Iterative Wisdom

"There’s one example in particular that comes close to summing up the entire argument of What Money..."

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 12:11:07 -0500

“There’s one example in particular that comes close to summing up the entire argument of What Money Can’t Buy. It concerns an Israeli daycare centre, which responded to a problem with parents turning up late to collect their children by introducing fines. The result? Late pick-ups increased. Parents turned up late, paid the fine, and thought no more of it; the fine had turned into a fee. The fear of disapproval and of doing the wrong thing was based on non-monetary values, and was a stronger force than mere cash. The daycare centre went back to the old system, but parents kept turning up late, because the introduction of market values had killed the old ideas of collective responsibility. Once the old “norm” of turning up on time had been marketised, it was impossible to change back.”

- What Money Can’t Buy by Michael Sandel – review | Books | The Guardian (via ayjay)

"People use guns. But in a sense guns use people, too. When we have the technology for violence..."

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 08:55:27 -0500

“

People use guns. But in a sense guns use people, too. When we have the technology for violence easily to hand, our choices are skewed and we are more vulnerable to being manipulated into violent action.

Perhaps that’s why, in a passage often heard in church around this time of year, the Bible imagines a world where swords are beaten into ploughshares. In the new world which the newborn child of Christmas brings into being, weapons are not left to hang on the wall, suggesting all the time that the right thing to do might after all be to use them. They are decommissioned, knocked out of shape, put to work for something totally different.

Control of the arms trade, whether for individuals or for nations, won’t in itself stop the impulse to violence and slaughter. But it’s a start in changing what’s taken for granted. The good news of Christmas is that the atmosphere of fear and hostility isn’t the natural climate for human beings, and it can be changed.

If all you have is a gun, everything looks like a target. But if all you have is the child’s openness and willingness to be loved, everything looks like a promise. Control of the weapons trade is a start. But what will really make the difference is dealing with fear and the pressure to release our anxiety and tension at the expense of others. A new heart, a new spirit, as the Bible says; so that peace on earth won’t be an empty hope.

”

- Rowan Williams.

ayjay: “I often have to tell people that I don’t agree with everything that I post — I sometimes post quotations because I think they’re interesting, worth thinking about, whether I agree or not. But in this case I want to be clear that I could not possibly agree more fervently with what the Archbishop says here.”

The ‘To a man holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ problem.

"9. Any thoughts about the role of the book in our professional lives and more generally our lives as..."

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 20:13:00 -0400

“

9. Any thoughts about the role of the book in our professional lives and more generally our lives as Christ-followers must be pursued within the parameters of the reflections above. We should not revere the book or any other technology in itself, but value it insofar as it helps us to work with the grain of God’s universe.

10. As a corollary, any decision to stick with paper codices instead of digital texts will be a trivial decision if in most other respects we are unreflective participants in Technopoly.

”

- Alan Jacobs

"As the authors were offering their final points at the end of the Q&A, [Steven] Johnson hit on a..."

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 20:03:40 -0400

“

As the authors were offering their final points at the end of the Q&A, [Steven] Johnson hit on a metaphor that, for once, everyone could agree on: the city.

The city, like the internet, is noisy, distracting, overwhelming, and potentially isolating. But people choose the city for its stimulus and connection, says Johnson, “and for me technology is like that: I know the cost, but I choose it.”

[Sherry] Turkle jotted down the metaphor on her notepad before responding:

“The best artists learned to find solitude in the middle of the metropolitan space,” she said. And “we need to learn to find solitude in the technological space.”

”

- Lonely, but united: Sherry Turkle and Steven Johnson on technology’s pain and promise

"The market economy must find its place in a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply and..."

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 12:05:50 -0400

“The market economy must find its place in a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply and demand, free prices, and competition. It must be firmly contained within an all-embracing order of society in which the imperfections and harshness of economic freedom are corrected by law and in which man is not denied conditions of life appropriate to his nature.”

- Wilhelm Roepke, the great free-market economist, quoted here.

"‘Bilbo knew no more than he told you, I am sure,’ said Gandalf. ‘He would certainly never have..."

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 19:11:16 -0400

“

‘Bilbo knew no more than he told you, I am sure,’ said Gandalf. ‘He would certainly never have passed on to you anything that he thought would be a danger, even though I promised to look after you. He thought the ring was very beautiful, and very useful at need; and if anything was wrong or queer, it was himself. He said that it was “growing on his mind”, and he was always worrying about it; but he did not suspect that the ring itself was to blame. Though he had found out that the thing needed looking after; it did not seem always of the same size or weight; it shrank or expanded in an odd way, and might suddenly slip off a finger where it had been tight.’

Amazing how much this resembles people’s feelings about their smartphone

”

- via ayjay

"In the absence of any meaningful regulations and restrictions, IVF has also brought with it..."

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:40:45 -0400

“

In the absence of any meaningful regulations and restrictions, IVF has also brought with it precisely the kind of consequences that many people caught up in the so-called “panic” worried about two generations ago. True, we don’t “decant” our babies in the laboratory, à la Huxley’s “Brave New World,” but between the embryos we keep on ice and the ones we create and destroy for scientific research, the normalization of paid surrogacy and the freewheeling marketplace in eggs and sperm, we live in a society that has commodified both reproduction and human life itself in ways that would have seemed dystopian, not only to the social conservatives of an earlier era, but to many of its liberals as well.

James Watson wasn’t mistaken, in this sense, about the consequences of the breakthrough; he was just wrong about how society would respond to them. The slippery slope was entirely real; going down it just turned out to be a relatively comfortable experience.

”

- The Wisdom of a Moral Panic - NYTimes.com. I think this happens a lot: people predict terrible consequences of some proposed social change, and then later are laughed at for their foolish fearfulness. Often, though — think for instance of those who warned against the dangers of no-fault divorce — the doomsayers were right, and what they prophesied came true. We were just too distracted by our toys to notice, or we decided that we preferred the benefits of the new model and could put up with the costs. But that doesn’t mean that those who predicted bad consequences were wrong: it only means that we are insensible to changes that occur over a long period of time, and that a given society often recalculates its cost/benefit ratios. Sometimes those recalculations are wise and sometimes they aren’t.

"Perhaps our most dangerous bias is that we naturally assume that everyone else is more susceptible..."

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 19:36:22 -0400

“

Perhaps our most dangerous bias is that we naturally assume that everyone else is more susceptible to thinking errors, a tendency known as the “bias blind spot.” This “meta-bias” is rooted in our ability to spot systematic mistakes in the decisions of others—we excel at noticing the flaws of friends—and inability to spot those same mistakes in ourselves. Although the bias blind spot itself isn’t a new concept, West’s latest paper demonstrates that it applies to every single bias under consideration, from anchoring to so-called “framing effects.” In each instance, we readily forgive our own minds but look harshly upon the minds of other people.

And here’s the upsetting punch line: intelligence seems to make things worse. The scientists gave the students four measures of “cognitive sophistication.” As they report in the paper, all four of the measures showed positive correlations, “indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” This trend held for many of the specific biases, indicating that smarter people (at least as measured by S.A.T. scores) and those more likely to engage in deliberation were slightly more vulnerable to common mental mistakes.

”

- Research Shows That the Smarter People Are, the More Susceptible They Are to Cognitive Bias : The New Yorker

And this is why you should follow @ayjay

Fri, 04 May 2012 14:39:51 -0400

And this is why you should follow @ayjay

"Facebook has created presumptive, default closeness among casual acquaintances where we once had..."

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 15:36:39 -0400

“

Facebook has created presumptive, default closeness among casual acquaintances where we once had presumptive, default formality, and I don’t know that it’s such a bad thing. I’m a social media agnostic. I’m also wary of sounding like, say, a middle-aged crank, nostalgic for a prelapsarian face-to-face social life that she most likely found strange when she was actually living through it as a young person. New forms of connection get invented, and an Elegy for the Private Man in the Privacy-Loathing Age told in dismayed rumblings doesn’t preoccupy me.

But what do we call this chimera of being closer—in each other’s business—yet not at all intimate? On Facebook we call it being friends. It’s harmless enough. We all know that there are gradations of intimacy and that there is a friendship deeper than a Facebook friend. The lucky ones among us have people with whom we are genuinely close: those who will help us in an emergency, whom we could call at midnight with a problem, with whom we feel mutual obligations, who provide us with social identity and place, and without whom our lives would be tangibly compromised. Facebook and the like promote intimacy lite.

Lite intimacies in social media create a background din of disclosure, confession, closeness, and familiarity. It isn’t inherently fake or objectionable, and if it were only a semantic problem, I wouldn’t be concerned. But there is danger, it seems to me, of losing our coordinates. There’s a danger that the lite intimacies of the sentimental culture might deplete the resources of our true intimacies. If the intimate building blocks that once belonged mostly to a domestic partner or family—the sharing of a million little details about our moods, and what we ate for breakfast, and our daily rituals and secret gripes—now belong to everyone on Facebook in the world of lite intimacy, then how much deeper do we need to go to find the everyday material out of which to recognize, solidify, and build that deeper intimacy? Do we have to scream emotions louder to be heard over the cacophony of the lite intimacy? A mild hypothesis for the new social life of our age: the easier it is to be close but not intimate in public, the easier it is to be close but not intimate in private.

”

- The American Scholar: Death by Treacle - Pamela Haag

"The real issue, it seems to me, is not whether Facebook makes us lonely, but whether Facebook is..."

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 15:22:41 -0400

“

The real issue, it seems to me, is not whether Facebook makes us lonely, but whether Facebook is reconfiguring our notions of loneliness, sociability, and relationships. These are after all not exactly static concepts. Here is where I think Marche raises some substantial concerns that are unfortunately lost when the debate goes down the path of determining causality.

What Facebook offers is the dream of managing the social and curating the self, and we seem to obsessively take to the task. The asynchronicity of Facebook is rather safe, after all, when compared to the messy and risky dynamics of face-to-face interactions and we naturally gravitate toward this sort of safety. I suspect this is in part also why we would sometimes rather text than call and, if we do call, why we hope to get sent to voicemail. It seems reasonable to ask whether we will be tempted to take the efficiency and smoothness of our social media interactions as the norm for all forms of social interaction.

”

- Facebook and Loneliness: The Better Question « The Frailest Thing

"In one experiment, Cacioppo looked for a connection between the loneliness of subjects and the..."

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 15:07:00 -0400

“In one experiment, Cacioppo looked for a connection between the loneliness of subjects and the relative frequency of their interactions via Facebook, chat rooms, online games, dating sites, and face-to-face contact. The results were unequivocal. “The greater the proportion of face-to-face interactions, the less lonely you are,” he says. “The greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are.” Surely, I suggest to Cacioppo, this means that Facebook and the like inevitably make people lonelier. He disagrees. Facebook is merely a tool, he says, and like any tool, its effectiveness will depend on its user. “If you use Facebook to increase face-to-face contact,” he says, “it increases social capital.” So if social media let you organize a game of football among your friends, that’s healthy. If you turn to social media instead of playing football, however, that’s unhealthy.”

- Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?

"One who will not allow any occurrence whatever to deprive him of his responsibility for the course..."

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 18:37:51 -0400

“One who will not allow any occurrence whatever to deprive him of his responsibility for the course of history—because he knows that it has been laid on him by God—will thereafter achieve a more fruitful relation to the events of history than that of barren criticism and equally barren opportunism. To talk of going down fighting like heroes in the face of certain defeat is not really heroic at all, but merely a refusal to face the future. The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live. It is only from this question, with its responsibility towards history, that fruitful solutions can come, even if for the time being they are very humiliating.”

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years” (1943)

"The reading experience is so much more valuable now than it was ten years ago because it’s rarer. I..."

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 18:11:08 -0400

“

The reading experience is so much more valuable now than it was ten years ago because it’s rarer. I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”

It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.” The endless gratification offered up by our devices means that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we have to choose to do.

”

- Clay Shirky (via Nick Carr )

"Researchers at Wellesley College and the University of Kansas investigated friendships at that..."

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 19:08:50 -0400

“

Researchers at Wellesley College and the University of Kansas investigated friendships at that 25,000-student institution and at four smaller colleges in the state. “People would expect in bigger and more diverse places you’d come into contact with a bigger and more diverse set of people,” says lead researcher Angela Bahns, a social psychologist at Wellesley. “But you find the exact opposite.”

The researchers gave pairs of friends separate questionnaires on their lifestyles (how often they drank, exercised, etc.) and opinions (on topics such as abortion) and found that the bigger the school, the more similar friends were to one another. In follow-up research, not yet published, Ms. Bahns and her team found similar results comparing big cities like New York and Chicago to smaller ones like Iowa City and Lawrence, Kan.

How can more people and more diversity lead to less diverse friendships? It’s simple, really: We like people who are like us. Social scientists call it the “similarity-attraction effect,” and it influences everything from whom we date and hire to where we choose to live. The bigger the pond, the more likely we are—consciously or not—to swim around until we find a group of like and like-minded people.

”

- How Big Cities Can Lead to Small Thoughts

"My dear Francesco, I have lately kept praising the age in which we live, because of the great,..."

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 21:24:49 -0400

“My dear Francesco, I have lately kept praising the age in which we live, because of the great, indeed divine gift of the new kind of writing which was recently brought to us from Germany. In fact, I saw a single man printing in a single month as much as could be written by hand by several persons in a year… . It was for this reason that I was led to hope that within a short time we should have such a large quantity of books that there wouldn’t be a single work which could not be procured because of lack of means or scarcity… . Yet — oh false and all too human thoughts — I see that things turned out quite differently from what I had hoped. Because now that anyone is free to print whatever they wish, they often disregard that which is best and instead write, merely for the sake of entertainment, what would best be forgotten, or, better still be erased from all books. And even when they write something worthwhile they twist it and corrupt it to the point where it would be much better to do without such books, rather than having a thousand copies spreading falsehoods over the whole world.”

- Niccolò Perotti, 1471 (as quoted by Robert Darnton in The Case for Books)

"The growth of sociable robotics is one thing that changed my mind. People are so vulnerable and so..."

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 21:34:46 -0400

“The growth of sociable robotics is one thing that changed my mind. People are so vulnerable and so willing to accept substitutes for human companionship in very intimate ways. I hadn’t seen that coming, and it really concerns me that we’re willing to give up something that I think defines our humanness: our ability to empathize and be with each other and talk to each other and understand each other. And I report to you with great sadness that the more I continued to interview people about this, the more I realized the extent to which people are willing to put machines in this role. People feel that they are not being heard, that no one is listening. They have a fantasy that finally, in a machine, they will have a nonjudgmental companion.”

- A Conversation with Sherry Turkle

Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 19:15:13 -0400

Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred

"Our period is not so unlike the age of Augustine: the planned society, caesarism of thugs or..."

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:54:07 -0500

“Our period is not so unlike the age of Augustine: the planned society, caesarism of thugs or bureaucracies, paideia, scientia, religious persecution, are all with us. Nor is there even lacking the possibility of a new Constantinism; letters have already begun to appear in the press, recommending religious instruction in schools as a cure for juvenile delinquency; Mr. Cochrane’s terrifying description of the “Christian” empire under Theodosius should discourage such hopes of using Christianity as a spiritual benzedrine for the earthly city.”

- Auden’s review of Charles Norris Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture, first printed in The New Republic in 1944.

"The benefits of social networking are many but require judicious and responsible use to be enjoyed...."

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 19:29:37 -0500

“

The benefits of social networking are many but require judicious and responsible use to be enjoyed. When done well, social networking can enhance the fellowship of the church by providing congregants a window into each other’s lives. It can mobilize congregants to serve their neighbors and enhance the church’s mission by embedding the community of church relationships in the broader community.

But social media can merely offer a short-term, technological solution to deeper, more fundamental problems. Social networking can give the appearance of intimacy and community without enabling the substance of embodied friendship.

The more we wed ourselves to social networking as a strategy for building community, the more we risk forgetting that the problems in our communities do not hinge upon lack of access to shared information about each other’s lives. They result from our own reluctance to share space and meals together, and to enter into environments and social situations that require our embodied presence. The comforting arm around a shoulder that comes when we “weep with those who weep” will never have an equal virtual substitute.

”

- Matthew Lee Anderson