Frankly, it is a critique of each us who has to deal with this market culture and through market mechanisms try to preserve some nonmarket values.
I loved his categorizing on different non-markey values above and he's right, it is becoming more and more difficult to hang onto those nonmarket values when you see others living the patriarchy path succeeding without values like those.
said love is the most dangerous discourse in the world. It is daring and difficult because it makes you vulnerable, but if you experience it, it is the peak of human existence.
friggin beautiful
perennially titillated
Perennially: in a way that continues for a long or apparently infinite time; permanently Titillated: stimulated or excited (someone), especially in a sexual way.
This is hilarious.
necessary for a democracy to function is based on a sense of the public—a sense of what it is to be a citizen among citizens.
Too bad Americans are so individualistic that even wearing a mask to protect your fellow citizens isn't widely accepted as a form of humility and respect for one another.
Spirituality requires an experience of something bigger than our individual selves that binds us to a community.
I'm glad they're speaking of spirituality instead of religion; in my opinion, it encompasses so much more.
Ordinary people were limited to the idyllic and the comic, the assumption being that their lives were less complex and one-dimensional.
We see this nowadays in the form of criminal punishments for the rich vs poor. If you can afford a good lawyer or have the notoriety to draw attention to your crime, you're more likely to be sympathized as opposed to a "nobody" that committed the same crime.
This makes it difficult for researchers or journalists to track what posts are being targeted at different groups of people, which is particularly concerning during elections.
Sure would be nice if facebook was willing to share some of this information with researchers trying to combat disinformation and the spread of misinformation.
Instead online users would be better taught to develop cognitive “muscles” in emotional skepticism and trained to withstand the onslaught of content designed to trigger base fears and prejudices.
sounds pretty idealistic.
A 2019 book by An Xiao Mina, Memes to Movements, outlines how memes are changing social protests and power dynamics, but this type of serious examination is relatively rare.
Memes ability to remain unchecked or researched by intellectuals allows them to fly under the radar and makes them more powerful.
The word “meme” was first used by theorist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, to describe “a unit of cultural transmission or a unit of imitation,
That's an interesting lil tidbit.
In these efforts, context, rather than content, is being weaponized. The result is intentional chaos.
I wonder what exactly they means by context rather than content is being weaponized. Are they referring to satire and the reframing of content with hyperbolic content?
“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.
Cool! I wonder how this is!
That’s doable with the optical illusion, he said, but extremely difficult with real-world cognitive biases.
so true!
Thinking, Fast and Slow
i ought to check this out
to finish an unappetizing restaurant meal because, after all, we’re paying for it
I think about this often; is it more american to force yourself to finish the food because you feel like it's wasteful? or to throw it away?
(Images of plane crashes are more vivid and dramatic in our memory and imagination, and hence more available to our consciousness.)
That's interesting but totally understandable and almost a survival instinct.
The paper described an attempt by Hershfield and several colleagues to modify that state of mind in their students. They had the students observe, for a minute or so, virtual-reality avatars showing what they would look like at age 70. Then they asked the students what they would do if they unexpectedly came into $1,000. The students who had looked their older self in the eye said they would put an average of $172 into a retirement account. That’s more than double the amount that would have been invested by members of the control group, who were willing to sock away an average of only $80.
I gotta check this out, I could use some encouragement towards saving money!
It uses the affordances of your phone or tablet to do what literature is always trying to do: give you new things to think about, to expand the world behind your eyes
This reminds me so much of David Foster Wallace's use of subtext and physical things you can include in a written text to be inventive and keep the reader from reading left to right, top to bottom.
Students asked to read a text on-screen thought they could do it faster than students asked to read the same text in print, and did a worse job of pacing themselves in a timed study period. Not surprisingly, the on-screen readers then scored worse on a reading comprehension test.
Makes me glad I decided to buy the print version of some of my textbooks this year!
and they read each item only once before racing on to the next.
I am guilty of feeling like it is unnecessary to reread books. But the times I have done it, I've thoroughly enjoyed them in a new light. Let it be a reminder to me to not fear picking up something I've already finished.
we have been wandering off all along. When we read, the eye does not progress steadily along the line of text; it alternates between saccades—little jumps—and brief stops, not unlike the movement of the mouse’s cursor across a screen of hypertext
I catch my eyes doing this all the time - jumping up and down lines, checking out words around where I'm reading, etc. It feels sometimes that it really is slowing down my comprehension. Curious if others have experiences like that or if there are ways to limit that.
stranding us in what the journalist Nicholas Carr has called “the shallows,” a frenzied flitting from one fact to the next. In Carr’s view, the “endless, mesmerizing buzz” of the Internet imperils our very being: “One of the greatest dangers we face,” he writes, “as we automate the work of our minds, as we cede control over the flow of our thoughts and memories to a powerful electronic system, is ... a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity.”
What a frightening thought. So far this semester this is at least the third time I have been introduced to this idea of "endless, mesmerizing buzz" and I have been actively trying to concentrate my focus while working on something. Not only for the increased focus, but for the efficiency involved with deeper concentration.
“Electorates normally do not control their political leaders in any way except by refusing to reelect them,” he wrote, in “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy” (1942). The rest of the time, he thought, they should refrain from “political back-seat driving.”
This is an interesting point - seems opposite the thesis of most of this piece which is that being an informed intelligent voter results in the best democracy. But this is saying to not pay too much attention to what your electorates do between elections. Maybe the point here is that once elected, your electorate has the freedom to act how they choose, and in doing so are hoping to be acting on your behalf enough to ensure your vote and be re-elected.
If I do not vote, your vote counts more
I remember my parents talking about cancelling one another's vote in the George W era. I wish people would remember this as an incentive to get out and vote; you can cancel someone's racist grandmother's vote!
And Caplan calculates that a voter ignorant of economics will tend to be more pessimistic, more suspicious of market competition and of rises in productivity, and more wary of foreign trade and immigration.
I catch myself and my lack of knowledge acting like this. Times when I don't know all the details I can jump to conclusions rather than more deeply analyze the truths involved.
bulwark
a defensive wall.
sagacity
sa·ga·cious /səˈɡāSHəs/ adjective having or showing keen mental discernment and good judgment; shrewd
Brennan avoids stepping on the rake that thwacked Plato between the eyes.
Love this humor.
A second group of people enjoy political news as a recreation, following it with the partisan devotion of sports fans, and Brennan calls them hooligans.
the mental picture of political hooligans is hilarious to me, but having just spent some time on a boat in the Pacific Northwest, I saw first hand the hooligan-like quality of people flying political flags.
In the United States, élites who feared the ignorance of poor immigrants tried to restrict ballots. In 1855, Connecticut introduced the first literacy test for American voters. Although a New York Democrat protested, in 1868, that “if a man is ignorant, he needs the ballot for his protection all the more,” in the next half century the tests spread to almost all parts of the country.
Sounds quite familiar - an example nowadays looks like post office drop boxes being ripped from the streets.
galled
Gall - VERB make (someone) feel annoyed.