Saturday, March 23, 2024
Friday, March 22, 2024
Beware the echo chamber..................
Taken together, these studies suggest an unnervingly plausible two-part engine of polarisation: first, given the choice, we seek out other people like us. Then, being surrounded by people like us makes us more extreme in our views and more confident that those views are correct.
Our current information ecosystem offers us more choice than ever. Alongside social media we can pick and choose from websites, podcasts and YouTube channels to reflect any interest, geography and ideology. And how do we use that choice? Generally, by seeking out people who share our views, broadcasters who seem to “get” us and, often, by avoiding news altogether.
I am wary of blaming social media for all our ills. It can be a great source of support and information, particularly for people in an unusual situation: anything from having a disability to a minority sexual orientation to a niche hobby. There is a real benefit to being able to reach out and find like-minded people.
Yet we must acknowledge the risk that we are self-selecting into echo chambers. Social media algorithms may be giving us a push, recommending content to us that drives “engagement”, the most surprising, outrageous and often toxic material. But we shouldn’t blame algorithms steering us away from serious and thoughtful exposure to different points of view. We are quite capable of choosing that for ourselves.
Our current information ecosystem offers us more choice than ever. Alongside social media we can pick and choose from websites, podcasts and YouTube channels to reflect any interest, geography and ideology. And how do we use that choice? Generally, by seeking out people who share our views, broadcasters who seem to “get” us and, often, by avoiding news altogether.
I am wary of blaming social media for all our ills. It can be a great source of support and information, particularly for people in an unusual situation: anything from having a disability to a minority sexual orientation to a niche hobby. There is a real benefit to being able to reach out and find like-minded people.
Yet we must acknowledge the risk that we are self-selecting into echo chambers. Social media algorithms may be giving us a push, recommending content to us that drives “engagement”, the most surprising, outrageous and often toxic material. But we shouldn’t blame algorithms steering us away from serious and thoughtful exposure to different points of view. We are quite capable of choosing that for ourselves.
-Tim Harford, from here
Be careful what you wish for......
Most Trump antagonists seem to be laughing and salivating. I suppose they would enjoy seeing the man tortured. It's bizarrely shortsighted. Do they think Trump is uniquely evil and nothing that happens to him will set a precedent?
-from this Althouse post
Happy Birthday...........................
This classic clip, featuring some interesting role reversals, is worth 3:42 minutes of your time.
Wednesday, March 20, 2024
a now familiar paradox..............
In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.
-Adam Gopnik, from this review
Seems like an early spring this year..........
 |
| Supposed to fall to 20 degrees tonight. Fearing for the magnolia blooms - my favorite blooming tree. |
 |
| My Sweetie and I just finished covering the peony sprouts. They are very early this year. |
 |
| Too many daffodils to cover. They're on their own |
First world......................................
...........................................problems.
Opening paragraphs................
Clay Hutmacher Jr., twenty-five, stood knee-deep in the Twelve Sleep River, casting for trout with a determined look on his face and an engagement ring in his pocket. He was twelve miles from the town of Saddlestring, on the ranch his father managed and that, he hoped, he would take over some day. . . .
The wonderful thing about fly-fishing, he'd discovered, was that it was all-consuming. The tactics, the gear, reading the water, the choice of flies, keeping his balance on smooth round river rocks—all of that fully occupied his mind and pushed out other concerns.
Fly-fishing was like sex in that way.
-C. J. Box, Three-Inch Teeth: A Joe Pickett Novel
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Sort of interesting...................
-a few excerpts:
Their deepest underlying assumption may be that the tradeoff between doing well and being well is a false choice.
The best teams aren't the ones with the best thinkers. They're the teams that unearth and use the best thinking from everyone.
. . . that collective intelligence depends less on people's cognitive skills than their prosocial skills. The best teams have the most team players—people who excel at collaborating with others.
The people to promote are the ones with the prosocial skills to put the mission above their ego—and team cohesion above personal glory.
If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and will never achieve, its full potential, that word would be "meetings."
Weak leaders silence voice and shoot the messenger. Strong leaders welcome voice and thank the messenger. Great leaders build systems to amplify voice and elevate the messenger.
If you doubt yourself, shouldn't you doubt your low opinion of yourself?
came naturally...................
Religion played a central role in his life and his thinking, as it would in the Revolution. It was no accident that so many Boston town meetings were conducted in houses of prayer, or the republicanism, as envisaged in Massachusetts Bay, traced the independent-minded, egalitarian, community-based lines of Puritanism. Men who preferred a church without a bishop came naturally to the idea of a state without a king.
-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
Reflection..........................
The danger in trying to hide who you are is that you'll succeed, and you'll start to see a stranger in the mirror of other people.
brainwriting....................
To unearth the hidden potential in teams, instead of brainstorming, we're better off shifting to a process called brainwriting. The initial steps are solo. You start by asking everyone to generate ideas separately. Next, you pool them and share them anonymously among the group. To preserve independent judgment, each member evaluates them on their own. Only then does the team come together to select and refine the most promising options. By developing and assessing ideas individually before choosing and elaborating them, teams can surface and advance possibilities that might not get attention otherwise. . . .
Collective intelligence begins with individual creativity. But it doesn't end there.
-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things
Believe......................
Some make the world believe that they believe what they do not believe. Others, in greater number, make themselves believe it, being unable to penetrate what it means to believe.
-Michel de Montaigne, from An Apology to Raymond Sebond, also known as Chapter 12, Book 2 of his Complete Works
Monday, March 18, 2024
Classic......................
................................Christopher Hitchens:
Tell me which decade you love, or hate, and I'll tell you who and what you are.
-1990
-1990
I must say that I've always found the generational emphasis on the way that my youth was covered to be very annoying. There were a lot of other people born in April, 1949, and I just don't feel like I have anything in common with most of them.
-2001
-2001
Of complexities..............
Of the complexities introduced by the "present vast and delicate division of labor," he wrote, "When everybody is working for everybody, everybody is injured by the mischances of everybody."
-James Grant, Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian
seeds.........................
Whether our cosmic helplessness paralyzes or mobilizes us depends largely on how we orient to freedom and what we make of agency. “The smallest act in the most limited circumstances,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition, “bears the seed of… boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.”
-Maria Popova, from here
a summary......................
It is difficult to improve on the summary of the chronicler who delivered up Adam's first years in a single storm cloud of a sentence: "He read theology and abandoned the ministry, read law and abandoned the bar, entered business and lost a thousand pounds."
-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
A love of reading often begins at home....
Although filling our homes with books might be a start, psychologists find that it's not enough. If we want our kids to enjoy reading, we need to make books part of their lives. That involves talking about books during meals and car rides, visiting libraries or bookstores, giving books as gifts, and letting them see us read. Children pay attention to our attention: where we focus tells them what we prize.
-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things
If.............................
If we held to God by the mediation of a living faith, if we held to God through him and not through ourselves, if we had a divine foothold and foundation, human accidents would not have the power to shake us as they do.
-Michel de Montaigne, from An Apology to Raymond Sebond, also known as Chapter 12, Book 2 of his Complete Works
Sunday, March 17, 2024
Opening paragraphs.................
As someone who never really had one, maybe I am the least qualified person to defend the importance of family. But as someone with more education than I ever expected to receive, maybe I'm more qualified to say we give education more importance than we should. I am grateful for the miraculous trajectory of my life, but I had to experience upward mobility firsthand and reach the summit of education to understand its limitations. I've come to understand that a warm and loving family is worth infinitely more than the money or accomplishments I hoped might compensate for them.
Rob Henderson, from the Preface to his book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class
taxing the mega-rich...................
...................to stop "transformational philanthropy"?
It doesn’t matter if you agree with Mr. Bankman-Fried about how to make the world better, whether you support his veganism, his global-warming alarmism or his priorities for spending his ill-gotten gains. History teaches us that the greatest crimes are committed by those who believe they are mankind’s benefactors.
Independent-mindedness...............
....................or, how to think for yourself:
The three components of independent-mindedness work in concert: fastidiousness about truth and resistance to being told what to think leave space in your brain, and curiosity finds new ideas to fill it.
The federal Board of Tea Experts........
....................................who knew?
It's a warning about the stickiness of bad ideas, about an inertia that can limit even the smallest attempts at trimming the state.
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