Gad Saad - Posts | Facebook - "One religion is responsible for 13 trillion acts of terror.
The other 99,999 religions are collectively responsible for 4 terror acts.
Progressive nuanced thinkers: You see, all religions can delve into violence.
=> Scale is white supremacy."
A Profanity Filter Banned the Word 'Bone' at a Paleontology Conference - "“Words like ‘bone,’ ‘pubic,’ and ‘stream’ are frankly ridiculous to ban in a field where we regularly find pubic bones in streams,” one participant said of the filter, which organizers had to thwart... “I became disturbed when I saw that the crowd-sourced list of banned words included ‘Wang,’” he continued. “I personally know of several vertebrate paleontologists by that surname. It didn't seem right, so I typed in other synonymous slangs into the Q&A platform and realized the bias that I tweeted about.”"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Death of the City? - "‘Let me put it to you that having a world city as your capital city is a particular problem for a nation state because we need the capital to reflect the nation. Whereas if the capital like ours reflects the world, doesn't it operate at some degrees removed from the National polity? And doesn't that create tensions?... my fear is that when London looks and feels a lot like the rest of the world, it doesn't look and feel quite so much like Northumberland or like Scotland or like Wales.’
‘Well, I agree, but that's because we allow our politicians to spend too much time in Westminster. We don't require them to spend more time going around the country. There was a time when our judges, the greatest judges in the land travelled from one, one city to the other to administer justice, and they've got a context. Now they, almost all of them sit in London, I think you're arguing for our politicians to get out more, not to get rid of London.’...
‘A lot of people outside of it, we feel London's an incredibly arrogant place. And it's very reluctant it feels to let go of its economic or political or cultural power.’...
‘We are separated from what really sustains us, which is the countryside, which I think is a very unhealthy way of living. Now, one interesting thing that a couple of witnesses suggested is that in their defense of the city, they acknowledged that the best way to make a city flourish was to make it more like the countryside. And we are seeing a move towards that. You are getting more farming done within town, within cities, you're starting to get more greenery within cities, but I find this ironic, that the people who are most strongly defending metropolitan living, in order to sell it to people have to convince people they're living in Surrey’"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Gambling - "‘I always forget how many people do have a moral objection to gambling. You know, I've never had a problem with it. I never felt that it was much of a taboo. But even amongst the economists and libertarians I tend to hang around with, a surprising number of them disapprove of gambling, and I think that's because they think it's a waste of money. They think it's stupid. They understand knowing the odds, that the house, on balance, will always win. What they don't grasp, I think, is that it is spending money. We shouldn't look at gambling losses, we should look at it as spend. It's something you do to make watching that football match or whatever more exciting.’... ‘There's simply isn't a correlation between regulation and prevalence of problem gambling, you know, the, the 'prevalence problem gambling, as I say hasn't risen in 20 years. Despite the rise of internet gambling, the rise of fixed odds betting terminals, the legalization of gambling advertising, and in Britain, the preference from gambling is often considerably lower than it is in other countries, including in countries where gambling is totally illegal, like China’"
Did Covid-19 Kill the Handshake? (NSQ Ep. 1) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "'The irony might be that as the world thinks, oh, let's turn to scientists because they have certainty about what's going to happen. It's usually the scientists are the most intellectually humble, and the most likely to say like, oh, there're all these nuances. And that's actually why a lot of people don't like to talk to scientists because they feel like you know, the answer is a paragraph when all they really wanted was a sentence.'
‘That's so interesting. And I totally hear what you're saying, although I wouldn't have put it in terms of uncertainty as much as I would put it in terms of nuance. In other words, things aren't as binary as people want them to be’
‘I think it's both. So scientists would have completely agreed with you, you know, they have jargon for that, they call them moderators and boundary conditions, right?’"
I guess climate change scientists aren't scientists
What Is the Optimal Way to Be Angry? (NSQ Ep. 2) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "‘The thing about it Anger is that in general emotion researchers don't think that catharsis, like express it, you'll get it out. In general, that's not the consensus of the scientific community. It does not actually reduce your negative emotions, it often increases them. So we probably shouldn't do things like slam our palm on cars… what is the optimal way to be angry? Seneca did have some good advice, I think. So one of his words of wisdom was to try to nip it in the bud. And the idea that you would not want to deal with anger when you have fully lost it, but when you're just like a little irritated is good advice. And it's consistent with modern scientific research on emotion regulation'
‘So that sounds perfectly sensible. I know Seneca also advised you should read poetry and history to amuse yourself and to be diverted.’'
‘Was he selling a book? Was he like you should read *my* poetry?’...
‘There was a study by these sociologists at Northeastern who were looking into the question of whether people human subjects are more emotionally disturbed by abuse of animals versus people and they found, let me see here, I'll read a bit. ‘We found more empathy for victims who are human children, so children, puppies and full grown dogs than for victims who are adult humans. Okay, so it doesn't even have to be a puppy’...
‘We tabulate the wrongdoing of other humans, you know, moral failings or behaviors we disapprove of in some way’
‘We have mixed feelings maybe about our fellow human’...
‘I think it's the paradox of the dog. They aren't capable of that much. So we can't blame them for that much’...
'When you see somebody feeding the pigeons and you ask yourself, why do they do that? I think it's at least partly because we need to be needed'...
‘There's a lot of evidence that service to others, whether it's charitable contributions or taking care of things for people, etc, etc, makes you feel a lot better, makes you feel needed, makes you feel worthy’...
'There was a famous line in Ecclesiastes said that a living dog is better than a dead lion, which is about like status and rank. But then in the Talmud, the Talmud is telling the story about when King David dies and his son Solomon, referring to that line says something like, is it not true that a live dog is better than a dead lion? And this was referring to Solomon's question of what should be done about his father, King David had died and was out in the sun and the dogs were coming around wanting to eat him'"
What Does It Mean to Be a “Hard Worker”? (NSQ Ep. 3) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "‘Reference bias refers to the bias of having a given arbitrary frame of comparison. That is idiosyncratic. And so you think you're comparing yourself to the universe of all people, but you're not, you're comparing yourself to a very small number of people. And if you choose a comparison set that happens to be super hard working, then you're going to have artificially lower responses. One of my favorite studies on this is the international study of personality, okay? And the personality trait that's being studied is conscientiousness. Now, some countries, one might argue are a little more conscientious in general, and I'm not biased because of my Asian back-, but some would say that the Far East, that the Chinese, the Koreans, the Japanese on questions like, are you a hard worker? Are you dependable? Are you punctual? Are you orderly? That they might do better? Well, the least conscientious people in the world by self report are exactly those people from the Far East. And the authors of the study said, look, it's theoretically possible that all of our stereotypes are 100% wrong. But it's also possible that these individuals from these cultures have such high standards for hard work and being orderly and the trains running on time that they have given themselves lower answers’"
Does All Creativity Come From Pain? (NSQ Ep. 4) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "The notion of infinite as the value that we place on our own lives struck me as resonant. And I began to think about that, and then you begin to think about other things that are infinite. You know, I got to think about like, well, let's say you like m&ms, let's say you have a barrel of m&ms, what seems to be a bottomless barrel. And the way you treat that resource is going to be very different than if you have one bag of m&ms. And so to me, the notion of death and immortality is constrained by the fact that a) there's uncertainty and b) it is finite. And so I got to thinking, well, what if you told me that I would live till infinity? What would life feel like? And I don't think it would feel very good. And I wondered, well, how much of that is just because it's so different? And how much of it is because it no longer has infinite value because it actually is infinite?"
Is Incompetence a Form of Dishonesty? (NSQ Ep. 6) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "'Moral licensing, like I seem to recall having read things about racial attitudes. If people do a certain thing or give a certain answer in one realm that shows them to be kind of racially enlightened or racially fair, that they will basically Pat themselves on the back and that the subsequent action might actually be in the opposite direction.’
‘Yeah, I mean, I think that makes it sound quite simple, right, that when we do a good act, that it kind of puts money in, in our virtue bank and then we can, you know, spend it a little bit later. There was a meta analysis that I read that is a study of studies, and in this case, there had been 91 different studies of moral licensing. And in this meta analysis, Steven, there was a small effect, it wasn't a sledgehammer effect. The problem is that the published studies had bigger effects than the unpublished studies and that always makes you wonder whether file drawers are just overflowing with: nah, it's really nothing. My guess is that there is something there. But it could be really small. And there's so many other things that drive human behavior’"
What Do Tom Sawyer and the Founder of Duolingo Have in Common? (NSQ Ep. 5) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "‘We need a computer to be able to determine whether it was talking to a human or a computer. We needed a test that a computer could administer and grade, but not pass. At first this seems paradoxical. But then when you're a professor, you actually realize this is not that uncommon. You can administer tests without being able to pass them, I definitely did that... at the time, computers were not very good at reading images of distorted text, but humans were. So this is something that a computer can actually administer and grade. So a computer starts by putting some letters on an image, then it distorts them. All you have to do is just match the story letter. So that was the idea with the CAPTCHA’.
‘Were there other ideas you had that didn't work?’
‘There are others that did work, but just not as well. For example, we could give you a bunch of pictures of like flowers, and then just ask you, what are these pictures of? And then you would have to type the word flower’
‘Is that too open ended?’
‘Yeah, it was too open ended, it was harder. It required people to know how to spell.’
‘I was gonna say there's a bit of human skill here. Not everybody knows how to spell. Whereas the beautiful thing about the distorted letters is that for every letter, there's actually a key on the keyboard. And humans happen to be pretty good at that.’...
‘It's now the most popular way to learn languages in the world. There are more people learning languages on Duolingo in the United States, than there are people learning languages in the whole US public school system. We have 10 times as many people learning Irish on Duolingo than there are Irish native speakers... there are more people learning High Valyrian on Duolingo from Game of Thrones than there are people learning Irish.’...
‘Really learning English in non English speaking countries can double your income potential’
‘There is data that shows that learning a second language, if you're an English speaking American is pretty much useless.’
‘I think it's the lowest rated skill from employers in a recent survey’...
‘What I, I never really liked this about being a professor is I think a lot of people including me, I was guilty of this. They think the end goal is the paper, not the result. And some of the people that I admire the most did not have that many papers throughout their career. Each one of them really changed the world. I think that we should strive to be a lot more like that. In computer science in particular, you know, you hear people who have 14 papers at the same conference. I can tell you this, I kind of don't care how smart you are. You cannot have 14 world changing amazing ideas in one year, it just can't’...
‘My PhD advisor Manuel Bluhm, very prominent in the field. I mean, he got the Turing Award, which is kind of the Nobel Prize for computer science.’
‘He's a cryptographer’
‘He helped invent modern cryptography, has more than a handful of papers, but he really didn't seem to publish more than a couple of papers per year. And there's a few of them that are really the beginnings of some amazing things.’...
'Authors have been known to publish more than 72 papers a year. Equivalent to one paper every five days'"
How Can You Stop Comparing Yourself With Other People? (NSQ Ep. 13) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "‘The economist, Emily Auster, who's now at Brown. And she and others looked at women in particular, in some parts of India, in very low income economies, where women and girls were really considered low status. And one thing she looked at was what happened when those women got TV in the home. And when women who were considered very low status would see like these soap operas and dramas and comedies, of a different sort of lifestyle where women were treated better. The result was for them, they began to experience less domestic violence, perhaps because they saw that what they were experiencing wasn't the norm. They invested more in their daughters’ health and education. So that's a case where I thought upward comparison could have a really beneficial effect.’
‘Yeah, I mean, this is why it's impossible to make these generalizations. In those examples, there is information that's really genuine and new. And it's inspiring. I think the question is, how do we get the information and the motivation out of social comparison, as opposed to the information with demotivation, unintended? I don't know if you've ever heard of the subito effect. But subito was a television producer, I think in Mexico, who had the idea that you would have soap operas with storylines that were very much like you're describing. They're supposed to give information through social comparison, but the key is confidence... one thing that happened in Mexico apparently was that there was a storyline where it was like a rags to riches story. And I think it's actually for women who subito wanted to make sure that they felt some sort of economic empowerment that they could have an occupation they could earn income, and the protagonist in the soap opera learned to sew and then somehow ended up finding her fortune and her happiness and sales of sewing machines were through the roof. And it was a good example of how you have social comparison. In this case, it ends up becoming inspiring, as opposed to demotivating. But I think part of the reason why it all worked is that everybody was watching these soap operas'...
‘One of the greatest concerns of a lot of people is how terribly money pollutes electoral politics, right? With the baseline assumption being that the more money you have, the better chance you have to be elected. And you know, my Freakanomics coauthor Steve Levitt did this academic paper trying to tease out the actual effect of money on electoral outcomes. And he did this in a very clever way, by comparing candidates who ran against each other multiple times. His argument, found it to be a very compelling argument. It turns out that money really doesn't help candidates very much. It is true that the winning candidate usually has more money, but, they didn't win because they had more money. They had more money because they were an attractive candidate. And being an attractive candidate means you start to attract a whole lot more money as well. If you can look at the actual effect of the money, you see, it's relatively very weak. Look at Mike Bloomberg’
‘A lot of money’
‘He spent about $900 million in the most recent presidential election, and all he got for it was American Samoa’"
8 new uses for your old smartphone - "Keep a spare phone
An extra remote
Game platform
Set up a webcam
Old-school media device
Their first phone
Donate it to charity
Take it apart"
“One Does Not Know Where an Insight Will Come From” | People I (Mostly) Admire Ep. 3: Kerwin Charles - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "[On young men not working and just playing video games] ‘I want to say, you know, a fifth [are doing that]. One of the things I speculate in the paper is that the technological shocks have been one of the main sources of demand side changes. And there might well have been, and indeed, we believe there were, technological shocks, that had the effect of raising the opportunity cost of going to work. What? It might show up in things like my increased utility flow from Facebook time, Instagram, video games, all that, yeah? And what we do is attempt to document the role that that factor - technology shocks - in the output of workspace, which people are calling the video game space, because that for men, is the key activity. That is technology related. Whereas for women, it is social media."
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Police encounters in Minneapolis - "Minneapolis implemented a reform program and screenings to weed out undesirables... the question is, how do we stop police seeing color?...
Ashok Melwani is an entrepreneur, it's in his blood. He's a fourth generation Indian immigrant in Singapore. His family started out in retail then branched out into property and fashion. But that wasn't enough for him. He wanted to run a restaurant. For the last two decades he's run one of this city's most popular eateries. Modesto’s, an affordable place for family gatherings and celebrations. It sits prominently on the main thoroughfare of Singapore's expensive shopping stretch, a familiar fixture of the city's past as this area became more gentrified. Inside, warm terracotta walls are decorated with paintings of the Italian countryside. In the centre of the restaurant, the piece de resistance, one of Singapore's first woodfired pizza ovens, a huge attraction for aspirational middle class Asian families keen to try for themselves Western cuisine. Modesto symbolized all that Singapore hoped to become in the late 1990s. A global city for emerging Asians. A place where east and west met"
Strange. Liberals tell us that if you don't see color, you're racist. So why would you want police to be racist?
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Did Japan get lucky? - "‘I am a fair skinned Indian woman. Growing up, I was always praised for this at family gatherings by aunties and uncles as if my skin color was some sort of personal achievement. I also saw what it meant not to be fair skinned from the treatment my younger, darker skinned sister got. She was often called the other one at weddings or birthdays. And although she laughed it off, I could tell it hurt. On our trips to visit family in Mumbai, a relative recommended a skin whitening cream called Fair and Lovely for my sister. It will make her complexion wheatish, she told my mother, more marriageable. You don't want her to be called Blackie, do you? We listened aghast from the bedroom, the two of us sisters in arms and before she could finish her cup of Masala Chai, we burst out, angry with her and at our mum for listening. They retreated, chastised, but consider this. These were educated middle class Indians, who are well traveled and exposed to the world. For millions of women and men in India, bound by caste, color and discrimination, this is still a very real daily struggle. Whiteness, and the desire to be fair, is embedded in much of India's history… Racism at its heart is fear and hatred of the other, the unknown, the unfamiliar.’
Naturally, they play down the evidence on a preference for fairness predating colonial contact, or consider that all beauty norms have winners and losers, not just a preference for fair skin
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Afghanistan: peace or more pain? - "For the celebration of July 4 1976, the US Bicentennial, all corners of the nation seem to wash in red, white and blue for months with events commemorating the signing of the declaration of independence from Britain. But for some African Americans that 200th anniversary rang hollow. Even though a black soldier was the first to die fighting for independence, black people remained in slavery for nearly 90 years after the US won the war. And even after slavery ended, African Americans remained shackled by inequalities, legalized segregation and systemic racism. So in that same summer in 1976, in Buffalo, New York, a small group of African Americans protested by organizing the city's first Juneteenth festival. Juneteenth marks the end of slavery in the US. Those organizers in Buffalo thought that a counter narrative to the national story of independence would be more relevant to the city's African Americans...
[Leopold of Belgium] was unpopular during his own lifetime, in part because after the death of his estranged Queen, he took up with a 16 year old girl he met in Paris, where she was working as a prostitute. He was 65
What happens when a country loses confidence in itself
If you reject shared civic events, what does this say about integration, patriotism and your commitment to the country?
