A critique on the Mass Media... The problem is that they want the Mass Media system to operate on the code of "True/False" rather than "Known/Unknown"... But if it were to be so, it would not be Mass Media anymore, but rather the Science System.

For Mass Media to be Mass Media it needs to be concerned with selection and filtering, to condense and make known, not to present "all the facts". Sure, they need to be concerned with truth to a certain degree, but it's not the primary priority.

This is a reflection based on my knowledge of Luhmann's theory of society as functionally differentiated systems; as explained by Hans-Georg Moeller (Carefree Wandering) on YouTube.

This is basically critical thinking. Which is also my goal for (optimal) education: To build a society of people who think for themselves, critical thinkers; those who do not take everything for granted. The skeptics.

See also Nassim Nicolas Taleb's advice to focus on what you DON'T know rather than what you DO know.

Related to syntopical reading/learning as well. (and Charlie Munger's advice). You want to build a complete picture with a broad understanding and nuanced before formulating an opinion.

Remove bias from your judgement (especially when it comes to people or civilizations) and instead base it on logic and deep understanding.

This also relates to (national, but even local) media... How do you know that what the media portrays about something or someone is correct? Don't take it for granted, especially if it is important, and do your own research. Validity of source is important; media is often opinionized and can contain a lot of misinformation.

See also Simone Weil's thoughts on media, especially where she says misinformation spread must be stopped. It is a vital need for the soul to be presented with (factual) truth.

Die globale Erhitzung zwingt Baumarten in den nördlichen Wäldern dazu, neue Habitate aufzusuchen, deren Böden oft weniger nährstoffreich sind. Ein Hauptgrund dafür, den eine neue Studie untersucht, sind die Bedürfnisse von Pilzen, mit denen diese Bäume in Symbiose leben.

By killing himself, he is cleansing the world of his "inner darkness" being a Turk, the beastliness that ruined the superior and ordered Venetian society. It is this, himself, who he kills -- showing he is, at heart, still a Turk, and not the driving motivation that causes all these events to unfold (Iago) -- as Iago is stabbed but has not died. This signifies the curse of suspicion and reason cannot be eliminated -- reason preys on individual people and is not something one can rid. In the end, he chooses once again to rid the tumor of society (which he believes first is his wife, Desdemona, now it is him, the Turk), following honor rather than personal desire.

https://westernsydney.pressbooks.pub/criticalanalysis/chapter/the-use-of-knowledge-in-society/

Cross reference Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Society

Highlights in para 1 build the case that trans/detransition is attracting public attention (i.e. it's an important, topical issue) Last sentence highlights an important gap in the coverage.

To improve society, ingrain a fear of the Lord. Don't deceive thyself.

Similiarly, the intrinsic purpose of a society as an individual organism, a superorganism is to maintain vitality and sustain a flourishing of itself, including its extended self through its cognitive architecture - sensing, evaluating, modeling, anticipating and taking action.

Imperial News. ‘“Issue of Inequalities” for Long COVID Patients Needs to Be Addressed | Imperial News | Imperial College London’. Accessed 22 April 2022. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232234/issue-inequalities-long-covid-patients-needs/.

Chen, Cathy Xi, Gordon Pennycook, and David Rand. ‘What Makes News Sharable on Social Media?’ PsyArXiv, 9 July 2021. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/gzqcd.

Societies have been inexorably been moving toward interdependence. More and more people specialize and sub-specialize into smaller fragments of the work that we do. As a result, we become more interdependent on the work of others to underpin our own. This makes the worry about renting a domain seem somewhat disingenuous, particularly when we can reasonably rely on the underlying structures to work to keep our domains in place.

Perhaps re-framing this idea may be worthwhile. While it may seem that we own our bodies (at least in modern liberal democracies, for the moment), a large portion of our bodies are comprised of bacteria which are simultaneously both separate and a part of us and who we are. The symbiosis between people and their bacteria has been going on so long and generally so consistently we don't realize that the interdependence even exists anymore. No one walks around talking about how they're renting their bacteria.

Eventually we'll get to a point where our interdependence on domain registrars and hosts becomes the same sort of symbiotic interdependence.

Another useful analogy is to look at our interdependence on all the other pieces in our lives which we don't own or directly control, but which still allow us to live and exist.

People only tend to notice the major breakdowns of these bits of our interdependence. Recently there has been a lot of political turmoil and strife in the United States because politicians have become more self-centered and focused on their own needs, wants, and desire for power that they aren't serving the majority of people. When our representatives don't do their best work at representing their constituencies, major breakdowns in our interdependence occur. We need to be able to rely on scientists to do their best work to inform politicians who we need to be able to trust to do their best work to improve our lives and the general welfare. When the breakdown happens it creates issues to the individual bodies that make up the society as well as the body of the society itself.

Who's renting who in this scenario?

ReconfigBehSci[@SciBeh}(2020, August) Videos of talks from July's eBridges conference on "SOCIETY, PSYCHOLOGY AND BEHAVIOUR DURING AND POST COVID-19 LOCKDOWN" are now all available here: Twitter. Retrieved from:https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1297863598144999424

Each syllabus is a sample from Project Syllabus, hosted by the Society of Teaching of Psychology.

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: COVID-19 Series: Medical journals - Episode 24. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. (n.d.). Zoom Video. Retrieved June 20, 2020, from https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_4_dGVRvDQEWi_d7ll7kMtQ

RSM COVID-19 Series | Episode 24: Medical Journals. (2020, June 24). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et-kl5ypx8Q

Leitner, S. (2020, April 18). On the dynamics emerging from pandemics and infodemics. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/nqru6

The nature of the wants that commodities satisfy makes no difference. This is perhaps somewhat surprising to readers, given the extent to which everyday critiques of capitalist society often center around the role that consumerism plays and the subjective effects that this produces, namely, the way that consumer society creates all sorts of desires (as well as the obverse--many will defend capitalism on the grounds that it is able to satisfy our inordinate appetite for novelty by producing an enormous proliferation of desirable commodities). Yet, for Marx, the nature of these desires "makes no difference."

It is worth pointing out that the critique of the appetites that consumer society spawns is by no means new (a rather early moment in the history of consumer society). We find it already on display in Book II of Plato's Republic. In looking to shift the terrain of the analysis of justice from the individualistic, social contractualist theory of justice elaborated by Glaucon, Socrates founds a 'city' based on the idea that no one is self-sufficient, that human beings have much need of one another, and that the various crafts--farming, weaving cloth, etc.--fare best when each person specializes in that craft to which they are most suited by nature. After sketching out a kind of idyllic, pastoral community based on the principle of working together to satisfy our natural appetites, Socrates aristocratic companion Glaucon objects, describing this city as a 'city fit for pigs'. At this point, Socrates conjures what he calls the 'luxurious city', at which point a whole host of social ills are unleashed in order to satisfy Glaucon's desire for the luxuries to which he is accustomed. Currency and trade are introduced, along with a more complex division of labor (and wage labor!), and quite quickly, war. On the basis of the principle of 'one person, one craft', Socrates argues that making war is itself a craft that requires specialization (and thus a professional army).

For Plato, this represents the beginning of class society, as the profession military becomes a class distinct from the class of producers and merchants.

Plato thus anticipates a version of a view that becomes one of the key theses of the Marxist theory of the state, namely, the idea that the state exists only in societies that have become "entangled in an insoluble contradiction within itself" and which are "cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel," (Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State). The state emerges as "a power apparently standing above society...whose purpose is to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of 'order'" Engels writes, "this power arising out of society, but placing itself above it, and increasingly separating itself from it, is the state." Lenin cites this passage in the first pages of State and Revolution in order to critique the 'bourgeois' view that the state exists in order to reconcile class interests. In Lenin's reading of Marx, the state exists as "an organ of classs domination, an organ of oppression of one class by another," a view articulated in The Communist Manifesto, (cf. V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution in V.I.Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 25, pp. 385-497).

Marx cites this same passage from Republic in a long footnote to his discussion of the Division of Labor and Manufacture on pp. 487-488, which also happens to be the sole place in Capital where Marx cites Plato.

The fact that Marx here expresses indifference to the particular appetites that commodities satisfy is thus intriguing and ambiguous. Given that this question both clearly animates Plato's discussion of the origin of class society in Republic and, additionally serves as an alternative to the social contractarian view of justice that descends from Glaucon through Hobbes and the 18th century 'Robinsonades', this seemingly technical point also touches upon questions concerning Marx's engagement with both classical and modern political theory.

If for Plato, the unruly appetites represent the seed of which class-divided society is the fruit, Marx's dismissal of the question of the nature of the appetites that are satisfied by commodities points to exchange-value and the social forms that it unleashes as being key dimensions of the particular form that class-antagonism takes in capitalist society.

I found this statement interesting because it demonstrates the never-ending trend of society continuously advancing and moving forward. It is almost comical to think back how in 1818, when the document was written, the writers believed that their society and educational systems were so advanced. Looking back, this was obviously not the case; however, it is true that they had made many advances from previous centuries. Furthermore, today’s society has surpassed the first generations of UVA by a remarkable amount, not only in the technological and educational regard, but also in the moral regard, considering the original UVA was a school for solely white men of high status. The “indigenous” neighbors the document goes on to mention who the writers perceive to be less advanced than themselves are described as “barbaric and wretched.” This description is ironic considering the low moral standard of these founders who are almost barbaric and wretched themselves. Finally, it is again ironic that the writers are calling themselves “advanced” when they still have ignorant and amateur views about themselves and others.

The authors of the Rockfish Gap Report affirm that religious worship is not conducive to a truly liberal arts education, going so far as to propose "no professor of Divinity." Yet religious language is smatter throughout the document (such as "blessings," "faithfulness," and "religious worship.") In the Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom which Thomas Jefferson also drafted, it is written,"all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities." In this way, the assertions of both texts are consistent, but the biases of the authors are apparent in their use of religious language. This demonstrates that a collective view of what a society should be is not necessarily reflected in individual beliefs.

In this act, mistaken identity is used to break tension. Apart from the obvious comedic relief this scene adds to the ever mounting tension and drama in the play, this scene also indicates the disintegration of society and the lack of social restraints of the general public after Caesar’s death.

In this scene, the plebeians initially surround Cinna the poet after confusing him with Cinna the conspirator. Even when Cinna repeatedly tells them “I am not Cinna the conspirator”, the citizens, in their bloodthirsty rampage, still decide to kill him, stating that “It is no matter, his name’s Cinna”. This degradation of social standards and the crumbling of the social foundations of Ancient Rome bolster the image of the plebeians as ‘sheep’ to be swayed and controlled by the ruling classes, and solidifies their position in the play.

It is also no coincidence that Shakespeare made Cinna a poet. In the citizens’ interrogation of Cinna, Cinna not only speaks for himself, but as a poet and as a projection of those in scholarly fields and free speech as a whole. With this, Shakespeare compels the audience to question whom poets and those who provide information to the public are accountable to, and whether free speech is more important than a stable and safe society.

In some ways, it’s quite remarkable that one of the key figures of post-development was also the one who called for “deschooling society”. As is obvious from observing humanitarian and philanthropic work is that “development” participates in neocolonialism, despite (or often because of) the best of intentions. MOOCs are closer to development than to postdevelopment. Even cMOOCs.

I really enjoy this idea, for some reason, as something so unfathomably sad has happened to Dorian, as if his life were a novel (hmhmhm) and he finds it too amusing to be bothered by. Wilde demonstrates the surreal reality that plagues life and continues somewhat of a commentary on how precious one's life is, and how it must not be wasted on conforming when one does not see fit.

Wilde uses this dialogue to convey his theory on the meaning of life. "People are afraid of themselves nowadays" is Wilde's call to the oppression of individuals by society. Wilde opens the concept of living as one sees fit - their true identity. This dialogue probably cause issue from early critics of Wilde's work, as it holds a somewhat secular message.

In precise contrast with school. In some ways, literacy is such a basic part of schooling that it’s nearly impossible to imagine other core skills (from numeracy to empathy) giving pupils and students any kind of social status outside of literacy.