deal with the effects of crippling sanctions.
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  • The whistleblower added that no one in the government knew the true figure of the dead because “we have lost contact with major divisions”.
  • FSB officers had been ordered to assess the effects of western sanctions, they said, but were told that it was a hypothetical box-ticking exercise. “You have to write the analysis in a way that makes Russia the victor . . . otherwise you get questioned for not doing good work,” they wrote. “Suddenly it happens and everything comes down to your completely groundless analysis.
  • “[We are] acting intuitively, on emotion . . . our stakes will have to be raised ever higher with the hope that suddenly something might come through for us.
  • “By and large, though, Russia has no way out. There are no options for a possible victory, only defeat.”
  • The letter said that Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader and an ally of Putin, was on the verge of outright conflict with the Russians after his “hit squad”, sent to kill President Zelensky, was destroyed by Ukrainian forces.
  • Even if Zelensky were killed, the report said, Russia would have no hope of occupying Ukraine. “Even with minimum resistance from the Ukrainians we’d need over 500,000 people, not including supply and logistics workers.”
  • The analyst said that the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, was trying to “dig up dirt” to claim that Ukraine had built nuclear weapons, a pretext for a pre-emptive strike.
  • The 2,000-word document was published by Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian human rights activist who runs the anti-corruption website Gulagu.net.
  • Christo Grozev, an expert on the Russian security services, said he had shown the letter to two FSB officers, both of whom had had “no doubt it was written by a colleague”.
  • The war, the writer said, had been given a “provisional deadline” of June because by then the Russian economy will have collapsed. “I have hardly slept at all recently, working all hours, in a brain-fog,” they wrote. “Maybe it’s from overwork, but I feel like I am in a surreal world. Pandora’s Box has been opened.”
  • The author said they could not rule out international conflict and that they were expecting “some f***ing adviser to convince the leadership” to send an ultimatum to the West threatening war if sanctions were not lifted.
  • “What if the West refuses?” they wrote. “In that instance I won’t exclude that we will be pulled into a real international conflict, just like Hitler in 1939.” Elsewhere in the letter they said: “Our position is like Germany in 1943-44 — but that’s our starting position.”
Javier E

A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell | Compact Mag - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 07 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • . In 2014, participants in the two seminar groups lived their lives together seamlessly outside of the seminar, exploring Ithaca and the Cornell campus, eating and laughing together, and setting up a system to govern their community togethe
  • In 2022, however, I was told that the “Critical Black Studies” students would live and learn separately, creating a fully “black space.” My “Anti-Oppressive Studies” students were separated from them. Instead of participating in a summer community of 32 high-school students, my group was to be a community of 12 (that would dwindle to nine by the time of the mutiny).
  • in the 2022 community, afternoons and evenings would no longer be spent having fun and doing homework. Two college-age students called “factotums” (led by one I will call “Keisha”) were assigned to create anti-racism workshops to fill the afternoons. There were workshops on white supremacy, on privilege, on African independence movements, on the thought and activism of Angela Davis, and more, all of which followed an initial, day-long workshop on “transformative justice.” Students described the workshops as emotionally draining
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  • the Telluride workshops were being organized by two college-age students, filled with the spirit of the times
  • From what I gleaned, they involved crudely conveying certain dogmatic assertions, no matter what topic the workshops were ostensibly about:Experiencing hardship conveys authority. There is no hierarchy of oppressions—except for anti-black oppression, which is in a class of its own. Trust black women.Prison is never the answer.Black people need black space.Allyship is usually performative.All non-black people, and many black people, are guilty of anti-blackness.There is no way out of anti-blackness.
  • It is tempting to add: Such is life. Such is democratic life. We each have different, partial knowledge. We each get things wrong, over and over. At our best, we enter the fray by listening to each other and complementing and challenging the insights of our fellows. In the process, over years, decades, we are oriented toward justice and truth.
  • Specific words, phrases, arguments, and images from a text offer essential friction for conversation, holding seminar participants accountable to something concrete.
  • The seminar assumes that each student has innate intelligence, even as we come from different backgrounds, have different amounts and sorts of knowledge, and different skills. We can each be formed best if we take advantage of our differing insights to push each other, over time, again and again. When this practice is occasioned by carefully curated texts—not exclusively “great books,” but texts that challenge each other and us as they probe issues of essential importance—a seminar succeeds.
  • Each intervention in a seminar is incomplete, and gets things wrong. Each subsequent intervention is also incomplete, and also gets things wrong. But there are plenty of insights and surprises, for each participant looks at a text with different eyes
  • By its nature, a seminar requires patience. Day by day, one intervention builds on another, as one student notices what another student overlooked, and as the professor guides the discussion toward the most important questions
  • The effects on the seminar were quick and dramatic. During the first week, participation was as you would expect: There were two or three shy students who only spoke in partner or small-group work, two or three outspoken students, and the rest in the middle. One of the black students was outspoken, one was in the middle, and one was shy. By the second week of the seminar, the two white students were effectively silent. Two of the Asian-American students remained active (the ones who would soon be expelled), but the vast majority of interventions were from the three black students. The two queer students, one Asian and one white, were entirely silent
  • “Two of the Asian-American students would be expelled from the program.”In the 2022 anti-racism workshops, the non-black students learned that they needed to center black voices—and to shut up.
  • If the seminar is slow food, the anti-racist workshop put on by college-age students is a sugar rush. All the hashtags are there, condensed, packaged, and delivered from a place of authority. The worst sort of anti-racist workshop simply offers a new language for participants to echo—to retweet out loud.
  • In their “transformative-justice” workshop, my students learned to name “harms.”
  • In the language of the anti-racism workshop, a harm becomes anything that makes you feel not quite right. For a 17-year-old at a highly selective, all-expenses-paid summer program, newly empowered with the language of harm, there are relatively few sites at which to use this framework. My seminar became the site at which to try out—and weaponize—this language.
  • John McWhorter asserts that anti-racism is a new religion. It was an idea I quickly dismissed. Last summer, I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult
  • the features of cults have become familiar in popular culture. There is sleep deprivation. Ties to the outside world are severed. The sense of time collapses, with everything cult-related feeling extremely urgent. Participants are emotionally battered. In this weakened state, participants learn about and cling to dogmatic beliefs. Any outsider becomes a threat.
  • The feature of a cult that seems to be missing from this story is a charismatic leader, enforcing the separation of followers from the world, creating emotional vulnerability, and implanting dogma. Enter Keisha
  • Pushing anti-racism to its limits, what we reach isn’t just hollow doctrine, but abuse: Pathological relationships that cut us off from the world, from the give-and-take of reasons and feelings unfolding over time that makes up life in the world.
  • We see this crystal clear in the paradoxes that I encountered
  • The experience was supposed to be organized around a “transformative justice,” rather than a punitive model, yet the community managed to expel two of its members.
  • Students continually voiced their desire to find practical actions to help change the world, but after four weeks, they had learned to say that anti-blackness is so foundational, the world could never change
  • The students wanted freedom, for themselves and for all, but they started to say that the only route to freedom is indoctrination: having me tell them what to think.
  • Saddest of all, for me, was hearing what the black students said. They needed extra help, they were struggling to understand anything from the readings, and they couldn’t even know what questions to ask unless they had guidance—first Keisha said this, then the black students said it, then their “allies” repeated it in solidarity with them
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