Links, Tuesday 16th May

"In a study led by Raymond Mar, voracious readers of fiction were better than lighter consumers of fiction at making nuanced social judgments based on limited information—for example, deciphering complex emotions by looking at photographs of people’s eyes, and using subtle cues in videos of social interactions (such as guessing who was the child of the two adults in the video based on body language, tone of voice, and other nonverbal information). Heavy readers of expository nonfiction showed the opposite pattern, performing worse than lighter readers of nonfiction." Nautilus

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Gosh, I wonder how legit this is?

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What is this witchcraft? Could it be that housing costs in London are going... down?

"The average monthly rent in the capital dropped from £1,297 a year ago to £1,203 in March 2017... In March alone, typical rents in the capital fell 6%, it added."

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Interested to hear the view of other people training in/practicing/receiving counselling

"My gut reaction to the alert was skepticism—as it almost always is, to this day, when the program’s algorithms contradict my instincts. There must be a mistake in the software, I thought. June had repeatedly told me that therapy was helpful. At the beginning of our next session, I asked her how she was doing. Looking into the corner of the room, she replied that the skills I was teaching her were useful; but this time, I persisted: “I’m glad to hear the skills are helpful, but how are you doing?” June was silent for a while and shifted in her chair, clearly uncomfortable. I felt my own anxiety rise, and resisted the urge to change the subject. “Take your time,” I said. “There’s no rush.” After a period of silence, June looked me in the eye for perhaps the first time ever and said, “I’m sorry, but I think I’m worse. I just don’t want you to think it’s your fault; it’s mine. You’ve been really helpful.” June was deteriorating, but I never would have seen it without the program." Atlantic

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Interested to hear people's thoughts on this, as I can see the general point about not doing your politics through state (or university) authorities, but also thinking maybe it's sometimes necessary?

"Rather than using Halloween to educate the community about how victims of sexist and racist oppression may find certain costumes offensive, the Diversity Office instead issued a mechanical and lengthy checklist to guide the behavior of the campus community from above. What is most disturbing about this top-down approach is the assumption that university (or government) administrators should be the principal source of corrective action in matters that do not involve individual or institutional discrimination. In the last analysis, university administrations will prioritize the institution’s peace and reputation over ensuring racial and gender justice."

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I'm somewhat skeptical about all of these claims, and about the impact of micro-targeting generally. It may have changed the result of the Brexit referendum, given the small margin, but loads of other factors still got things to the point where it was so close. Worrying nevertheless

"This is Britain in 2017. A Britain that increasingly looks like a “managed” democracy. Paid for by a US billionaire. Using military-style technology. Delivered by Facebook. And enabled by us."

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This is actually a very good point, and not something I've seen addressed in the political philosophy literature

"I therefore think there is a sort of deflection that goes on with defenses of wealth. If we find it appalling that there are so many rich people in a time of need, we are asked to consider questions of acquisition rather than questions of retention. The retention question, after all, is much harder for a wealthy person to answer. It’s one thing to argue that you got rich legitimately. It’s another to explain why you feel justified in spending your wealth upon houses and sculptures rather than helping some struggling people pay their rent or paying off a bunch of student loans or saving thousands of people from dying of malaria. "

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This is actually a very useful distinction: segregated bike lines are good on high-speed roads with loads of car traffic, but actually make things *worse* on low-traffic, low-speed roads

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A detailed review of pretty much *all* the means currently available to us to prevent climate change. Some of the most important things we could be doing are: educating women and girls, providing family planning, phasing out hydrofluorcarbons in air conditioners, switching to plant-based diets.

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Interesting suggestion

"After polling people from 32 countries to learn how much they felt various feelings should be expressed openly, the authors found that emotional expressiveness was correlated with diversity. In other words, when there are a lot of immigrants around, you might have to smile more to build trust and cooperation, since you don’t all speak the same language." Atlantic

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How Prevent is enabling and spreading Islamophobia. Some truly shocking examples

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"Differentiation [between Israel and the occupied territories] creates an illusion of US castigation, but in reality it insulates Israel from answering for its actions in the occupied territories, by assuring that only settlements and not the government that creates them will suffer consequences for repeated violations of international law. Opponents of settlements and occupation, who would otherwise call for costs to be imposed on Israel, instead channel their energies into a distraction that creates headlines but has no chance of changing Israeli behaviour. It is in this sense that the policy of differentiation, of which Europeans and US liberals are quite proud, does not so much constitute pressure on Israel as serve as a substitute for it, thereby helping to prolong an occupation it is ostensibly meant to bring to an end." Guardian

Links, Monday 1st May

Hadn't thought this all the way through before, but it makes a lot of sense. The practice of tipping (at least in the US) is basically an excuse to pay women and people of colour less than the minimum wage. Unacceptable.

"The restaurant industry, which was hiring newly freed slaves as tipped workers, really wanted the right to hire these workers but pay them next to nothing. So they put forth this idea that they were valueless and really shouldn’t have to be paid by their employers. They essentially made the argument that newly freed slaves should get a zero dollar wage."

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Hey, at least one bit of good news coming out of South Africa today... :/

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Wowzers

"In fact in the US case it's not even obesity, or indeed their greater pre-existing disease burden, that is doing most of the work in dragging their life expectancy down; it's accidental and violent deaths... simply normalising for violent and accidental death puts the USA right to the top of the life expectancy rankings."

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Harsh :D

"“I’m here with my darling, Sergey,” she said, referring to her boyfriend, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. “And he called me yesterday and said, ‘I’m reading this book, “Homo Deus,” and it says on page twenty-eight that I’m going to die.’ I said, ‘It says you, personally?’ He said, ‘Yes!’ ” (In the book, the author, Yuval Noah Harari, discusses Google’s anti-aging research, and writes that the company “probably won’t solve death in time to make Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin immortal.”)" New Yorker

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"When well-meaning white people say, “Help me define cultural appropriation so I know what to do and not to do,” what they are actually saying, even if they aren’t aware, is, “Help me understand how to continue in this system of privilege and oppression without feeling bad.”" The Establishment

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"Needing to fully mobilize their household labor force, mothers did what they felt they had to, employing a cruel tactic. For ordinary people, footbinding was labor discipline. It was frequent among folk with resources readily worked by girls’ hand labor, less common where these were few. Shifts in technology and cultural practice further support this understanding: We have tracked the demise of footbinding in parallel with the local arrival of machine-made cotton yarn and cloth. As cheaper, machine-made cotton yarn and cloth infiltrated a region, mothers abandoned footbinding." Stanford Press

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The term "clean meat" is new to me, but the argument is a good one.

"Plenty of vegans have no interest in eating clean meat, but this is perfectly fine since they aren’t its target audience. Instead, the product is intended for people who have trouble putting social norms and ethical and environmental concerns above taste and convenience. As clean meat grows more widespread, it will help lower the barriers to a vegan lifestyle – reducing the number of animals that are farmed, and hopefully one day supplanting factory farming completely."

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"It was strange to me, the idea that somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25-million books and nobody is allowed to read them. It’s like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where they put the Ark of the Covenant back on a shelf somewhere, lost in the chaos of a vast warehouse. It’s there. The books are there. People have been trying to build a library like this for ages—to do so, they’ve said, would be to erect one of the great humanitarian artifacts of all time—and here we’ve done the work to make it real and we were about to give it to the world and now, instead, it’s 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they’re the ones responsible for locking it up." Atlantic

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Hardly news anecdotally, but it's nice to see these things studied systematically :D

"Ego dissolution experienced during a participant's "most intense" psychedelic experience positively predicted liberal political views, openness and nature relatedness, and negatively predicted authoritarian political views."