The ultimate logic of a market culture is the gangsterization of culture: I want power now. I want pleasure now. I want property now. Your property. Give it to me.
This is very reflective of our society today. We often crave our desires immediately and want to continually climb the ladder of power or money. It is in the minority to donate regularly and volunteer out of desire rather than for a resume or required reasons.
And yet 25 percent of all of America’s children live in poverty, and 42 percent of young brown brothers and sisters live in poverty, and 51 percent of young black brothers and sisters live in poverty in the richest nation in the history of the world. These sets of conditions are immoral.
From these statistics, it is clear that there is a correlation between financial stability and race.
Their beauty is attacked: wrong hips, lips, noses, skin texture, skin pigmentation, and hair texture. Black intelligence is always guilty before proven innocent in the court of the life of the mind: The Bell Curve2 is just a manifestation of the cycle.
This is very sad and true. In a psychology experiment I learned about, there was an option for young girls to choose between black or white dolls, and almost every girl had a preference for the white dolls, independent of the child's identity.
“We memed him into power.... We directed the culture.”
I definitely feel that our culture has changed. Not only Trump, but Biden is trying to appeal to younger audiences which only lead to more memes of him. For example, Biden recently had an interview with Cardi B and states that his daughter loves Cardi B, which is interesting for a potential president to bring up as Cardi B's most latest famous song is "WAP." Many memes such as "this is the best Trump Ad" have arisen because of it.
Bad actors who want to deepen existing tensions understand these societal trends, designing content that they hope will so anger or excite targeted users that the audience will become the messenger. The goal is that users will use their own social capital to reinforce and give credibility to that original message.
I do not believe most actors necessarily want to "anger" users and spread misinformation. Social media is known for displaying audience number (followers/members). Famous people have a huge audience and this in turn makes each post from them very accessible. I do not think their goal is to spread misinformation, but it is done so easier if one is famous as they may have pressure to post consistently or get paid for posting certain things that are misinformation that even they do not know about. A huge example is the fyre festival fail. Celebrities like Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid promoted the Fyre Festival on their social media and it turned out to be fraud.
the ways in which information was being used as a weapon.
Social media can be used for good as well. Such as connecting people who may feel lost and alone to others across the world who are going through similar situations.
It is easy to imagine that, today, almost everyone in that scene would be holding a smartphone. Some would be filming their observations and posting them to Twitter and Facebook. Powered by social media, rumors and misinformation would be rampant. Hate-filled posts aimed at the Muslim community would proliferate, the speculation and outrage boosted by algorithms responding to unprecedented levels of shares, comments and likes. Foreign agents of disinformation would amplify the division, driving wedges between communities and sowing chaos. Meanwhile those stranded on the tops of the towers would be livestreaming their final moments.
This is a very negative perspective of social media and smartphones. I personally would imagine the majority of people to be contacting their loved ones to hear their voice and see their face for possibly the last time (which is possible because of smartphones).
isbett’s Coursera course and Hal Hershfield’s close encounters with one’s older self are hardly the only de-biasing methods out there.
I wonder if de-biasing methods are more effective when taught at a significantly young age.
But because of the conjunction fallacy (the assumption that multiple specific conditions are more probable than a single general one) and the representativeness heuristic (our strong desire to apply stereotypes), more than 80 percent of undergraduates surveyed answered (b)
Especially considering they are students actively in school, I believe that with the information given, they were trying to predict what the researchers had wanted them to say.
Is it really impossible, however, to shed or significantly mitigate one’s biases?
If someone has no biases then they are ultimately not really human. Bias helps us perceive the world and have inferences. Certain biases though are not helpful and we should take steps to actively try to eliminate (racial bias), but bias in general and in certain amounts is necessary.
That is, laziness or inertia can be more powerful than bias
This was slightly comical to me and I can understand why it is true! It is less likely for someone to not participate in a retirement plan if they are already enrolled and ultimately know it is good for them.
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
We have confirmation bias because we want to be right and proved right.
Wikipedia’s “List of cognitive biases” contains 185 entries
That is a lot more than I would have guessed to exist! However, it makes sense because bias is how our brain is able to process and analyze the world by searching for patterns.
saving is like a choice between spending money today or giving it to a stranger years from now.
I think people do understand the concept and value of saving, but are actually devaluing the worth based on delayed gratification.
the tendency people have, when considering a trade-off between two future moments, to more heavily weight the one closer to the present. A great many academic studies have shown this bias—also known as hyperbolic discounting—to be robust and persistent.
I had learned in psychology that hyperbolic discounting is a cognitive bias. Advertisements take advantage of this bias and advertise things that can get you "instant rewards" or "fast-acting" promises.
It’s one thing for the effects of training to show up in the form of improved results on a test—when you’re on your guard, maybe even looking for tricks—and quite another for the effects to show up in the form of real-life behavior.
This is why many times a double-blind study is taken into effect to avoid observer bias where neither the researcher nor the participant knows how the participant is expected to behave or feel
“The reading brain circuit reflects the affordances of what it reads,” she notes: affordances being the built-in opportunities for interaction. The more we skim, the more we’re likely to keep skimming; on the other hand, the more we plunge into a text, the more we’re likely to keep plunging.
I really agree with this statement. It is hard to fully comprehend or enjoy reading something when I am just disinterested and thinking about other things I could be doing.
found myself thinking about how much more interesting the scrambled one was, and how much more fun it was to read. Maybe I’m just the kind of person who likes building situation models, but I don’t think I’m alone in this. If there were no pleasure in reading things that don’t make sense, who would read the Surrealists? Who would giggle at bad subtitles, or Mad Libs?
I think reading something that makes no sense has a very limited scope in the type of genre and audience. To most people, the goal of reading is to reflect, learn or relax. However, the above text was confusing and not very beneficial. As a game or entertainment, it is interesting but it does not completely relate to the main topic of standard reading.
The impact of hypertext on the reading brain has, as you’d expect, received a fair amount of scientific attention
I have personally never enjoyed hypertext articles. I find it bothersome to keep having to click through different links.
But a 2011 study by the cognitive scientists Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith suggests that this may be a function less of the intrinsic nature of digital devices than of the expectations that readers bring to them. Ackerman and Goldsmith note that readers perceive paper as being better suited for “effortful learning,” whereas the screen is perceived as being suited for “fast and shallow reading of short texts such as news, e-mails, and forum notes.”
I noticed this article was written in 2016. I wonder if that study would be any different now considering that students are getting used to learning with technology more and more and especially during COVID.
The German historian Rolf Engelsing argues that a “reading revolution” took place at the end of the 18th century: Before that point, the typical European reader had only a few books—the Bible, an almanac, maybe a work of devotional literature—and he read them over and over,
During those days, I wonder if they read less or if they read about the same amount as we do now, but just read those works over and over. I can imagine someone reading the Bible many times because it is so open to interpretation, but I can imagine myself getting tired of reading the other things over and over.
A thousand years later, critics fear that digital technology has put this gift in peril. The Internet’s flood of information, together with the distractions of social media, threaten to overwhelm the interior space of reading, 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.”
I agree that technology can easily take over our lives. It is crazy to think about the generational difference in how children prefer to entertain themselves now versus twenty years ago. I remember I loved to pretend I always had a class and and would be "teaching" them. Now, more often than not, I see very small children's faces glued to screens. There is a lot of studies showing scary consequences that too much technology can have on children for their brain, social skills, and more.
To read silently is to free your mind to reflect, to remember, to question and compare.
I really love how this is phrased. I am a strong believer in learning something from everything you read. You have uninterrupted you time between the book and your thoughts. I also like how they used the term "free," indicating that reading silently lets your mind wander wherever it wants and in our busy, fast-paced lives... sometimes that is exactly what we need.
Brennan calls people who don’t bother to learn about politics hobbits, and he thinks it for the best if they stay home on Election Day.
I believe that instead of not bothering to learn, most people are not given the proper chance to learn about politics specifically. It is difficult to understand Brennan's viewpoints for me as he refers to people as hobbits and hooligans. I respect his thoughts in trying to better the system, but I believe that he may have socioeconomic bias and not understand where a lot of people are coming from.
If the odds that your vote will be decisive are minuscule—Brennan writes that “you are more likely to win Powerball a few times in a row”—then learning about politics isn’t worth even a few minutes of your time.
I think this mentality is dangerous and causes people to start relying on the more "educated" and stop taking actions themselves. One person believing this will turn to ten and hundreds and thousands who now do not bother to vote in the belief that it does not matter. For example. I am a vegetarian and by refusing to eat meat, I do not believe that I have made any significant impact; however, there are so many vegetarians and vegans now who also changed their diet and as a result, have changed the markets demands (there is much more vegetarian and vegan options at grocery stores and restaurants than there was 10 years ago).
Voting rights may happen to signify human dignity to us, he writes, but corpse-eating once signified respect for the dead among the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea.
This quote really exemplifies how one culture or generation can perceive things completely differently. This relates to the last article, "Reader Come Home" about moral catastrophe. At the time, people thought it was okay and were unknowingly complicit. I believe the answer to this article is the same as the the last: educate, think critically, act. The first step being the most important of educating people, rather than eliminating people's voices.
Against Estlund’s claim that universal suffrage is the default, Brennan argues that it’s entirely justifiable to limit the political power that the irrational, the ignorant, and the incompetent have over others. To counter Estlund’s concern for fairness, Brennan asserts that the public’s welfare is more important than anyone’s hurt feelings; after all, he writes, few would consider it unfair to disqualify jurors who are morally or cognitively incompetent.
Brennan states that the welfare of the public is more important than hurting anyone's feelings. I think that "hurt feelings" diminishes the reality that certain election choices could completely change certain people's lives in a negative way. It is important that they have the opportunity to vote for themselves.
A more practical suggestion came from J. S. Mill, in the nineteenth century: give extra votes to citizens with university degrees or intellectually demanding jobs.
I believe that this would only lead to an even bigger gap. Instead of shutting out voices, I believe it would be more helpful to educate more people and help them get the degrees and jobs.
prevented from reading any literature in which the characters have speaking parts, which might lead them to forget themselves.
I find this slightly ironic. I believe that a lot of people help shape who they are as a person from reading. As Plato believed, if reading one book shifts the identity of someone, was their identity very strong in the first place?
To keep their minds pure of distractions—such as family, money,
It's interesting how Plato calls family a "distraction" and how he said typical citizens are flighty because one day they are on a diet and one day the are not. To an extent, family and money can be a serious distraction, but for the most part those are important functions to living. If only the "educated guardians" make decisions, is that really what is best for everyone? Can't anyone become corrupt (money/power) and if there are only a handful of these guardians, one person can make a significant change for the worse for everyone.
If most voters are uninformed, who should make decisions about the public’s welfare?
The subtitle really caught my eye. The first thought that popped up in my mind is how would you test if people are "uninformed"? What would be the standard? Would it ever be completely unbiased?