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liamhudgings

Lawrence Lessig: How to Repair Our Democracy | JSTOR Daily - 0 views

daily.jstor.org/ig-how-to-repair-our-democracy

US politics Policy

shared by liamhudgings on 24 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • Lessig has been an outspoken critic of the Electoral College, campaign financing, and gerrymandering, and is a frequent commentator on these issues.
  • In his book, Lessig proposes some solutions to these problems, including penalties on states that suppress voters, incentives to end gerrymandering, and “civic juries,” which would be a system to have representative bodies make decisions on behalf of constituents.
  • I don’t think there was any “golden age.” At any time we could have written a book about how institutions have produced unrepresentativeness.
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  • So you might step back and say Republicans should be happier with this system overall than Democrats are. But grassroots Republicans are as frustrated and disillusioned with this and as grassroots democrats
  • The problem is the way the system amplifies the power of the extremists.
  • if you think about the consequence of the inequality in the Senate and the consequence of the inequality in funding, those two things together pretty clearly benefit Republicans. When you think about voter suppression, the most dramatic examples that we see are examples that benefit Republicans. But the gerrymandering example is not benefiting either Republicans or Democrats.
  • We could change the way campaigns are funded, or at least the business model of how campaigns are funded, by adopting some version of public funding for national campaigns.
  • The second thing Congress can do quite easily is, using its power under the Constitution, it can ban partisan gerrymandering in the states.
  • The hardest problem to change, constitutionally, is the electoral college. I think that there’s that interpretation of the power of the states to allocate their electors proportionally at a fractional level. I think that’s constitutionally possible.
  • We’re not going to solve that, in the sense that we’re going to get to a place where we all know the same stuff. We need to think about solving it without trying to get everybody to the right place. We need alternatives to everyone being in the right place.
  • That’s why I talked about things like the civic juries that can help people decide issues
  • We should be really concerned that we fix the underlying causes of this, so we don’t produce a weakening of the commitment of the public to our democracy.
Javier E

An Ancient Guide to the Good Life | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...-susan-sauve-meyer-book-review

aristotle ethics life rules principles judgment phronesis practice

shared by Javier E on 05 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • What’s striking about AITA is the language in which it states its central question: you’re asked not whether I did the right thing but, rather, what sort of person I’m being.
  • We would have a different morality, and an impoverished one, if we judged actions only with those terms of pure evaluation, “right” or “wrong,” and judged people only “good” or “bad.”
  • , if Aristotle’s ethics is to be sold as a work of what we call self-help, we have to ask: How helpful is it?
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  • Our vocabulary of commendation and condemnation is perpetually changing, but it has always relied on “thick” ethical terms, which combine description and evaluation.
  • “How to flourish” was one such topic, “flourishing” being a workable rendering of Aristotle’s term eudaimonia. We might also translate the term in the usual way, as “happiness,” as long as we suspend some of that word’s modern associations; eudaimonia wasn’t something that waxed and waned with our moods
  • For Aristotle, ethics was centrally concerned with how to live a good life: a flourishing existence was also a virtuous one.
  • “famously terse, often crabbed in their style.” Crabbed, fragmented, gappy: it can be a headache trying to match his pronouns to the nouns they refer to. Some of his arguments are missing crucial premises; others fail to spell out their conclusions.
  • Aristotle is obscure in other ways, too. His highbrow potshots at unnamed contemporaries, his pop-cultural references, must have tickled his aristocratic Athenian audience. But the people and the plays he referred to are now lost or forgotten. Some readers have found his writings “affectless,” stripped of any trace of a human voice, or of a beating human heart.
  • Flourishing is the ultimate goal of human life; a flourishing life is one that is lived in accord with the various “virtues” of the character and intellect (courage, moderation, wisdom, and so forth); a flourishing life also calls for friendships with good people and a certain measure of good fortune in the way of a decent income, health, and looks.
  • much of what it says can sound rather obvious
  • Virtue is not just about acting rightly but about feeling rightly. What’s best, Aristotle says, is “to have such feelings at the right time, at the right objects and people, with the right goal, and in the right manner.” Good luck figuring out what the “right time” or object or manner is.
  • Virtue is a state “consisting in a mean,” Aristotle maintains, and this mean “is defined by reference to reason, that is to say, to the reason by reference to which the prudent person would define it.
  • The phrase “prudent person” here renders the Greek phronimos, a person possessed of that special quality of mind which Aristotle called “phronesis.” But is Aristotle then saying that virtue consists in being disposed to act as the virtuous person does? That sounds true, but trivially so.
  • it helps to reckon with the role that habits of mind play in Aristotle’s account. Meyer’s translation of “phronesis” is “good judgment,” and the phrase nicely captures the combination of intelligence and experience which goes into acquiring it, along with the difficulty of reducing it to a set of explicit principles that anyone could apply mechanically, like an algorithm.
  • “good judgment” is an improvement on the old-fashioned and now misleading “prudence”; it’s also less clunky than another standby, “practical wisdom.”
  • The enormous role of judgment in Aristotle’s picture of how to live can sound, to modern readers thirsty for ethical guidance, like a cop-out. Especially when they might instead pick up a treatise by John Stuart Mill and find an elegantly simple principle for distinguishing right from wrong, or one by Kant, in which they will find at least three. They might, for that matter, look to Jordan Peterson, who conjures up as many as twelve.
  • the question of how to flourish could receive a gloomy answer from Aristotle: it may be too late to start trying. Why is that? Flourishing involves, among other things, performing actions that manifest virtues, which are qualities of character that enable us to perform what Aristotle calls our “characteristic activity
  • But how do we come to acquire these qualities of character, or what Meyer translates as “dispositions”? Aristotle answers, “From our regular practice.”
  • In a passage missing from Meyer’s ruthless abridgment, Aristotle warns, “We need to have been brought up in noble habits if we are to be adequate students of noble and just things. . . . For we begin from the that; if this is apparent enough to us, we can begin without also knowing why. Someone who is well brought up has the beginnings, or can easily acquire them.”
  • Aristotle suggests, more generally, that you should identify the vices you’re susceptible to and then “pull yourself away in the opposite direction, since by pulling hard against one fault, you get to the mean (as when straightening out warped planks).
  • Sold as a self-help manual in a culture accustomed to gurus promulgating “rules for living,” Aristotle’s ethics may come as a disappointment. But our disappointment may tell us more about ourselves than it does about Aristotle.
  • Michael Oakeshott wrote that “nobody supposes that the knowledge that belongs to the good cook is confined to what is or may be written down in the cookery book.” Proficiency in cooking is, of course, a matter of technique
  • My tutor’s fundamental pedagogical principle was that to teach a text meant being, at least for the duration of the tutorial, its most passionate champion. Every smug undergraduate exposé of a fallacy would be immediately countered with a robust defense of Aristotle’s reasoning.
  • “How to read Aristotle? Slowly.”
  • I was never slow enough. There was always another nuance, another textual knot to unravel
  • Sometimes we acquire our skills by repeatedly applying a rule—following a recipe—but when we succeed what we become are not good followers of recipes but good cooks. Through practice, as Aristotle would have said, we acquire judgment.
  • What we were doing with this historical text wasn’t history but philosophy. We were reading it not for what it might reveal about an exotic culture but for the timelessly important truths it might contain—an attitude at odds with the relativism endemic in the rest of the humanities.
  • There is no shortcut to understanding Aristotle, no recipe. You get good at reading him by reading him, with others, slowly and often. Regular practice: for Aristotle, it’s how you get good generally.
  • “My parents taught me the difference between right and wrong,” he said, “and I can’t think what more there is to say about it.” The appropriate response, and the Aristotelian one, would be to agree with the spirit of the remark. There is such a thing as the difference between right and wrong. But reliably telling them apart takes experience, the company of wise friends, and the good luck of having been well brought u
  • we are all Aristotelians, most of the time, even when forces in our culture briefly persuade us that we are something else. Ethics remains what it was to the Greeks: a matter of being a person of a certain sort of sensibility, not of acting on “principles,” which one reserves for unusual situations of the kind that life sporadically throws up
  • That remains a truth about ethics even when we’ve adopted different terms for describing what type of person not to be: we don’t speak much these days of being “small-souled” or “intemperate,” but we do say a great deal about “douchebags,” “creeps,” and, yes, “assholes.
  • In one sense, it tells us nothing that the right thing to do is to act and feel as the person of good judgment does. In another sense, it tells us virtually everything that can be said at this level of generality.
  • If self-help means denying the role that the perceptions of others play in making us who we are, if it means a set of rules for living that remove the need for judgment, then we are better off without it.
  • Aristotle had little hope that a philosopher’s treatise could teach someone without much experience of life how to make the crucial ethical distinctions. We learn to spot an “asshole” from living; how else
  • when our own perceptions falter, we continue to do today exactly what Aristotle thought we should do. He asserts, in another significant remark that doesn’t make Meyer’s cut, that we should attend to the words of the old and experienced at least as much as we do to philosophical proofs: “these people see correctly because experience has given them their eye.”
  • Is it any surprise that the Internet is full of those who need help seeing rightly? Finding no friendly neighborhood phronimos to provide authoritative advice, you defer instead to the wisdom of an online community.
  • “The self-made man,” Oakeshott wrote, “is never literally self-made, but depends upon a certain kind of society and upon a large unrecognized inheritance.”
  • It points us in the right direction: toward the picture of a person with a certain character, certain habits of thinking and feeling, a certain level of self-knowledge and knowledge of other people.
  • We have long lived in a world desperate for formulas, simple answers to the simple question “What should I do?”
  • the algorithms, the tenets, the certificates are all attempts to solve the problem—which is everybody’s problem—of how not to be an asshole. Life would be a lot easier if there were rules, algorithms, and life hacks solving that problem once and for all. There aren’t.
  • At the heart of the Nicomachean Ethics is a claim that remains both edifying and chastening: phronesis doesn’t come that easy. Aristotle devised a theory that was vague in just the right places, one that left, intentionally, space to be filled in by life. 
  • Twenty-four centuries later, we’re still guided by the approach toward ethical life that Aristotle exemplified, one in which the basic question is not what we do but who we are
  • The Internet has no shortage of moralists and moralizers, but one ethical epicenter is surely the extraordinary, addictive subreddit called “Am I the Asshole?,” popularly abbreviated AITA
Javier E

Where Environmentalists Went Wrong - Yascha Mounk - 0 views

yaschamounk.substack.com/...e-environmentalists-went-wrong

backlash nuclear culture politics policy maximalism moderation compromise focus

shared by Javier E on 30 Sep 24 - No Cached
  • what is wrong with a particular kind of increasingly common environmental regulation: one that is short on impact but big on virtue signaling.
  • Some American states have banned cafés and restaurants from offering their customers single-use plastic straws.Many jurisdictions around the world now require grocery stores to charge their customers for plastic bags.The EU has phased out incandescent light bulbs.The EU has also banned plastic bottles with removable caps, leading to the introduction of bottles that don’t always properly close once they have been opened.Though not yet implemented, some prominent organizations and activists have called for gas stoves to be banned.
  • These seemingly disparate examples share an important commonality: They are a form of policy intervention that achieves small improvements for the environment at the cost of a salient deterioration in quality of life or a large loss of political goodwill. For that reason, each of these interventions is likely to backfire.
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  • policy makers and environmentalists need to get smart about political capital: how to build it and, most importantly, how to avoid wasting it.
  • Environmentalist policies don’t just need to be well-intentioned or feel virtuous; they need to be effective in accomplishing their stated goals.
  • Cumulatively, they risk giving citizens the impression that those in charge care more about forcing them to change their lifestyle than about solving real problems
  • If we want to win the fight against climate change, we need to get serious about achieving the biggest possible environmental impact for the smallest possible price in quality of life and political goodwill
  • Low-impact policies that demand small, if frequent and highly salient, sacrifices feel virtuous. But they deplete a disproportionate amount of political capital.
  • It’s time for a new paradigm. Call it “effective environmentalism.”
  • This is driven by a deeper sense, widespread in the environmental movement, that the fight against climate change is coterminous with the fight to remake the world from scratch. To many, social ills like racism, sexism and even capitalism itself are facets of one interrelated system of oppression. A victory against any one facet requires a victory against all.
  • Naomi Klein’s bestselling This Changes Everything is a classic of the genre. Tellingly, the first change she admonishes her readers to make concerns their lifestyle: “For us high consumers,” she writes, preventing the dire future that awaits humanity requires “changing how we live.”
  • Even more tellingly, Klein maintains that making these changes will require nothing short of the abolition of capitalism. To her, the right way to understand this historical moment is as “a battle between capitalism and the planet.”
  • it turns out that you can’t scare and shame people into taking action on climate change. If anything, this political moment seems to be characterized by a mix of apathy and backlash. In the United States, a recent poll of young voters reveals that only 6 percent of them consider “environmental issues” their top priority, the same number who say their top priority is immigration (economic issues easily eclipse both).
  • As recently as four years ago, Germany’s Green Party was polling around 25 percent of the vote, and looked likely to lead a federal government for the first time in the country’s history. Now, its support is down to about ten percent, with the decline among young voters especially dramatic. Opinions about the party in the electorate give a clue about the source of its troubles:
  • In a recent exit poll conducted during the state election in Brandenburg, 71 percent of voters complained that the party “has insufficient concern with the economy and creating jobs.” 66 percent complained that the party “wants to tell us how to live.”
  • The environment, like most areas of public policy, is the realm of painful trade-offs. Efforts to fix the climate crisis will involve a significant degree of expense and inconvenience. For both moral and strategic reasons, the goal of environmental regulation should therefore be to accomplish important goals while minimizing these costs insofar as possible
  • effective environmentalism consists in actions or policies which maximize positive impact on the environment while minimizing both the price for humans’ quality of life and the depletion of a collective willingness to adopt other impactful measures.
  • most of the time, such a definition is less helpful than the spirit which animates it. And that spirit is best captured in a more informal register. So rather than focusing on the definition, effective environmentalists should evaluate any proposed action, policy or regulation by asking themselves three questions:
  • . How big a positive impact (if any) will the proposed action have?
  • In politics, it’s easy to obsess over whatever happens to be salient. If some question touches a cultural nerve, or has given rise to major political battles in the past, its stakes can come to seem existential—even if not much hinges on it in the real world. This is part of what makes it so tempting to obsess about such things as banning plastic straws or detachable bottle caps (which have little impact) rather than tax incentives or cap-and-trade schemes (which would have a vastly larger impact)
  • 2. To what extent will the proposed action lead to a deterioration in quality of life?
  • this also gives them reason to care about the negative consequences that environmental policies may have for human welfare. So the extent of the trade-off needs to be a key consideration. The bigger an adverse impact a particular policy has on people’s quality of life, the more skeptical we should be about implementing it.
  • For the most part, people who worry about climate change and other forms of environmental degradation are motivated by a concern about human welfare. They worry about the negative consequences that runaway climate change would have for humankind
  • 3. To what extent will the proposed action lead to backlash?
  • Political capital is limited. In most democracies, a clear majority of the population now cares about climate change to some extent. But this genuine concern competes with, and tends to be eclipsed by, voters’ concern about economic priorities like the availability of good jobs
  • This context makes it all the more important for voters to feel that governments and environmental groups are focusing on impactful steps that leave them in charge of decisions about their own lives; otherwise, support for any environmental policy is likely to polarize along partisan lines, or even to crater across the board. 
  • When I coined the term “effective environmentalism,” I was of course inspired by an earlier movement: “effective altruism.”
  • for all of the problems with effective altruism, the original insight on which it is built is hard to contest. People spend billions of dollars on charitable contributions every year. Much of that money goes to building new gyms at fancy universities or upgrading the local cat shelter. Wouldn’t it be better to direct donors’ altruistic instincts to more impactful endeavors, potentially saving the lives of thousands of people?
  • Something similar holds true for the environmental movement. Many activists are more focused on interventions that feel virtuous than on ones that will make a real difference. As a result, much of the movement has proven ineffective
  • Effective altruists pride themselves in adopting principles and mental heuristics that are supposed to help them assess what to do in a more rational way. These include not judging an idea based on who says it; reserving judgment about an idea until you’ve analyzed both its benefits and its costs; paying attention to the relative weight of different priorities; and being skeptical about forms of symbolic politics that don’t lead to real change
  • these norms make a lot of sense, and have relevance for environmentalists focused on having real impact.
  • So, to figure out what policies can make the biggest difference in the fight against climate change, and actually win the political capital to put these into practice, effective environmentalists should:
  • Assess Policies on the Basis of their Impact, not Their Perceived Purity:
  • Prioritize Actions that Solve the Biggest Problems:
  • It would be a mistake to subsume all environmental concerns to the fight against climate change. People have reasons to care about living in a clean environment or alleviating animal suffering even if it does not help to protect us from the threat posed by climate change
  • There are a variety of environmental goals, and it makes sense to recognize this plurality of goods. And yet, those who care about environmental goals need to have a clear sense of relative priorities. Some goals are more important than others
  • effective environmentalists should unflinchingly give precedence to the most important goals.
  • Be Willing to Build Cross-Ideological Coalitions:
  • Activists increasingly pride themselves in being “intersectional.” Since they believe that various forms of oppression intersect, people who want to participate in the fight against one form of injustice must also get on board with a set of progressive assumptions about how to combat other forms of perceived injustice
  • This can raise the entrance ticket for anyone who wants to get involved in fighting for an environmental cause; distract major environmental organizations from fighting for their stated goals; and make powerful players unwilling to forge tactical coalitions with partners whose broader worldview they disdai
  • Effective environmentalists should reject this purist instinct, making common cause with anyone who favors impactful action irrespective of the views they may hold about unrelated issues.
  • Put People in Charge of Their Own Lives:
  • Effective environmentalists should fight to transition as much of the economy as possible to forms of energy that do not emit carbon. This will require broad political support and, yes, real financial trade-offs
  • effective environmentalists should avoid overly intrusive regulations about how people then go about using that energy. If consumers are willing to pay an elevated price for the pleasure of sitting on an outside terrace in the late fall, it shouldn’t be for the government or for environmental activists to decide that a different use of energy is more morally righteous.
  • No-Bullshit Environmentalism
  • For the last decades, the environmentalist movement has tried its hand at fear-mongering.
  • this kind of rhetoric is factually misleading and politically disastrous.
  • This is why I favor a different approach. This approach centers the serious risks posed by climate change. But it also insists that humans are capable of meeting this moment with a mix of collective action and ingenuity.
  • With the right investments and regulations, we can reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the impact of a warming planet. And while this transition will exact considerable costs, it need not make us poor or require us to abstain from putting plentiful energy to its many miraculous uses.
  • at a start, the mix of policies advocated by effective environmentalists is likely to include: a commitment to creating energy abundance while transitioning towards a low-carbon economy; significant investment in both renewable and nuclear energy; regulatory action to raise the price of fossil-fuels; the adoption of genetically-modified crops that can withstand a changing climate; public and private investment to mitigate the effects of the warming that is already underway; the development and adoption of new technologies that can capture carbon; and a willingness to do serious research on speculative ideas, such as marine cloud brightening, that have the potential to avert worst-case outcomes in the case of a climate emergency. 
  • In life as in economics, trade-offs are real. But in the context of a growing economy, we should be able to bear those costs without suffering any overall reduction in human affluence or well-being. If we adopt the principles of effective environmentalism and take energetic action, our future shines bright.
Javier E

The problem for poor, white kids is that a part of their culture has been destroyed | P... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...eir-culture-has-been-destroyed

white poor working class UK solidarity culture education

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • the headline grabber in the paper from the liberal thinktank CentreForum concerns ethnicity: the serial losers after 28 years of marketisation, testing, a centralised curriculum and decentralised control of schools are poor white kids.
  • “During the early years, white British pupils are among the highest achievers,” say the authors. “By the end of secondary school however, those white British pupils are overtaken by 10 other ethnic groups to just below average, when compared with other ethnicities.”
  • Thatcherite culture celebrated the chancers and the semi-crooks: people who had been shunned in the solidaristic working-class towns became the economic heroes of the new model – the security-firm operators, the contract-cleaning slave drivers; the outright hoodlums operating in plain sight as the cops concentrated on breaking strikes.
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  • So what is it? In short, it is their lives.
  • It was not always the case that ethnic-minority children did better than white English ones, but the reason why some of them do now is pretty obvious: their problem – racism – is defined; their language skills tend to be well-developed; their culture is one of aspiration; they have social and religious institutions that promote cohesion.
  • By contrast, the problem of poor white kids cannot be properly defined: not in the language of freemarket capitalism, at least. It has nothing to do with being “overtaken” – still less with any reverse discrimination against them.
  • It is simply that a specific part of their culture has been destroyed. A culture based on work, rising wages, strict unspoken rules against disorder, obligatory collaboration and mutual aid. It all had to go, and the means of destroying it was the long-term unemployment millions of people had to suffer in the 1980s.
  • If the country is populated with low-achieving, inarticulate white kids it is something that happens between the year they stop being toddlers and the year they start being Neets (Not in Education, Employment or Training).
  • the great discovery of the modern right was that you only have to do this once. Suppress paternalism and solidarity for one generation and you create multigenerational ignorance and poverty. Convert Labour to the idea that wealth will trickle down, and to attacks on the undeserving poor, and you remove the means even to acknowledge the problem, let alone solve it.
  • Thatcherism didn’t just crush unions: alone that would not have been enough to produce this spectacular mismatch between aspiration and delivery in the education system. It crushed a story.
  • And what the most successful Chinese, Indian and white Irish children probably have – although you would need more research than offered here to give this assertion rigour – is a clear and compelling story.
  • In my first week at university, myself and a few other working-class kids on our course were quizzed by our middle-class peers: “You must be exceptionally bright to get here, against these odds,” was the theme. We were incredulous. We had been headed for university since we picked up Ladybird books. Without solidarity and knowledge, we are just scum, is the lesson trade unionism and social democracy taught the working-class kids of the 1960s; and Methodism and Catholicism taught the same.
  • To put right the injustice revealed by the CentreForum report requires us to put aside racist fantasies about “preferential treatment” for ethnic minorities; if their kids are preferentially treated, it is by their parents and their communities – who arm them with narratives and skills for overcoming economic disadvantage.
  • educational reforms alone will barely scratch the surface. We have to find a form of economics that – without nostalgia or racism – allows the working population to define, once again, its own values, its own aspirations, its own story.
Javier E

'Traditional Masculinity' Can Be Harmful, Psychologists Find - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...580006

masculine men mental health culture

shared by Javier E on 11 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • This week, the American Psychological Association, the country’s largest professional organization of psychologists, did something for men that it’s done for many other demographic groups in the past: It introduced a set of detailed guidelines for clinicians who treat men and boys.
  • The guidelines’ development began in 2005, and has included input from more than 200 physicians and researchers.
  • “men are struggling,” he says. “The recession has hit men harder than women, men are less likely to graduate from college, men are more likely to complete suicide than women.” To help patients, the guidelines assert, psychologists need to understand what’s making their lives untenable. For a lot of men, it might be the harsh cultural expectations that can come along with manhood itself.
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  • What exactly “traditional masculinity” means depends on who’s talking about it.
  • In science, the term refers to a specific set of traits and behaviors that are considered culturally appropriate for manhood, some of which can become harmful in certain cases. When that happens, it’s “an extreme form of stoicism, dominance, violence, and aggression,” according to McDermott. But he’s quick to note that in many situations, more moderate expressions of those traits, along with other masculine ideals, are totally healthy and advantageous to people of all genders.
  • In popular culture, meanwhile, “traditional masculinity” has a fuzzier, broader meaning, which generally encapsulates whatever the person reading or saying it associates with being a man
  • When an article in the APA’s Monitor magazine characterized traditional masculinity as “on the whole, harmful,” writers for conservative media outlets including National Review and Fox News saw it as an attack
  • “As we survey a culture that is rapidly attempting to enforce norms hostile to traditional masculinity, are men flourishing?” asks the columnist David French. “And if men are struggling more the farther we move from those traditional norms, is the answer to continue denying and suppressing a boy’s essential nature?”
  • “It’s positioning traditional masculinity as a problem to be solved,” he says. “If you’re a man who holds traditional values, why would you go see a psychologist when the starting point is that traditional masculinity is the problem?
  • “Part of the problem among men is that one of the markers of traditional masculinity is independence and rejection of help.”
  • McDermott says that the guidelines are “meant to protect men, because studies indicate that men receive quite a lot of gender bias in therapy. These are stereotypes that men experience, and when therapists buy into them, that can cause serious problems.” For example, if a male patient wants to address problems with violence or aggression, seeing a therapist who believes men are resigned to those traits probably won’t get him the help he needs
  • “precarious masculinity.” In American culture, Vandello points out, manhood generally has to be earned and maintained through actions in a way that womanhood doesn’t. That constant test is where harm can fester, he says: “Proving your manhood can be done through risky, aggressive, and violent behavior. And another response is the shaming and bullying of men who don’t fit the masculine mold.”
  • McDermott hopes that the guidelines help doctors see their male patients as a little more human. “We have a chance here to understand men as multidimensional individuals,” he says. “There are many different ways of being masculine.”
Javier E

The Equality Conundrum | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...the-equality-conundrum

equality philosophy political theory history politics

shared by Javier E on 26 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The philosopher Ronald Dworkin considered this type of parental conundrum in an essay called “What Is Equality?,” from 1981. The parents in such a family, he wrote, confront a trade-off between two worthy egalitarian goals. One goal, “equality of resources,” might be achieved by dividing the inheritance evenly, but it has the downside of failing to recognize important differences among the parties involved.
  • Another goal, “equality of welfare,” tries to take account of those differences by means of twisty calculations.
  • Take the first path, and you willfully ignore meaningful facts about your children. Take the second, and you risk dividing the inheritance both unevenly and incorrectly.
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  • In 2014, the Pew Research Center asked Americans to rank the “greatest dangers in the world.” A plurality put inequality first, ahead of “religious and ethnic hatred,” nuclear weapons, and environmental degradation. And yet people don’t agree about what, exactly, “equality” means.
  • One side argues that the city should guarantee procedural equality: it should insure that all students and families are equally informed about and encouraged to study for the entrance exam. The other side argues for a more direct, representation-based form of equality: it would jettison the exam, adopting a new admissions system designed to produce student bodies reflective of the city’s demography
  • In the past year, for example, New York City residents have found themselves in a debate over the city’s élite public high schools
  • The complexities of egalitarianism are especially frustrating because inequalities are so easy to grasp. C.E.O.s, on average, make almost three hundred times what their employees make; billionaire donors shape our politics; automation favors owners over workers; urban economies grow while rural areas stagnate; the best health care goes to the richest.
  • It’s not just about money. Tocqueville, writing in 1835, noted that our “ordinary practices of life” were egalitarian, too: we behaved as if there weren’t many differences among us. Today, there are “premiere” lines for popcorn at the movies and five tiers of Uber;
  • Inequality is everywhere, and unignorable. We’ve diagnosed the disease. Why can’t we agree on a cure?
  • In a book based on those lectures, “One Another’s Equals: The Basis of Human Equality,” Waldron points out that people are also marked by differences of skill, experience, creativity, and virtue. Given such consequential differences, he asks, in what sense are people “equal”?
  • According to the Declaration of Independence, it is “self-evident” that all men are created equal. But, from a certain perspective, it’s our inequality that’s self-evident.
  • More than twenty per cent of Americans, according to a 2015 poll, agree: they believe that the statement “All men are created equal” is false.
  • In Waldron’s view, though, it’s not a binary choice; it’s possible to see people as equal and unequal simultaneously. A society can sort its members into various categories—lawful and criminal, brilliant and not—while also allowing some principle of basic equality to circumscribe its judgments and, in some contexts, override them
  • Egalitarians like Dworkin and Waldron call this principle “deep equality.” It’s because of deep equality that even those people who acquire additional, justified worth through their actions—heroes, senators, pop stars—can still be considered fundamentally no better than anyone else.
  • In the course of his search, he explores centuries of intellectual history. Many thinkers, from Cicero to Locke, have argued that our ability to reason is what makes us equals.
  • Other thinkers, including Immanuel Kant, have cited our moral sense.
  • Some philosophers, such as Jeremy Bentham, have suggested that it’s our capacity to suffer that equalizes us
  • Waldron finds none of these arguments totally persuasive.
  • In various religious traditions, he observes, equality flows not just from broad assurances that we are all made in God’s image but from some sense that everyone is the protagonist in a saga of error, realization, and redemption: we’re equal because God cares about how things turn out for each of us.
  • Waldron himself is taken by Hannah Arendt’s related concept of “natality,” the notion that what each of us share is having been born as a “newcomer,” entering into history with “the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting.”
  • equality may be not a self-evident fact about human beings but a human-made social construction that we must choose to put into practice.
  • In the end, Waldron concludes that there is no “small polished unitary soul-like substance” that makes us equal; there’s only a patchwork of arguments for our deep equality, collectively compelling but individually limited.
  • Equality is a composite idea—a nexus of complementary and competing intuitions.
  • The blurry nature of equality makes it hard to solve egalitarian dilemmas from first principles. In each situation, we must feel our way forward, reconciling our conflicting intuitions about what “equal” means.
  • The communities that have the easiest time doing that tend to have some clearly defined, shared purpose. Sprinters competing in a hundred-metre dash have varied endowments and train in different conditions; from a certain perspective, those differences make every race unfair.
  • By embracing an agreed-upon theory of equality before the race, the sprinters can find collective meaning in the ranked inequalities that emerge when it ends
  • Perhaps because necessity is so demanding, our egalitarian commitments tend to rest on a different principle: luck.
  • “Some people are blessed with good luck, some are cursed with bad luck, and it is the responsibility of society—all of us regarded collectively—to alter the distribution of goods and evils that arises from the jumble of lotteries that constitutes human life as we know it.” Anderson, in an influential coinage, calls this outlook “luck egalitarianism.”
  • This sort of artisanal egalitarianism is comparatively easy to arrange. Mass-producing it is what’s hard. A whole society can’t get together in a room to hash things out. Instead, consensus must coalesce slowly around broad egalitarian principles.
  • No principle is perfect; each contains hidden dangers that emerge with time. Many people, in contemplating the division of goods, invoke the principle of necessity: the idea that our first priority should be the equal fulfillment of fundamental needs. The hidden danger here becomes apparent once we go past a certain point of subsistence.
  • a core problem that bedevils egalitarianism—what philosophers call “the problem of expensive tastes.”
  • The problem—what feels like a necessity to one person seems like a luxury to another—is familiar to anyone who’s argued with a foodie spouse or roommate about the grocery bil
  • The problem is so insistent that a whole body of political philosophy—“prioritarianism”—is devoted to the challenge of sorting people with needs from people with wants
  • the line shifts as the years pass. Medical procedures that seem optional today become necessities tomorrow; educational attainments that were once unusual, such as college degrees, become increasingly indispensable with time
  • Some thinkers try to tame the problem of expensive tastes by asking what a “normal” or “typical” person might find necessary. But it’s easy to define “typical” too narrowly, letting unfair assumptions influence our judgment
  • an odd feature of our social contract: if you’re fired from your job, unemployment benefits help keep you afloat, while if you stop working to have a child you must deal with the loss of income yourself. This contradiction, she writes, reveals an assumption that “the desire to procreate is just another expensive taste”; it reflects, she argues, the sexist presumption that “atomistic egoism and self-sufficiency” are the human norm. The word “necessity” suggests the idea of a bare minimum. In fact, it sets a high bar. Clearing it may require rethinking how society functions.
Javier E

The South's Fight for White Supremacy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lost-cause-meacham.html

south white supremacy confederacy Lost Cause ideology racism history

shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • After the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, he turned to a new project, publishing, in 1866, a book titled “The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates.”
  • “No one can read aright the history of America,” Pollard wrote, “unless in the light of a North and a South.” For all its bloodshed, he argued, the Civil War “did not decide negro equality; it did not decide negro suffrage; it did not decide State Rights. … And these things which the war did not decide, the Southern people will still cling to, still claim and still assert them in their rights and views.”
  • Here, then, was the ur-text of the Lost Cause, of the mythology of a South that believed its pro-slavery war aims were just, its fate tragic and its white-supremacist worldview worth defending
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  • To Pollard, the Southern side had fought nobly for noble ends. “The war has left the South its own memories, its own heroes, its own tears, its own dead,” he wrote. “Under these traditions, sons will grow to manhood, and lessons sink deep that are learned from the lips of widowed mothers.” Pollard declared that a “‘war of ideas,’” a new war that “the South wants and insists upon perpetrating,” was now unfolding.
  • The South, Pollard wrote, “must wear the crown of thorns before she can assume that of victory.”
  • in “The Lost Cause Regained,” published in 1868. Pollard wrote that he was “profoundly convinced that the true cause fought for in the late war has not been ‘lost’ immeasurably or irrevocably, but is yet in a condition to be ‘regained’ by the South on ultimate issues of the political contest.” The issue was no longer slavery, but white supremacy, which Pollard described as the “true cause of the war” and the “true hope of the South.”
  • The Civil War, then, was to be fought perennially
  • And in many ways it unfolds still. The defiance of federal will from Reconstruction to our own day, the insistence on states’ rights in the face of the quest for racial justice and the revanchist reverence for Confederate emblems and figures are illuminated by engaging with the ethos of which Pollard so effectively wrote.
  • In this recasting of reality, the Civil War was a family quarrel in which both sides were doing the best they could according to their lights.
  • David W. Blight detailed how a white narrative of the war took hold, North and South, after Appomattox. As early as 1874 the historian William Wells Brown had said, “There is a feeling all over this country that the Negro has got about as much as he ought to have.”
  • White Americans chose to celebrate one another without reference to the actual causes and implications of the war. “The memory of slavery, emancipation and the 14th and 15th Amendments never fit well into a developing narrative in which the Old and New South were romanticized and welcomed back to a new nationalism,” Blight wrote, “and in which devotion alone made everyone right, and no one truly wrong
  • To recall that the war had been about what Lincoln had called a “new birth of freedom” meant acknowledging the nation’s failings on race. So white Americans decided to recall something else.
  • In such a view, it had all been a struggle between two reasonable parties over the nature of the Constitution; slavery was incidental
  • By minimizing race in the story of the war, white Americans felt free to minimize race not only in the past but in the present — leading, as Blight wrote, to “the denigration of Black dignity and the attempted erasure of emancipation from the national narrative of what the war had been about.”
  • in 1965, at a time when white Southerners were still deeply engaged in preserving Pollard’s Lost Cause, the editors of Ebony magazine published a special edition that became a book: “The White Problem in America.
  • “The problem of race in America, insofar as that problem is related to packets of melanin in men’s skins, is a white problem,” not a Black one, Lerone Bennett Jr., a historian and senior editor at Ebony, wrote in the volume’s opening essay. “And in order to solve that problem we must seek its source, not in the Negro but in the white American (in the process by which he was educated, in the needs and complexes he expresses through racism) and in the structure of the white community (in the power arrangements and the illicit uses of racism in the scramble for scarce values: power, prestige, income).”
  • King’s piece, “The Un-Christian Christian,” argued that white religious believers “too often … have responded to Christ emotionally, but they have not responded to His teachings morally.”
  • Baldwin closes the book by imagining the interior monologue of the white American who has been raised on the false history of the Lost Cause. “Do not blame me,” Baldwin wrote of the white “stammering” in his conscience. “I was not there. I did not do it. My history has nothing to do with Europe or the slave trade. Anyway, it was your chiefs who sold you to me.
  • on the same day … in the most private chamber of his heart always, he, the white man, remains proud of that history for which he does not wish to pay, and from which, materially, he has profited so much” — a history manipulated to make the unspeakable palatable.
Javier E

Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...omsday-prep-for-the-super-rich

doomsday Collapse rich prepper history crisis Culture politics

shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”
  • In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”
  • Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”
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  • When Marvin Liao, a former Yahoo executive who is now a partner at 500 Startups, a venture-capital firm, considered his preparations, he decided that his caches of water and food were not enough. “What if someone comes and takes this?” he asked me. To protect his wife and daughter, he said, “I don’t have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery.”
  • Over the years, Huffman has become increasingly concerned about basic American political stability and the risk of large-scale unrest. He said, “Some sort of institutional collapse, then you just lose shipping—that sort of stuff.” (Prepper blogs call such a scenario W.R.O.L., “without rule of law.”) Huffman has come to believe that contemporary life rests on a fragile consensus. “I think, to some degree, we all collectively take it on faith that our country works, that our currency is valuable, the peaceful transfer of power—that all of these things that we hold dear work because we believe they work. While I do believe they’re quite resilient, and we’ve been through a lot, certainly we’re going to go through a lot more.”
  • Justin Kan heard the first inklings of survivalism among his peers. Kan co-founded Twitch, a gaming network that was later sold to Amazon for nearly a billion dollars. “Some of my friends were, like, ‘The breakdown of society is imminent. We should stockpile food,’ ” he said. “I tried to. But then we got a couple of bags of rice and five cans of tomatoes. We would have been dead if there was actually a real problem.” I asked Kan what his prepping friends had in common. “Lots of money and resources,” he said. “What are the other things I can worry about and prepare for? It’s like insurance.”
  • Long before the financial crisis became front-page news, early signs appeared in user comments on Reddit. “People were starting to whisper about mortgages. They were worried about student debt. They were worried about debt in general. There was a lot of, ‘This is too good to be true. This doesn’t smell right.’ ” He added, “There’s probably some false positives in there as well, but, in general, I think we’re a pretty good gauge of public sentiment. When we’re talking about a faith-based collapse, you’re going to start to see the chips in the foundation on social media first.”
  • How did a preoccupation with the apocalypse come to flourish in Silicon Valley, a place known, to the point of cliché, for unstinting confidence in its ability to change the world for the better?Those impulses are not as contradictory as they seem. Technology rewards the ability to imagine wildly different futures,
  • “When you do that, it’s pretty common that you take things ad infinitum, and that leads you to utopias and dystopias,” he said. It can inspire radical optimism—such as the cryonics movement, which calls for freezing bodies at death in the hope that science will one day revive them—or bleak scenarios.
  • In 2012, National Geographic Channel launched “Doomsday Preppers,” a reality show featuring a series of Americans bracing for what they called S.H.T.F. (when the “shit hits the fan”). The première drew more than four million viewers, and, by the end of the first season, it was the most popular show in the channel’s history.
  • A survey commissioned by National Geographic found that forty per cent of Americans believed that stocking up on supplies or building a bomb shelter was a wiser investment than a 401(k).
  • Johnson wishes that the wealthy would adopt a greater “spirit of stewardship,” an openness to policy change that could include, for instance, a more aggressive tax on inheritance. “Twenty-five hedge-fund managers make more money than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined,” he said. “Being one of those twenty-five doesn’t feel good. I think they’ve developed a heightened sensitivity.”
  • In an e-mail, Wong told me, “Most people just assume improbable events don’t happen, but technical people tend to view risk very mathematically.” He continued, “The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this . . . is a logical thing to do.”
  • I asked Hoffman to estimate what share of fellow Silicon Valley billionaires have acquired some level of “apocalypse insurance,” in the form of a hideaway in the U.S. or abroad. “I would guess fifty-plus per cent,” he said, “but that’s parallel with the decision to buy a vacation home. Human motivation is complex, and I think people can say, ‘I now have a safety blanket for this thing that scares me
  • In building Reddit, a community of thousands of discussion threads, into one of the most frequently visited sites in the world, Huffman has grown aware of the way that technology alters our relations with one another, for better and for worse. He has witnessed how social media can magnify public fear. “It’s easier for people to panic when they’re together,” he said, pointing out that “the Internet has made it easier for people to be together,” yet it also alerts people to emerging risks.
  • “I’ve heard this theme from a bunch of people,” Hoffman said. “Is the country going to turn against the wealthy? Is it going to turn against technological innovation? Is it going to turn into civil disorder?”
  • The C.E.O. of another large tech company told me, “It’s still not at the point where industry insiders would turn to each other with a straight face and ask what their plans are for some apocalyptic event.” He went on, “But, having said that, I actually think it’s logically rational and appropriately conservative.”
  • “Our food supply is dependent on G.P.S., logistics, and weather forecasting,” he said, “and those systems are generally dependent on the Internet, and the Internet is dependent on D.N.S.”—the system that manages domain names. “Go risk factor by risk factor by risk factor, acknowledging that there are many you don’t even know about, and you ask, ‘What’s the chance of this breaking in the next decade?’ Or invert it: ‘What’s the chance that nothing breaks in fifty years?’ ”
  • “Anyone who’s in this community knows people who are worried that America is heading toward something like the Russian Revolution,” he told me recently.
  • “People know the only real answer is, Fix the problem,” he said. “It’s a reason most of them give a lot of money to good causes.” At the same time, though, they invest in the mechanics of escape. He recalled a dinner in New York City after 9/11 and the bursting of the dot-com bubble: “A group of centi-millionaires and a couple of billionaires were working through end-of-America scenarios and talking about what they’d do. Most said they’ll fire up their planes and take their families to Western ranches or homes in other countries.”
  • By January, 2015, Johnson was sounding the alarm: the tensions produced by acute income inequality were becoming so pronounced that some of the world’s wealthiest people were taking steps to protect themselves. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Johnson told the audience, “I know hedge-fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway.”
  • many worry that, as artificial intelligence takes away a growing share of jobs, there will be a backlash against Silicon Valley, America’s second-highest concentration of wealth.
  • The gap is widening further. In December, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a new analysis, by the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, which found that half of American adults have been “completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s.” Approximately a hundred and seventeen million people earn, on average, the same income that they did in 1980, while the typical income for the top one per cent has nearly tripled.
  • r the silo and finished construction in December, 2012, at a cost of nearly twenty million dollars. He created twelve private apartments: full-floor units were advertised at three million dollars; a half-floor was half the price. He has sold every unit, except one for himself, he said
  • Johnson said, “If we had a more equal distribution of income, and much more money and energy going into public school systems, parks and recreation, the arts, and health care, it could take an awful lot of sting out of society. We’ve largely dismantled those things.”
  • “Why do people who are envied for being so powerful appear to be so afraid?” Johnson asked. “What does that really tell us about our system?” He added, “It’s a very odd thing. You’re basically seeing that the people who’ve been the best at reading the tea leaves—the ones with the most resources, because that’s how they made their money—are now the ones most preparing to pull the rip cord and jump out of the plane.”
  • The movement received another boost from the George W. Bush Administration’s mishandling of Hurricane Katrina. Neil Strauss, a former Times reporter, who chronicled his turn to prepping in his book “Emergency,” told me, “We see New Orleans, where our government knows a disaster is happening, and is powerless to save its own citizens.”
  • Tyler Allen, a real-estate developer in Lake Mary, Florida, who told me that he paid three million dollars for one of Hall’s condos. Allen said he worries that America faces a future of “social conflict” and government efforts to deceive the public. He suspects that the Ebola virus was allowed to enter the country in order to weaken the population. When I asked how friends usually respond to his ideas, he said, “The natural reaction that you get most of the time is for them to laugh, because it scares them.” But, he added, “my credibility has gone through the roof. Ten years ago, this just seemed crazy that all this was going to happen: the social unrest and the cultural divide in the country, the race-baiting and the hate-mongering.”
  • d G. Mitchell, Jr., a professor emeritus at Oregon State University, who spent twelve years studying survivalism, said, “During the Reagan era, we heard, for the first time in my life, and I’m seventy-four years old, from the highest authorities in the land that government has failed you, the collective institutional ways of solving problems and understanding society are no good. People said, ‘O.K., it’s flawed. What do I do now?’ ”
  • That gap is comparable to the gap between average incomes in the U.S. and the Democratic Republic of Congo,
  • If a silo in Kansas is not remote or private enough, there is another option. In the first seven days after Donald Trump’s election, 13,401 Americans registered with New Zealand’s immigration authorities, the first official step toward seeking residency—more than seventeen times the usual rate. The New Zealand Herald reported the surge beneath the headline “Trump Apocalypse.”
  • In fact, the influx had begun well before Trump’s victory. In the first ten months of 2016, foreigners bought nearly fourteen hundred square miles of land in New Zealand, more than quadruple what they bought in the same period the previous year
  • Much as Switzerland once drew Americans with the promise of secrecy, and Uruguay tempted them with private banks, New Zealand offers security and distance. In the past six years, nearly a thousand foreigners have acquired residency there under programs that mandate certain types of investment of at least a million dollars.
  • The difference between New Zealand and the U.S., to a large extent, is that people who disagree with each other can still talk to each other about it here. It’s a tiny little place, and there’s no anonymity. People have to actually have a degree of civility.”
  • Jack Matthews, an American who is the chairman of MediaWorks, a large New Zealand broadcaster, told me, “I think, in the back of people’s minds, frankly, is that, if the world really goes to shit, New Zealand is a First World country, completely self-sufficient, if necessary—energy, water, food. Life would deteriorate, but it would not collapse.”
  • Top to bottom, the island chain runs roughly the distance between Maine and Florida, with half the population of New York City
  • In a recent World Bank report, New Zealand had supplanted Singapore as the best country in the world to do business.
  • “Kiwis used to talk about the ‘tyranny of distance,’ ” Wall said, as we crossed town in his Mercedes convertible. “Now the tyranny of distance is our greatest asset.”
  • American clients have also sought strategic advice. “They’re asking, ‘Where in New Zealand is not going to be long-term affected by rising sea levels?’ ”
  • In particular, the attention of American survivalists has generated resentment. In a discussion about New Zealand on the Modern Survivalist, a prepper Web site, a commentator wrote, “Yanks, get this in your heads. Aotearoa NZ is not your little last resort safe haven.”
  • An American hedge-fund manager in his forties—tall, tanned, athletic—recently bought two houses in New Zealand and acquired local residency. He agreed to tell me about his thinking, if I would not publish his name. Brought up on the East Coast, he said, over coffee, that he expects America to face at least a decade of political turmoil, including racial tension, polarization, and a rapidly aging population. “The country has turned into the New York area, the California area, and then everyone else is wildly different in the middle,” he said. He worries that the economy will suffer if Washington scrambles to fund Social Security and Medicare for people who need it. “Do you default on that obligation? Or do you print more money to give to them? What does that do to the value of the dollar? It’s not a next-year problem, but it’s not fifty years away, either.”
  • He said, “This is no longer about a handful of freaks worried about the world ending.” He laughed, and added, “Unless I’m one of those freaks.”
  • Fear of disaster is healthy if it spurs action to prevent it. But élite survivalism is not a step toward prevention; it is an act of withdrawal.
  • Philanthropy in America is still three times as large, as a share of G.D.P., as philanthropy in the next closest country, the United Kingdom. But it is now accompanied by a gesture of surrender, a quiet disinvestment by some of America’s most successful and powerful people. Faced with evidence of frailty in the American project, in the institutions and norms from which they have benefitted, some are permitting themselves to imagine failure. It is a gilded despair.
  • As Huffman, of Reddit, observed, our technologies have made us more alert to risk, but have also made us more panicky; they facilitate the tribal temptation to cocoon, to seclude ourselves from opponents, and to fortify ourselves against our fears, instead of attacking the sources of them. Justin Kan, the technology investor who had made a halfhearted effort to stock up on food, recalled a recent phone call from a friend at a hedge fund. “He was telling me we should buy land in New Zealand as a backup. He’s, like, ‘What’s the percentage chance that Trump is actually a fascist dictator? Maybe it’s low, but the expected value of having an escape hatch is pretty high.’ 
  • As Americans withdraw into smaller circles of experience, we jeopardize the “larger circle of empathy,” he said, the search for solutions to shared problems. “The easy question is, How do I protect me and mine? The more interesting question is, What if civilization actually manages continuity as well as it has managed it for the past few centuries? What do we do if it just keeps on chugging?”
Javier E

Cognitive Biases and the Human Brain - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...565775

cognitive bias psychology research knowledge bias

shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • If I had to single out a particular bias as the most pervasive and damaging, it would probably be confirmation bias. That’s the effect that leads us to look for evidence confirming what we already think or suspect, to view facts and ideas we encounter as further confirmation, and to discount or ignore any piece of evidence that seems to support an alternate view
  • At least with the optical illusion, our slow-thinking, analytic mind—what Kahneman calls System 2—will recognize a Müller-Lyer situation and convince itself not to trust the fast-twitch System 1’s perception
  • The whole idea of cognitive biases and faulty heuristics—the shortcuts and rules of thumb by which we make judgments and predictions—was more or less invented in the 1970s by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman
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  • versky died in 1996. Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for the work the two men did together, which he summarized in his 2011 best seller, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Another best seller, last year’s The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis, tells the story of the sometimes contentious collaboration between Tversky and Kahneman
  • Another key figure in the field is the University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler. One of the biases he’s most linked with is the endowment effect, which leads us to place an irrationally high value on our possessions.
  • In an experiment conducted by Thaler, Kahneman, and Jack L. Knetsch, half the participants were given a mug and then asked how much they would sell it for. The average answer was $5.78. The rest of the group said they would spend, on average, $2.21 for the same mug. This flew in the face of classic economic theory, which says that at a given time and among a certain population, an item has a market value that does not depend on whether one owns it or not. Thaler won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics.
  • “The question that is most often asked about cognitive illusions is whether they can be overcome. The message … is not encouraging.”
  • Kahneman and others draw an analogy based on an understanding of the Müller-Lyer illusion, two parallel lines with arrows at each end. One line’s arrows point in; the other line’s arrows point out. Because of the direction of the arrows, the latter line appears shorter than the former, but in fact the two lines are the same length.
  • In this context, his pessimism relates, first, to the impossibility of effecting any changes to System 1—the quick-thinking part of our brain and the one that makes mistaken judgments tantamount to the Müller-Lyer line illusion
  • that’s not so easy in the real world, when we’re dealing with people and situations rather than lines. “Unfortunately, this sensible procedure is least likely to be applied when it is needed most,” Kahneman writes. “We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available.”
  • Because biases appear to be so hardwired and inalterable, most of the attention paid to countering them hasn’t dealt with the problematic thoughts, judgments, or predictions themselves
  • Is it really impossible, however, to shed or significantly mitigate one’s biases? Some studies have tentatively answered that question in the affirmative.
  • what if the person undergoing the de-biasing strategies was highly motivated and self-selected? In other words, what if it was me?
  • I met with Kahneman
  • Over an apple pastry and tea with milk, he told me, “Temperament has a lot to do with my position. You won’t find anyone more pessimistic than I am.”
  • Confirmation bias shows up most blatantly in our current political divide, where each side seems unable to allow that the other side is right about anything.
  • “I see the picture as unequal lines,” he said. “The goal is not to trust what I think I see. To understand that I shouldn’t believe my lying eyes.” That’s doable with the optical illusion, he said, but extremely difficult with real-world cognitive biases.
  • he most effective check against them, as Kahneman says, is from the outside: Others can perceive our errors more readily than we can.
  • “slow-thinking organizations,” as he puts it, can institute policies that include the monitoring of individual decisions and predictions. They can also require procedures such as checklists and “premortems,”
  • A premortem attempts to counter optimism bias by requiring team members to imagine that a project has gone very, very badly and write a sentence or two describing how that happened. Conducting this exercise, it turns out, helps people think ahead.
  • “My position is that none of these things have any effect on System 1,” Kahneman said. “You can’t improve intuition.
  • Perhaps, with very long-term training, lots of talk, and exposure to behavioral economics, what you can do is cue reasoning, so you can engage System 2 to follow rules. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t provide cues. And for most people, in the heat of argument the rules go out the window.
  • Kahneman describes an even earlier Nisbett article that showed subjects’ disinclination to believe statistical and other general evidence, basing their judgments instead on individual examples and vivid anecdotes. (This bias is known as base-rate neglect.)
  • over the years, Nisbett had come to emphasize in his research and thinking the possibility of training people to overcome or avoid a number of pitfalls, including base-rate neglect, fundamental attribution error, and the sunk-cost fallacy.
  • When Nisbett has to give an example of his approach, he usually brings up the baseball-phenom survey. This involved telephoning University of Michigan students on the pretense of conducting a poll about sports, and asking them why there are always several Major League batters with .450 batting averages early in a season, yet no player has ever finished a season with an average that high.
  • about half give the right answer: the law of large numbers, which holds that outlier results are much more frequent when the sample size (at bats, in this case) is small. Over the course of the season, as the number of at bats increases, regression to the mean is inevitabl
  • When Nisbett asks the same question of students who have completed the statistics course, about 70 percent give the right answer. He believes this result shows, pace Kahneman, that the law of large numbers can be absorbed into System 2—and maybe into System 1 as well, even when there are minimal cues.
  • Nisbett’s second-favorite example is that economists, who have absorbed the lessons of the sunk-cost fallacy, routinely walk out of bad movies and leave bad restaurant meals uneaten.
  • we’ve tested Michigan students over four years, and they show a huge increase in ability to solve problems. Graduate students in psychology also show a huge gain.”
  • , “I know from my own research on teaching people how to reason statistically that just a few examples in two or three domains are sufficient to improve people’s reasoning for an indefinitely large number of events.”
  • isbett suggested another factor: “You and Amos specialized in hard problems for which you were drawn to the wrong answer. I began to study easy problems, which you guys would never get wrong but untutored people routinely do … Then you can look at the effects of instruction on such easy problems, which turn out to be huge.”
  • Nisbett suggested that I take “Mindware: Critical Thinking for the Information Age,” an online Coursera course in which he goes over what he considers the most effective de-biasing skills and concepts. Then, to see how much I had learned, I would take a survey he gives to Michigan undergraduates. So I did.
  • he course consists of eight lessons by Nisbett—who comes across on-screen as the authoritative but approachable psych professor we all would like to have had—interspersed with some graphics and quizzes. I recommend it. He explains the availability heuristic this way: “People are surprised that suicides outnumber homicides, and drownings outnumber deaths by fire. People always think crime is increasing” even if it’s not.
  • When I finished the course, Nisbett sent me the survey he and colleagues administer to Michigan undergrads
  • It contains a few dozen problems meant to measure the subjects’ resistance to cognitive biases
  • I got it right. Indeed, when I emailed my completed test, Nisbett replied, “My guess is that very few if any UM seniors did as well as you. I’m sure at least some psych students, at least after 2 years in school, did as well. But note that you came fairly close to a perfect score.”
  • In 2006, seeking to prevent another mistake of that magnitude, the U.S. government created the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (iarpa), an agency designed to use cutting-edge research and technology to improve intelligence-gathering and analysis. In 2011, iarpa initiated a program, Sirius, to fund the development of “serious” video games that could combat or mitigate what were deemed to be the six most damaging biases: confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, the bias blind spot (the feeling that one is less biased than the average person), the anchoring effect, the representativeness heuristic, and projection bias (the assumption that everybody else’s thinking is the same as one’s own).
  • For his part, Nisbett insisted that the results were meaningful. “If you’re doing better in a testing context,” he told me, “you’ll jolly well be doing better in the real world.”
  • The New York–based NeuroLeadership Institute offers organizations and individuals a variety of training sessions, webinars, and conferences that promise, among other things, to use brain science to teach participants to counter bias. This year’s two-day summit will be held in New York next month; for $2,845, you could learn, for example, “why are our brains so bad at thinking about the future, and how do we do it better?”
  • Nevertheless, I did not feel that reading Mindware and taking the Coursera course had necessarily rid me of my biases
  • One of the most important ingredients is what Tetlock calls “the outside view.” The inside view is a product of fundamental attribution error, base-rate neglect, and other biases that are constantly cajoling us into resting our judgments and predictions on good or vivid stories instead of on data and statistics
  • most promising are a handful of video games. Their genesis was in the Iraq War
  • Philip E. Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and his wife and research partner, Barbara Mellers, have for years been studying what they call “superforecasters”: people who manage to sidestep cognitive biases and predict future events with far more accuracy than the pundits
  • Together with collaborators who included staff from Creative Technologies, a company specializing in games and other simulations, and Leidos, a defense, intelligence, and health research company that does a lot of government work, Morewedge devised Missing. Some subjects played the game, which takes about three hours to complete, while others watched a video about cognitive bias. All were tested on bias-mitigation skills before the training, immediately afterward, and then finally after eight to 12 weeks had passed.
  • he said he saw the results as supporting the research and insights of Richard Nisbett. “Nisbett’s work was largely written off by the field, the assumption being that training can’t reduce bias,
  • “The literature on training suggests books and classes are fine entertainment but largely ineffectual. But the game has very large effects. It surprised everyone.”
  • even the positive results reminded me of something Daniel Kahneman had told me. “Pencil-and-paper doesn’t convince me,” he said. “A test can be given even a couple of years later. But the test cues the test-taker. It reminds him what it’s all about.”
  • Morewedge told me that some tentative real-world scenarios along the lines of Missing have shown “promising results,” but that it’s too soon to talk about them.
  • In the future, I will monitor my thoughts and reactions as best I can
Javier E

How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...nology-wrecks-the-middle-class

economics employment trends technology middle-class

shared by Javier E on 25 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • the productivity of American workers — those lucky enough to have jobs — has risen smartly
  • the United States still has two million fewer jobs than before the downturn, the unemployment rate is stuck at levels not seen since the early 1990s and the proportion of adults who are working is four percentage points off its peak in 2000.
  • Do “smart machines” threaten us with “long-term misery,” as the economists Jeffrey D. Sachs and Laurence J. Kotlikoff prophesied earlier this year?
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Economists have historically rejected what we call the “lump of labor” fallacy: the supposition that an increase in labor productivity inevitably reduces employment because there is only a finite amount of work to do. While intuitively appealing, this idea is demonstrably false.
  • Labor-saving technological change necessarily displaces workers performing certain tasks — that’s where the gains in productivity come from — but over the long run, it generates new products and services that raise national income and increase the overall demand for labor.
  • The multi-trillionfold decline in the cost of computing since the 1970s has created enormous incentives for employers to substitute increasingly cheap and capable computers for expensive labor.
  • Computers excel at “routine” tasks: organizing, storing, retrieving and manipulating information, or executing exactly defined physical movements in production processes. These tasks are most pervasive in middle-skill jobs
  • Logically, computerization has reduced the demand for these jobs, but it has boosted demand for workers who perform “nonroutine” tasks that complement the automated activities
  • At one end are so-called abstract tasks that require problem-solving, intuition, persuasion and creativity.
  • On the other end are so-called manual tasks, which require situational adaptability, visual and language recognition, and in-person interaction.
  • Computerization has therefore fostered a polarization of employment, with job growth concentrated in both the highest- and lowest-paid occupations, while jobs in the middle have declined.
  • overall employment rates have largely been unaffected in states and cities undergoing this rapid polarization.
  • So computerization is not reducing the quantity of jobs, but rather degrading the quality of jobs for a significant subset of workers. Demand for highly educated workers who excel in abstract tasks is robust, but the middle of the labor market, where the routine task-intensive jobs lie, is sagging.
  • Spurred by growing demand for workers performing abstract job tasks, the payoff for college and professional degrees has soared; despite its formidable price tag, higher education has perhaps never been a better investment.
  • The good news, however, is that middle-education, middle-wage jobs are not slated to disappear completely. While many middle-skill jobs are susceptible to automation, others demand a mixture of tasks that take advantage of human flexibility
  • we predict that the middle-skill jobs that survive will combine routine technical tasks with abstract and manual tasks in which workers have a comparative advantage — interpersonal interaction, adaptability and problem-solving.
  • this category includes numerous jobs for people in the skilled trades and repair: plumbers; builders; electricians; heating, ventilation and air-conditioning installers; automotive technicians; customer-service representatives; and even clerical workers who are required to do more than type and file
  • Lawrence F. Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, memorably called those who fruitfully combine the foundational skills of a high school education with specific vocational skills the “new artisans.”
  • The outlook for workers who haven’t finished college is uncertain, but not devoid of hope. There will be job opportunities in middle-skill jobs, but not in the traditional blue-collar production and white-collar office jobs of the past
  • we expect to see growing employment among the ranks of the “new artisans”: licensed practical nurses and medical assistants; teachers, tutors and learning guides at all educational levels; kitchen designers, construction supervisors and skilled tradespeople of every variety; expert repair and support technicians; and the many people who offer personal training and assistance, like physical therapists, personal trainers, coaches and guides
Javier E

Milton Friedman, Unperson - NYTimes.com - 0 views

krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/...milton-friedman-unperson

friedman macroeconomics history monetary economics great depression

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Friedman was an avid free-market advocate, who insisted that the market, left to itself, could solve almost any problem. Yet he was also a macroeconomic realist, who recognized that the market definitely did not solve the problem of recessions and depressions.
  • At a fundamental level, however, this was an inconsistent position: if markets can go so wrong that they cause Great Depressions, how can you be a free-market true believer on everything except macro? And as American conservatism moved ever further right, it had no room for any kind of interventionism, not even the sterilized, clean-room interventionism of Friedman’s monetarism.
Javier E

Championing Environment, Francis Takes Aim at Global Capitalism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ts-favored-path-to-change.html

climate change Pope Francis capitalism carbon trade

shared by Javier E on 19 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Francis’ embrace of the issue of climate change, and his broader critique of global capitalism, stem from his signature economic concern: eradicating poverty.
  • In the encyclical, Francis writes of “the intimate relationship between the poor and the fragility of the planet,” and says, “Both everyday experience and scientific research show that the gravest effects of all attacks on the environment are suffered by the poorest.”
  • He added, “As the effects of climate change worsen, we know that escaping poverty will become even more difficult.”
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  • “The pope’s ideas will be jarring to a modern reader at first. He says that people should not ascribe to the market magical qualities that can solve all problems.”
  • “Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it,” the pope wrote. “At one extreme, we find those who doggedly uphold the myth of progress and tell us that ecological problems will solve themselves simply with the application of new technology and without any need for ethical considerations or deep change.”
  • “He’s rather brilliantly brought back a concept that has been lost for 30 years or so, since the beginning of the Reagan administration — he says profit-making can’t be the sole criteria for decision-making,
  • While the pope’s arguments against markets are likely to play poorly in Washington, they could play well in Latin American nations, especially Brazil. That nation, one of the world’s largest polluters, has a majority Roman Catholic population and has resisted devising an aggressive climate change policy, in part because of its struggles with poverty.
  • The pope said several times that developed economies owed a debt to poor nations. “A true ‘ecological debt’ exists, particularly between the global north and south, connected to commercial imbalances with effects on the environment, and the disproportionate use of natural resources by certain countries over long periods of time,”
katyshannon

Who are the winners and losers of the COP21's climate deal? - CBS News - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/...-the-cop21-climate-change-deal

winners cop climate deal cbs news crisis history Politics economics

shared by katyshannon on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • "The problem's not solved because of this accord, but make no mistake, the Paris agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis," the president said late Saturday in a speech from the White House's Cabinet Room. "It creates the mechanism, the architecture, for us to continually tackle this problem in an effective way."
  • But who benefits from the new "architecture" the accord creates? And what will the deal cost for others?
  • On its face, the plan agreed to on Saturday affects just about every nation. It requires countries to limit the rise in global average temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. It also sets an even more ambitious goal to slow the warming further -- down to just 1.5 degrees Celsius. (In the years since global industrialization, the world's temperature has already risen 1 degree Celsius.)
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  • To achieve this goal, countries that signed on to the agreement promised that they would focus on cultivating clean, renewable energy sources and shift from the use of fossil fuels. They will also be required to report on their progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions every five years.
  • The deal also commits countries to deliver $100 billion a year in aid for developing countries by 2020, with a promise to increase financing in the future.
  • In a preamble, the deal doubles down on a pledge made six years ago, that richer, industrialized countries will contribute at least $100 billion of aid a year to poorer nations to help them battle the effects of climate change by 2020. It also promises that countries will consider increases to that amount in the future.
  • So there may be many vested parties with a stake in the climate change deal -- but there are also a few key winners and losers. We take a look at them here:
  • According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre's (IDMC) 2015 Global Estimates report, "an average of 26.4 million people per year have been displaced from their homes by disasters brought on by natural hazards" since 2008. These threatened populations are largely found in developing countries, which tend to be more vulnerable to rises in sea level, droughts, and floods.
  • The climate accord in Paris, however, have many in the developing world cheering.
  • According to President Obama, the targets are bold, but they also empower "businesses, scientists, engineers, workers, and the private sector -- investors -- to work together."
  • In fact, the aid money already seems to be flowing in light of the Paris negotiations: early this week, the U.S. promised to double its own aid to affected countries to $861 million as part of last-ditch efforts to push the climate deal through.
  • Some nations were not entirely satisfied with the final language -- there is still, after all, no legally binding provision that holds industrialized countries to this pledge for "adaptation" funds -- but nonetheless, Adow said, it gives significant hope to those countries hit especially hard with the threat of displaced citizens.
  • Mohamed Adow, senior climate change adviser from the disaster relief agency Christian Aid, told CBS News that this is one of the most important aspects of the COP21 accord: the promise provides poorer nations with the "assurance that the international community will not leave developing countries to deal with climate impact."
  • The effects of climate change in poor and developing nations also pose an increasing terror threat to the United States -- a connection that President Obama has made in the past, when he called global warming "an economic and security imperative" just weeks after the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris.
  • As Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders explained it on CBS' "Face the Nation" in November: "If we are going to see an increase in drought, in flood, and extreme weather disturbances as a result of climate change, what that means is that people all over the world are going to be fighting over limited natural resources... When people migrate into cities and they don't have jobs, there's going to be a lot more instability, a lot more unemployment, and people will be subject to the types of propaganda that al Qaeda and ISIS are using right now."
  • Military reports have also viewed climate change as a "catalyst for conflict," and the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review last year dubbed its effects as "threat multipliers" that ultimately lead to "conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence."
  • But the climate change deal seeks to mitigate these possible conflict catalysts so that "countries that don't have the resources to address these problems head on, now will," Jon Powers, who served the Federal Chief Sustainability Officer and Special Advisor on Energy to the U.S. Army in the Obama Administration, told CBS News.
  • One important target put forth by the deal was to ensure that parties would "undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century."
  • Here, the deal aims to strangle heavy carbon-emitting industries -- the "anthropogenic emissions" -- and cut down on total fossil fuels burned worldwide. Importantly, it's also a nod to investment in and development of new technologies that would remove carbon dioxide from the air.
  • U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz told CNBC in an interview, "We recognize fossil fuels will continue to be a part of the portfolio for quite a long time," but that the popularity of other power sources are on the rise.
  • "Wind energy has gone up by several fold just in the last five to six years," Moniz said, "and now (wind) provides about 4.5 percent of our electricity. You add that with solar, we're talking 5 percent."
  • Kathleen McLaughlin, the chief sustainability officer for Walmart, said in a statement that the company would "support the U.N.'s call for the U.S. corporate sector to commit to science-based targets to reduce emissions."
  • Ahead of the Paris summit, China -- the world's biggest coal consumer -- said it would aim to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by nearly two-thirds of its 2005 levels. In the past, international monitoring of those numbers would have been difficult to do, but the COP21 deal changes that.
  • The agreement holds nations accountable for reporting their progress on their climate goals in a global "stocktake" every five years starting in 2023. It also means countries will be monitoring, verifying and reporting their greenhouse gas emissions in a single accounting system.
  • According to one report released last month by the carbon investment think tank Carbon Tracker, fossil fuel companies could risk over $2 trillion dollars of current and future projects being left valueless as the market for fossil fuels narrows with recent global climate change action.
mcginnisca

We Talked to One of the World Trade Center Bombers About ISIS and Mass Shootings | VICE... - 1 views

www.vice.com/...lamic-state-and-mass-shootings

world trade center US politics history ISIS terrorism

shared by mcginnisca on 08 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Eyad Ismoil is one of the half-dozen men convicted for carrying out the World Trade Center bombings in 1993
  • sentenced to 240 years in prison for driving a rental van packed with a bomb into a garage, killing six and injuring about 1000 more
  • for someone who's supposed to "hate the infidels," he shows no signs of loathing towards the many prisoners and staff who openly despise him.
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  • when I first asked Ismoil about ISIS after the Paris attacks, he asked me one question back: "Why do you think they did it?" I responded with the only thing I knew: "They hate us."
  • He said that to resolve the conflicts between extremists in the Middle East and the West, it was important to talk "human to human," but he also made it clear that he empathizes at least somewhat with the Islamic State. Unsurprisingly, many of his views would be considered appalling to the vast majority of Americans, but our conversation gave me a window into the worldview of people who think the US is to blame for terrorism.
  • So, the question should be who is the first to be blamed? Tell both sides of the story.
  • You don't have to recruit people for ISIS. They're Muslims from all over the world that have seen an injustice after 25 years and want to help their brothers. What you have to understand is the Iraqi people are the most stubborn of the Muslim world. They won't accept occupation or humiliation.
  • People over in America ask why ISIS did this. [But] people in the Middle East ask, "Why is the US doing this to us?" Put yourself in their shoes—France is dropping bombs for a year in Iraq and [more recently] Syria, destroying everything, women, children, buildings... A bomb doesn't discriminate between ISIS or women and children—it just destroys.
  • Imagine the Iraq and Syrian people. After a year of bombing, you see your people killed, land destroyed, children scared to do anything more than hide in the corners all day. All this coming from bombs in the sky and you can't stop it. What would you do?
  • ISIS is not jihadists recruited from all over to fight. They are the Sunni Muslims that have lived through 25 years of wars, torture, and rapes. They are the Iraqi and Syrian people that have suffered from unjust wars started by the US government. And when the US government [mostly pulled out of] Iraq in 2010, the Shia and Maliki government started killing the Sunni day and night under the watch of the Americans.
  • My religion prohibits attacks on civilians. Unfortunately, many Muslims don't know much about Islam
  • What about the Planned Parenthood attack?What this man did is worse then what the doctors do. If this is what he's angry at, taking life, he did worse. Islam doesn't believe in abortion—all life is precious....[But] what he did was kill adult people who are grown. How is he trying to solve the issue?
  • For every action, there's a reaction. If you throw a ball against a wall, it's going to come back at you. If you throw a ball hard, it's going to come back at you hard. This is the problem with all sides in these wars. We hit you, you hit back. We hit you hard, you hit back harder. Back and forth, back and forth. Nobody wins. Both sides end up with death and destruction.
  • To solve the problem from the root, everyone has to become human. They need to talk, human to human. Let the people decide what they want. Leave them alone. Everyone can come together and say enough is enough. How long are we going to keep this action up? For the rest of our lives?It's the law of the jungle that we're living in right now. We were given more sense than this. We walk on two legs, with our heads high. But right now, we are walking with our heads down. We need to lift our heads up, and use the brains God created for us.
  • The only thing that keeps us just is Islam. Because in Islam, the peace, the justice, comes from the sky. The one who created earth and man, he knows best.
  • The Arabs are not radicalizing themselves. Your government action is radicalizing the Arabs
  • "hate the infidels,"
Javier E

The Republican Health Care Crackup - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lican-health-care-crackup.html

state government health-care era issues politics history

shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • The Republican health care bill could represent the moment when the old order of American politics completely cracks up, the end of a certain era in American politics.
  • That era began around 1974, when Ted Kennedy introduced a bill to supplement America’s employer-based insurance system with a government program. The Democratic dream of universal coverage continued through Hillary Clinton’s time as first lady and reached a partial culmination with the passage of Obamacare
  • By 2010, however, both the Obama administration and the Tea Party opposition were out of step with the times. They both still thought the big political issues in American life were universal health care and the size of government.
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  • It will also point the way to a new era
  • This thing probably won’t pass, but even if it passes it will probably lead to immense pain and disruption. That will discredit market-based social reform, cost the Republicans their congressional majorities and end what’s left of the Reagan-era party.
  • The central debate in the old era was big government versus small government, the market versus the state. But now you’ve got millions of people growing up in social and cultural chaos and not getting the skills they need to thrive in a technological society. This is not a problem you can solve with tax cuts
  • And if you don’t solve this problem, voters around the world have demonstrated that they’re quite willing to destroy market mechanisms to get the security they crave. They will trash free trade, cut legal skilled immigration, attack modern finance and choose state-run corporatism over dynamic free market capitalism.
  • The core of the new era is this: If you want to preserve the market, you have to have a strong state that enables people to thrive in it. If you are pro-market, you have to be pro-state. You can come up with innovative ways to deliver state services, like affordable health care, but you can’t just leave people on their own. The social fabric, the safety net and the human capital sources just aren’t strong enough.
clairemann

Boris Johnson Hopes Covid-19 Vaccine Success Can Inoculate Him Against Brexit Critics -... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...is-johnson-vaccine-brexit.html

Brexit Politics policy culture economics

shared by clairemann on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Now, Mr. Johnson’s allies hope the stark disparity between Britain’s performance and the European Union’s will do something perhaps even more challenging: vindicate their larger Brexit project.
  • Pro-Brexit politicians and commentators are casting Britain’s vaccine deployment, which ranks among the fastest in the world, as an example of risk-taking and entrepreneurial pluck that comes from not being shackled to the collective decision-making of the 27 member states of the European Union.
  • “It is the first serious test that the U.K. state has faced since Brexit,” said Matthew Goodwin, a professor of politics at the University of Kent who studies the British right. “Boris Johnson is going to have a vaccine dividend, and that will give him a who
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Now, though, the prime minister’s approval ratings have recovered, powered largely by the public’s enthusiasm about the vaccine rollout.
  • Sixty-seven percent of those surveyed said they thought Britain had performed better on vaccinations than E.U. countries
  • Significantly, a slight plurality of those surveyed — 40 percent — said they thought Brexit had helped improve Britain’s handling of the pandemic, while 14 percent said it had made it worse, and 38 percent thought it had made no difference.
  • But Mr. Goodwin said one consequence of the vaccine success is that there are few signs of significant numbers of people rethinking the wisdom of Brexit or suffering the acute regret — or as he called it, “Bregret” — that some expected.
  • The monthslong shutdown of much of Britain’s economy will also complicate the task of identifying the negative effects of Brexit, since they are likely to be lost in a sea of red ink.
  • “Brexit doesn’t solve those problems,” Mr. Frost added, “but it does give us means to solve them, to move on, to get a grip but also to reform our attitudes and become a country that can deal with problems again.”
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,”
aidenborst

Chamber of Commerce: Worker shortage can't be solved without ramping up immigration - CNN - 0 views

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

Immigration US politics history crisis Culture policy Pandemic pandemic-recovery jobs work

shared by aidenborst on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • As businesses grapple with record-high job openings, the US Chamber of Commerce is loudly calling on Washington to allow more foreign workers to legally enter the country.
  • Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the Chamber of Commerce, told CNN Business that the worker shortage can't be solved in the long run without ramping up immigration.
  • "We've never seen a situation this broad-based across the country where businesses are having to turn down work because they simply can't find the workers to do it," Bradley said. "This crisis is not going to go away."
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  • Economists have long warned that the aging US population means the nation will need to rely on a steady influx of foreign workers to meet demand. Yet Washington has repeatedly failed to reach a deal on immigration reform. And the Trump administration repeatedly put up obstacles to legal immigration, including restrictions imposed in 2020 that cited the pandemic's impact on the jobs market.
  • "Immigration was completely upended by the pandemic," said Bradley. "Go to any resort town in America. Where you would normally have individuals on temporary J-1 visas, they are nonexistent."
  • "But labor supply will be a longer run issue, just like before the pandemic," Zandi said. "There are reasons to believe it will be a bigger problem post-pandemic because immigration is a shadow of what it was."
  • "The survivability of your business comes down to how lucky you are in the lottery," Bradley said.
  • "The [Biden] administration deserves a lot of credit for taking that step," Bradley said. "They are operating within the limits of where the current law exists."
  • Beyond immigration reform, the Chamber told CNN Business it will urge states to use American Rescue Plan funding to help parents struggling with the high cost of childcare.
  • "There is no question the disruption of in-person schooling and childcare has reduced the number of caregivers, principally women, who are in the workforce and able to work," Bradley said.
  • Arizona announced plans on May 13 to use funds from the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to assist working parents with childcare costs. The state said it will provide three months of childcare assistance to people making $52,000 or less who return to work after collecting unemployment benefits. The initiative is part of Arizona's decision to end the $300 enhanced unemployment benefit.
  • "The president deserves credit for identifying a lot of important problems that we need to discuss with the American Families Plan," Bradley said, specifically citing the affordability and accessibility of childcare. /* dynamic basic css */ .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-widget-items-container {margin:0;padding:0;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-widget-items-container .ob-clearfix {display:block;width:100%;float:none;clear:both;height:0px;line-height:0px;font-size:0px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-widget-items-container.ob-multi-row {padding-top: 2%;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-container {position:relative;margin:0;padding;0;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-link, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-link:hover {text-decoration:none;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-video-icon-container {position:absolute;left:0;height:50%;width:100%;text-align:center;top:25%;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-video-icon {display:inline-block;height:100%;float:none;opacity:0.7;transition: opacity 500ms;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-video-icon:hover {opacity:1;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-rec-rtb-image {background-color:white;background-position:center;background-repeat:no-repeat;width:100%;position:absolute;top:0;bottom:0;left:0;right:0;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-rec-rtb-image.ob-lazy-bgimg{background:none!important;}.AR_36.ob-widget .ob_what{direction:ltr;clear:both;padding:5px 10px 0px;} .AR_36 .ob_what a:after {content: "";vertical-align:super;;;background-image: url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/achoice.svg');background-size:75% 75%;width:12px;height:12px;padding-left:4px;display:inline-block;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:right center;border-left:1px solid #999;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_what a{color:#757575;font-size:11px;font-family:arial;text-decoration: none;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_what.ob-hover:hover a{text-decoration: underline;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia_covid, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_logo, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_feed_logo, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_sfeed_logo, .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_text_logo{vertical-align:baseline !important;display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;padding:0px 5px;box-sizing:content-box;-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_logo_16x16.png') no-repeat center top;width:16px;height:16px;margin-bottom:-2px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia_covid{width:auto;height:16px;max-height:16px;margin-bottom:-2px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_logo_67x12.png') no-repeat center top;width:67px;height:12px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_text_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_text_logo_67x22.png') no-repeat center top;width:67px;height:22px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_feed_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_feed_logo.png') no-repeat center top;width:86px;height:23px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_sfeed_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_smartFeedLogo.min.svg') no-repeat center top;width:140px;height:21px;} .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_sphere_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_sphere.svg') no-repeat center top;width:93px;height:27px;vertical-align:baseline!important;display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;padding:0px 0px;box-sizing:content-box;-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;} @media only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2),(min-resolution: 192dpi) { .AR_36.ob-widget .ob_amelia{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_logo_16x16@2x.png') no-repeat center top;width:16px;height:16px;margin-bottom:-2px; 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Javier E

How Knowledge Helps | American Federation of Teachers - 0 views

www.aft.org/...how-knowledge-helps

knowledge education chunking learning reading understanding thinking critical thinking memory

shared by Javier E on 23 May 19 - No Cached
  • Javier E on 23 May 19
     
    Knowledge enhances thinking in two ways. First, it helps you solve problems by freeing up space in your working memory. Second, it helps you circumvent thinking by acting as a ready supply of things you've already thought about
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