40 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
  2. Apr 2024
    1. Divergence of views istherefore universal and necessarily so. This is of immensevalue to us, difference of opinion is in fact the parent of im-provement and progress. Divergence causes us to comparenotes as it were, it helps to broaden our views.
  3. Mar 2024
    1. Ongweso Jr., Edward. “The Miseducation of Kara Swisher: Soul-Searching with the Tech ‘Journalist.’” The Baffler, March 29, 2024. https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-miseducation-of-kara-swisher-ongweso.

      ᔥ[[Pete Brown]] in Exploding Comma

    2. Kara Swisher certainly can't blame the issues within technology on diversity, equity, or incluse and simultaneously call herself a journalist. As a woman with a self-professed diverse view of the world, she allowed too much boosterism in her take on technology without voicing any concerns of its effects.

    3. In fact, Uber’s top lawyer—Tony West, a Black man—has been the public face of Uber’s campaign against laws that would force the company to pay livable wages to its largely Black and brown workforce.
    4. “white male homogeneity”

      or even more specific cis-gender white male homogeneity or cisheteropatriarchy

      Does cis-gender white male homogeneity act in ways (cuckoo-like) similar to how narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths can act when brought to power in society? (Though obviously at much larger percentages of the population.) What are the long term effects?

    1. How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or indeedaccommodate, its persistently marginalized people?

      Is some of the "backlash" against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in 2020s America a manifestation of attempting to prevent a shift in the status quo of class structure in America?

      How is the history of the space potentially useful in easing the potential transition to something better?

  4. Aug 2023
  5. Jul 2023
    1. The final decision on the list wasmade by me.

      Robert Hutchins takes sole responsibility for the final decision on the selection for the books which appear in The Great Books of the Western World series.

      One wonders what sort of advice he may have sought out or received with respect to a much broader diversity of topics and writers with respect to his own time. I reminded a bit of the article The 102 Great Ideas (Life, 1948) which highlights a more progressive stance with respect to women and feminism in the examples used.

      See: LIFE. “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog.” January 26, 1948. Https://books.google.com/books?id=p0gEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA92&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. Google Books.

  6. Apr 2023
    1. The Medici effect is a concept that describes the way in which innovation arises from the intersection of different disciplines and ideas. The term was coined by author Frans Johansson in his book “The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation”. The Medici family of Renaissance-era Florence is used as an example of the way in which the intersection of different disciplines, such as art, science, and finance, led to a period of great innovation and cultural advancement. Similarly, Johansson argues that innovation today is more likely to occur when people from different backgrounds and disciplines come together to share ideas and collaborate. The Medici effect highlights the importance of diversity, curiosity, and creativity in driving innovation and problem-solving.

      Frans Johansson's "Medici effect" which describes innovation arriving from an admixture of diversity of people and their ideas sounds like a human-based mode of combinatorial creativity similar to that seen in the commonplace book/zettelkasten traditions. Instead of the communication occurring between a person and their notes or written work, the communication occurs between people.

      How is the information between these people crystalized? Some may be written, some may be in prototypes and final physical products, while some may simply be stored in the people themselves for sharing and re-sharing over time.

  7. Mar 2023
    1. Whose values do we put through the A.G.I.? Who decides what it will do and not do? These will be some of the highest-stakes decisions that we’ve had to make collectively as a society.’’

      A similar set of questions might be asked of our political system. At present, the oligopolic nature of our electoral system is heavily biasing our direction as a country.

      We're heavily underrepresented on a huge number of axes.

      How would we change our voting and representation systems to better represent us?

  8. Nov 2022
  9. Sep 2022
    1. The need for students to participate in the larger conversations around subject mattershelps writers creating more intellectual prose, but this becomes difficult in a “culture

      prone to naming winners and losers, rights and wrongs. You are in or out, hot or not, on the bus or off it. But academics seldom write in an all-or- nothing mode” (p. 26).

      Our culture is overly based on the framing of winners or losers and we don't leave any room for things which aren't a zero sum game. (See: Donald J. Trump's framing of his presidency.) We shouldn't approach academic writing or even schooling or pedagogy in general as a zero sum game. We need more space and variety for neurodiversity as teaching to the middle or even to the higher end is going to destroy the entire enterprise.


      Politics is not a zero sum game. Even the losers have human rights and deserve the ability to live their lives.

  10. Aug 2022
  11. Jul 2022
    1. Their value lies intheir diversity - companies exploit the fact that thesepeople make different sense of the same phenomenaand therefore respond in diverse ways.

      Humans make sense of information in different ways and as a result respond to it and their environments in diverse manners, a fact from which companies can derive direct value.


      This idea is becoming more commonplace now, but here it is in print in 1994. Are there earlier versions of this in the literature?

  12. Jun 2022
    1. I’ve also learned, thanks to my doctoral training in sociology, that one must expand one’s personal problems into the structural, to recognize what’s rotten at the local level as an instantiation of the institutional. Our best public sociologists, like Tressie McMillan Cottom and Jess Calarco, do this exceptionally well.
  13. Apr 2022
    1. Even as he was critical of overabundance, Gesner exulted in it, seeking exhaustiveness in his accumulation of both themes and works from which others could choose according to their judgment and interests.

      Note here the presumed freedom to pick and choose based on interest and judgement. Who's judgement really? Book banning and religious battles would call to question which people got to exercise their own judgement.

  14. Mar 2022
    1. Refinement is a social process

      The idea that refinement is a social process is a powerful one, but it is limited by the society's power structures, scale, and access to the original material and least powerful person's ability to help refine it.

    2. There is a growing risk that advancing technology will widen the gap between rich and poor, and produce further disadvantages for poorly educated citizens.

      Nice that he takes this sort of inclusive approach so early in the evolution of the internet.

  15. Feb 2022
    1. But the coverage, as our editorial page later noted in 2018, “deplored the inhumanity of the perpetrators without ever really acknowledging the humanity of the victims” or the community terrorized by their brutal deaths. The ire was directed at the “poor, white trash” killers, as Mencken put it; there was no empathy for — or even real interest in — the Black victims.
    2. Pretending we were all the same never worked, because it ignored the fact that we’re not all given the same opportunities to succeed or fail on our merits; some are privileged, others are oppressed. Refusing to recognize that only prolonged difficult conversations and much-needed soul-searching, dooming more generations to repeat the cycle.
    1. First, consider who gets to make the rules. Tenured scholars who, as we’ve noted, are mostly white and male, largely make the rules that determine who else can join the tenured ranks. This involves what sociologists call “boundary work,” or the practice of a group setting rules to determine who is good enough to join. And as such, many of the rules established around tenure over the years work really well for white scholars, but don’t adequately capture the contributions of scholars of color.

      Boundary work is the practice of a group that sets the rules to determine who is and isn't good enough to join the group.

      Link to Groucho Marx quote, "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member."

  16. Jan 2022
  17. Nov 2021