A long read
1. technology
It’s hard to be a moral person. Technology is making it harder.
I have middling thoughts about this article. I think that it is useful to show the harm that technology can do, and I also agree that attention spans are waning. I think that the internet has made a lot of people more empathetic, and a lot of people less empathetic. I agree that it might prompt someone to pull out their camera sooner than offering to help, but I would also generously like to think that those people might already know that their help might not be useful.
Multiple studies have suggested that digital technology is shortening our attention spans and making us more distracted. What if it’s also making us less empathetic, less prone to ethical action? What if it’s degrading our capacity for moral attention — the capacity to notice the morally salient features of a given situation so that we can respond appropriately?
I wanna know how often this person is in a situation where candy crush stops them from saving babies from burning buildings.
This reads like “old person sad that kids aren’t reading books”:
Weil, an early 20th-century French philosopher and Christian mystic, wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” She believed that to be able to properly pay attention to someone else — to become fully receptive to their situation in all its complexity — you need to first get your own self out of the way. She called this process “decreation,” and explained: “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty ... ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.”
Weil argued that plain old attention — the kind you use when reading novels, say, or birdwatching — is a precondition for moral attention, which is a precondition for empathy, which is a precondition for ethical action.
You know me! I am all about the moral economy. So when we have so many apps vying for our attention in the attention economy, that’s gonna affect morals too.
But why are you trying to shove the same morals and same behaviours into a society that genuinely has just changed:
I tried out this app, choosing family, kindness, and creativity as the three values I wanted to track. For a few days, it worked great. Being primed with a reminder that I value family gave me the extra nudge I needed to call my grandmother more often. But despite my initial excitement, I soon forgot all about the app. It didn’t send me push notifications reminding me to log in each day. It didn’t congratulate me when I achieved a streak of several consecutive days. It didn’t “gamify” my successes by rewarding me with points, badges, stickers, or animal gifs — standard fare in behavior modification apps these days.
My issue, which is becoming my issue with most moral/ethical arguments at the moment, is that this doesn’t consider the scale of time. It also isn’t considering the scale of space. More time and space between people mean that everyday ethics don’t prompt you to reach out to them. You don’t bump into them everyday. It’s not part of your routine (unless you make the choice to make it, or you live in a way that it is part of your routine).
With technology, we’re able to change how we interact with time, space, and moral attention. 100 years ago I wouldn’t hear from overseas relatives for a long time. But now I can, at any moment.
I’m writing myself into thinking that what technology has done is made the scale of time in relationships even smaller: we can literally reach out whenever; which means that we don’t more often than not. The glass is half empty because we have this constant choice to call grandma, and so yeah, we don’t call grandma most of that time! I suppose it’s just a matter of focus and value. Are you looking at the large amount of time that we don’t call grandma, or are you looking at the times we do. If you’re using the fact that we can call grandma always to also point out that we’re always on technology and that’s bad, then you’re constantly pulling your readers in two different directions.
Meme break
2. murder
A few reads
3. science
I agree with this tweet but I feel like it is quite cynical. The tweet thread talks about scientific research and scientific reporting as the same thing, but they are not. They must be critiqued using different methods.
But I do agree that it is best to know how to look at a study and see some indicators of whether it has followed the scientific process well, or not. Because Here’s How Cornell Scientist Brian Wansink Turned Shoddy Data Into Viral Studies About How We Eat
This is a conversation about knowledge production and dissemination.
The scientific process, when followed, produces data that can be replicated. This data can become knowledge that is important to humanity. However, data can be manufactured to make a product called “science”. This is when “knowledge” is produced for a specific purpose, through specific channels that don’t follow the scientific process. People attribute the value and authority of the scientific process to something that hasn’t gone through it at all.
Scientific research is how people present their research for a journal. These are peer reviewed. This process is still flawed in a way, but it is more robust than scientific reporting. Scientific reporting is when “science” gets reported to lay people. The headlines are often sensationalized in order to get more clicks.
Somewhere in those survey results, the professor was convinced, there had to be a meaningful relationship between the discount and the diners. But he wasn’t satisfied by Siğirci’s initial review of the data.
“I don’t think I’ve ever done an interesting study where the data ‘came out’ the first time I looked at it,” he told her over email.
Scientific research and reporting are connected to each other, since a lot of popular scientific reporting leads to big funding grants for specific researchers, who then get to do more research in that area.
The key to this is to show that there is a difference between “science” as a product and “the scientific process”. Science is a product that is sold. This is the thing that is reported. It has stakeholders and interests so it can become biased. Take, for example, this study: People who drink 3-5 cups of coffee a day are more alert, have better memory. Regularly drinking coffee may give people better motor control. It was commissioned by the Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee. The ISIC members are six of the major European coffee companies: illycaffè, Jacobs Douwe Egberts, Lavazza, Nestlé, Paulig, and Tchibo. You tell me that’s not biased science. However, this is where replicability, conclusions, statistical analysis done right, are the most important. The scientific process is what scientists do to confirm or deny hypotheses. This, too, can become biased, depending on who is funding a study or what the scientist is looking for (the influence of scientific reporting).
Conflating scientific research and scientific reporting is an issue, because you do genuinely need scientists to look at replicability, conclusions, and statistical analysis. If you do conflate the two, you tend to skew anti-intellectual.
Youtube break
4. physical comedy
things that make me laugh out loud when im alone.
A short read
5. football
Why do hardcore football fans behave like rutting stags?
Over the eight years that I’ve researched football fandom in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Australia, fans have told me that ‘football binds us all together like nothin’ else’. When they were young, they felt like ‘part of a tribe, the animal came pouring out every Saturday, all you wanted/needed to do was act like an animal and fight any other tribe that came into your area’. I began to suspect that identity fusion, an extreme and enduring form of social bonding, held the answer to the toxic flip. For the fused fan, the fantastical contest of football becomes an irrevocable part of their identity.
Identity fusion is the ‘oneness’ we feel with the people that help make you ‘you’ – your family, for instance. This intense form of bonding leads to extraordinary pro-group behaviours; we see it in people so fused to their nation that they promptly give blood following a terrorist attack, or among military insurgents so closely bonded to their comrades that they’ll risk it all on the frontline. When I began this research, some naysayers doubted that fusion would even exist for a social target as ‘arbitrary’ as football. I wondered if these critics had ever witnessed live football in Europe or Latin America.
Because bonded fans are ready to ‘go down with the ship’, they’re resilient to negative team outcomes. In fact, bitter defeats only bond them more tightly together: ‘The club I support isn’t about winning, it’s about being in the shit together,’ said one fan. Another fan said his club caused ‘more lows than highs … but it is that unexpected element which is like a drug.’