Jordan T. Thevenow-Harrison
graduate student, researcher, info tech
Posts
Jaron Lanier says the coming decade will be characterized by the decline in the belief that human beings are special.
The most important reason to stop multitasking so much isn’t to make me feel respected, but to make you exist. If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?
A good perspective from evolutionary psychology.
The children who were under the impression that Princess Alice was in the room with them were just as likely to refrain from cheating as those children who were actually in the room with a physical real-life human being. A similar study Bering did with adults showed the same thing — that they were dramatically less likely to cheat when they thought they were being observed by a supernatural presence.
Granted, it’s from a website called “Skeptoid,” but it makes a valid point, I think. Though there is something too it; a lot of the people I’m close to are scored exactly or one bit away from me.
One obvious trait that the MBTI has in common with horoscopes is its tendency to describe each personality type using only positive words. Horoscopes are so popular, in part, because they virtually always tell people just what they want to hear, using phrases that most people generally like to believe are true, like “You have a lot of unused potential.” They’re also popular because they are presented as being personalized based on the person’s sign. This has been called the Forer Effect, after psychologist Bertram Forer who, in 1948, gave a personality test to his students and then gave each one a supposedly personalized analysis. The impressed students gave the analyses an average accuracy rating of 85%, and only then did Forer reveal that each had received an identical, generic report. Belief that a report is customized for us tends to improve our perception of the report’s accuracy.
A little-known Benedictine monk, Udo of Aachen, investigated the Mandelbrot set seven centuries before Mandelbrot.
Initially, Udo’s aim was to devise a method for determining who would reach heaven. He assumed each person’s soul was composed of independent parts he called “profanus” (profane) and “animi” (spiritual), and represented these parts by a pair of numbers. Then he devised rules for drawing and manipulating these number pairs. In effect, he devised the rules for complex arithmetic, the spiritual and profane parts corresponding to the real and imaginary numbers of modern mathematics.
As far as I can see, it’s reasonable to hold that brain studies are methodologically privileged with respect to other ways of finding out about the mind only if you are likewise prepared to hold that facts about the brain are metaphysically privileged with respect to facts about the mind; and you can hold that only if you think the brain and the mind are essentially different kinds of thing. But I had supposed that dualistic metaphysics was now out of fashion, in the brain science community most of all. Brain scientists are supposed to be materialists, and materialists are supposed not to doubt that distinct mental states have ipso facto got different neural counterparts. That being so, why does it matter where in the brain their different counterparts are?
There is some truth in the old adage that it takes an enormous amount of education to be truly credulous. Indeed, years of familiarity with several academic fields have convinced me that the proposition is quite literally true. Being an academic means (at least in some disciplines I am familiar with) believing a great number of impossible things before breakfast, and, it would seem, the more preposterous the better.
William Deresiewicz traces the changing face of friendship and speaks to those nostalgic pangs I have whenever I imagine an older world and my imagined experience in it.
We are citizens now, not subjects, bound together directly rather than through allegiance to a monarch. But what is to bind us emotionally, make us something more than an aggregate of political monads? One answer was nationalism, but another grew out of the 18th-century notion of social sympathy: friendship, or at least, friendliness, as the affective substructure of modern society.
Deresiwicz then turns this light on social networking and gives voice to that bilious twinge I sometimes feel:
Until a few years ago, you could share your thoughts with only one friend at a time (on the phone, say), or maybe with a small group, later, in person. And when you did, you were talking to specific people, and you tailored what you said, and how you said it, to who they were—their interests, their personalities, most of all, your degree of mutual intimacy.
And:
But surely Facebook has its benefits. Long-lost friends can reconnect, far-flung ones can stay in touch. I wonder, though. Having recently moved across the country, I thought that Facebook would help me feel connected to the friends I’d left behind. But now I find the opposite is true. Reading about the mundane details of their lives, a steady stream of trivia and ephemera, leaves me feeling both empty and unpleasantly full, as if I had just binged on junk food, and precisely because it reminds me of the real sustenance, the real knowledge, we exchange by e-mail or phone or face-to-face. And the whole theatrical quality of the business, the sense that my friends are doing their best to impersonate themselves, only makes it worse. The person I read about, I cannot help feeling, is not quite the person I know.
Posts
My favorite photograph. (via If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger,There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats: Similar Images #16S is for Steichen #20)
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ― Isaac Asimov
I choose to fit myself into most of Apple’s intended-use constraints because their products tend to work better that way, which makes my life easier. But that requires trade-offs that many people can’t or won’t make.
I.2.20 (Bar/Brothel of Innulus and Papilio); 3932: Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!
Bon Iver - Beth/Rest
This is the most amazing song I’ve heard in months. Some may call it cheesy, horrible, whatever. There is a synth pad and a saxophone. This is aural love.
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Why are they so cynical about conversation on the web? Because a company like Google thinks it’s okay to sell video ads on YouTube above conversations that are filled with vile, anonymous comments. Because almost every great newspaper in America believes that it’s more important to get a few more page views on their website than to encourage meaningful discourse about current events within their community, even if many of those page views will be off-putting to the good people who are offended by the content of the comments. And because lots of publishers think that any conversation is good if it boosts traffic stats.
Audio
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Bon Iver - Beth/Rest This is the most amazing song I’ve heard in months. Some may call it cheesy, horrible, whatever. There is a synth pad and a saxophone. This is aural love.0 plays
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Updates
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Huge life-changing decisions DO NOT HAVE TO BE MADE! WOOO! Never felt so good to have nothing change.
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"Drink-Driving"
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There is nothing enjoyable about the word "pubertal."
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» Is Thor a feminist movie? (Yes) Social Justice League http://t.co/zWpbl9J0 (via Instapaper)
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@_Rades I always thought in Rise it meant that they landed before anyone anyone remembers was alive.
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@gomatgo You touch a lot of people. In a good way.
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@MatthewWRossi WOOOHOOO! I salivate, expectantly.
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@MatthewWRossi Done. But make more Nitpixels.
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Bradley Manning nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize: http://t.co/PMKXv1UL
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@mikesacco apocalypse now redux
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"drinking so much coffee or doing so much coke you just stare at games of solitaire, trapped in assessment, without actually playing"
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@abraham You could probably do that in the course of 30 minutes and two city blocks.
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Oh man http://t.co/UImr0Lxm I sense a shirt purchase.
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"Your mom's ugly, bear."
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So @papersapp doesn't actually highlight PDFs, just marks them up proprietarily, right? Is there any way to do it normally?
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Everyone: @fart is the greatest digital anthropologist. His dissertation, publications, and CV are his twitter feed.
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This weather is throwing my sinuses into Rebellion Mode.
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Path just automatically broadcasted my location. New "feature?"
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I bet I can transport you through time and space: http://t.co/t9yFoMiU
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What is this guy holding? http://t.co/Jwn29Juy
