Why smart people are better off with fewer friends - The Washington Post - "people who live in more densely populated areas tend to report less satisfaction with their life overall. "The higher the population density of the immediate environment, the less happy" the survey respondents said they were. Second, they find that the more social interactions with close friends a person has, the greater their self-reported happiness. But there was one big exception. For more intelligent people, these correlations were diminished or even reversed... When smart people spend more time with their friends, it makes them less happy."
Great Scientists Don't Need Math - WSJ - "Many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semiliterate... Fortunately, exceptional mathematical fluency is required in only a few disciplines, such as particle physics, astrophysics and information theory. Far more important throughout the rest of science is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes by intuition... Over the years, I have co-written many papers with mathematicians and statisticians, so I can offer the following principle with confidence. Call it Wilson's Principle No. 1: It is far easier for scientists to acquire needed collaboration from mathematicians and statisticians than it is for mathematicians and statisticians to find scientists able to make use of their equations. This imbalance is especially the case in biology, where factors in a real-life phenomenon are often misunderstood or never noticed in the first place"
The Self-Esteem Movement's Beneficiaries Come of Age — Letters to the Editor - WSJ - "The graduating classes at most universities entered kindergarten in 1997: an era of self-esteem promotions, universal trophies and zero tolerance for any statement that could possibly offend any individual in any regard, regardless of the accuracy of the observation. These new adults have been protected from the ordinary daily negativity that abounds in the real world and that is critically necessary for full emotional development"
Karmic Battle Takes Place on Shanghai River - WSJ - "After prayers, the Buddhists release the creatures into the river to swim free... you can imagine how the Buddhists reacted a few years back when weekend fishermen began hovering nearby with nets affixed to long poles or hidden underwater to catch the liberated animals and sell them back to the markets or fry them up for dinner."
The Exhaustion of American Liberalism - WSJ - "Unlike the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, when protesters wore their Sunday best and carried themselves with heroic dignity, today’s liberal marches are marked by incoherence and downright lunacy—hats designed to evoke sexual organs, poems that scream in anger yet have no point to make, and an hysterical anti-Americanism. All this suggests lostness, the end of something rather than the beginning. What is ending? America, since the ’60s, has lived through what might be called an age of white guilt. We may still be in this age, but the Trump election suggests an exhaustion with the idea of white guilt, and with the drama of culpability, innocence and correctness in which it mire... Perhaps the Obama presidency was the culmination of the age of white guilt, so that this guiltiness has entered its denouement. There are so many public moments now in which liberalism’s old weapon of stigmatization shoots blanks— Elizabeth Warren in the Senate reading a 30-year-old letter by Coretta Scott King, hoping to stop Jeff Sessions’s appointment as attorney general. There it was with deadly predictability: a white liberal stealing moral authority from a black heroine in order to stigmatize a white male as racist. When Ms. Warren was finally told to sit, there was real mortification behind her glaring eyes. This liberalism evolved within a society shamed by its past. But that shame has weakened now"
In China, Pork Fat Inspires Poetry, Art and Literature - China Real Time Report - WSJ - "“When I was little, being a butcher was my dream so I could kill pigs and eat the pork fat,” Chinese novelist Gao Wenxuan recalls in the book. “Walking in the countryside with an oily belly, walking in front of starving children with hungry eyes.”"
Study Sees Link Between Allergies and the Infant Gut - WSJ - "Dogs tracking in and out of the home also can boost the diversity of the bacteria in that newborn microbiome and lower the risk of allergies, Dr. Lynch and her colleagues reported in a 2014 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (Even the practice of cleaning a baby’s pacifier by sucking on it promotes an exchange of bacteria and lowers the baby’s risk of developing allergies, researchers at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg reported in a 2013 study published in the journal Pediatrics.) Other common practices, including delivery by C-section or the use of antibiotics, have a substantial effect on gut bacteria at a time when the immune system is still a work in progress... “Babies born by C-section get bacteria minutes after birth, but not from the mother”"
Afghan 'Child' asylum seeker is revealed to be in his TWENTIES - "An Afghan who claimed to be just 12 is revealed to be in his twenties after assaulting his British foster father. The Afghan teen, who had arrived in Britain illegally via Calais, was actually registered as a child but after a dental examination found that he had rotting wisdom teeth, a dentist suggested he was more likely to be an adult... 'The dentist said he had to be in at least his 20s but the Home Office strike people down to 16 if they don't know what their age is for certain, so he was listed as 16.' Mr Davies said that Britain was being fooled by fraudster immigrants who knew how to play our system... The comments from Mr Davies come just weeks after two shocking pictures emerged of migrant 'children' in Sweden. The first photo was of Iraqi Saad Alsaud, who despite looking like a man in his twenties, is reported to have been just 14. The other shows a Somalian named Youssaf Khaliif Nuur who claims he is 15 though he is 6ft tall and, according to one unconfirmed source, shaves his beard and moustache."
Home Office rules out 'inaccurate, inappropriate and unethical' dental checks to verify age of Calais refugee children - "Mr Davies was criticised by the British Dental Association, but he said he did not accept that it was "intrusive" to take an X-ray of a migrant. "Someone who is willing to throw themselves on to an electrified rail line or jump into a moving lorry isn't going to be terribly worried about having an X-ray.""
Migrant crisis: Three quarters of child refugees age tested in Denmark are adults - "Officials in Copenhagen used dental X-ray checks - which have been blocked in Britain because they are 'inhumane' - to rumble hundreds of adult migrants trying to clinch asylum by claiming they were children. Immigration officers referred 800 refugees who they suspected of lying about their ages to specialist scientists, who discovered that at least 600 were far older than they had told authorities. And the figure could be even higher because officials built in plenty of leeway and gave borderline cases the benefit of the doubt to make sure no genuine under-18s were denied their rights under international law... Critics have also pointed out that there are serious child safety issues raised by the possibility of grown men being classified as minors, because they will be placed in schools alongside vulnerable youngsters"
This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like - "What’s remarkable about this letter is that, as Justin Weinberg noted in the Daily Nous, a philosophy website, each and every one of the falsifiable points it makes is, based on a plain reading of Tuvel’s article, simply false or misleading... it’s remarkable how many basic facts this letter gets wrong about Tuvel’s paper. Either the authors simply lied about the article’s contents, or they didn’t read it at all. Every single one of the hundreds of signatories on the open letter now has their name on a document that severely (and arguably maliciously) mischaracterizes the work of one of their colleagues. This is not the sort of thing that usually happens in academia — it’s a really strange, disturbing instance of mass groupthink, perhaps fueled by the dynamics of online shaming and piling-on... Trans people face the threat of real, physical violence every day in huge parts of this country and this world. A nerdy philosophy paper trying to suss out the specifics of identity and identity-change is not an act of violence, and it’s really unfortunate that this sort of “speech is violence” language has caught on given that it makes it much easier for opponents of trans rights (or the rights of other marginalized groups) to sweep away legitimate claims of violence as mere hysteria"
The lessons of the Rebecca Tuvel witch-hunt - "Over 800 academics and others signed an ‘open letter to Hypatia’, calling for the article to be retracted, on the grounds that it causes ‘harm’ to marginalised people and reflects ‘white and cisgender privilege’. More piled on... ‘Tuvel enacts violence and perpetuates harm in numerous ways throughout her essay. She deadnames a trans woman... Berenstain is not debating the substance of Tuvel’s ideas – she is simply declaring that certain words are taboo, and is mad that Tuvel crossed her line by using them"
Maybe 800 academic feminists are pseudo feminists and a small, unrepresentative group (Of 13,000 full/part-time faculty and instructional staff in degree-granting institutions in fall 2003, 2,200 were women). And the fact that tumblr feminists use the same language suggests that they aren't really misunderstanding feminism.
No true feminist puts sugar in her porridge
Rebecca Tuvel, Amy Cuddy, and “bullying” in academia. - "Tuvel herself reported getting hate mail and said she’d been repeatedly “denounced as a horrible person by people who have never met me”... more than three-fourths of tenured and tenure-track positions are held by men, and black women make up just 0.4 percent of professional philosophers—just 55 scholars in a total of 13,000."
Slate's defending and playing down of the witch hunt is self defeating: given how few women there are in philosophy (which we can take as a proxy for feminist philosophers), the hundreds signing the anti-Tuvel letter are even more striking - and even less able to be dismissed as a small, unrepresentative minority
Data...or “The Philosophy Exception” - Women in introductory philosophy courses (n=700) generally
– found the course less enjoyable, and the material less interesting and relevant to their lives, than their male counterparts;
– felt they had less in common with philosophy majors or instructors and felt less able and likely to succeed in philosophy;
– reported being less likely to enroll in more advanced philosophy courses or major in the discipline, and
– were likelier to disagree that the syllabus included a fair proportion of women authors.
However: Women were no more likely to report that class conversations were aggressive, or to anticipate lower grades.
If men in introductory feminism courses found the course less enjoyable, the material less interesting etc than women, would this be proof that academic feminism was biased against men?
of course, there’s the backchannel – Freddie deBoer - "When within-group criticism is only voiced privately, there’s no opportunity for the group to evolve, to shore up its weakness, to evaluate its own problems, to correct its own course. And political movements have to evolve or die. It’s a classic cause of political self-destruction, when a group’s inner dynamics become so ossified and conformist that no one is willing to point out the group’s problems. That’s the condition in far too many left spaces today: a near-total inability to point out the cracks in the foundation for fear of being shamed yourself... For every one of these controversies that goes public, there are vastly more situations where someone self-censors, or is quietly bullied into acquiescing... Since the beginning of my graduate education, I have been someone who other academics feel that they can come to in order to voice their shock and dismay at just how toxic the culture within academia has become. They tell stories about petty witch hunts and show trials within their departments. They share their fear about objecting to arguments they find unfair or unsupported. They say they feel compelled to follow current academic fads for fear of being labeled. They are convinced that stepping out of line with the constant search for offense will render them permanently unemployable, even though they are themselves progressive people. You’ve heard the litany before. They share it with me... all kinds of people discuss this stuff with me: white and black, male and female, trans and cis. And the people who approach me aren’t mostly those rare academic conservatives, who barely exist these days, but rather liberals and leftists who believe in the movement for equality but find that the way that movement operates in the contemporary university has become toxic and unjust. And that all comes down to a broader reality: on campus and off, even many or most of those who are deeply committed to the cause of social justice and its expression in feminism, anti-racism, and the fight for LGBTQ rights recognize that the culture of social justice is deeply unhealthy... We will not build a mass movement by turning our groups into a never-ending production of The Crucible. That tendency is almost uniquely destructive to our efforts to spread our beliefs through persuasion, which, you know, is the whole fucking point of all this — to convince those who are amenable to being convinced, so as to build a majority party that can win... there’s a backlash brewing, against these tactics... We’ve already seen the political backlash; look at the conditions of this country. Soon, I think, there will be a social and cultural backlash as well... Central to the culture of Weird/Left Twitter is the absolute rejection of any insecurity or self-doubt whatsoever. It’s perhaps the most obvious shared trope within that discursive space: you treat everything in politics as laughably obvious, as though the entire world unfolds itself in predigested moral scenarios where there is always a hero and a villain and where anyone who does not immediately identify the correct position is a shill or a fool."
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Public Opinion - "'I think in a democracy every view has a right to be heard. But I think the majority has important rights too. For example that we should take timely decisions that push forward our progress and our prosperity. And I fear that in this country we have skewed too much in favor of minority vested interests'...
Protest is the lifeblood of democracy. Democracy is about much more than elections every five years. It's about a constant process of consultation and negotiation between the rulers and the ruled. And so protest has a very very important role in keeping politicians on their toes and hold them to account. I agree absolutely that it's very important and most effective when protest is backed by evidence...
What is it we complain about when it comes to politicians? We complain that they don't act in the long term, they don't address big, complex, structural issues. They instead knee jerk. They respond to one off things. They respond to public opinion. So arguably isn't your life's work I mean part of the problem that we've got, which is a policy that is all about fast responses rather than these deep, more complex issues? Hard issues to mobilize people about...
'Majorities can be wrong'
'They can get things wrong but that doesn't mean that minorities should keep prevailing'"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Drugs in Sport and Human Enhancement - "The playing field is not level. It's mostly private schools that have them for a start: half the UK's gold medalists in 2012 went to public i.e. private schools. Top sportsmen and women are supported by multi million pound programs: doctors, nutritionists, high altitude training. That's why champions come mainly from rich countries. Why are performance enhancing drugs wrong when all sorts of other ways of obtaining competitive advantage aren't? Sport's not fair, life's not fair...
If it's the case that diversity and you know people having a lot of different flaws is a good thing then we should probably be trying to create more flawed people. More psychopaths...
The doping rules are actually an artificially imposed set of rules brought about by sporting bodies that say a particular form of enhancement across all sports is immoral, wrong and there's so many rules now and I'm suggesting that those rules are arbitrary morally because there's lots of enhancement in sport"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Moral Certainty - "'Convictions need to be treated with great humility because I think actually what we regard as solid moral principles are very much influenced by time and place. They change with geography, they change over time'...
'I'm actually going to defer to Bertolt Brecht who has this great line in his poem In Praise of Doubt where he says: greet with cheerfulness and respect the man who treats your word like a bad penny and I think that's very good advice to journalists, conviction driven or otherwise and to us all because I think we use doubt best when we use it to test our own arguments'...
Not sure whether it's actually bravery I think that might be you sort of stretching the concept. If you, you know if you have a jolly nice job, good life out of it then good for you. I'm not sure it's bravery, I think there're very few brave columnists other than in dictatorships and none of us thankfully are there"
In a time when the bar for bravery is so low, some still have standards...
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Charities - "[On charities campaigning] If you say ministers want to hear from charities they can pick up the phone and ask the charity. The charity can pick up the phone to the minister."