Category: Society & Citizenship

The Circles of American Financial Hell – The Atlantic

Source: The Circles of American Financial Hell – The Atlantic

There’s no escaping the pressure that U.S. inequality exerts on parents to make sure their kids succeed.

Why can’t people live below their means, save up some money, and kick up their feet?

The place to start is by looking at what they are spending their money—and particularly their loans—on. The biggest expenditure? Housing, by far. (Transportation is next, but a good portion of that—gas—is in some ways a housing cost as well, since it’s a function of one’s commute.) And the biggest sources of debt? Housing and education. The average loan burdens for mortgages and student loans dwarf auto loans or credit-card debt, the other major types of debt that Americans tend to carry.

Housing and education appear to be two distinct categories of spending, but for many families they are one and the same: For the most part, where a family lives determines where their kids go to school, and, as a result, where schools are better, houses are more costly.

Charitable Plutocracy: Bill Gates Philanthropy, Washington State & the Nuisance of Democracy

Source: Charitable Plutocracy: Bill Gates Philanthropy, Washington State & the Nuisance of Democracy

Once upon a time, the superwealthy endowed their tax-exempt charitable foundations and then turned them over to boards of trustees to run. … Today’s multi-billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates are a different species of philanthropy.

Education-reform philanthropists justify their massive political spending as a necessary counterweight to the teachers unions; yet, the philanthropists can, and consistently do, far outspend the unions.

multibillionaires acting as philanthropists aggravate the problem [of plutocracy] by channeling vast sums into the nation’s immense nonprofit sector. Their top-down modus operandi makes this a powerful tool for shaping public policy according to individual beliefs and whims. And they receive less critical scrutiny than other actors in public life. Most people admire expressions of generosity and selflessness and are loath to find fault.

The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit | Quillette

Source: The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit | Quillette

the trick is to unleash so many fallacies, misrepresentations of evidence, and other misleading or erroneous statements — at such a pace, and with such little regard for the norms of careful scholarship and/or charitable academic discourse — that your opponents, who do, perhaps, feel bound by such norms, and who have better things to do with their time than to write rebuttals to each of your papers, face a dilemma. Either they can ignore you, or they can put their own research priorities on hold to try to combat the worst of your offenses.

It’s a lose-lose situation. Ignore you, and you win by default. Engage you, and you win like the pig in the proverb who enjoys hanging out in the mud.

As the programmer Alberto Brandolini is reputed to have said: “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”

 

Science isn’t the only place this asymmetry exists: see marketing, advertising, politics.

The Seven Habits of Highly Depolarizing People – The American Interest

If polarization is all around us, familiar as an old coat, what about its opposite? What would depolarization look and sound like? Would we know it if we saw it, in others or in ourselves? Perhaps most importantly, what are the mental habits that encourage it?

Source: The Seven Habits of Highly Depolarizing People – The American Interest

We Americans didn’t necessarily think our way into political polarization, but we’ll likely have to think our way out.

1. Criticize from within.
In other words, criticize the other—whether person, group, or society—on the basis of something you have in common.

2. Look for goods in conflict.
Some conflicts are entirely about good versus evil or right versus wrong, but many (probably most) are more about good versus good or right versus right. Each side, at least in part, is likely to be defending a goal or value that both recognize as worthy.

3. Count higher than two.
Of all the mental habits that encourage polarization, the most dangerous is probably binary thinking—the tendency to divide everything into two mutually antagonistic categories.

4. Doubt.
Doubt—the concern that my views may not be entirely correct—is the true friend of wisdom and (along with empathy, to which it’s related) the greatest enemy of polarization.

5. Specify.
Because generalization is both an ally and a frequent indicator of polarization, highly depolarizing people tend to be connoisseurs of the specific. … persistent skepticism about categories … consider each issue separately and on its own terms … privilege the specific assertion (including the empirically valid generalization) over the general assertion … rely first and foremost on inductive reasoning, which tries to build conclusions from the bottom up by accumulating specific data points, as compared to deductive reasoning, which tries to build conclusions from the top down by exploring the implications of true general premises or statements.

6. Qualify (in most cases).
To qualify something you say is to make it less definitive, less comprehensive, and more nuanced, and thus to acknowledge the possibility that some pieces of the puzzle may still be missing. … To qualify is to demonstrate competence.

7. Keep the conversation going.
Because ending the conversation is tantamount to ending the relationship, and when the relationship ends, everything hardens, polarization reigns, and your opponents turn into your enemies.