889 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2022
    1. In 1991, the earliest known roundel was found in Germany, also corresponding to the Stroked Pottery culture. Called the Goseck Circle, it is 246 feet (75 m) in diameter and had a double wooden palisade and three entrances. Because two of the entrances correspond with sunrise and sunset during the winter and summer solstices, one interpretation of the Goseck Circle is that it functioned as an observatory or calendar of sorts, according to a 2012 study in the journal Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association (opens in new tab).

      Sounds like this shares many of the potential features of Stonehenge, stone and timber circles, and menhirs that fit into Lynne Kelly's thesis on mnemonic devices.

    1. At first, TikTok was exciting because there was culture that could only happen there. Now that on-platform culture is being overwhelmed by viral arbitrage, and the actual content is getting closer to what you see on every other network. As the platform gets bigger, it gets more generic, and there’s less to distinguish it from every other mass-market social network.

      There was a sense of newness to TikTok that's gone. Instead of a "TikTok culture", there's a sense that it's part of a bigger, algorithmically arbitraged and filtrated whole.

      And that's by the way an interesting idea, that "viral arbitrage" is cross-platform - as there are so many narratives about platforms as closed gardens with moats, pitching their services against each other.

    1. the human brain I've argued for at least two million years has co-evolved with the emergence of these distributed networks and it can't realize its design 00:02:13 potential is to say we wouldn't even be speaking for example until it is immersed in such a network these networks themselves 00:02:24 generate complex cognitive structures which were connected to and which reformat our our brains and therefore the brains task is is very complex we have to assimilate the structures of 00:02:37 culture and manage them and I'm going to argue that a lot of our most complex thinking strategies are actually culturally imposed in the starting point 00:02:51 of the human journey

      !- for : individual / collective gestalt - In Deep Humanity praxis, the individual / collective gestalt is fundamental - the individual is enmeshed and entangled with culture before birth - culture affects individual and individual affects culture in entangled feedback loops

    1. Ukrainian artist Lubov Panchenko became famous in the 1960s with her pictures full of folk motifs. She was persecuted by the Soviet authorities for her works that revived Ukrainian culture.

      one of my favorite artists!

    1. an increasing share of adaptive information is stored in culture compared with genes.

      !- feature : culture-driven human inheritance - more adaptive information is being stored in culture than in genes

    2. It follows, then, that humans are experiencing an evolutionary transition in individuality from single human to cultural group because culture is replacing genes as the primary human inheritance system, and cultural adaptations are heavily group structured.

      !- Question : culture-driven human inheritance - How do progress traps fit into this, as opposed to genetic-driven inheritance?

    3. culture is gradually replacing genetics as the primary human system of inheritance. This hypothesis helps clarify the human ETI.

      !- conclusion : GCC - very important finding - nobody knows the implications of such a profound shift - it means we are profoundly dependent on culture, on artificial human-created adaptations for our survival !- in other words : GCC - we no longer genetically evolve to adapt, but rather cognitive create solutions to adapt!

    4. if cultural evolution is sufficiently rapid, it may act to pre-empt and slow genetic evolution. That is, in solving adaptive challenges before genetic evolution takes place, cultural inheritance may reduce the opportunity for natural selection on genes and weaken the adaptive value of information stored in genetic inheritance in the long term. This process is the opposite of genetic assimilation, in which a plastic trait becomes genetically encoded. We call this mode of GCC cultural pre-emption.

      !- Question : Genetic Evolution

      Does this mean that our predominantly cultural evolution threatens to freeze our genetic evolution? This is possible, since genetic evolution takes place on time scales that are orders of magnitudes larger than cultural evolution Unless theoretically proposed, it may have escaped detection for a long time

    5. human long-term GCC is characterized by an evolutionary transition in inheritance (from genes to culture) which entails a transition in individuality (from genetic individual to cultural group).

      !- for : Cultural Evolution - the findings of this paper point to culture is displacing genetic adaptive potential as the main driver of evolution. This is a very profound finding!

    1. The list is compiled each year by the Marist Mindset team of Professor Tommy Zurhellen, Associate Professor of English; Dr. Vanessa Lynn, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice; and Dr. Joyce Yu-Jean Lee, Assistant Professor of Art and Digital Media.
    1. Here it is probably necessary to explain that lots of things were once typed — on machines called typewriters — during a period of human history after stone tablets and before laptops and cellphones. It is probably also necessary to explain that reference to a card catalog in the first paragraph. A card catalog was an inventory of what was in a library before all the holdings were listed, and maybe available, online.

      A bit tongue-in-cheek, the New York Times describes for the technically inadept what a typewriter and a card catalog are.

    1. They are not meant to prove thatthe student did his or her homework. Rather, they provethat students can make something out of their education.

      Francesco Erspamer's definition of a thesis is proof "that students can make something out of their education."

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  2. Aug 2022
    1. Indeed, judging from the accounts of the many employees who have now gone on record about this issue, the “debates” that have been happening at Basecamp are precisely the kinds of conversations that happen when you have a diverse workforce. Different issues affect different people differently, and being able to speak freely about those differences is the hallmark of a healthy culture. But by framing these discussions as “acrimonious debates” rather than “challenging conversations,” Hansson has positioned himself not as a peacemaker, but as a tyrant hell-bent on taking his toys and going home; shutting down discussions rather than holding space for growth and discovery.
    1. "Self-silencing" — people saying what they think others want to hear rather than what they truly feel — is skewing our understanding of how Americans really feel about abortion, COVID-19 precautions, what children are taught in school and other hot-button issues, a new study finds.

      This has to be true, and I'm glad there is a study to demonstrate it. It's one study, and it's a small sample. But, it's worth a look.

    1. I was doing some random searches for older material on zettelkasten in German and came across this.

      Apparently I've come across this before in a similar context: https://hypothes.is/a/CsgyjAXQEeyMfoN7zLcs0w

      The description now makes me want to read it all the more!

      This is a book about a box that contained the world. The box was the Picture Academy for the Young, a popular encyclopedia in pictures invented by preacher-turned-publisher Johann Siegmund Stoy in eighteenth-century Germany. Children were expected to cut out the pictures from the Academy, glue them onto cards, and arrange those cards in ordered compartments—the whole world filed in a box of images.

      As Anke te Heesen demonstrates, Stoy and his world in a box epitomized the Enlightenment concern with the creation and maintenance of an appropriate moral, intellectual, and social order. The box, and its images from nature, myth, and biblical history, were intended to teach children how to collect, store, and order knowledge. te Heesen compares the Academy with other aspects of Enlightenment material culture, such as commercial warehouses and natural history cabinets, to show how the kinds of collecting and ordering practices taught by the Academy shaped both the developing middle class in Germany and Enlightenment thought. The World in a Box, illustrated with a multitude of images of and from Stoy's Academy, offers a glimpse into a time when it was believed that knowledge could be contained and controlled.

      Given the portions about knowledge and control, it might also be of interest to @remikalir wrt his coming book.

    1. If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.

      A breathless paragraph that does articulate well and generously the conservative (nay) reactionary position of those who year to return to an "orange" (or even amber) order before the arrival of green.

      The issue is they want to go back rather than forward which is the only option. We need to "transclude" green -- and orange and amber. Yes we do want virtue, and values, and (probably) a reduced government -- and more. And we need to recognize difference and systematic injustice and a multiplicity of perspectives. And go beyond that into something new.

      This ultimately is simply reactionary. One can sympathize and appreciate it. One imagine what it was like for Catholics in their old ordered world with the all good things of the high middle ages bemoaning the arrival of the protestant heretics. But there is no going back. We can go forward -- and still take much of what was good from that past.

    1. Contemporary scholarship is not in a position to give a definitive assessmentof the achievements of philosophical grammar. The ground-work has not beenlaid for such an assessment, the original work is all but unknown in itself, andmuch of it is almost unobtainable. For example, I have been unable to locate asingle copy, in the United States, of the only critical edition of the Port-RoyalGrammar, produced over a century ago; and although the French original isnow once again available, 3 the one English translation of this important workis apparently to be found only in the British Museum. It is a pity that this workshould have been so totally disregarded, since what little is known about it isintriguing and quite illuminating.

      He's railing against the loss of theory for use over time and translation.

      similar to me and note taking...

    1. As geekdom moves from the cultural fringes into the mainstream, it becomes increasingly difficult for the figure of the geek to maintain the outsider victim status that made him such a sympathetic figure in the first place. Confronted with his cultural centrality and white, masculine privilege—geeks are most frequently represented as white males—the geek seeks a simulated victimhood and even simulated ethnicity in order to justify his existence as a protagonist in a world where an unmarked straight white male protagonist is increasingly passé.
    1. https://twitter.com/_35millimetre/status/1556586974928068611

      Turns out the world’s greatest drawing of a frog was done in 1790, by Itō Jakuchu pic.twitter.com/GttSfHA7Kl

      — Charlie (@_35millimetre) August 8, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      Makes me want to revisit some of the history of early haiku and frog references. What was the literacy level within Japanese culture at this time? Were there more methods entwining elements of orality and memory into the popular culture?

    1. Historical Hypermedia: An Alternative History of the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 and Implications for e-Research. .mp3. Berkeley School of Information Regents’ Lecture. UC Berkeley School of Information, 2010. https://archive.org/details/podcast_uc-berkeley-school-informat_historical-hypermedia-an-alte_1000088371512. archive.org.

      https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/events/2010/historical-hypermedia-alternative-history-semantic-web-and-web-20-and-implications-e.

      https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/audio/2010-10-20-vandenheuvel_0.mp3

      headshot of Charles van den Heuvel

      Interface as Thing - book on Paul Otlet (not released, though he said he was working on it)

      • W. Boyd Rayward 1994 expert on Otlet
      • Otlet on annotation, visualization, of text
      • TBL married internet and hypertext (ideas have sex)
      • V. Bush As We May Think - crosslinks between microfilms, not in a computer context
      • Ted Nelson 1965, hypermedia

      t=540

      • Michael Buckland book about machine developed by Emanuel Goldberg antecedent to memex
      • Emanuel Goldberg and His Knowledge Machine: Information, Invention, and Political Forces (New Directions in Information Management) by Michael Buckland (Libraries Unlimited, (March 31, 2006)
      • Otlet and Goldsmith were precursors as well

      four figures in his research: - Patrick Gattis - biologist, architect, diagrams of knowledge, metaphorical use of architecture; classification - Paul Otlet, Brussels born - Wilhelm Ostwalt - nobel prize in chemistry - Otto Neurath, philosophher, designer of isotype

      Paul Otlet

      Otlet was interested in both the physical as well as the intangible aspects of the Mundaneum including as an idea, an institution, method, body of work, building, and as a network.<br /> (#t=1020)

      Early iPhone diagram?!?

      (roughly) armchair to do the things in the web of life (Nelson quote) (get full quote and source for use) (circa 19:30)

      compares Otlet to TBL


      Michael Buckland 1991 <s>internet of things</s> coinage - did I hear this correctly? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things lists different coinages

      Turns out it was "information as thing"<br /> See: https://hypothes.is/a/kXIjaBaOEe2MEi8Fav6QsA


      sugane brierre and otlet<br /> "everything can be in a document"<br /> importance of evidence


      The idea of evidence implies a passiveness. For evidence to be useful then, one has to actively do something with it, use it for comparison or analysis with other facts, knowledge, or evidence for it to become useful.


      transformation of sound into writing<br /> movement of pieces at will to create a new combination of facts - combinatorial creativity idea here. (circa 27:30 and again at 29:00)<br /> not just efficiency but improvement and purification of humanity

      put things on system cards and put them into new orders<br /> breaking things down into smaller pieces, whether books or index cards....

      Otlet doesn't use the word interfaces, but makes these with language and annotations that existed at the time. (32:00)

      Otlet created diagrams and images to expand his ideas

      Otlet used octagonal index cards to create extra edges to connect them together by topic. This created more complex trees of knowledge beyond the four sides of standard index cards. (diagram referenced, but not contained in the lecture)

      Otlet is interested in the "materialization of knowledge": how to transfer idea into an object. (How does this related to mnemonic devices for daily use? How does it relate to broader material culture?)

      Otlet inspired by work of Herbert Spencer

      space an time are forms of thought, I hold myself that they are forms of things. (get full quote and source) from spencer influence of Plato's forms here?

      Otlet visualization of information (38:20)

      S. R. Ranganathan may have had these ideas about visualization too

      atomization of knowledge; atomist approach 19th century examples:S. R. Ranganathan, Wilson, Otlet, Richardson, (atomic notes are NOT new either...) (39:40)

      Otlet creates interfaces to the world - time with cyclic representation - space - moving cube along time and space axes as well as levels of detail - comparison to Ted Nelson and zoomable screens even though Ted Nelson didn't have screens, but simulated them in paper - globes

      Katie Berner - semantic web; claims that reporting a scholarly result won't be a paper, but a nugget of information that links to other portions of the network of knowledge.<br /> (so not just one's own system, but the global commons system)

      Mention of Open Annotation (Consortium) Collaboration:<br /> - Jane Hunter, University of Australia Brisbane & Queensland<br /> - Tim Cole, University of Urbana Champaign<br /> - Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory annotations of various media<br /> see:<br /> - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311366469_The_Open_Annotation_Collaboration_A_Data_Model_to_Support_Sharing_and_Interoperability_of_Scholarly_Annotations - http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/20130205/index.html - http://www.openannotation.org/PhaseIII_Team.html

      trust must be put into the system for it to work

      coloration of the provenance of links goes back to Otlet (~52:00)

      Creativity is the friction of the attention space at the moments when the structural blocks are grinding against one another the hardest. —Randall Collins (1998) The sociology of philosophers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (p.76)

    1. Neural models more closely resemble movable type: they will change the way culture is transmitted in many social contexts.
    1. actors in the motion capture suits, referred to as zhongzhiren in Chinese and naka no hito in Japanese

      “Person in the Middle” name for virtual environment actors

      It refers to the person at the center of the technology fulfilling the physical aspects of the virtual world — the person in the motion capture suit.

  3. Jul 2022
    1. From Friday 2022-07-29 evening:

      Narrative String Theory<br /> Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (Warner Bros., 2011) has background NST boards at approx 17:22 and 1:18:46.

      Currently available on Netflix. If you're careful with timing you can get some fun facial expressions out of Holmes and Watson on one of them.

      https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1515091/

    1. The lesson here is that political and cultural logic, rooted in emotion, identity and ways of life cultivated among one’s own kind, operate in an entirely different frame than the rational and universalizing ethos of economics and technology. Far from moving forward in lockstep progress, when they meet, they clash.
    1. My team worked like a lab. We focused on (2) to design new services and (4) to create staff and manager resources to improve internal and external services. Every lab should focus on (4) as this drives everything.Labs should be a beacon of insight and knowledge. Prehn was blunt in saying that staff should “climb down from the ivory tower and avoid the tendency of labs to define themselves in opposition to the rest of the organization,” adding, “Please, lose the arrogant attitude.” That’s sound advice.

      "Labs should be a beacon of insight and knowledge". And: a(ny) "normal" team can work like a lab.

    1. Think about the sad essay we all used to write for your (insert language here) class: back then you didn’t have permission to generate original ideas.

      I'm not sure that's the correct diagnosis.

      Alternative take: you were not, at that point in your life, equipped to understand that you could be generating new ideas and that you should walk away from that writing course with an appreciation for writing as a vehicle for what you'd like to accomplish with a given subject/format. It's fine that you didn't—many people don't—and your instructors, institution, parents, community, etc. probably could have done a better job at communicating this to you, but it was there, and it was the point all along.

    1. // NB: Since line terminators can be the multibyte CRLF sequence, care // must be taken to ensure we work for calls where `tokenPosition` is some // start minus 1, where that "start" is some line start itself.

      I think this satisfies the threshold of "minimum viable publication". So write this up and reference it here.

      Full impl.:

      getLineStart(tokenPosition, anteTerminators = null) {
        if (tokenPosition > this._edge && tokenPosition != this.length) {
          throw new Error("random access too far out"); // XXX
        }
      
        // NB: Since line terminators can be the multibyte CRLF sequence, care
        // must be taken to ensure we work for calls where `tokenPosition` is some
        // start minus 1, where that "start" is some line start itself.
        for (let i = this._lineTerminators.length - 1; i >= 0; --i) {
          let current = this._lineTerminators[i];
          if (tokenPosition >= current.position + current.content.length) {
            if (anteTerminators) {
              anteTerminators.push(...this._lineTerminators.slice(0, i));
            }
            return current.position + current.content.length;
          }
        }
      
        return 0;
      }
      

      (Inlined for posterity, since this comes from an uncommitted working directory.)

  4. Jun 2022
    1. Between 1914 and 1980, inequalities in income and wealth decreasedmarkedly in the Western world as a whole (the United Kingdom,Germany, France, Sweden, and the United States), and in Japan,Russia, China, and India, although in different ways, which we willexplore in a later chapter. Here we will focus on the Western countriesand improve our understanding of how this “great redistribution”took place.

      Inequalities in income and wealth decreased markedly in the West from 1914 to 1980 due to a number of factors including:<br /> - Two World Wars and the Great Depression dramatically overturned the power relationships between labor and capital<br /> - A progressive tax on income and inheritance reduced the concentration of wealth and helped increase mobility<br /> - Liquidation of foreign and colonial assets as well as dissolution of public debt

    1. But systems of schooling and educational institutions–and much of online learning– are organized in ways that deny their voices matter. My role is to resist those systems and structures to reclaim the spaces of teaching and learning as voice affirming. Voice amplifying.

      Modeling annotation and note taking can allow students to see that their voices matter in conversation with the "greats" of knowledge. We can and should question authority. Even if one's internal voice questions as one reads, that might be enough, but modeling active reading and note taking can better underline and empower these modes of thought.

      There are certainly currents within American culture that we can and should question authority.

      Sadly some parts of conservative American culture are reverting back to paternalized power structures of "do as I say and not as I do" which leads to hypocrisy and erosion of society.

      Education can be used as a means of overcoming this, though it requires preventing the conservative right from eroding this away from the inside by removing books and certain thought from the education process that prevents this. Extreme examples of this are Warren Jeff's control of religion, education, and social life within his Mormon sect.

      Link to: - Lawrence Principe examples of the power establishment in Western classical education being questioned. Aristotle wasn't always right. The entire history of Western science is about questioning the status quo. (How can we center this practice not only in science, but within the humanities?)


      My evolving definition of active reading now explicitly includes the ideas of annotating the text, having a direct written conversation with it, questioning it, and expanding upon it. I'm not sure I may have included some or all of these in it before. This is what "reading with a pen in hand" (or digital annotation tool) should entail. What other pieces am I missing here which might also be included?

    1. So, i started researching where the capitalization of said pronoun came from and was quite stunned to find that it was always capitalized because it always appeared as the first word in a sentence, never stuck in the middle. And then, when it started appearing in the middle, it started getting capitalized out of convention and because people worried that it would get lost in script. Of course, "It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case" (journalist Sydney J. Harris).

      If it's true that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized instead of the more commonly capitalized "you", does this help to underline some of the self-centeredness show by most of the English speaking West?

    1. The course Marginalia in Books from Christopher Ohge is just crying out to have an annotated syllabus.

      Wish I could follow along directly, but there's some excellent reference material hiding in the brief outline of the course.


      Perhaps a list of interesting people here too for speaking at https://iannotate.org/ 2022 hiding in here? A session on the history of annotation and marginalia could be cool there.

    2. Archaeology of Reading project

      https://archaeologyofreading.org/

      The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) uses digital technologies to enable the systematic exploration of the historical reading practices of Renaissance scholars nearly 450 years ago. This is possible through AOR’s corpus of thirty-six fully digitized and searchable versions of early printed books filled with tens of thousands of handwritten notes, left by two of the most dedicated readers of the early modern period: John Dee and Gabriel Harvey.


      Perhaps some overlap here with: - Workshop in the History of Material Texts https://pennmaterialtexts.org/about/events/ - Book Traces https://booktraces.org via Andrew Stauffer, et al. - Schoenberg Institute's Coffe with a Codex https://schoenberginstitute.org/coffee-with-a-codex/ (perhaps to a lesser degree)

    3. https://www.sas.ac.uk/events/event/25322

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Jeremy Cherfas</span> (email) (<time class='dt-published'>06/16/2022 07:18:14</time>)</cite></small>

    1. The second was “makedance pay for the dancers.” I’ve always been resentful of the fact that some of theso-called elite art forms can’t survive on their own without sponsorship andsubsidies. It bothers me that dance companies around the world are not-for-profitorganizations and that dancers, who are as devoted and disciplined as any NFL orNBA superstar, are at the low end of the entertainment industry’s income scale. Iwanted this Broadway-bound project not only to elevate serious dance in thecommercial arena but also to pay the dancers well. So I wrote my goals for theproject, “tell a story” and “make dance pay,” on two blue index cards and watchedthem float to the bottom of the Joel box.

      Given the importance of dance in oral cultures, what, why, and how has dance moved to be one of the seemingly lowest and least well paid art forms in modern society?

      How might modern dance regain its teaching and mnemonic status in our culture?

    2. The box makes me feel connected to a project. It is my soil. I feel this evenwhen I’ve back-burnered a project: I may have put the box away on a shelf, but Iknow it’s there. The project name on the box in bold black lettering is a constantreminder that I had an idea once and may come back to it very soon.

      Having a physical note taking system also stands as a physical reminder and representation of one's work and focus. It may be somewhat out of the way on a shelf, but it takes up space in a way that digital files and notes do not. This invites one into using and maintaining it.


      Link to - tying a string on one's finger as a reminder - method of loci - orality

    1. Short-lived victories, however, came at a long-term cost. Evangelical leaders set something in motion decades ago that pastors today can no longer control. Not only were Christians conditioned to understand their struggle as one against flesh and blood, fixated on earthly concerns, a fight for a kingdom of this world—all of which runs directly counter to the commands of scripture—they were indoctrinated with a belief that because the stakes were getting so high, any means was justified.
    1. “So I’m supposed to ask the Lakota Language Consortium if I can use my own Lakota language,” Taken Alive asked in one of many TikTok posts that would come to define his social media presence. 

      Based on some beyond the average knowledge of Indigenous cultures, I'm reading some additional context into this statement that is unlikely to be seen or understood by those with Western-only cultural backgrounds who view things from an ownership and capitalistic perspective.

      There's a stronger sense of identity and ownership of language and knowledge within oral traditions than can be understood by Westerners who didn't grow up with it.

      He obviously feels like we're stealing from him all over again. We need better rules and shared definitions between Indigenous peoples and non before embarking on these sorts of projects.

    2. But the copyright on the materials still gives the organization control over how the information is used, which is what some tribal leaders find objectionable.

      Oral cultures treat information dramatically different than literate cultures, and particularly Western literate cultures within capitalism-based economies.

  5. May 2022
    1. An Introduction to PLAN E Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First-Century Era of Entangled Security and Hyperthreats

      Planetary Boundary / Doughnut Economic Main Category: SOCIO-ECONOMIC: Culture, Education

      Although culture and education are chosen as the main categories, Plan E applies to all planetary boundaries and all socio-economic categories as it is dealing with whole system change.

      Visit Stop Reset Go on Indyweb for detailed context graph and to begin or engage in discussion on this topic. (Coming soon)

    1. the memory castle that jordan peter peterson described i think it has potentially a risk of inducing 00:58:28 confirmation bias

      Jordan Peterson apparently has described using a memory palace (castle?) he used with 12 spaces for writing his book (presumably 12 Rules for life?).

    1. Eighty-seven percent of students who report feeling understood are satisfied with their experience overall compared to just 45% of students who say their institution doesn’t understand what's important to them.
    1. According to the “Korean age” system, a person turns one the day they are born and they then become a year older on New Year’s Day, irrespective of the date on which they were born.   This traditional method of determining age was used in a number of east Asian nations in the past, including China and Japan, and is believed to stem from the concept that time inside the mother’s womb counts as the first year of a child’s life.
    1. Where there wasn’t a local real Mari Lwyd to hand, the flat-pack Mari designed by David Pitt has been incredibly useful.

      Modern celebrations of the Mari Lwyd which haven't had easy access to a horse skull to decorate have used a flat-pack cardboard version of a skull designed by David Pitt.

    1. I would share concerns about ‘Disneyfication’ and trivialisation about much of our public life - one has only to turn on the TV any evening to see that - but this revival and the many others like it that are happening in Wales, as well as their ‘wassailing’ counterparts in England which are now spreading from their southwest redoubt to parts that never had them before, are a welcome antidote to such trivialisation. No two ‘traditions’ will be completely alike, but then they never were, completely, even the first time round.

      https://forum.saysomethingin.com/t/could-we-have-a-thread-on-welsh-customs/4068/68

      Example of the word 'Disneyfication' used in a setting relating to the revival of cultural traditions. It's happening in the same area the original culture stemmed from so it's not exactly cultural appropriation, though that is often what Disneyfication does.

      Another example appears a few posts further up the page.

  6. Apr 2022
    1. Humans’ tendency to“overimitate”—to reproduce even the gratuitous elements of another’s behavior—may operate on a copy now, understand later basis. After all, there might begood reasons for such steps that the novice does not yet grasp, especially sinceso many human tools and practices are “cognitively opaque”: not self-explanatory on their face. Even if there doesn’t turn out to be a functionalrationale for the actions taken, imitating the customs of one’s culture is a smartmove for a highly social species like our own.

      Is this responsible for some of the "group think" seen in the Republican party and the political right? Imitation of bad or counter-intuitive actions outweights scientifically proven better actions? Examples: anti-vaxxers and coronavirus no-masker behaviors? (Some of this may also be about or even entangled with George Lakoff's (?) tribal identity theories relating to "people like me".

      Explore this area more deeply.

      Another contributing factor for this effect may be the small-town effect as most Republican party members are in the countryside (as opposed to the larger cities which tend to be more Democratic). City dwellers are more likely to be more insular in their interpersonal relations whereas country dwellers may have more social ties to other people and groups and therefor make them more tribal in their social interrelationships. Can I find data to back up this claim?

      How does link to the thesis put forward by Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous? Does Henrich have data about city dwellers to back up my claim above?

      What does this tension have to do with the increasing (and potentially evolutionary) propensity of humans to live in ever-increasingly larger and more dense cities versus maintaining their smaller historic numbers prior to the pre-agricultural timeperiod?

      What are the biological effects on human evolution as a result of these cultural pressures? Certainly our cultural evolution is effecting our biological evolution?

      What about the effects of communication media on our cultural and biological evolution? Memes, orality versus literacy, film, radio, television, etc.? Can we tease out these effects within the socio-politico-cultural sphere on the greater span of humanity? Can we find breaks, signs, or symptoms at the border of mass agriculture?


      total aside, though related to evolution: link hypercycles to evolution spirals?

    1. The bookitself participates in the history it recounts: it has a title page, table of contents,footnotes, a bibliography and an index to assist the reader, while the digitalcopy enables the reader to search for individual words and phrases as well asto copy-and-paste without disfiguring a material object.

      Some scholars study annotations as part of material culture. Are they leaving out too much by solely studying those physically left in the books about which they were made, or should we instead also be looking at other sources like commonplace books, notebooks, note cards, digital spaces like e-readers that allow annotation, social media where texts are discussed, or even digital marginalia in services like Hypothes.is or Perusall?

      Some of these forms of annotation allow a digital version of cut and paste which doesn't cause damage to the original text, which should be thought of as a good thing though it may separate the annotations from the original physical object.

    1. same with our with the with the dendrites we will always tell you the story tell the story to the juvenile who's coming through the novices who's coming through the ceremony will tell them so as they 00:47:47 get to a certain age or a certain time or a certain experience in the ceremony we will then pass that knowledge onto him and we'll take it to him so these hieroglyphs and 00:47:58 petroglyphs and the etchings on the rocks and the paintings on there on the cave walls that's our library that is our library

      The dendroglyphs (markings on trees) or the petroglyphs (markings on stone in the stony territories) are the libraries of the indigenous peoples who always relate their stories from the markings back up to the sky.

      via Uncle Ghillar Michael Anderson


      Can this be linked to the practices of the Druids who may have had similar methods? How about linking the petroglyphs in the Celtic (English) countryside?

    2. and of course the white fellas learned very quickly because they learned from the romans the british learned from iran and the first thing you attack other people from religious beliefs 00:46:28 that's the first thing you've done back in those days we didn't have towers communication so you didn't target your communication towers but you communicate you you attacked the way people transmitted 00:46:41 their knowledge

      The white fellas learned very quickly from the Romans that the first thing you attack is other people's religious beliefs, which are the modern day equivalent of communication towers. That's how oral societies communicate their knowledge and culture.

      via Uncle Ghillar Michael Anderson

  7. Mar 2022
    1. Who were the world’s first astronomers? The answer typicallyincludes scientists such as Galileo, Nicolaus Copernicus, or ancientcivilisations that gave birth to what we consider Western science,such as Sumer in Mesopotamia.

      Given the predominantly non-literate civilizations that comprised the ancient Near East, I've been wondering about how they may have actually been closer to Indigenous cultures than they are to more modern, literate Western culture.

      Perhaps he shouldn't dismiss them so readily here, but rather tie them more directly into his broader thesis.

    2. Indigenous scholars conducting scientific research combine formalacademic training and a personal lived experience that bridgesIndigenous and Western ways of knowing. In the United States andCanada, this concept is called Etuaptmumk, meaning ‘Two-EyedSeeing’. Etuaptmumk comes from the Mi’kmaw language of easternCanada and Maine, and was developed by Elders Dr Albert Marshalland Murdina Marshall.

      Developed by Elders Dr. Albert Marshall and Murdina Marshall, the Mi'kmaw word Etuaptmunk describes the concept of "Two-Eyed Seeing". It is based on the lived experience of Indigenous peoples who have the ability to see the world from both the Western and Indigenous perspectives with one eye on the strengths of each practice.


      The idea behind Etuaptmunk is designed and geared toward Western thinkers who place additional value on the eyes and literacy. Perhaps a second analogy of "Two-Eared Hearing" might better center the orality techniques for the smaller number of people with lived experiences coming from the other direction?

      These ideas seem somewhat similar to that of the third culture kid.

    3. A sense ofconnectedness is a unique part of Indigenous science. In Westernscience, knowledge is often considered separate from the people whodiscover it, while Indigenous cultures see knowledge as intricatelyconnected to people.

      A primary difference between Indigenous science and Western science is the first is intimately connected to the practitioners while the second is wholly separate.


      Would Western science be in a healthier space currently if its practice were more tightly bound to the people who need to use it (everyone)? By not being bound to the everyday practice and knowledge of our science, increasingly larger portions of Western society don't believe in science or its value.

    4. When profound ideas are introduced to theworld for the first time, our world is fundamentally changed and theprevious understandings consigned to history. There are those whocontinue to deny the intelligence and scientific traditions ofIndigenous people. The idea that the only true science is that ofWestern thinking must be consigned to history. Those who read thisbook will understand why.

      This is a great pull quote for the book, particularly for Westerners.

      However, these ideas are not being introduced to the "world" for the first time, they've long lived in indigenous cultures. We should be more pointed in underlining that they're being introduced to the "Western World" for the first time. These ideas should take up their own space in the pantheon of intellectual history.

    1. t can’t be possible, because the texts were from his agent. A senior-aged Asexual woman, and I quote:“so it’s far-from-romantic.”Talk to any Asexual person, and they would be offended at the implication that Asexuals aren’t romantic or don’t date. It’s actually more-in-line with Aphobic rhetoric that Asexuality is born from somebodies lack of ability to form relationships due to looks or personality.

      This is a case of false generalization.

    1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/third-culture-kid

      Third culture kids are raised by parents of one or more different backgrounds in a completely different culture. As a result they're not able to completely identify with either their parents' culture(s) or the one in which they're being raised.

      Examples include Barak Obama, Viggo Mortensen, and Kobe Bryant.

    1. Each of us faces a threat as we pursue our craft. Like sirens on the rocks, ego sings a soothing, validating song— which can lead to a wreck. The second we let the ego tell us  we have graduated, learning grinds to a halt. That’s why Frank Shamrock said, “Always stay a student.” As in, it never ends.

      One of the prices of the pursuit of greatness. You're never "there".

    1. The report is 33 slides long; yet about 10 slide-equivalents are essentially content-free (compulsive repetitive branding, twiddly hierarchical organization, empty space, assorted title pages, and so on). This PP fluffed-up material here and quite a bit more could easily be placed in a technical report on 4 pages of an 11" by 17" piece of paper (folded in half)
    2. One does not read a printout of someone's two-month old PowerPoint slides, one guesses, decodes, and attempts to glean meaning from the series of low-resolution titles, bullets, charts, and clipart. At least they do that for a while...until they give up. With a written document, however, there is no reason for shallowness or ambiguity (assuming one writes well).
    1. Technology itself is culture, and a phone or a laptop or an algorithmic feed is in itself a cultural object just as worthy of analysis, critique, and serious attention as any piece of artwork or fashion trend.

      See technology more critical -- it shapes culture more so than anything else these days. And every tech product is deliberately designed to be the way it is.

    1. The legacy of the expansion of the Russian Empire and the development of Soviet nationalities policies was a complex mosaic of different communities scattered across Eurasia with historical ties to Russia.

      Not "one Russia", but many unique cultures loosely associated with it.

      • Russia and Ukraine DO have a shared culture and origin, but all people have that actually. Both cultures (plus Belarus) shaped each other, it's incorrect to say that any one was once part of the other (the "ancient Rus" were not today's Russians).
      • Putin fits his ideas of a strong Russia into the historical context with disregard for actual facts.
      • In that he leaves the Ukrainians no choice of their own culture or power to shape it, which short-circuits (invalidates) the entire discussion.
    1. Ukrainians, Russians and Belarusians have all used Rus’ as part of their compound name at various times; but this only means they are kin, not the ‘same people’. Putin’s argument that the Ancient Rus’ were ancient Russians is, therefore, only one possibility out of four.

      Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians DO have a shared culture -- but that simply means they are similar to each other. No two people are exactly the same.

    1. The president who refused to flee the capital, telling the US that he needs ammunition, not a ride; the soldiers from Snake Island who told a Russian warship to “go fuck yourself”; the civilians who tried to stop Russian tanks by sitting in their path. This is the stuff nations are built from. In the long run, these stories count for more than tanks.

      Individual acts of bravery that shape people's cultural identity.

      • Cultural change is a choice, not purely defined by historical trends (e.g. "war is inevitable").
      • For one of the first times in history, we see war not as a way to make progress. Intellectual progress can't be conquered like raw resources can. Global cooperation is worth more than a bigger country.
      • But this is again subject to our choice. If Russia's war is successful, we will see more wars (since it will be a viable method for political change). It's not just about preventing atrocities in Ukraine.
    1. I think another very important thing is what has been dividing the West over the several years now, it’s what people term the “culture war”. The culture war between left and right, between conservatives and liberals. And I think this war can be an opportunity to end the culture war within the West, to make peace in the culture war. 00:15:59 First of all, because you suddenly realize we are all in this together. There are much bigger things in the world than these arguments between left and right within the Western democracies. And it's a reminder that we need to stand united to protect Western liberal democracies. But it's deeper than that. 00:16:22 Much of the argument between left and right seemed to be in terms of a contradiction between liberalism and nationalism. Like, you need to choose. And the right goes with nationalism, and the left goes more liberalism. And Ukraine is a reminder that no, the two actually go together. Historically, nationalism and liberalism are not opposites. 00:16:47 They are not enemies. They are friends, they go together. They meet around the central value of freedom, of liberty. And to see a nation fighting for its survival, fighting for its freedom, you see it on Fox News or you see it in CNN. And yes, they tell the story a little differently, but they suddenly see the same reality. 00:17:14 And they find common ground. And the common ground is to understand that nationalism is not about hating minorities or hating foreigners, it's about loving your compatriots, and reaching a peaceful agreement about how we want to run our country together. And I hope that seeing what is happening would help to end the culture war in the West.

      Harari makes a very astute observation here. This is an opportunity to reflect on the divisiveness of the culture wars. The acceleration of the culture wars is, in fact no accident, but directly related to Putin's information warfare on the West, especially the election and support of Trump in the US and Johnson in the UK.

  8. Feb 2022
    1. speaks about how each of us can, like her, become a creative genius

      Is this the ultimate form of culturally accepted bragging? How many people discover they can be vaguely "inspiring" instead of delivering substance? Maybe that's what's wrong with the world.

  9. Jan 2022
    1. “youth culture”

      Definition: Youth culture refers to the societal norms of children, adolescents, and young adults

      • today's societal norms I feel like would revolve around the likes of something such as Tiktok. The app that blew up over quarantine is definitely something that I feel creates modern "youth culture". Almost everything from the hottest celebrities, and fashion and makeup trends, to sabotaging political activities is found within this app.
  10. canvas.ucsc.edu canvas.ucsc.edu
    1. The Culture Industry: Mass Deception in Dialectic of Enlightenment

      The culture industry is any industry that is producing cultural products: news, beauty, music, fashion industry has one goal: generate profit. They will produce things that are produced like a factory. They are intended to produce consumerism. In the way that sex sells, rebellion also sells. The industries that are making our culture are feeding us our news so are corporaterized. Adorno and Horkheimer would not be suprised about YouTube. That cultural adversary may be dialectical.

      Academia. You know more about less and less.

      Backdrop context: Shaky ground of liberal democracy in the beginnings of WW2,rise of social movements, rise of nationalism and facism.

      Englightment: Reason & Individual liberty Bacon: a larger system that synthesized knowledge and power as one; a flipping of nature over man and man over nature; but A/H thought that this played out in a human global scale.

      If Enlightenment was supposed to create logic and reason why did we experience WW2, for A/H if we're to take Bacon seriously we have to consider DOMINATION in newer notions of freedom.

      Regression: Enlightenment as Myth. Englightenment becomes totalitarian it ABSTRACTS. Ex. Hitler youth, a difference among others yet they become homogenous sameness among each other.

      The result of the sacrifice continues that is far more reaching that MArx's alienation. --> UNFETTERED ACCEPTANCE

      Adorno/H say that positivism: 1) a system of philiospgy were every assertion can be proved 2) as ideoogy where eveyrthing is true by default and questioning it goes against objective foundations.

      Kant saw a short-sighted view of self-reason

      IDEOLOGY of defintiion #2 the process of Englightenment is brought into analysis of the Culture Industry.

      Context: AMerica is becoming global powerhouse, Soviet underwent their own Industrial Revolution, change was everywhere and revolutionary change with one large outlier thus the immediat question. Despite a global population of workers revolitng around the globe then why didnt the United States or Western Countries embrace similar post-capitalist systems seen across teh globe? And how is Soviet existing as a post-capitalist system alongside the capitalist system?

      Art is being systematized, newer technology is being synthesized into one and the same narrative. The same repackaged story; subject and authority. This mimics the governance of a few over many.

      A/H utilize Kant's idea of schemtaism (being how the midn communicates with objects and other structures aorund us, how to reason and cogantate; synthesize and bring Froyd into the mix, how we suppress ourselves and our desires to how we fit into society. We cognitively pick up how the world is presented to us. Viewership creates the bounds within which we can do art. A psychological realism that is difficult to break for a person who works a 9-5pm; to break it in a capitalist system is used to labor and build wealth. Art becomes the same even when it tries to stand out. There is a unifornm aethetic if you wnat to be different, the sameness and constant

      Art is now abstracted a fulfilmmnet of mere numbers rather than aesthetic work and utility. Regarding art in newer creation, A/H bring up autombiles as an example, a film must have a romatic sequence that the industry now demands. This is part of Mechanical reproduction. Art will become tailored to your class relation as well. But it's not only class and poleconomy but it's not just corporate art is entirely based oof profit but rather there is a cyclcial ideology that reinforces this ideology. see

      The focus isn't on marvel movies (for their thrist for profit) or to tell consumers to not consume this art but its the industry itself that reproduces the

      "Thirst" is not conscious it is a result of the structure that is capitalism the culture industry modling of our desires in the first place.

      It's not good enough to tell individuals to not consume said tailored art. Example anti-semitism is a result of essentialist notions of race. Largest incubators of anti-semitism stem from the bourigeoise themselves but a ruling class of people attempting to hide a ruling class domination. Here the bouregoise know the struggles of individuals and pins this to Jewish individuals.

      Thus its not really just pushing Jewish people out of certain borders this marks the downfall of bouregoise property.

      Look up: > Cultural education became....

      The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry...

      Culture is a paradoxical commodity. It is so completely subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly equated with use that it can no longer be used. For this reason it merges with the adver­tisement. The more meaningless the latter appears under monopoly, the more omnipotent culture becomes. (pg 131).

      Unending sameness also governs the relationship to the past. What is new in the phase of mass culture compared to that of late liberalism is the exclusion of the new.

    1. The Goddess of Memory (Mnemosyne) was a Titan, daughter of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth), and mother of all the nine Muses

      The Greeks gave Mnemosyne, a Titan and the goddess of memory a significant location within their culture as the daughter of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth) and the mother of all the nine Muses.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. I went to Portland, Oregon, to interview Prof Joel Nigg, who is one of the leading experts in the world on children’s attention problems, and he told me we need to ask if we are now developing “an attentional pathogenic culture” – an environment in which sustained and deep focus is harder for all of us.

      : attentional pathogenic culture ; an environment in which sustained and deep focus is harder for all of us

    1. A recent addition to the writer-editor-reader relationship is something called a “sensitivity reader,” that is someone of diverse background who can advise on dicey cultural matters whom writers are now encouraged to consult.
    2. You live only until an objection scares the people whose job is more and more to avoid objections — that new, primary executive function.

      Are there other examples of this job function in the broader American culture? What do these job descriptions and titles look like?

  11. Dec 2021
    1. It would be just as easy (actually, rather easier) to identify things thatcan be interpreted as the first stirrings of rationalism, legality,deliberative democracy and so forth all over the world, and only thentell the story of how they coalesced into the current global system.24

      Nationalistic, racial, and cultural blinders have led us to posit broadly accepted (positive) ideas like democracy as having developed and grown out of Western ideas rather than attributing them to historical cultures and societies all over the world.

    1. I mean how are they gonna learn the ten commandments if they don't ever command each other you know no kidding order is necessary it's a moral duh so it's exactly the opposite you know of 00:42:38 the the opinions that most people would have today

      Is it possible that the delivery of the ten commandments was a moral and ethical ill brought upon Western culture? Was the fact of one person (or God, in this case) creating a hierarchical structure of one commanding another that began the idea of inequality in Western culture?

    1. In oral societies, personal memories fade and even-tually disappear, and yet knowledge somehow remains, as does language. Con-sequently, social memory arises outside, but not independently of, individual psychic systems; it may be regarded as the recursive outcome of communica-tions that are operatively reproduced inside social systems.14

      This idea of transmission of knowledge within oral societies is worth exploring. What is the media of transmission? How does it work in comparison with literate societies? What is the overlap in the two Venn Diagrams?

    1. Some people have found success with a crowd-funded Patreon-kind of funding model. Even though ostensibly making is showbusiness now,

      Starting with reality television, everything seems to have become entertainment. Social media has accelerated this.

      The idea that "making is showbusiness" is an interesting label for this.

      We also have "manufacturing"; when will we have digufacturing?

  12. Nov 2021
    1. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/evangelical-trump-christians-politics/620469/

      Evangelical Christians have been held together more by political orientation and sociology than they have by a common theology. This has set them up for a schism which has been exacerbated by Donald J. Trump, COVID-19, and social changes.

      Similar to Kurt's quote, "We go to church to see and be seen", too many churches are focused on entertainment and being an ongoing institution that they aren't focusing on their core mission. This is causing problems in their overall identity.

      Time at church and in religious study is limited, but cable news, social media, and other distractions are always on and end up winning out.

      People are more likely to change their church because of politics than to change their politics because of church.

      The dichotomy of maleness and femaleness compound the cultural issues of the evangelical church.

      Southernization of the Church

      Pastors leaving the profession due to issues with a hostile work environment. Some leaving because parishioners are organizing and demanding they be fired.

      Peter Wehner looks at the rifts that are appearing in the Christian evangelical movement in America, some are issues that have been building for a while, while others are exaggerated by Donald J. Trump, the coronavirus, the culture wars, political news, political beliefs, and and hypocrisy.

    2. it isn’t simply the case that much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism is not essential to Christianity; it is that now, in important respects, much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism has become antithetical to authentic Christianity. What we’re dealing with—not in all cases, of course, but in far too many— is political identity and cultural anxieties, anti-intellectualism and ethnic nationalism, resentments and grievances, all dressed up as Christianity.
    3. The conservative writer David French, who lives in Tennessee, has written about the South’s shame/honor culture and its focus on group reputation and identity. “What we’re watching right now in much of our nation’s Christian politics,” he wrote, “is an explosion not of godly Christian passion, but rather of ancient southern shame/honor rage.”

      This sounds like some of the remnants of the Scots/Irish fighting spirit renewed.

      What does the overlap of this look like in Appalachia within the American Nations thesis?

    4. “southernization of the Church.” Some of the distinctive cultural forms present in the American South—masculinity and male dominance, tribal loyalties, obedience and intolerance, and even the ideology of white supremacism—have spread to other parts of the country, he said. These cultural attitudes are hardly shared by every southerner or dominant throughout the South, but they do exist and they need to be named. “Southern culture has had a profound impact upon religion,” Alexander told me, “particularly evangelical religion.”
    5. “People come to believe what they are most thoroughly and intensively catechized to believe, and that catechesis comes not from the churches but from the media they consume, or rather the media that consume them. The churches have barely better than a snowball’s chance in hell of shaping most people’s lives.”
      • Alan Jacobs
    6. “Culture catechizes,” Alan Jacobs, a distinguished professor of humanities in the honors program at Baylor University, told me. Culture teaches us what matters and what views we should take about what matters. Our current political culture, Jacobs argued, has multiple technologies and platforms for catechizing—television, radio, Facebook, Twitter, and podcasts among them. People who want to be connected to their political tribe—the people they think are like them, the people they think are on their side—subject themselves to its catechesis all day long, every single day, hour after hour after hour.
    7. The root of the discord lies in the fact that many Christians have embraced the worst aspects of our culture and our politics. When the Christian faith is politicized, churches become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized. The result is not only wounding the nation; it’s having a devastating impact on the Christian faith.

      This would seem to indicate that culture and politics are taking precedence over the religion and faith portions of these churches.

    1. Huang, speaking in Chinese, agrees that radicals can facilitate the mastery of characters while also building cultural understanding, yet he also encourages teachers to become versed in common inconsistencies.

      Learning radicals in languages like Chinese and the related Japanese can not only help vocabulary and literacy, but build cultural understanding of the language and culture.

    1. The pressure is still on – how should we be teaching the current content to the current students in the current context and how does this impact on research?

      current content, current students, current context

    2. t interweaves the three strands which build staff (through research) – students (through the T&L) – and the community (through both).

      the 3 strands

    3. Teaching in a University is different, we use the same word in primary school, secondary school, TAFE, Teachers Colleges, CAEs etc but it is not the same. One of the major differences is of course the extent to which it (the teaching) is interwoven with research and our research principles.

      teaching in univ is diff >> interwoven with research

    4. I believe that this concern with Research Culture is due to broader effects that are manifestations brought about, by and large, by the extraordinary commoditisation of Higher Education in general.

      research culture >> broad effects

    5. This type of academic activity is vital to our research (and not only to the research); it is something that I will be pursuing.

      mentoring is vital

    6. A good mentoring program promotes understanding of the culture of the University and helps staff adjust to new or changing roles and situations.

      mentoring program >> bukan hanya masalah luaran dan metrik

    7. I believe that until we understand what a research culture is and why it is important, that

      intertwined teaching and research >> homogeneous research culture.

    8. We will no longer discuss research; we will be too busy doing it – and talks such as this, will no longer be necessary.

      terlalu banyak meriset >> tuntutan luaran >> jarang diperbincangkan

    9. the moment we stand still, that is fail to keep learning, fail to keep cultivating, our knowledge and experience falls behind the status quo.

      fails to cultivate >> stand still in the moment >> stagnant >> status quo

    10. Most general, the term culture denotes whole product of an individual, group or society of intelligent beings. It includes technology, art, science, as well as moral systems and characteristic behaviours and habits of the selected intelligent entities.

      culture >> tech, art, science, moral systems, etc

    11. Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate"),

      to cultivate >> menumbuhkan >> membudidayakan >> tanpa perintah >> tanpa insentif?

    12. The essential characteristic of research activity is that it leads to publicly verifiable outcomes which are open to peer appraisal.

      publicly verifiable outcomes >> how can we do that?

      and open for appraisal >> how?

    13. Research and experimental development comprises creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of man (sic), culture and society, and the use of this stock of knowledge to devise new applications.

      systematic basis >> creative work >> increase the stock of knowledge >> new applications

    14. The final strand is knowledge transfer. It encompasses many dimensions of interaction between academia

      tahap berikutnya adalah transfer pengetahuan kepada masyarakat yang lebih luas.

    15. The second strand is Learning and Teaching. It explicates a body of ideas, is informed by available research, and instils habits of inquiry that reflect the provisional nature of knowledge

      dari penelitian menuju kelas untuk disampaikan kepada mahasiswa.

    16. Research is the first strand (note the first is research), embracing the systematic generation of new knowledge, development of new ideas and experiment with new techniques.

      Tridarma perguruan tinggi >> penelitian, pendidikan, transfer pengetahuan. >> bukan pengabdian kepada masyarakat.

    1. Professional musicians, concert pianists get to know this instrument deeply, intimately. And through it, they're able to create with sound in a way that just dazzles us, and challenges us, and deepens us. But if you were to look into the mind of a concert pianist, and you used all the modern ways of imaging it, an interesting thing that you would see 00:11:27 is how much of their brain is actually dedicated to this instrument. The ability to coordinate ten fingers. The ability to work the pedal. The feeling of the sound. The understanding of music theory. All these things are represented as different patterns and structures in the brain. And now that you have that thought in your mind, recognize that this beautiful pattern and structure of thought in the brain 00:11:52 was not possible even just a couple hundred years ago. Because the piano was not invented until the year 1700. This beautiful pattern of thought in the brain didn't exist 5,000 years ago. And in this way, the skill of the piano, the relationship to the piano, the beauty that comes from it was not a thinkable thought until very, very recently in human history. 00:12:17 And the invention of the piano itself was not an independent thought. It required a depth of mechanical engineering. It required the history of stringed instruments. It required so many patterns and structures of thought that led to the possibility of its invention and then the possibility of the mastery of its play. And it leads me to a concept I'd like to share with you guys, which I call "The Palette of Being." 00:12:44 Because all of us are born into this life having available to us the experiences of humanity that has come so far. We typically are only able to paint with the patterns of thoughts and the ways of being that existed before. So if the piano and the way of playing it is a way of being, this is a way of being that didn't exist for people 5,000 years ago. 00:13:10 It was a color in the Palette of Being that you couldn't paint with. Nowadays if you are born, you can actually learn the skill; you can learn to be a computer scientist, another color that was not available just a couple hundred years ago. And our lives are really beautiful for the following reason. We're born into this life. We have the ability to go make this unique painting with the colors of being that are around us at the point of our birth. 00:13:36 But in the process of life, we also have the unique opportunity to create a new color. And that might come from the invention of a new thing. A self-driving car. A piano. A computer. It might come from the way that you express yourself as a human being. It might come from a piece of artwork that you create. Each one of these ways of being, these things that we put out into the world 00:14:01 through the creative process of mixing together all the other things that existed at the point that we were born, allow us to expand the Palette of Being for all of society after us. And this leads me to a very simple way to go frame everything that we've talked about today. Because I think a lot of us understand that we exist in this kind of the marvelous universe, 00:14:30 but we think about this universe as we're this tiny, unimportant thing, there's this massive physical universe, and inside of it, there's the biosphere, and inside of that, that's society, and inside of us, we're just one person out of seven billion people, and how can we matter? And we think about this as like a container relationship, where all the goodness comes from the outside to the inside, and there's nothing really special about us. 00:14:56 But the Palette of Being says the opposite. It says that the way that we are in our lives, the way that we affect our friends and our family, begin to change the way that they are able to paint in the future, begins to change the way that communities then affect society, the way that society could then affect its relationship to the biosphere, and the way that the biosphere could then affect the physical planet 00:15:21 and the universe itself. And if it's a possible thing for cyanobacteria to completely transform the physical environment of our planet, it is absolutely a possible thing for us to do the same thing. And it leads to a really important question for the way that we're going to do that, the manner in which we're going to do that. Because we've been given this amazing gift of consciousness.

      The Palette of Being is a very useful idea that is related to Cumulative Cultural Evolution (CCE) and autopoiesis. From CCE, humans are able to pass on new ideas from one generation to the next, made possible by the tool of inscribed language.

      Peter Nonacs group at UCLA as well as Stuart West at Oxford research Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET) West elucidates that modern hominids integrate the remnants of four major stages of MET that have occurred over deep time. Amanda Robins, a researcher in Nonacs group posits the idea that our species of modern hominids are undergoing a Major Systems Transition (MST), due specifically to our development of inscribed language.

      CCE emerges new technologies that shape our human environments in time frames far faster than biological evolutionary timeframes. New human experiences are created which have never been exposed to human brains before, which feedback to affect our biological evolution as well in the process of gene-culture coevolution (GCC), also known as Dual Inheritance theory. In this way, CCE and GCC are entangled. "Gene–culture coevolution is the application of niche-construction reasoning to the human species, recognizing that both genes and culture are subject to similar dynamics, and human society is a cultural construction that provides the environment for fitness-enhancing genetic changes in individuals. The resulting social system is a complex dynamic nonlinear system. " (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3048999/)

      This metaphor of experiences constituting different colors on a Palette of Being is a powerful one that can contextualize human experiences from a deep time framework. One could argue that language usage automatically forces us into an anthropomorphic lens, for sophisticated language usage at the level of humans appears to be unique amongst our species. Within that constraint, the Palette of Being still provides us with a less myopic, less immediate and arguably less anthropomorphic view of human experience. It is philosophically problematic, however, in the sense that we can speculate about nonhuman modalities of being but never truly experience them. Philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote his classic paper "What it's like to be a bat" to illustrate this problem of experiencing the other. (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf)

      We can also leverage the Palette of Being in education. Deep Humanity (DH) BEing Journeys are a new kind of experiential, participatory contemplative practice and teaching tool designed to deepen our appreciation of what it is to be human. The polycrisis of the Anthropocene, especially the self-induced climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have precipitated the erosion of stable social norms and reference frames, inducing another crisis, a meaning crisis. In this context, a re-education of embodied philosophy is seen as urgent to make sense of a radically shifting human reality.

      Different human experiences presented as different colors of the Palette of Being situate our crisis in a larger context. One important Deep Humanity BEing journey that can help contextualize and make sense of our experiences is language. Once upon a time, language did not exist. As it gradually emerged, this color came to be added to our Palette of Being, and shaped the normative experiences of humanity in profound ways. It is the case that such profound shifts, lost over deep time come to be taken for granted by modern conspecifics. When such particular colors of the Palette of Being are not situated in deep time, and crisis ensues, that loss of contextualizing and situatedness can be quite disruptive, de-centering, confusing and alienating.

      Being aware of the colors in the Palette can help us shed light on the amazing aspects that culture has invisibly transmitted to us, helping us not take them for granted, and re-establish a sense of awe about our lives as human beings.

    1. it is designed to help institutional leaders reflect on the extent to which their organization can support sustained and values-driven assessment practices, and where they might focus efforts to further evolve them.

      SPACE to support sustained and values-driven assessment practices.

    2. SPACE is a rubric that is composed of two axes

      adaptation to Indonesian institutes

    3. prioritize rankings over their stated goals for diversity, equity, and inclusion

      prioritize rankings over other missions

    4. the metric oversimplification of scholarly achievement distracts academics and institutions

      metric oversimplification >> distractions

    5. Rather, it is due to a growing reliance on proxy measures of research quality in the management of recruitment, promotion, tenure and funding decisions: these proxy measures are widely used because they are convenient, not because they are meaningful. The pursuit of a higher ranking in league tables for universities has also contributed to the problem.

      proxy measures >> convenient but not meaningful

    6. Ghent University in Belgium made headlines in 2019 when it announced a new policy for evaluating faculty that marked a shift away from the 'rat race' of metrics and rankings towards more holistic processes focused on valuing and nurturing talent

      notice >> rat race

    1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-justice-canceled/619818/

      Anne Applebaum looks at the ideas of public humiliation and cancel culture as a potential slippery slope toward authoritarianism. She provides numerous examples of people experiencing forms of cancel culture without any arguments for or against them, but instead explores the cultural space around it and what its consequences might possibly be.

      Many of her examples focus on spaces related to academia rather than broader life, a space which needs further exploration as the scope and shape for those may differ dramatically.

      She also brings up the broad phenomenon of "university justice" (my descriptor) and generally secret tribunals and justice administered by them rather than traditional governmental means.

      This brings up some excellent avenues for thought about who we are as a country and a liberal democracy.

      Highly recommend.

    2. Robert George has created the Academic Freedom Alliance, a group that intends to offer moral and legal support to professors who are under fire, and even to pay for their legal teams if necessary. George was inspired, he told me, by a nature program that showed how elephant packs will defend every member of the herd against a marauding lion, whereas zebras run away and let the weakest get killed off. “The trouble with us academics is we’re a bunch of zebras,” he said. “We need to become elephants.”

      There's something intriguing here with this cultural analogy of people to either elephants or zebras.

      The other side of this is also that of the accusers, who on the whole have not been believed or gaslit for centuries. How can we simultaneously be elephants for them as well?

    3. Stephen Elliott wrestled for a long time with whether or not to describe what it feels like to be wrongly accused of rape—he wrote something and abandoned it because “I decided that I wouldn’t be able to handle the blowback”—before finally describing his experiences in a published essay.

      I have no context with this particular case, but if innocent of the charges, the viciousness of such a public charge without confrontation or proof is tantamount to an emotional rape without the physical violence.

      There's something interesting to be learned in this experience.

      See: How An Anonymous Accusation Derailed My Life by Stephen Elliott on 2018-09-25. For additional context see this opinion piece follow up a few months later: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/13/opinion/stephen-elliott-moira-donegan-media-men.html

      (My opinion of this essay is already biased by the fact that it's published in Quillette...)

    4. The liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, writing at about the same time as Hawthorne, made a similar argument. Much of his most famous book, On Liberty, is dedicated not to governmental restraints on human liberty but to the threat posed by social conformism, by “the demand that all other people shall resemble ourselves.”
    5. But the real, and nonpartisan, lesson is this: No one—of any age, in any profession—is safe. In the age of Zoom, cellphone cameras, miniature recorders, and other forms of cheap surveillance technology, anyone’s comments can be taken out of context; anyone’s story can become a rallying cry for Twitter mobs on the left or the right. Anyone can then fall victim to a bureaucracy terrified by the sudden eruption of anger. And once one set of people loses the right to due process, so does everybody else. Not just professors but students; not just editors of elite publications but random members of the public.
    6. In May, a young reporter, Emily Wilder, was fired from her new job at the Associated Press in Arizona after a series of conservative publications and politicians publicized Facebook posts critical of Israel that she had written while in college. Like so many before her, she was not told precisely why she was fired, or which company rules her old posts had violated.
    7. This spring, Braden Ellis, a student at Cypress College in California, shared a class Zoom recording of his professor’s response when Ellis defended portrayals of police as heroes. Ellis said he did this in order to expose a purported bias against conservative viewpoints on campus. Even though the recording by itself does not prove the existence of long-standing bias, the professor—a Muslim woman who said on the recording that she did not trust the police—became the focus of a Fox News segment, a social-media storm, and death threats. So did other professors at the college. So did administrators. After a few days, the professor was removed from her teaching assignments, pending investigation.

      Kudos to Applebaum for not naming the party involved here, but instead giving the infamy to the "offending" parties who may have sought fame and attention for themselves.

    8. In March, Sandra Sellers, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, was caught on camera speaking to another professor about some underperforming Black students in her class. There is no way to know from the recording alone whether her comments represented racist bias or genuine concern for her students. Not that it mattered to Georgetown—she was fired within days of the recording’s becoming public. Nor could one know what David Batson, the colleague she was talking to on the recording, really thought either. Nevertheless, he was placed on administrative leave because he seemed, vaguely, to be politely agreeing with her. He quickly resigned.
    9. Anyone who accidentally creates discomfort—whether through their teaching methods, their editorial standards, their opinions, or their personality—may suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of not just a student or a colleague but an entire bureaucracy, one dedicated to weeding out people who make other people uncomfortable. And these bureaucracies are illiberal. They do not necessarily follow rules of fact-based investigation, rational argument, or due process. Instead, the formal and informal administrative bodies that judge the fate of people who have broken social codes are very much part of a swirling, emotive public conversation, one governed not by the rules of the courtroom or logic or the Enlightenment but by social-media algorithms that encourage anger and emotion, and by the economy of likes and shares that pushes people to feel—and to perform—outrage. The interaction between the angry mob and the illiberal bureaucracy engenders a thirst for blood, for sacrifices to be offered up to the pious and unforgiving gods of outrage—a story we see in other eras of history, from the Inquisition to the more recent past.

      Certainly this modern inquisition is a more gentle one than the original Inquisition of the Catholic Church.

      Is this a supporting data point on the continuum of decreasing violence for Steven Pinker's decline of violence thesis?

      Is the totality of what we may be giving up worth it for the greater overall comfort for society?

    10. A relevant criticism of Donald McNeil turned out to be that he was “kind of a grumpy old guy,” as one student on that trip to Peru described him.

      Are people being targeted simply for being socially divergent in small ways? Could this be similar to how the LGBTQ are marginalized for being themselves but from a different perspective? This requires some studying and thinking. Not everyone should be penalized for being their true selves.

    11. It’s not just the hyper-social and the flirtatious who have found themselves victims of the New Puritanism. People who are, for lack of a more precise word, difficult have trouble too. They are haughty, impatient, confrontational, or insufficiently interested in people whom they perceive to be less talented. Others are high achievers, who in turn set high standards for their colleagues or students. When those high standards are not met, these people say so, and that doesn’t go over well. Some of them like to push boundaries, especially intellectual boundaries, or to question orthodoxies. When people disagree with them, they argue back with relish.

      How much of this can be written down to differing personal contexts and lack of respect for people's humanity? Are the neurodivergent being punished in these spaces?

      Applebaum provides a list of potential conflict areas of cancel culture outside of power dynamics.

    12. Once it was not just okay but admirable that Chua and Rubenfeld had law-school students over to their house for gatherings. That moment has passed. So, too, has the time when a student could discuss her personal problems with her professor, or when an employee could gossip with his employer. Conversations between people who have different statuses—employer-employee, professor-student—can now focus only on professional matters, or strictly neutral topics. Anything sexual, even in an academic context—for example, a conversation about the laws of rape—is now risky.

      Is it simply the stratification of power and roles that is causing these problems? Is it that some of this has changed and that communication between people of different power levels is the difficulty in these cases?

      I have noticed a movement in pedagogy spaces that puts the teacher as a participant rather than as a leader thus erasing the power structures that previously existed. This exists within Cathy Davidson's The New Education where teachers indicate that they're learning as much as their students.

    13. To begin with, the protagonists of most of these stories tend to be successful. Though not billionaires or captains of industry, they’ve managed to become editors, professors, published authors, or even just students at competitive universities. Some are unusually social, even hyper-gregarious: They were professors who liked to chat or drink with their students, bosses who went out to lunch with their staff, people who blurred the lines between social life and institutional life.

      Is there a prototype for the people at the center of these cancel culture stories?

    14. Just as odd old women were once subject to accusations of witchery, so too are certain types of people now more likely to fall victim to modern mob justice.

      Modern mob justice is not too dissimilar to the historical experience of the Salem witch trials.


      How might one rewrite Arthur Miller's The Crucible within the framework of modern cancel culture? What does that look like? We need more art to reflect these changes in society to tell our story and get people thinking.

    15. After Alexi McCammond was named editor in chief of Teen Vogue, people discovered and recirculated on Instagram old anti-Asian and homophobic tweets she had written a decade earlier, while still a teenager.

      Should people be judged by statements made in their youth or decades prior? Shouldn't they be given some credit for changing over time and becoming better?

      How can we as a society provide credit to people's changed contexts over time?

      This can be related to Heraclitus' river.

    16. You would think it would be a good thing for the young readers of Teen Vogue to learn forgiveness and mercy, but for the New Puritans, there is no statute of limitations.
    17. The censoriousness, the shunning, the ritualized apologies, the public sacrifices—these are rather typical behaviors in illiberal societies with rigid cultural codes, enforced by heavy peer pressure.

      I'd highlighted this from a pull quote earlier, but note that the full context also includes the phrase:

      enforced by heavy peer pressure.

    18. But what gives anyone the conviction that such a measure is necessary? Or that “keeping students safe” means you must violate due process? It is not the law. Nor, strictly speaking, is it politics. Although some have tried to link this social transformation to President Joe Biden or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, anyone who tries to shoehorn these stories into a right-left political framework has to explain why so few of the victims of this shift can be described as “right wing” or conservative. According to one recent poll, 62 percent of Americans, including a majority of self-described moderates and liberals, are afraid to speak their mind about politics. All of those I spoke with are centrist or center-left liberals. Some have unconventional political views, but some have no strong views at all.

      Is cancel culture a right/left political issue? Some have indicated that it is though Anne Applebaum shows that the victims don't show such bias.

      This is worth exploring in more depth to untangle the justice needed from the political debate cesspool and political polarization which seems to be occurring in America.

    19. The censoriousness, the shunning, the ritualized apologies, the public sacrifices—these are typical behaviors in illiberal societies with rigid cultural codes.
    20. Once it becomes clear that attention and praise can be garnered from organizing an attack on someone’s reputation, plenty of people discover that they have an interest in doing so.

      This is a whole new sort of "attention economy".

      This genre of problem is also one of the most common defenses given by the accused as sort of "boogeyman" meant to silence accusers. How could we better balance the ills against each of the sides in these cases to mitigate the broader harms in both directions?

    21. Source: De Agostini Picture Library / Getty

      This is a searing image for what this article is about:

      Muted dull painting of what appears to be a 17th century gallows being erected in front of a line of soldiers with guns and bayonets and a  crowd with shovels. Instead of a gallows, the structure being erected is a large Facebook thumbs up image on a pole. Various flags with the Facebook logo fly around the scene.

      Could be entitled "A different kind of social justice."

    22. Kipnis, who was accused of sexual misconduct because she wrote about sexual harassment, was not initially allowed to know who her accusers were either, nor would anyone explain the rules governing her case. Nor, for that matter, were the rules clear to the people applying them, because, as she wrote in Unwanted Advances, “there’s no established or nationally uniform set of procedures.” On top of all that, Kipnis was supposed to keep the whole thing confidential: “I’d been plunged into an underground world of secret tribunals and capricious, medieval rules, and I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it,’’ she wrote. This chimes with the story of another academic, who told me that his university “never even talked to me before it decided to actually punish me. They read the reports from the investigators, but they never brought me in a room, they never called me on the phone, so that I could say anything about my side of the story. And they openly told me that I was being punished based on allegations. Just because they didn’t find evidence of it, they told me, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

      While the accusers should definitely be believed and given a space to be heard and prosecute their cases, one of the most drastic harms I see here and repeated frequently are Universities sitting as judges and juries for harms that should be tried in the courts.

      These cases have been removed entirely from the public social justice system and are tried in a space that is horribly ill-equipped to handle them. This results in tremendous potential for miscarriage of justice.

      If universities are going to engage in these sorts of practices, they should at least endeavor to allow all parties to present their sides and provide some sort of restorative justice.

      Somewhere I've read and linked to (Reddit?) communities practicing restorative justice in doing these practices. As I recall, it took a lot of work and effort to sort them out, but it also pointed to stronger and healthier communities over time. Why aren't colleges and universities looking into and practicing this if they're going to be wielding institutional power over individuals? Moving the case from one space to the next is simply passing the buck.

    23. Nobody is perfect; nobody is pure; and once people set out to interpret ambiguous incidents in a particular way, it’s not hard to find new evidence.

      Wouldn't it be better for us to focus our efforts and energies on people who are doing bigger mass scale harms on society?

      Surely the ability to protect some of these small harms undergird ability to build up protection for much larger harms.

      Why are we prosecuting these smaller harms rather than the larger (especially financial and) institutional harms?

      It is easier to focus on the small and specific rather than broad and unspecific. (Is there a name for this as a cognitive bias? There should be, if not. Perhaps related to the base rate fallacy or base rate neglect (a form of extension neglect), which is "the tendency to ignore general information and focus on information only pertaining to the specific case, even when the general information is more important." (via Wikipedia)

      Could the Jesuits' descent into the particular as a method help out here?

    24. Not that everyone really wants an apology. One former journalist told me that his ex-colleagues “don’t want to endorse the process of mistake/apology/understanding/forgiveness—they don’t want to forgive.” Instead, he said, they want “to punish and purify.” But the knowledge that whatever you say will never be enough is debilitating. “If you make an apology and you know in advance that your apology will not be accepted—that it is going to be considered a move in a psychological or cultural or political game—then the integrity of your introspection is being mocked and you feel permanently marooned in a world of unforgivingness,” one person told me. “And that is a truly unethical world.”

      How can restorative justice work in a broader sense when public apologies aren't more carefully considered by the public-at-large? If the accuser accepts an apology, shouldn't that be enough? Society-at-large can still be leery of the person and watch their behavior, but do we need to continue ostracizing them?

      An interesting example to look at is that of Monica Lewinsky who in producing a version of her story 20+ years later is finally able to get her own story and framing out. Surely there will be political adherents who will fault her, but has she finally gotten some sort of justice and reprieve from a society that utterly shunned her for far too long for an indiscretion which happens nearly every day in our society? Compare her with Hester Prynne.

      Are we moving into a realm in which everyone is a public figure on a national if not international stage? How do we as a society handle these cases? What are the third and higher order effects besides the potential for authoritarianism which Applebaum mentions?

    25. Websites now offer “sample templates” for people who need to apologize; some universities offer advice on how to apologize to students and employees, and even include lists of good words to use (mistake, misunderstand, misinterpret).

      In an era of cancel culture there are now websites that offer sample templates of apologies and even universities are offering advice to constituents about how to apologize better.

      When might we see a book in the self-help section with a title like "How to apologize?" At what point have we perhaps gone too far on this scale?

    26. But isolation plus public shaming plus loss of income are severe sanctions for adults, with long-term personal and psychological repercussions—especially because the “sentences” in these cases are of indeterminate length.

      Putting people beyond the pale creates isolation, public shaming, loss of income, loss of profession, and sometimes loss of personal identity and psychological worth. The most insidious problem of all is the indeterminate length of the "sentence".

      For wealthy people like Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, and Kevin Spacey, they're heavily insulated by the fact that at least they've got amassed wealth which mitigates some of these issues. In these cases the decades of extracting wealth through privilege gives them an unfair advantage.

      There are now apparently enough cases of this happening, it would be interesting to watch the long term psychological effects of this group to see if these situations statistically effects their longevity or if there are multi-generational knock on effects as have been seen in Holocaust survivors or those freed from slavery.

    27. All of them, sinners or saints, have been handed drastic, life-altering, indefinite punishments, often without the ability to make a case in their own favor. This—the convicting and sentencing without due process, or mercy—should profoundly bother Americans.

      There is a growing number of cases in which people are having their lives being completely upended because they are being deprived of due process.

      In some cases, it may actually be beneficial as people may have been abusing their positions of privilege and the traditional system wouldn't have prosecuted or penalized them at all. In these cases the dismantling of institutional power is good. However, how many of them aren't related to this? How many are being decimated without serving this function?

    28. The purpose here is not to reinvestigate or relitigate any of their cases. Some of those I interviewed have behaved in ways that I, or readers of this article, may well consider ill-judged or immoral, even if they were not illegal. I am not here questioning all of the new social codes that have led to their dismissal or their effective isolation. Many of these social changes are clearly positive.

      This sounds a lot like the article How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life though in that case it was a single instance and these examples here may go beyond social media.

      Though I'm curious if all of them will entail social media as a (major?) factor in how they played out.

    29. There is a reason that Laura Kipnis, an academic at Northwestern, required an entire book, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, to recount the repercussions, including to herself, of two allegations of sexual harassment against one man at her university; after she referred to the case in an article about “sexual paranoia,” students demanded that the university investigate her, too. A full explanation of the personal, professional, and political nuances in both cases needed a lot of space.

      Definitely unfortunate for Laura Kipnis (to me on the surface), but are these growing cases helping to deconstruct some of the unfair power structures which we've institutionalized over time? Dismantling them is certainly worthwhile, but the question is are the correct institutions and people paying the price and doing the work? In Kipnis's case, she probably isn't the right person to be paying the price, but rather the institution itself.

      Another example of this is that of Donald McNeil in the paragraph above (in the related article).

    30. But dig into the story of anyone who has been a genuine victim of modern mob justice and you will often find not an obvious argument between “woke” and “anti-woke” perspectives but rather incidents that are interpreted, described, or remembered by different people in different ways, even leaving aside whatever political or intellectual issue might be at stake.

      Cancel culture and modern mob justice are possible as the result of volumes of more detail and data as well as large doses of context collapse.

      In some cases, it's probably justified to help level the playing field for those in power who are practicing hypocrisy, but in others, it's simply a lack of context by broader society who have kneejerk reactions which have the ability to be "remembered" by broader society with search engines.

      How might Google allow the right to forget to serve as a means of restorative justice?

    31. Partisans, especially on the right, now toss around the phrase cancel culture when they want to defend themselves from criticism, however legitimate.

      A solid definition of cancel culture.

    32. Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago. Some have made egregious errors of judgment. Some have done nothing at all. It is not always easy to tell.
    33. After that, she must wear a scarlet A—for adulterer—pinned to her dress for the rest of her life. On the outskirts of Boston, she lives in exile. No one will socialize with her—not even those who have quietly committed similar sins, among them the father of her child, the saintly village preacher.

      Given the prevalence of people towards making mistakes and practicing extreme hypocrisy, we really ought to move toward restorative justice. Especially in the smaller non-capital cases.

    1. Context: Sonia was watching Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath: Season 3: "Episode 1" and had previously been watching a documentary One of Us about people who had left oppressive seeming Hassidic Jewish communities.

      I can't help but that that every culture could be considered a "cult" in which some percentage of people are trapped with comparison to all other cultures on Earth. Based on one's upbringing and personal compass, perhaps living and submitting to one's culture can become oppressive and may seem particularly unfair given power structures and the insidiousness of hypocrisy.

      Given this, could there logically be a utopian society in which everyone lives freely?

      Even within the United States there are smaller sub-cultures withiin which people feel trapped and which have the features of cults, but which are so large as to not be considered such. Even the space in which I freely live might be considered a cult by others who don't agree with it. It's only the vast size of the power of the group which prevents the majority who comfortably live within it from viewing it as a bad thing.

      A Democrat may view the Republican Party as a cult and vice versa, something which becomes more apparent when one polarizes these communities toward the edges rather than allowing them to drift into each other in a consensus.

      An African American may think they're stuck in a broader American cult which marginalizes them.

      A Hassidic Jew may feel they're stuck in a cult (of religious restrictions) with respect to the perceived freedoms of broader American Culture. Some may feel more comfortable within these strictures than others.


      A gender non-comforming person living in the deep South of the United States surrounded by the Southern Baptist Convention may feel they're stuck in a cult based on social norms of one culture versus what they experience personally.


      What are the roots of something being a cult? Could it be hypocrisy? A person or a broader group feeling as if they know "best" and creating a rule structure by which others are forced to follow, but from which they themselves are exempt? This also seems to be the way in which authoritarian rules arise when privileging one group above another based solely on (perceived) power.


      Another potential thing at play here may be the lack of diversity within a community. The level of cult within a society may be related to the shape of the bell curve of that society with respect to how large the center is with respect to the tails. Those who are most likely to feel they're within a "cult" (using the broader definition) are those three or more standard deviations from the center. In non-diverse communities only those within a standard deviation of the norm are likely to feel comfortable and accepted and those two deviations away will feel very uncomfortable while those who are farther away will be shunned and pushed beyond the pale.


      How can we help create more diverse and broadly accepting communities? We're all just people, aren't we? How can we design communities and governments to be accepting of even the most marginalized? In a heavily connected world, even the oddball teenager in a small community can now manage to find their own sub-community using the internet. (Even child pornographers manage to find their community online.)

      The opposite of this is at what point do we circumscribe the norms of the community? Take the idea of "Your freedom to strike me ends at my nose." Perhaps we only shun those extreme instances like murder and pornography, and other actions which take extreme advantage of others' freedoms? [This needs to be heavily expanded and contemplated...] What about the over-financialization of the economy which takes advantage of the unprivileged who don't know that system and are uncapable of the mathematics and computation to succeed. Similarly hucksters and snake oil salesmen who take advantage of their targets' weaknesses and lack of knowledge and sophistication. Or the unregulated vitamin industry taking rents from millions for their superstitions? How do we regulate these to allow "cultural freedom" or "religious freedom" without them taking mass-scale advantage of their targets? (Or are some of these acculturated examples simply inequalities institutionally built into societies and cultures as a means of extracting power and rents from the larger system by those in power?)


      Compare with Hester Prynne and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.


    1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/nov/03/what-does-tech-take-from-us-meet-the-writer-who-has-counted-100-big-losses

      A brief review/interview with a book author who eschews many new technologies and why.

    2. In one particularly ingenious entry, she explains the demise of the full stop (or, in American English, the “period”). If you have ever wondered why putting such once-crucial punctation in emails, phone messages or tweets now feels so awkward, here is the answer: “The period can feel so emphatic as to sound sarcastic, the internet’s version of ‘puh-leeze’ and ‘no, thank you’ and ‘srsly’ rolled into one tiny dot.” It can easily come across as passive-aggressive. Exclamation marks, moreover, “now convey warmth and sincerity”; failing to use them runs the risk of making the person you are messaging feel uncertain and anxious.
  13. Oct 2021
    1. The real conspiracies are hiding in plain sight.

      The big difference between the paranoiac's conspiracy theories and the real ones is that in the fake ones the conspirators are "in it together" and form a like-minded group. In reality, the billionaires would be very happy to through each other under the bus if they could.

      So it's not so much that there are real conspiracies as there are a known set of methods and tools - known to everyone, everywhere - that allow this gross power imbalance to be created. These methods and tools are known to all but can only be used by the rich because they are themselves very costly.