4,417 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2021
    1. Social: It’s Not All About Productivity; Relationships Matter, Too
      • relationships matter
      • prefer physical over digital
    1. Meritocracy harms the elite as well. Life for the meritocratic elite is dominated by work. Substantial numbers of elites report that their work interferes with their health, prevents them from forming strong relationships with their children, gets in the way of good relationships with their spouses, and even makes it harder to have a satisfying sex life.
    2. The impact of this exclusion itself is impossible to measure, but increasing meritocratic inequality has coincided with the opioid epidemic, a sharp increase in “deaths of despair,” and an unprecedented fall in life expectancy concentrated in poor and middle-class communities.

      Are these all actually related to meritocratic inequality? What other drivers might there be?

    3. Diminishing social mobility excludes the middle class from the hope of achieving the American Dream.

      Do we actually need social mobility?

      Social mobility and the goods it can purchase can be a useful social motivation.

      However, social mobility for the poorest amoungst us would be good, but how much additional marginal good does society derive from continued social mobility of the middle and upper classes continuing to gain wealth and moving up?

      Perhaps there's a myth of social mobility confounding the issue with the myth of meritocracy as well.

      Certainly the idea of raw capitalism without caps is at play as well. Could providing better governmental oversight of this be a helpful factor for society? (At least American society at the moment? As international competition may drive other broader problems vis-a-vis other pieces of global domination...)

    4. At its core, The Meritocracy Trap is a comprehensive — and rather scathing — critique of the aspirational view. Markovits argues that meritocracy itself is the problem: It produces radical inequality, stifles social mobility, and makes everyone — including the apparent winners — miserable. These are not symptoms of systemic malfunction; they are the products of a system that is working exactly as it is supposed to.
    1. Professor, interested in plagues, and politics. Re-locking my twitter acct when is 70% fully vaccinated.

      Example of a professor/research who has apparently made his Tweets public, but intends to re-lock them majority of threat is over.

    1. Yet books are curious objects: their strength is to be both intensely private and intensely social — and marginalia is a natural bridge between these two states.

      Books represent a dichotomy in being both intensely private and intensely social at the same time.

      Are there other objects that have this property?

      Books also have the quality of providing people with identities.

    2. The practice, back then, was surprisingly social — people would mark up books for one another as gifts, or give pointedly annotated novels to potential lovers.

      This could be an interesting gift idea. Definitely shows someone that you were actively thinking about them for extended lengths of time while they were away.

    1. socialconstructivist views of learning

      While I agree, I also sometimes think about where on the social constructivist spectrum different kinds of Hypothesis/social annotation activities fall.

  2. May 2021
    1. Books and OER distributed by RSS. OPML lists creating collections for specific purposes - courses, discussion lists, whatever. RSS readers like gRSShopper using these OPML files to aggregate the contents and present them inside the student's own integrated learning environment. And then these - chapters, resources, comments, etc. - shared through the network among people taking the same course, working in the same community, or associated in any other way.

      This is roughly what I'd been thinking when reading Tonz' work on OPML recently as well. OPML could be used for quite a lot more and when paired with dumping things into a reader environment could be incredibly powerful.

    1. Wellenius, G. A., Vispute, S., Espinosa, V., Fabrikant, A., Tsai, T. C., Hennessy, J., Dai, A., Williams, B., Gadepalli, K., Boulanger, A., Pearce, A., Kamath, C., Schlosberg, A., Bendebury, C., Mandayam, C., Stanton, C., Bavadekar, S., Pluntke, C., Desfontaines, D., … Gabrilovich, E. (2021). Impacts of social distancing policies on mobility and COVID-19 case growth in the US. Nature Communications, 12(1), 3118. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23404-5

    1. Derek Thompson. (2021, May 17). Weeks ago, Gov. Abbott made Texas the first state to abolish its mask mandate and lift capacity constraints for all businesses. So, what changed? Nothing. There was ~no effect on COVID cases, employment, mobility, or retail foot traffic, in either liberal or conservative areas. Https://t.co/M8aeKOKJuP [Tweet]. @DKThomp. https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1394294260787261447

    1. Charlotte Jee recently wrote a lovely fictional intro to a piece on a “feminist Internet” that crystallized something I can’t quite believe I never saw before; if girls, women and non-binary people really got to choose where they spent their time online, we would never choose to be corralled into the hostile, dangerous spaces that endanger us and make us feel so, so bad. It’s obvious when you think about it. The current platforms are perfectly designed for misogyny and drive literally countless women from public life, or dissuade them from entering it. Online abuse, doxing, blue-tick dogpiling, pro-stalking and rape-enabling ‘features’ (like Strava broadcasting runners’ names and routes, or Slack’s recent direct-messaging fiasco) only happen because we are herded into a quasi-public sphere where we don’t make the rules and have literally nowhere else to go.

      A strong list of toxic behaviors that are meant to keep people from having a voice in the online commons. We definitely need to design these features out of our social software.

    1. Draft notes, E-mail, plans, source code, to-do lists, what have you

      The personal nature of this information means that users need control of their information. Tim Berners-Lee's Solid (Social Linked Data) project) looks like it could do some of this stuff.

    1. In 1962, a book called Silent Spring by Rachel Carson documenting the widespread ecological harms caused by synthetic pesticides went off like a metaphorical bomb in the nascent environmental movement.

      Where is the Silent Spring in the data, privacy, and social media space?

    2. Amidst the global pandemic, this might sound not dissimilar to public health. When I decide whether to wear a mask in public, that’s partially about how much the mask will protect me from airborne droplets. But it’s also—perhaps more significantly—about protecting everyone else from me. People who refuse to wear a mask because they’re willing to risk getting Covid are often only thinking about their bodies as a thing to defend, whose sanctity depends on the strength of their individual immune system. They’re not thinking about their bodies as a thing that can also attack, that can be the conduit that kills someone else. People who are careless about their own data because they think they’ve done nothing wrong are only thinking of the harms that they might experience, not the harms that they can cause.

      What lessons might we draw from public health and epidemiology to improve our privacy lives in an online world? How might we wear social media "masks" to protect our friends and loved ones from our own posts?

    1. “For one of the most heavily guarded individuals in the world, a publicly available Venmo account and friend list is a massive security hole. Even a small friend list is still enough to paint a pretty reliable picture of someone's habits, routines, and social circles,” Gebhart said.

      Massive how? He's such a public figure that most of these connections are already widely reported in the media or easily guessable by an private invistigator. The bigger issue is the related data of transactions which might open them up for other abuses or potential leverage as in the other examples.

    1. This is a solidly comprehensive overview of much of what I'd want in my own personal reader. I'll have to revisit it as I'm reading and using other readers to see if there are any other pieces missing.

      Being able to sort by social distance, by community/tags, and by posting frequency and/or post type (ie separating articles from notes from bookmarks, etc) would be some of the bigger must haves.

    1. social telephones — primarily emails and Twitter mentions

      There's something lovely about the way he defines email and social media as "social telephones"

    1. Social media platforms work on a sort of flywheel of engagement. View->Engage->Comment->Create->View. Paywalls inhibit that flywheel, and so I think any hope for a return to the glory days of the blogosphere will result in disappointment.

      The analogy of social media being a flywheel of engagement is an apt one and it also plays into the idea of "flow" because if you're bored with one post, the next might be better.

    1. Yet apart from a few megastar “influencers”, most creators receive no reward beyond the thrill of notching up “likes”.

      But what are these people really making? Besides one or two of the highest paid, what is a fair-to-middling influencer really making?

    1. Dr. Tom Frieden. (2021, April 30). Globally, the end of the pandemic isn’t near. More than a million lives depend on improving our response quickly. Don’t be blinded by the light at the end of the tunnel. There isn’t enough vaccine and the virus is gathering strength & speed. Global cooperation is crucial. 1/ [Tweet]. @DrTomFrieden. https://twitter.com/DrTomFrieden/status/1388172436999376899

    1. A strong and cogent argument for why we should not be listening to the overly loud cries from Tristan Harris and the Center for Human Technology. The boundary of criticism they're setting is not extreme enough to make the situation significantly better.

      It's also a strong argument for who to allow at the table or not when making decisions and evaluating criticism.

    2. These companies do not mean well, and we should stop pretending that they do.
    3. But “humane technology” is precisely the sort of pleasant sounding but ultimately meaningless idea that we must be watchful for at all times. To be clear, Harris is hardly the first critic to argue for some alternative type of technology, past critics have argued for: “democratic technics,” “appropriate technology,” “convivial tools,” “liberatory technology,” “holistic technology,” and the list could go on.

      A reasonable summary list of alternatives. Note how dreadful and unmemorable most of these names are. Most noticeable in this list is that I don't think that anyone actually built any actual tools that accomplish any of these theoretical things.

      It also makes more noticeable that the Center for Humane Technology seems to be theoretically arguing against something instead of "for" something.

    4. Big tech can patiently sit through some zingers about their business model, as long as the person delivering those one-liners comes around to repeating big tech’s latest Sinophobic talking point while repeating the “they meant well” myth.
    5. Thus, these companies have launched a new strategy to reinvigorate their all American status: engage in some heavy-handed techno-nationalism by attacking China. And this Sinophobic, and often flagrantly racist, shift serves to distract from the misdeeds of the tech companies by creating the looming menace of a big foreign other. This is a move that has been made by many of the tech companies, it is one that has been happily parroted by many elected officials, and it is a move which Harris makes as well.

      Perhaps the better move is to frame these companies as behemoths on the scale of foreign countries, but ones which have far more power and should be scrutinized more heavily than even China itself. What if the enemy is already within and it's name is Facebook or Google?

    1. O’Connor, D. B., Aggleton, J. P., Chakrabarti, B., Cooper, C. L., Creswell, C., Dunsmuir, S., Fiske, S. T., Gathercole, S., Gough, B., Ireland, J. L., Jones, M. V., Jowett, A., Kagan, C., Karanika‐Murray, M., Kaye, L. K., Kumari, V., Lewandowsky, S., Lightman, S., Malpass, D., … Armitage, C. J. (2020). Research priorities for the COVID‐19 pandemic and beyond: A call to action for psychological science. British Journal of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12468

    1. Franceschini, C., Musetti, A., Zenesini, C., Palagini, L., Pelosi, A., Quattropani, M. C., Lenzo, V., Freda, M. F., Lemmo, D., Vegni, E., Borghi, L., Saita, E., Cattivelli, R., De Gennaro, L., Plazzi, G., Riemann, D., & Castelnuovo, G. (2020). Poor quality of sleep and its consequences on mental health during COVID-19 lockdown in Italy [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ah6j3

    1. Adjiwanou, V., Alam, N., Alkema, L., Asiki, G., Bawah, A., Béguy, D., Cetorelli, V., Dube, A., Feehan, D., Fisker, A. B., Gage, A., Garcia, J., Gerland, P., Guillot, M., Gupta, A., Haider, M. M., Helleringer, S., Jasseh, M., Kabudula, C., … You, D. (2020). Measuring excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic in low- and lower-middle income countries: The need for mobile phone surveys [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/4bu3q

    1. Aleta, A., Martín-Corral, D., Pastore y Piontti, A., Ajelli, M., Litvinova, M., Chinazzi, M., Dean, N. E., Halloran, M. E., Longini Jr, I. M., Merler, S., Pentland, A., Vespignani, A., Moro, E., & Moreno, Y. (2020). Modelling the impact of testing, contact tracing and household quarantine on second waves of COVID-19. Nature Human Behaviour, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0931-9

    1. Darren Dahly. (2021, February 24). @SciBeh One thought is that we generally don’t ‘press’ strangers or even colleagues in face to face conversations, and when we do, it’s usually perceived as pretty aggressive. Not sure why anyone would expect it to work better on twitter. Https://t.co/r94i22mP9Q [Tweet]. @statsepi. https://twitter.com/statsepi/status/1364482411803906048

    1. Ira, still wearing a mask, Hyman. (2020, November 26). @SciBeh @Quayle @STWorg @jayvanbavel @UlliEcker @philipplenz6 @AnaSKozyreva @johnfocook Some might argue the moral dilemma is between choosing what is seen as good for society (limiting spread of disinformation that harms people) and allowing people freedom of choice to say and see what they want. I’m on the side of making good for society decisions. [Tweet]. @ira_hyman. https://twitter.com/ira_hyman/status/1331992594130235393

    1. build and maintain a sense of professional community. Educator and TikTok user Jeremy Winkle outlines four ways teachers can do this: provide encouragement, share resources, provide quick professional development, and ask a question of the day (Winkler).

      I love all of these ideas. It's all-around edifying!

  3. Apr 2021
    1. Others are asking questions about the politics of weblogs – if it’s a democratic medium, they ask, why are there so many inequalities in traffic and linkage?

      This still exists in the social media space, but has gotten even worse with the rise of algorithmic feeds.

    1. ReconfigBehSci. (2021, April 19). @ToddHorowitz3 so, given that no one can know the ‘unmitigated number’ what they seem to be calculating is in difference deaths given lockdown and model prediction without lockdown and calling that the ‘overestimate’—Which seems truly bizarre [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1384147188180082692

    1. If we accept the idea that the entire surface of the earth is migratory, then why not landscapes in particular? A landscape — as a scene, landschap, ecosystem, and socio-political territory — is a material assembly of moving entities, a dynamic medium which changes in quality and structure through the aggregate movements or actions of the things that constitute it.
    1. India had taken the first steps to becoming a “nation”
      • The common rule under the British caused there to be a common characteristic among Indians that could turn into an Indian nationality
    2. Indians were not to be appeased—and certainly not brought into British public life.
      • Indians were kept from entering politics or public life
      • After the British gov take over in 1858, the British gov seeked to not only have direct control instead of a company's control, but also direct control instead of letting Indians have control
    3. Effects in India
      • Increased economic activity in cities associated with the British, like in the Industrial Revolution in Britain, increased those city populations in the early 1800s
      • Indians were segregated from Europeans in these towns
    1. I managed to do half the work. But that’s exactly it: It’s work. It’s designed that way. It requires a thankless amount of mental and emotional energy, just like some relationships.

      This is a great example of how services like Facebook can be like the abusive significant other you can never leave.

    2. I realized it was foolish of me to think the internet would ever pause just because I had. The internet is clever, but it’s not always smart. It’s personalized, but not personal. It lures you in with a timeline, then fucks with your concept of time. It doesn’t know or care whether you actually had a miscarriage, got married, moved out, or bought the sneakers. It takes those sneakers and runs with whatever signals you’ve given it, and good luck catching up.
    3. Pinterest doesn’t know when the wedding never happens, or when the baby isn’t born. It doesn’t know you no longer need the nursery. Pinterest doesn’t even know if the vacation you created a collage for has ended. It’s not interested in your temporal experience.This problem was one of the top five complaints of Pinterest users.
    4. So on a blindingly sunny day in October 2019, I met with Omar Seyal, who runs Pinterest’s core product. I said, in a polite way, that Pinterest had become the bane of my online existence.“We call this the miscarriage problem,” Seyal said, almost as soon as I sat down and cracked open my laptop. I may have flinched. Seyal’s role at Pinterest doesn’t encompass ads, but he attempted to explain why the internet kept showing me wedding content. “I view this as a version of the bias-of-the-majority problem. Most people who start wedding planning are buying expensive things, so there are a lot of expensive ad bids coming in for them. And most people who start wedding planning finish it,” he said. Similarly, most Pinterest users who use the app to search for nursery decor end up using the nursery. When you have a negative experience, you’re part of the minority, Seyal said.

      What a gruesome name for an all-too-frequent internet problem: miscarriage problem

    5. To hear technologists describe it, digital memories are all about surfacing those archival smiles. But they’re also designed to increase engagement, the holy grail for ad-based business models.

      It would be far better to have apps focus on better reasons for on this day features. I'd love to have something focused on spaced repetition for building up my memory for other things. Reminders at a week, a month, three months, and six months would be a useful thing for some posts.

    6. Our smartphones pulse with memories now. In normal times, we may strain to remember things for practical reasons—where we parked the car—or we may stumble into surprise associations between the present and the past, like when a whiff of something reminds me of Sunday family dinners. Now that our memories are digital, though, they are incessant, haphazard, intrusive.
    7. I still have a photograph of the breakfast I made the morning I ended an eight-year relationship and canceled a wedding. It was an unremarkable breakfast—a fried egg—but it is now digitally fossilized in a floral dish we moved with us when we left New York and headed west. I don’t know why I took the photo, except, well, I do: I had fallen into the reflexive habit of taking photos of everything. Not long ago, the egg popped up as a “memory” in a photo app. The time stamp jolted my actual memory.

      Example of unwanted spaced repetition via social media.