What I think is interesting is how the cultures of different social network sites are themselves reflections of different strata of contemporary society itself: MySpace is generally the working class/lower-middle class/high school space (plus musicians); Facebook is middle class/collegiate (and one that most academics seem to prefer) while LinkedIn is for higher-end professionals. They have different aesthetics, just like Chez Panisse and the French Laundry have a different aesthetic from an Olive Garden, which has a different aesthetic from a Denny's. Even the applications at each site suggest different modes of thinking about the world, different values and different ideas of what makes your identity (is it what you do? what you buy, listen to? what you read? what your tastes are? etc.)
There is a third use for them that is related to the "keeping in touch with people." The little apps in Facebook act as a mechanism for maintaining social interaction, and allow managed cross-involvement between groups of friends. In other words, I can have my brother (in Texas) join me (on the West Coast) and a colleague (in New York) over a game of Scrabble, and chat with each other. Because it aggregates all your "social attention" in one place, it isn't like trying to cobble interest in one of a million "online scrabble" sites.
And the "keep in touch" function isn't important for close friends: it's better for staying in touch with acquaintances and more distant friends, giving you a viable reason to drop a quick hello without the awkward "I know it's been years since we've chatted, but..." In the space between the deeply personal and the completely professional is a kind of sociability that is vital for many people's careers.
The first is reliable yet lacks animation, and the latter is fun to play with and look at, can produce beautiful things, but is expensive and temperamental?
The point is that the OP thinks that sexual selection should take the well-being of the species as a whole into account, that the persistence of selection for traditional dominance traits no longer helps the species. Thinking of the perpetuation of the species as any kind of motivation for selection when it doesn't benefit the immediate offspring of the individual in direct competition with others is misguided.
I think it's more infantile. Americans like as little government as possible over themselves, and as much as possible over other people. People resent being told that they can't add an addition to their house but are happy to force their neighbors to care for their lawns.
I don't see this kind of divided thinking in a lot of other countries. One thing about Americans is that they have a sort of egalitarian blindness - they assume that the differences between the people below them and themselves are based on a defect of character of those lower, while attributing differences between themselves and those above them in rank and status as either arbitrary or unfair. They want the government to enforce the differences between themselves and those they deem beneath them, but to leave them alone.
I suggest you investigate the psychological profile of a typical CEO. A measured amount of sociopathy is not really a bad thing to have in modernity, either.
We already know that a lot of bad decisions are motivated by other physiological factors - adolescent "testosterone poisioning", PMS, dementia, etc. The fact that cognition has a material basis puts us in a place beyond either "excuses" or simple "suck it up" volitionalism. Each of us is, ultimately and existentially, "responsible" for ourselves. Yet much of our behavior and attitudes are still formed by factors out of our control, and there is no one I know who doesn't have thoughts, behaviors, and emotions which baffle them.
Knowing the roots of these behaviors gives us a way to short-circuit the negative ones.
If you're capable of "putting" any class into place, then you already are the ruling class.
One thing I love about geek pop political/organizational theory - it works as if politics were a god game in which systems are designed by an abstract, external power, rather than always produced by people who already have a stake in it as players.
Guantanamo's detainees are not who you think they are. Only 5% of them were picked up "on the battlefield" by US forces. 55% are not even accused of engaging in hostile acts against the US, and many of the rest have been picked up after being identified by 3rd parties responding to a bounty program, or have been identified as having roles such as "cooks assistant."
Guantanamo is an utter travesty, a testament to a nearly sociopathic streak in US foreign policy.
As someone who has, in fact, read widely and studied (both in and out of classroom settings) ethics in the Western philosophical tradition, I can assure you that it does. And that example can be amplified to issues that, for example, affect your employability.
Law is generally about the creation of an ordered society, not the management of right and wrong on a personal level.
"Free speech" isn't ethical per se. I have the freedom to say thing that are completely neutral - for me to say that "blue is my favorite color" is not ethical insofar that not saying so would be unethical.
There is actually a Buddhist saying about speech. Before saying something, ask yourself: is it kind? is it necessary? is it true? If you cannot say "yes" to at least two of those three questions, one should not speak. Gossip may be true, but it is never kind and it is usually not necessary. It can besmirch reputations and cause ridicule. Suppose I caught you picking your nose when no one was looking, and I took pictures and told everyone. While it would be a true claim that I had, in fact, seen you picking your nose, the effect is to humiliate and marginalize. I don't think it should be illegal for me to make this observation: freedom of speech protects me, as it should. But I certainly think it would be unethical for me to act this way.
Ethics, generally speaking and as an intellectual discipline, includes many elements that your personal definition excludes, including questions of self-harm and the kind of behavior covered by gossip, cruel jokes and the such. Your definition which limits it to those actions which can be covered by public policy is highly idiosyncratic.
In other words, "I do not think it means what you think it means."
Also, let me refer you to the beginning of my post - the brain is more plastic and the mind more dynamic than we ever thought in the past. The model is such that it doesn't really even make much sense to talk about "potential" at all - there are so many variables at play in mental activity, that it isn't like one crafts a 'brain' and then works with it. Having-a-mind is an active, changing process.
There is a big difference: few people talk about their athletic potential as a significant component in their lives. There is no "Athleticism Quotient" to which parents gleefully refer when describing their children.
Indexing one's potential with a simple number is counter-productive and misleading. When you see why people do it - what inequalities it justifies, what differences it excuses, what failures it compensates for - one wonders why those numbers exist at all. The genes may explain as little about one's net intellectual performance as what kind of CPU I have explains for the quality of software that's running on my computer (given that the variances in "hardware" for human are fairly minor.)
I'm not sure what "ethnicity" has to do with it, by the way, at all. All the significant variables I've seen for academic performance involve things like the amount of time parents spend doing homework with their kids, the level of socioeconomic stress of the family, etc.
Some of the most interesting work in cognitive science, particularly in distributed cognition, post-connectionism, and dynamic systems modeling, is done by people directly inspired and influenced by non-British philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger.
Your kind of naive empiricism too often rests on an unexamined ontology.
The "busiest shopping day" is not a "per store" statistic. I'm sure that at the bikini store, it's probably around Memorial Day. That's irrelevant, particularly at the scale that this discussion is about.
Please, please, please: learn to be wary of anecdotal reasoning.
As we learn more about brain plasticity and the mind as a dynamic system, rather than a simply structured one, the idea that there is a fixed property like "intelligence" in that system becomes increasingly naive and dated.
We don't think of physical strength or athletic ability as "fixed", just waiting for us to "learn to use it." We need to think of intellectual activity in the same terms that we think of physical activity.
That advice is only valid if you really like the way that your siblings, aunts, uncles and parents turned out. If one's family is a mess, or even just mediocre, perhaps that's not such good advice.
The point of the research is more subtle, and it is a criticism of something you've fallen into: that resorting to identity ("I'm a book person, not an athletic person") is really a kind of excuse for lack of effort, and will keep you from developing as much as you could. And more to the point, that parents who assure their children that they "are" smart may be creating a disincentive which keeps children from actually working their minds. Kids who are told that they "are" smart will coast on their abilities and find excuses for their failures.
This article is a subtle attack on the conceit of many geeks, particularly underachieving ones, who flatter themselves on "being smarter" rather than focusing on what they are accomplishing.
Too many people see intelligence as part of their identity, rather than as being the equivalent of a muscle they should be training. That itself is both a kind of narcissism and simple laziness: if I "am" smart, I don't have to do anything to validate myself. It's why so many geeks seem to "peak" intellectually at high school just like jocks peak athletically.
However, it is a critically praised and groundbreaking game, one that is on many people's shortlist for the most aesthetically innovative commercial games yet made. So far, looking at the comments, I've seen little discussion of this fact.
Games aren't just software, they are also cultural artifacts (in a way that productivity and utility software are not); they are texts of a sort. This case should foreground the unusual dual nature of digital games.
Slashdot Mirror
What I think is interesting is how the cultures of different social network sites are themselves reflections of different strata of contemporary society itself: MySpace is generally the working class/lower-middle class/high school space (plus musicians); Facebook is middle class/collegiate (and one that most academics seem to prefer) while LinkedIn is for higher-end professionals. They have different aesthetics, just like Chez Panisse and the French Laundry have a different aesthetic from an Olive Garden, which has a different aesthetic from a Denny's. Even the applications at each site suggest different modes of thinking about the world, different values and different ideas of what makes your identity (is it what you do? what you buy, listen to? what you read? what your tastes are? etc.)
There is a third use for them that is related to the "keeping in touch with people." The little apps in Facebook act as a mechanism for maintaining social interaction, and allow managed cross-involvement between groups of friends. In other words, I can have my brother (in Texas) join me (on the West Coast) and a colleague (in New York) over a game of Scrabble, and chat with each other. Because it aggregates all your "social attention" in one place, it isn't like trying to cobble interest in one of a million "online scrabble" sites.
And the "keep in touch" function isn't important for close friends: it's better for staying in touch with acquaintances and more distant friends, giving you a viable reason to drop a quick hello without the awkward "I know it's been years since we've chatted, but..." In the space between the deeply personal and the completely professional is a kind of sociability that is vital for many people's careers.
The first is reliable yet lacks animation, and the latter is fun to play with and look at, can produce beautiful things, but is expensive and temperamental?
The article is about foot-dragging and rejections for some short-code services that compete with the wireless carriers.
The point is that the OP thinks that sexual selection should take the well-being of the species as a whole into account, that the persistence of selection for traditional dominance traits no longer helps the species. Thinking of the perpetuation of the species as any kind of motivation for selection when it doesn't benefit the immediate offspring of the individual in direct competition with others is misguided.
Evolution isn't about "the species." It's about the propagation of one's own gene line.
I think it's more infantile. Americans like as little government as possible over themselves, and as much as possible over other people. People resent being told that they can't add an addition to their house but are happy to force their neighbors to care for their lawns.
I don't see this kind of divided thinking in a lot of other countries. One thing about Americans is that they have a sort of egalitarian blindness - they assume that the differences between the people below them and themselves are based on a defect of character of those lower, while attributing differences between themselves and those above them in rank and status as either arbitrary or unfair. They want the government to enforce the differences between themselves and those they deem beneath them, but to leave them alone.
I suggest you investigate the psychological profile of a typical CEO. A measured amount of sociopathy is not really a bad thing to have in modernity, either.
We already know that a lot of bad decisions are motivated by other physiological factors - adolescent "testosterone poisioning", PMS, dementia, etc. The fact that cognition has a material basis puts us in a place beyond either "excuses" or simple "suck it up" volitionalism. Each of us is, ultimately and existentially, "responsible" for ourselves. Yet much of our behavior and attitudes are still formed by factors out of our control, and there is no one I know who doesn't have thoughts, behaviors, and emotions which baffle them.
Knowing the roots of these behaviors gives us a way to short-circuit the negative ones.
If you're capable of "putting" any class into place, then you already are the ruling class.
One thing I love about geek pop political/organizational theory - it works as if politics were a god game in which systems are designed by an abstract, external power, rather than always produced by people who already have a stake in it as players.
It's been stuccoed!
Guantanamo's detainees are not who you think they are. Only 5% of them were picked up "on the battlefield" by US forces. 55% are not even accused of engaging in hostile acts against the US, and many of the rest have been picked up after being identified by 3rd parties responding to a bounty program, or have been identified as having roles such as "cooks assistant."
Guantanamo is an utter travesty, a testament to a nearly sociopathic streak in US foreign policy.
Overview here. Detailed study here.
As someone who has, in fact, read widely and studied (both in and out of classroom settings) ethics in the Western philosophical tradition, I can assure you that it does. And that example can be amplified to issues that, for example, affect your employability.
Law is generally about the creation of an ordered society, not the management of right and wrong on a personal level.
"Free speech" isn't ethical per se. I have the freedom to say thing that are completely neutral - for me to say that "blue is my favorite color" is not ethical insofar that not saying so would be unethical.
There is actually a Buddhist saying about speech. Before saying something, ask yourself: is it kind? is it necessary? is it true? If you cannot say "yes" to at least two of those three questions, one should not speak. Gossip may be true, but it is never kind and it is usually not necessary. It can besmirch reputations and cause ridicule. Suppose I caught you picking your nose when no one was looking, and I took pictures and told everyone. While it would be a true claim that I had, in fact, seen you picking your nose, the effect is to humiliate and marginalize. I don't think it should be illegal for me to make this observation: freedom of speech protects me, as it should. But I certainly think it would be unethical for me to act this way.
Ethics, generally speaking and as an intellectual discipline, includes many elements that your personal definition excludes, including questions of self-harm and the kind of behavior covered by gossip, cruel jokes and the such. Your definition which limits it to those actions which can be covered by public policy is highly idiosyncratic.
In other words, "I do not think it means what you think it means."
Also, let me refer you to the beginning of my post - the brain is more plastic and the mind more dynamic than we ever thought in the past. The model is such that it doesn't really even make much sense to talk about "potential" at all - there are so many variables at play in mental activity, that it isn't like one crafts a 'brain' and then works with it. Having-a-mind is an active, changing process.
There is a big difference: few people talk about their athletic potential as a significant component in their lives. There is no "Athleticism Quotient" to which parents gleefully refer when describing their children.
Indexing one's potential with a simple number is counter-productive and misleading. When you see why people do it - what inequalities it justifies, what differences it excuses, what failures it compensates for - one wonders why those numbers exist at all. The genes may explain as little about one's net intellectual performance as what kind of CPU I have explains for the quality of software that's running on my computer (given that the variances in "hardware" for human are fairly minor.)
I'm not sure what "ethnicity" has to do with it, by the way, at all. All the significant variables I've seen for academic performance involve things like the amount of time parents spend doing homework with their kids, the level of socioeconomic stress of the family, etc.
Even better: learn from families that are more than OK, but are at a level you aspire to.
Some of the most interesting work in cognitive science, particularly in distributed cognition, post-connectionism, and dynamic systems modeling, is done by people directly inspired and influenced by non-British philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger.
Your kind of naive empiricism too often rests on an unexamined ontology.
The "busiest shopping day" is not a "per store" statistic. I'm sure that at the bikini store, it's probably around Memorial Day. That's irrelevant, particularly at the scale that this discussion is about.
Please, please, please: learn to be wary of anecdotal reasoning.
As we learn more about brain plasticity and the mind as a dynamic system, rather than a simply structured one, the idea that there is a fixed property like "intelligence" in that system becomes increasingly naive and dated.
We don't think of physical strength or athletic ability as "fixed", just waiting for us to "learn to use it." We need to think of intellectual activity in the same terms that we think of physical activity.
That advice is only valid if you really like the way that your siblings, aunts, uncles and parents turned out. If one's family is a mess, or even just mediocre, perhaps that's not such good advice.
The point of the research is more subtle, and it is a criticism of something you've fallen into: that resorting to identity ("I'm a book person, not an athletic person") is really a kind of excuse for lack of effort, and will keep you from developing as much as you could. And more to the point, that parents who assure their children that they "are" smart may be creating a disincentive which keeps children from actually working their minds. Kids who are told that they "are" smart will coast on their abilities and find excuses for their failures.
This article is a subtle attack on the conceit of many geeks, particularly underachieving ones, who flatter themselves on "being smarter" rather than focusing on what they are accomplishing.
Too many people see intelligence as part of their identity, rather than as being the equivalent of a muscle they should be training. That itself is both a kind of narcissism and simple laziness: if I "am" smart, I don't have to do anything to validate myself. It's why so many geeks seem to "peak" intellectually at high school just like jocks peak athletically.
However, it is a critically praised and groundbreaking game, one that is on many people's shortlist for the most aesthetically innovative commercial games yet made. So far, looking at the comments, I've seen little discussion of this fact.
Games aren't just software, they are also cultural artifacts (in a way that productivity and utility software are not); they are texts of a sort. This case should foreground the unusual dual nature of digital games.